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More "Jest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The long speeches give importance to the decisions, and compel a belief that momentous events are about to happen or have happened. In harmony with this effect is the absence of all comic relief—although Shakespeare was to prove later that this has a useful place in tragedy. A smile, a jest would be sacrilege in the prevailing gloom. Two effects alone are aimed at; an impression of loftiness in the theme, and a profound melancholy. Not warm gushing tears. Those are the outcome of a personal sorrow, small and ignoble beside ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... was seen to do it on the battle-field while planning a retreat. "Distrust the admiral's toothpick, the No of the Connetable, and Catherine's Yes," was a court proverb of that day. After the Saint-Bartholomew the populace made a horrible jest on the body of Coligny, which hung for three days at Montfaucon, by putting a grotesque toothpick into his mouth. History has recorded this atrocious levity. So petty an act done in the midst of that great catastrophe pictures the Parisian ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... notorious 'Ghost's Walk.' As he approached the spot, there, to be sure, was the object of terror, taking his usual exercise. 'Now,' as Dobbin told the story, 'thinks I to myself, I'll play you a trick, mister, and find out who you are, if I can. So, jest slyly unfastening the door of the lantern, as I met him, I flung the door wide open and held it up to his face, and I says, says I, "A stormy night, friend." I thought I should know him, and guess I should if ever I do see him again, which I don't ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... out "Speech," "Speech," as they used often to do, half in jest and half in earnest, when we met in concert tents and estaminets ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... donneroit le royaulme de France au premier occupant selon sa Tyrannique coustume," etc. Baum, ii., App., 102, 103. Nemours, after his conspiracy was discovered, fled from court. He wrote, however, disclaiming any ulterior object in his invitations to the young Prince of Orleans, to whom he had in jest proposed to ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... their clarity and greatness that he is forced into irresistible laughter when he beholds how raw, awkward, and clumsy these ideas may appear when interpreted by a narrow circle of contemporary spirits. Then perforce must he jest about their thick temporal hides—bear hides. There are mirrors which are ground in so irregular a way that even an Apollo would behold himself as a caricature in them, and invite laughter. But we do not laugh at the god but merely at ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... as the time of the first Punic war, a consul was bold enough to jest at the auspices in public. Superstitions and impostures flourished, the astrology of ancient Chaldea spread, the Oriental ceremonies were introduced with the pomps that accompanied the reception of the unformed boulder which the special embassy ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... must, in general, deduct a considerable quantum of verbiage; short have often a meagre and skeleton air. The reading of long sentences is more painful at first, less so afterward; a volume composed entirely of short sentences becomes soon as wearisome as a jest-book. The mind which employs long sentences has often a broad, but dim vision—that which delights in short, sees a great number of small points clearly, but seldom a rounded whole. De Quincey is a good specimen of the first class. The late Dr. Hamilton, of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... their voyage. The men in a clean whale ship are never happy. When everything is filthy, and dirty, and greasy, and smoky, and black—decks, rigging, clothes, and person—it is then that the hearty laugh and jest and song are heard as the crew work busily, night and day, at ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... to be a fortune," said Bone. "Couldn't you hold on jest a week or two and see if he won't get over ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the cold earth's breast! The sages chuckle o'er their jest; Must they, to give a people rest, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... how I hate you!" growled Drysdale, half in jest and half in earnest, as they sped along under ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... So's my pretty. I hate to see it, but ye can't fool Natur'—no, sir! Natur' says to these young things: 'Advance!' an' they've jest got to march, I reckon," and Aunt Alvirah sighed, too. Then her little, bird-like eyes twinkled suddenly and she chuckled. "Jest the same," she added, in a whisper, "Ruth got out all her doll-babies the other day and played with 'em jest like ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... with quip and jest when Grace, hearing a crackling of under brush, looked back along the path they had come. She started ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... are entitled to an equal voice. Then the influences which arise from the relations of the sexes, when left to be exerted in our halls of justice, would at least cause decency and propriety of conduct to be maintained there; but now low-minded men are encouraged to jest openly in court over the most sacred and most delicate subjects. From the nature of things, the guilty woman can not now have justice done her before the professed tribunals of justice; and the innocent but ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... "Meanin' shows?" he asked, after a pause of reflection. "No, we've never shew none, as I know of. We've been asked, father 'n' I, to allow guessin' on our weight at fairs and sech, but we jedged it warn't jest what we cared about doin'. Sim'lar ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... to get the sum awarded, with the object of putting it into Wall Street "for shaving purposes." The insinuation was uncalled for and unjustifiable; and as the editor subsequently admitted that it was only made in jest, it may be imputed to his credit that he had the grace to be ashamed of it. A libel suit, however, followed. It was at first decided in Cooper's favor. It was then carried up to the Court of Errors, and in December, 1845, more than ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... attracted by Esperance's beauty and talent, and it was also known that he was a sceptic, a railer, not easy for anyone to "take in." The attache, not knowing how to back out of his awkward position, apologized for having spoken in jest. He had heard ... but the world is so unjust ... etc., etc. No ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... I let all these lower rooms; and the folks is jest as well off up three pair of stairs as up one," he replied, almost out of breath, for the stairs told more heavily on him than on me. "Besides, I like to have the old woman as far as I can from the business; she don't interfere so ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... appear to the reader, it struck me forcibly that more falsehood, or more absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of the truth, could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have been crowded into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a jest, the disgrace of the age; and, as regards the two universities, and the enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master. Homely, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... treated as anything but vassals. When we show you a kindness, see how you abuse it. We extend to you our little finger and you instantly lay claim to the whole arm. Because last night I permitted myself to exchange a jest with you, because I chance to be kind to you again to-day, you repay me ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... a very poor jest. Change from body to body as travellers used to change horses at post houses. I've heard of this ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... with a laugh that rang unnatural and hoarse. "Jest! when for a day and a night my soul hath been on the rack and mocking demons have jeered at ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... man might do worse than win so much beauty and wealth. But the creature is arrogant, and calls me 'child;' and half the peerage is after her. But we'll have our jest with the city scrub, Ralph; not because I bear him malice, but because I hate his wife. And we'll have our masquerading some time after midnight; if you ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... heard of this mysterious swan, and, although his father's wedding bells were ringing merrily, he himself returned to the castle a sorrowful man, for he felt convinced that some evil was hanging over him. Despite his father's jest at what he considered groundless superstition on his part, the young man could not shake off his fears, replying to his father, "Perhaps before long you also may be sorrowful." On the night of that very day the son died, and here ends the strange ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... in the friendly ring, O restless Pilgrim? Haply now thou ridest O'er the long tropic-wave; or now abidest 'Mid seas with ice eternal glimmering! Thrice happy voyage!... With a jest thou leapedst From the Lyceum's threshold to thy bark, Thenceforth thy path aye on the main thou keepedst, O child beloved ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... could paint Alike the student and the saint; Alas! whose speech too oft I broke With gambol rude and timeless joke; For I was wayward, bold, and wild, A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child; But, half a plague and half a jest, Was ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... workin' every day and likes to keep up my sewin'. Plenty of it to do all de time—jest like I'm doin' today. My health is purty good ceptin' I has a sort of misery ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... you," remarked Uncle Larry calmly; "but I'm willing to back a merry jest called forth by my sunrise against any two merry jests called forth ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... a day or two she was well again; As who should say, "You labor in vain! This is all a jest against God, who meant {170} I should ever be, as I am, content And glad in his sight; therefore, glad I will be." So, smiling as at ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Aesop. "The fable," says Professor K. O. Mueller, "originated in Greece in an intentional travestie of human affairs. The 'ainos,' as its name denotes, is an admonition, or rather a reproof veiled, either from fear of an excess of frankness, or from a love of fun and jest, beneath the fiction of an occurrence happening among beasts; and wherever we have any ancient and authentic account of the Aesopian fables, we find it to be ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... than a beast, Wha has mair honour in his breast Than mony scores as guid's the priest Wha sae abus'd him: And may a bard no crack his jest What way ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... to jest with the hardships I experienced while battling the watch with opposition in the Montreal department, and the privations I afterwards endured in New Caledonia. Surely, Sir, you ought to have considered it sufficient ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... you can't come no sailor yarns on this fellar. Wal, now, we've got ther Englishman's gold. One or t'other of us might jest ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... shatter the fast of a Pope; and without, a brown-edged white layer, so firm that the lieutenant's deft carving knife, passing through, gave no hint to the eye that it was delicious fat. There had been merry jest and laughter and banter and gallant compliment before, but it was Richard Hunt's turn now, and story after story he told, as the rose-flakes dropped under his knife in such thin slices that their edges coiled. It was full half an hour before the carver and story-teller ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... all in her power to console him in his disappointment. There was plenty of jealous people always that wanted to keep young folks from rising in the world. Never mind, she did n't believe but what Gifted could make jest as good verses as any of them that they kept such a talk about. She had a fear that he might pine away in consequence of the mental excitement he had gone through, and solicited his appetite with her choicest appliances,—of which he partook ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ready at a trigger's pull should life show itself! When daylight comes the British sing out their "Good-morning, Germans!" and the Germans answer, "Good-morning, British!" without adding, "We hope to kill some of you to-day!" Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint across through their periscopes. At the gibe business the German ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... love me? do you not, indeed, Well, do not then; for since you love me not, I will not love myself. Do you not love me? Nay, tell me, if you speak in jest or no? Hot. Come, wilt thou see me ride? And when I am o' horseback, I will ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... is it to read a play in a rainy day? Though you should be now and then interrupted in a witty scene, and she perhaps preserve her laughter, till the jest were over; even that may be borne with, considering the reward ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... but it was a jest which made an unintended wound. Hylda became conscious of a sudden sharp inquiry going on in her mind. There flashed into it the question, Does Eglington's heart ever really throb for love of any object or any cause? Even in moments of greatest intimacy, soon after marriage, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thought good to demonstrate here, Because I saw how much they grieved were; That any way, the least part of offence, Should make them seem offensive to their Prince. Thus three nights was I staid and lodged in Preston, And saw nothing ridiculous to jest on, Much cost and charge the Mayor upon me spent, And on my way two miles, with me he went, There (by good chance) I did more friendship get, The under Sheriff of Lancashire we met, A gentleman that loved, ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... with reddish hair. He had sech shifty eyes I couldn't help but think that maybe he had stolen them things jest to raise some ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... in jest about those cups in order to induce them to laugh," old goody Liu at these words, mused within herself, "but, who would have thought that she actually has some of the kind. I've often been to the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... thing of religion and of God, but of self-respect, of care for the coming generation, and, especially, of that great love which one day will come into their lives. It should not be called a "sin"; at the same time it should not be laughed at and made the subject of a whispered jest. Sexual laxity should be treated in the same way as dishonesty and untruthfulness—a sin against oneself, against the beauty of one's own soul, and against those who believe in us and love us and are our world. Children should be taught to respect ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... supposed the aerial visitor to be, might not have done as well, we are unable to conceive. Sir Thomas tells Mr. Southey nothing about future events, and indeed absolutely disclaims the gifts of prescience. He has learned to talk modern English. He has read all the new publications, and loves a jest as well as when he jested with the executioner, though we cannot say that the quality of his wit has materially improved in Paradise. His powers of reasoning, too, are by no means in as great vigour as when he sate on the woolsack; and though he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that house. It's a nasty old yaller shell anyhow, not to say nothin' o' it's bein' haunted, 's like 's not. But there ain't no other place so handy to the mill for us, an' I guess our money's good ez any lawyer's money, o' the hull on 'em any day. Mill people, indeed! I'll jest give Steve White a piece o' my mind, the first time I see him ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... This was Saturday night: Father John was fond of holding vigorous discourses on Saturday nights. Sue stopped to make her purchases. She was well-known in the neighborhood, and as she stepped in and out of one shop and then of another, she was the subject of a rough jest or a pleasant laugh, just as the mood of the person she addressed prompted one or other. She spent a few pence out of her meager purse, her purchases were put into a little basket, and she found her way home. The season was winter. She turned into a street back of Westminster; it went by the name ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... After the actor had become famous and his prosperity had turned his head, he was wont to "put the table in a roar" by mimicking the doctor's grimaces. There is a story that on the occasion of a certain dinner party where both were guests, Garrick indulged in a coarse jest on the great man's table manners. After the merriment had subsided, Doctor Johnson arose solemnly ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Jest not but pay me as is meet, For I come from beyond the moor, Return I cannot to ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... scarabs), announced that Hatasu was the "first suffragette." But even those who thought her downtrodden nephew, Thothmes III, justified in erasing every trace of her existence wherever possible, did not smile at this jest. In fact, having Antoun and me to refer to, the Set as a whole sat upon the unfortunate dragoman, trying to talk him down in tombs and temples, or ostentatiously reading Weigall, Maspero, Petrie, Sladen, and Lorimer when he attempted to give them information. A few with kinder intentions, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... orders to them to keep silence. In his familiar conversations with the chiefs he plainly told them that he would one day crucify them all. Doubtless they laughed heartily at this pleasantry, as they deemed it, but they were to find it a grim sort of jest. ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... moment beyond the happy hunting-grounds of the ball-room or the Opera, the last Academy or the next Horticultural. Beautiful beings are made, they feel, not to amuse, but to be amused. The one object of their enthusiasm is the "funny Bishop" who turns a great debate into a jest for the entertainment of his fair friends in the Ladies' Gallery. The object of their social preference is the young wit who lounges up to tell his last little story, and then, without boring them for ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... his jest-word; but its sound their labour slew at last, And swift his father caught it up, as from his mouth it passed, And stayed him, by the might of God bewildered utterly. 119 Then forthwith: "Hail," he cried, "O land that Fate hath owed to me! And ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... blood," is one recorded favourite among them; the songs, far other than hymns, which Dennis Hanks and his other mates would pick up or compose; and the practice in rhetoric and the art of exposition, which he unblushingly afforded himself before audiences of fellow labourers who welcomed the jest and the excuse for stopping work. The achievement of the self-taught man remains wonderful, but, if he surmounts his difficulties at all, some of his limitations may turn to sheer advantage. There is some advantage merely in being driven to make the most ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... fight I've seed in my time, by God," he said, coolly, "'n', Rome, y'u air the biggest fool this side o' the settlements, I reckon. I had dead aim on him, 'n' I was jest a-thinkin' hit was a purty good thing fer you that old long-nosed Jim Stover chased me up hyeh, when, damn me, ef that boy up thar didn't let his ole gun loose. I'd a-got Jas myself ef he hadn't been so ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... the tales that passed among us to-day, he told us of one Damford, that, being a black man, did scald his beard with mince-pie, and it came up again all white in that place, and continued to his dying day. Sir W. Pen told us a good jest about some gentlemen blinding of the drawer, and who he catched was to pay the reckoning, and so they got away, and the master of the house coming up to see what his man did, his man got hold of him, thinking it to be one of the gentlemen, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... shall not join the party-cry which insults their fall—I certainly shall not exult in that melancholy pageant of mixed mirth and scorn, in which, like the old Roman triumph, the soldier with his ruthless jest and song goes before the chariot, and the captive monarch follows behind; wearing the royal robe and the diadem only till he has gratified a barbarous curiosity or a cruel pride, and then exchanging them for the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Constable's History ha. The Thief's Tale i. Ninth Constable's History j. Tenth Constable's History k. Eleventh Constable's History l. Twelfth Constable's History m. Thirteenth Constable's History n. Fourteenth Constable's History na. A Merry Jest of a Clever Thief nb. Tale of the Old Sharper o. Fifteenth Constable's History p. Sixteenth Constable's History 14. Tale of Harun Al-Rashid and Abdullah Bin Nafi' a. Tale of the Damsel Torfat Al-Kulub and the Caliph Harun Al-Rashid 15. Women's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... dizzily, head downward, frightening Banjo half out of his senses. What he had started as a grim jest, he now continued in deadly earnest; what was this uncanny semblance of a cow-puncher which he could not unseat, yet which clung so precariously to the saddle? He had no thought now of bucking in pure devilment—he was galloping madly, his ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... laying her hand on the arm of her irate friend. "I said that only in jest. I shan't continue if you ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... he believed in signs, Charlie replied: "I sho does for dis reason. Once jest befo my baby brother died, ole screech owl, he done come and set up in the big oak tree right at the doah by de bed and fo' the next twelve hours passed, my brother was dead. Screech owls allus holler 'round ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... Christopherus, and he spoke with anger. "You jest in Spain! But in France it shall ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... friends to a social reunion. He chats and laughs at the passing jest, or takes part in the music—the glee, or the comic song. A servant whispers in his ear. Ten minutes elapse, and he is standing by the bed of death. He watches the flickering flame; he endeavours to relieve ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... and the power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran,—"The heavens and the earth and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does it profit me? What does ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... before the expedition of Lopez de Aguirre; the denomination of the river is therefore erroneously attributed to the nickname of maranos (hogs), which this adventurer gave his companions in going down the river Amazon. Was not this vulgar jest rather an allusion to the Indian name of the river?) He called this river Rio Dolce—a name which, since Ribeyro, was long preserved on our maps, and which has sometimes been given erroneously to the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... poets: wut they've airly read Gits kind o' worked into their heart an' head, So's 't they can't seem to write but jest on sheers With furrin countries or played-out ideers, Nor hev a feelin', ef it doosn't smack O' wut some critter chose to feel 'way back: This makes 'em talk o' daisies, larks, an' things, Ez though we 'd nothin' here ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... and Mediaeval Dancing to the 14th Century. Dancing in Churches and Religious Dancing. The Gleemen's Dance. Military Dances. The Hornpipe. Tumbling and Jest Dances. Illustrations of Gleemen's Dance, Hornpipe, Sword Dances, Tumbling ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... paraded by hundreds, the trained cavalry of a ghostly army organized into companies, battalions, divisions, departments, having at their head the "Grand Wizard of the Empire." It was all in sport—a great jest, or at the worst designed only to induce the colored man to work somewhat more industriously from apprehension of ghostly displeasure. It was a funny thing—the gravest, most saturnine, and self-conscious people on the globe making themselves ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... long mirror in his bedroom, that gave on Horridge's Hotel, and surveyed himself thoughtfully. He was looking at the only man he trusted, for it was not vanity, but a love of agreeable company that explained the passion for mirrors which was the jest of ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... or fourteen he was a mere bag of bones, with upper arms about as thick as the wrists of other boys of his age; his little chest was pigeon-breasted; he appeared to have no strength or stamina whatever, and finding he always went to the wall in physical encounters, whether undertaken in jest or earnest, even with boys shorter than himself, the timidity natural to childhood increased upon him to an extent that I am afraid amounted to cowardice. This rendered him even less capable than ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... well-recognized "competing points." The larger the area controlled by one management, the fewer are the competing points; the larger, therefore, is the power over the rate and the more completely the monopoly principle applies. It is a grim jest to say that consolidation does not change the railroad situation as ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... they passed along Cornhill in their coaches, with a guard of horse, the Earl of Lauderdale was addressed by a by-stander—"Oh, my lord, you are welcome to London! I protest, off goes your head as round as a hoop!"(1061) The ill-timed jest, which the earl passed off with a laugh, was wanting in fulfilment, for he lived to witness the Restoration and to earn the universal ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... Battersea has been won and held by the speeches of its member. It is not the mighty voice alone, silencing interruption often enough by sheer volume of sound, but the plainly pointed epigram, the ready jest and the quick repartee that endear Mr. John Burns' speeches to the multitude. His sayings and phrases are quoted. His wit is the wit of the Londoner—the wit that Dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... Peacocks,' answered the King angrily, 'you had better take care what you are about. I am as good a King as yourself, and have a splendid kingdom and robes and crowns, and plenty of good red gold to do what I like with. You are pleased to jest about having our heads cut off; perhaps you think we have stolen something ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... he said. "Jest set down and take it right easy. Lay off your wraps, and I'll put 'em on the bunk. You mustn't worry about nothing. We're ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... cross my inclinations, do you, father?" asked Julie, half in earnest, half in jest. "Am I to marry to please you and not ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... a line fer? Are ye a-going with us to the Pacific, or are ye jest naturally short of ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... though I hardly think Mr. Thurston would agree with you. For instance?" asked Millicent, finding his humor infectious, for English Jim could gather all the men in camp about him, when half in jest and half in earnest he began one ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... understand whether she was in jest or in earnest. She went on without waiting for ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... vehicle that ever came out of Long Acre; whilst more four-horse coaches, with fast teams and still faster loads, are thundering in the rear. Slang reigns supreme; and John Gilpin's friend, who had a "ready wit," would here meet with his match. Nor are jest and repartee (what John calls "chaff") the only missiles bandied about. Toys, knocked off "the sticks" for the purpose, darken the air as they fly from one vehicle to another, and the broadside from a well-supplied coach is like that of a seventy-four. Fun and good-humour abound, but ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... painfully, horribly true," she said. She looked from him to the canvas, from the canvas to him, and then made a little pathetic gesture with her hands. "What a jest life is!" ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... Paul met the sarcastic jest with deep earnestness, which must have hushed the audience of sycophants ready to laugh with the king, and evidently touched him and Festus. His whole soul ran over in yearning desire for the salvation of them all. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate. Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a sort of tribute with a feeling between jest and earnest.' ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... make us all free, sometime,' he said, 'that's enough. Don't look like it, jest yet, I knows; but I lives in faith; it'll come byumby' When the fellow said that, I declare to you, Surrey, I felt like hiding my face. At last I began to comprehend what your indignation meant against the order forbidding ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... easy enough without words to understand the indications of coarse and disagreeable natures in whose neighbourhood she disliked to find herself of whose neighbourhood she exceedingly disliked to be reminded. The muttered oath, the more than muttered jest, the various laughs that tell so much of head or heart emptiness the shadowy but sure tokens of that in human nature which one would not realize, and which one strives to forget; Fleda shrank within herself, and would gladly have stopped her ears; ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... quite certain whether all this was meant in jest or earnest; and perhaps the truth was, that though grandpapa had little liking for new plans, he was too wise not to adopt those which possessed manifest advantage, and only indulged himself in a good deal of playful grumbling, which greatly teased ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Pike, "if that ain't goldenrod! I do b'lieve it comes earlier every year, or else the seasons are changin'. See them elderberries! Ain't they purple! You jest remember that bush, an' when we go back, we'll fill some pails. I dunno when I've made ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... myself the jest; he gave it no attention, but seated himself in the chair that he had left and resumed the interrupted monologue as if ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... indications are no proof of it. I don't pretend to be satisfied, and made no pretense at the time of being satisfied with my share in Maga's treachery. But I claim that it was more than human nature could have done, to endure the open disapproval of my friends, begun by Fred's half-earnest jest, and continued by my own indignation; and at the same time to induce them to take my ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... complacently to the appearance of boys and men in women's parts. He makes Rosalind say, laughingly and saucily, to the men of the audience in the epilogue to As You Like It: "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me." "If I were a woman," she says. The jest lies in the fact that the speaker was not a woman but a boy. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in Antony and Cleopatra, (V. ii. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... must not be told; and perhaps with more than one with whom she had no business to flirt. Little Scoutbush had remonstrated with her on some such affair, but she had silenced him with an Irish jest,—"You're a fisherman, Freddy; and when you can't catch salmon, you catch trout; and when you can't catch trout, you'll whip on the shallow for poor little gubbahawns, and say that it is all to keep your hand in—and so ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... have to send Ben up with the cart this afternoon for your box, so you may as well come alonger him. And mind this, Lilac. Don't you go bringin' any litter and rubbish with you. Jest your clothes and no more, and your Bible and Prayer Book. And now I'll ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... haphazard affair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of our verse "jest growed," like Topsy. And the resulting state of things has but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets spend their days in correcting encyclopaedia proof, or clerking, or running, notebook in hand, to fires—inheres in the ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... own word is true, Not earth or hell with all their crew Against us shall prevail. A jest and by-word are they grown; God is with us, we are his own, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... during which time we never saw land, for we had lost all reckoning, and no one cared to steer—the same dreadful visitation took place. Habit had, to a degree, hardened the men; they now swore and got drunk as before, and even made a jest of the boatswain of the middle watch, as they called him, but at the same time they were worn out with constant fatigue; and one night they declared that they would pump no longer. The water remained in the vessel all that ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... was thinking. Was it possible that Nikky, of every one, should have been chosen to carry to Karl the marriage arrangements? What an irony! What a jest! It was true there was a change in him. He looked subdued, ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... jest. She had found that no real attachment was to be formed between her brother and friend. There had arisen instead a tender familiarity, a friendship that is rare to be seen. Maude Bereford had grown to treat Guy Trevelyan with brotherly kindness. It pleased him to witness this feeling arising ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... growing redder of face. "She wasn't no lady if she treated that grand hoss that way.... See heah, kid, I'll stake you to a good night hoss. Turn Ol' Cal loose, an' whenever you need to do some real fancy separatin' jest set your frusky on ol' Cal. Better tie to your stirrups if you're perticler aboot keepin' your seat, 'cause 'at ol' pony can sure git from under ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... drama). "Sir," says Quin, "you mistake me. I am in your debt. I owe you a hundred pounds, and I am come to pay you." Thomson, with a disconsolate air, replied, that, as he was a gentleman whom he had never offended, he wondered he should seek an opportunity to jest with his misfortunes. "No," said Quin, raising his voice, "I say I owe you a hundred pounds, and there it is," (laying a bank note of that value before him). Thomson, astonished, begged he would explain himself. "Why," says Quin, "I'll tell you; soon after I had read your Seasons, ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... hide of a Getulian lion, still retaining the claws, which had been gilt. Upon this, Nisus also merrily asked for some consolation, since but for an accident the first prize would have been his, and he showed his face and limbs all besmeared with mud. His chief entered into the jest, and gave him a buckler, finely carved, which had once hung on the walls of Neptune's temple ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... serving that writ on Bassett, Bassett went to Wheeler and treated it as a jest. But Wheeler looked puzzled, and Bassett himself, on second thoughts, said he should like advice of counsel. Accordingly they both went up to London to a solicitor, and obtained an interview with a counsel learned in the law. He heard their story, and said, "The question is, ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... comes to see you," he used to throw out in obvious jest. "That's the only way I can ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... likely there may be people who can read this, even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten, who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting, "Yes! an English joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... off with jewels, though now fantastically masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit for her to handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the groups round a door-step or in the descent of a cellar, chatting with prodigious earnestness about intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest, sympathizing at almost the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and another's shadow, wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed, and breaking into small feminine ebullitions of spite, wrath, and jealousy, tornadoes of a moment, such as vary the social atmosphere ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... The Marble Rocks are often resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers. Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the magar (or Nerbada crocodile) may pop up from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Space-Wanderer had left unquestionable proof of his visit by rendering a tribute to "innate intelligence" and playing a Jovian Jest upon an educated fool—a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Chris, who was plucky enough when he understood the nature of the threatened danger. "Golly, I jest reckon dis nigger got to stay and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... was," declared Nancy, indignantly. "There's no pleasin' her, nohow, no matter how you try! I wouldn't stay if 'twa'n't for the wages and the folks at home what's needin' 'em. But some day—some day I shall jest b'ile over; and when I do, of course it'll be good-by Nancy for me. It will, ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... experience by no expansion or indulgence, but by the confinement of the castle; the terrible loneliness of an imprisoned child, broken after a while by the sudden appearance of his mother, and that merry but alarming jest of his conveyance in the great chest, half stifled in the folds of her embroideries and cloth of gold. Then another flight, and renewed stately confinement among his old surroundings, monotony broken by sudden excitements ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the great art of forecasting, of keeping anticipation on the alert, which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast, without discounting, your effects—that is all the Law and the Prophets. In the first act of Children of the Ghetto, for instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine, followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies. This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have seen ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... and often two and three, for they rarely lived an ordinary lifetime. Adonis thought of that sometimes, when he was alone, or when he looked down at the crowd of delicately scented and richly dressed men and women, every one called by some noble name, who would doubtless laugh at some jest of his before the night was over. To their eyes the fool was a necessary servant, because there had always been a fool at court; he was as indispensable as a chief butler, a chief cook, or a state coachman, and much more amusing. But he was not a man, he had no name, he had ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... new species," said Mr. Wadreds to him one day, "right out of the same trap you're haulin'. And sometimes, when there has been a long-continued storm and the wind's settin' in from the southeast, the traps have jest had ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... audaciously said, "the reason her cousin did not marry was because she would not lose the power of compelling men to make love to her." Perhaps the memory of this jest made it easier to sign ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... and success with it, I quite got out of the way of concealment, and spoke of myself openly as her slave. She used to laugh at me, pretend to think me an absurd boy; and now and then threatened (and that half in jest) to tell her husband. I know very well that she never did. The padron, we used to call him to each other, having taken the name from old Nonna. It was one of our little foolish jokes to pretend the house an inn, he the landlord, and ourselves travellers ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Madam, to smile at the jest which plants a Thorn on another's Breast is to become ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... Sir, the court, In troth, stays for you. I am mad, a mule That never read Justinian, should get up, And ride an advocate. Had you no quirk To avoid gullage, sir, by such a creature? I hope you do but jest; he has not done it: 'Tis but confederacy, to blind the rest. You are ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... thou wert the first to fling Thy virgin flag of freedom to the breeze, The first to humble, in thy neighboring seas, The imperious despot's power; But long before that hour, While yet, in false and vain imagining, Thy sister nations would not own their foe, And turned to jest thy warnings, though the low, Deep, awful mutterings, that precede the throe Of earthquakes, burdened all the ominous air; While yet they paused in scorn, Of fatal madness born,— Thou, oh, my Mother! like a priestess bless'd With wondrous vision of the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... makes a poet's skill a jest, revealing to the soul inexpressible feelings by the aid of inexplicable sounds! A blast of thy trumpet, and millions rush forward to die; a peal of thy organ, and uncounted nations sink down to pray. ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Binford, and intimated that if B. should be elected, he (James) would resign rather than serve with such a colleague. Hearing this, Binford went to the house of James to demand an explanation. Mrs. James remarked, in a jest as Binford thought, that if she was in the place of her husband she would resign her seat in the Senate, and not serve with such a character. B. told her that she was a woman, and could say what she pleased. She replied that she was not in earnest. James then looked B. in the face and said ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... She had a high sense of her responsibilities, and therefore, at various times, endeavoured to further the spread of philanthropy and literature and theosophy and art and temperance and education and other laudable causes. Mr. Kennaston, in his laughing manner, was wont to jest at her varied enterprises and term her Lady Bountiful; but, then, Mr. Kennaston had no real conception of the proper uses of money. In fact, he never thought of money. He admitted this to Margaret with a ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... a little later, they go to dinner. After their meals they resume their domestic amusements, during which the flame of mutual affection spreads in every heart, and unites the rising generation with new and tender ties. The lively jest, without any ill-nature, the artless tale, the jocund dance and frugal supper, bring on the evening; and another visit to the river concludes the actions of the day. Thus contented with their simple way of life, and placed in a delightful country, they are free ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... the thronged thoroughfare, obstructed by crowds who came to gaze upon the pageant, many a significant sneer or half-uttered jest would convey to Haman a sense of his degradation in appearing as the groom ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... plenty of time," said the old frontiersman. "You jest lay around in the sun, an' you'll feel better ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... Marble! 'T ain't anythin' but baked clay; split all to pieces prob'ly—but ye can't tell. I've heard ye can shoot a taller candle through an inch plank—and that's consid'able softer than a marble. And that pesky cat's jest as ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... and a pondering upon things; even his rustic wariness is innocent in its way. Early that autumn he found the turf on the roof of the stable was beginning to slip down inside. Isak chewed at his beard for a while, then, smiling like a man who understands a jest, he laid some poles across to keep it up. Not a bitter word did he say. And another thing: the shed where he kept his store of provisions was simply built on high stone feet at the corners, with nothing between. After a while, ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... Girodon have left them the French seem to be less confident. When Bailloud entered our Mess he said, in the presence of four or five young Officers, "If the Asiatic side of the Straits is not held by us within fifteen days our whole force is voue a la destruction." He meant it as a jest, but when those who prophesy destruction are gros bonnets; big wigs; it needs no miracle to make them come off—I don't mean the wigs but the prophecies. Fortunately, Bailloud soon made a cheerier class of joke and wound ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... boat came surging in on the foam, these manly children waded out to meet her, throwing water at each other, and skylarking as they went. They treated the whole business in fact as a rather good jest, and although they toiled like heroes, they accompanied their work with such jovial looks, and hummed such lilting, free-and-easy airs the while, that it was difficult to associate their doings with ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... he had formed the habit of being robbed, and later on he was drugged; but no one could conjecture what he would next add to his repertory. His troubles were amusing, his difficulties were humorous, his failures were laughable, and his sorrows were the cause for jest. He had a growing paunch, and when he stood he leaned back slightly as though his rotund front found ease in exhibition. As a law student he had aimed a severe blow at justice, and failing as an attorney, he had served his country a good turn. As a reporter he wrote with a torch, ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... each other. This seemed a heartless jest indeed! And it wasn't a bit like their father to tease them when they were in trouble. And real ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... "Twisted it across his shoulders, and let it drag behind him." 54 "Every beaver now made a mad rush for the canal." 58 "It was no longer a log, but a big gray lynx." 62 "He caught sight of a beaver swimming down the pond." 72 "'Or even maybe a bear.'" 90 "He drowns jest at the place where he come in." 96 "Hunted through the silent and pallid aisles of the forest." 102 "A sinister, dark, slow-moving beast." 106 "He sprang with a huge bound that landed him, claws open, squarely on the wolverene's hind quarters." 110 "It was not until the moon appeared ... that ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... life in it. She suffered him to put her hand upon his arm, and then she began to feel a strange pride in his being tall and handsome, and hers. But she kept thinking as they walked, "I hope he'll never he sorry," and she said it again, half in jest. He pressed her hand against his heart, and met her look with one of protest and reassurance, that presently melted into something sweeter yet. He said, "What beautiful eyes you have! I noticed the long lashes when I saw ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... for his comeliness; but at her honeyed words the youth, quite abashed, sat silent, saying nothing. The Queen at last questioned him if his heart was set on any maid or dame, to which he replied that it was not, that love was a serious business and not to be taken in jest. ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... hell, auld wheezie bellows," replied one woman coarsely, adding a rough jest at his breathlessness, whilst the others laughed loudly, adding, each one, another sally to ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... resist. He even sought to conceal his depth of feeling under a disguise of lightness. He admitted that in his present frame of mind he ought to be with her as much as possible, as then, if ever, he stood in need of a sure antidote for the blues, and with a half-hearted jest he closed the conversation, and after that call merely kept away from her. It was hard for him, and as hard for her; but if he had honor, she had pride. So they drifted apart, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... value of these ideas (we trust and hope) by their bulk. The reader indeed—that great idea!—is very often a more important person towards the fortune of an essay than the writer. Even 'the prosperity of a jest,' as Shakespeare tells us, lies less in its own merit than 'in the ear of him that hears it.' If he should happen to be unusually obtuse, the wittiest jest perishes—the most pointed is found blunt. So, with regard to ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Wotton is credited with the statement that "an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the commonwealth", a definition half in jest but not without a touch of seriousness. The feeling is making itself manifest which will soon become universal, that an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to represent the people of his own country ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... the puncher made motions of going through the performance a second time. The joke never staled. It always got a hand, no matter how often it was repeated. At each encore the Utes stamped their flatfooted way round the room in a kind of impromptu and mirthful dance. The baptismal jest never ceased to be ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... revealed to your own mind, and to the assembled jury of the universe? Will your thinking, or saying, that the whole is a fiction, make it so? Will your scoff at God's revelation of the future prevent the dead from rising, or the Judge from appearing? Will a foolish jest, or a proud callousness, or a subtle argument, or a brave indifference to what others fear, enable you, on the resurrection morning, to shut your ears against the sound of the last trump, or to disobey the summons of the Son of God to rise from the tomb, and to appear before Him? ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... from earlier generations. Far as we think we are from our uncivilized ancestors, much of what they did and thought has come into our doing and thinking,—with many changes perhaps, under different religious forms, and sometimes in jest where they were in earnest. Still, these customs and observances (of which All-hallow Eve is only one) may be called the piers, upon which rests a bridge that spans the wide past between us and the generations ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... the expression of the others it was patent that to them also the jest appealed. Only Judas did not seem to have heard; he sat bolt upright, fumbling Mary with his ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... now," said Simon. "It's a railway station, and I see that 'ere willain there, jest as cunnin' as ever. He's a gettin' in the ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... he said. "I seem to be the only one who doesn't know what's going on in my ship. Is this part of the jest?" ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... instead of correcting the vices of the age, have done all they could to inflame them. Marriage has been one of the common topics of ridicule that every stage scribbler hath found his account in; for whenever there is an occasion for a clap, an impertinent jest upon matrimony is sure to raise it. This hath been attended with very pernicious consequences. Many a country squire, upon his setting up for a man of the town, has gone home in the gaiety of his heart and beat his wife. A kind husband hath been looked upon as a clown, and a good wife as a domestic ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and in my manhood, I derived ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... for he was refreshed, and restored. Forthwith, as soon as I could speak with him (and I could, so soon as he was able, for I never left him, and we hung but too much upon each other), I essayed to jest with him, as though he would jest with me at that baptism which he had received, when utterly absent in mind and feeling, but had now understood that he had received. But he so shrunk from me, as from an enemy; and with a wonderful ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... exclaimed Ned, with a sudden flash of ferocity; "ay, bad enough in all conscience, and the worst of it is, that it makes me ready to jest about anything—in heaven, earth, or ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... was a man, nevertheless; had a humorously wrinkled mouth, and an eye that twinkled responsive to a jest; and was the best judge of wine in Oxford. On the strength of this undeniable gift the dons had long since elected him steward of Common-room; and he valued the responsibility, abstaining from tobacco—which he loved—to keep pure his taste for vintages, and preserve ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sea! But, as I say, Dante never heeded my jeers, and sat there very quiet and silent, very much as if he had forgotten our existence, and was thinking only of that gracious child he spoke of. And I, my laughter being somewhat abashed by his gravity, and the edge of my jest being blunted by his indifference, as well as by the reproof on Guido's face, stood there awkwardly, not knowing whether to abide with him or leave him, when there came, to break my embarrassment, the presence of ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... I had to come east on business. There was some property to be settled up in Beulah, so I thought I'd jest step down here an' ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... was at this time a young officer, and he and I, leaving the two seniors to proceed in their chat as they pleased, never once opened our mouths either to them or each other. The Pragmatic Sanction happened unfortunately to become the theme of their conversation, when Constable said in jest, "Now, John, I'll wad you a plack that neither of these two lads ever heard of the Pragmatic Sanction."—"Not heard of the Pragmatic Sanction!" said John Davidson; "I would like to see that;" and with a voice of thunder he asked his son the fatal question. As young ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... of the elaborate ritual, pleasantly punctuated with cups of raisin wine, passed peacefully by, and the evening meal, mercifully set in the middle, was reached, to the children's vast content. They made wry, humorous mouths, each jest endeared by annual repetition, over the horseradish that typified the bitterness of the Egyptian bondage, and ecstatic grimaces over the soft, sweet mixture of almonds, raisins, apples, and cinnamon, vaguely suggestive of the bondsmen's mortar; they ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... forehead, and her face grow ashen and perturbed. And this was not mended by the levity with which the young ladies, with whom the spectre had lost his influence, familiarity, as usual, breeding contempt, had come to talk, and even to jest, about it. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... think exactly as I spoke, strive as I might to believe the man in jest. Too much solemnity and sorrow both were discernible in his worn and rugged features, hewn grandly as if from granite, to admit of a hope like this. His words were earnest, and some great calamity was in store, I could not doubt, or at least he apprehended such. For ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... dropped the jewel-case? Was it because I was startled by the jocular remark which identified the mysterious man with the person who had disturbed the steersman? That remark was made in mere jest. Yet I could not help thinking that it contained the truth. Nay, I knew that it was true; I knew by instinct. And being true, what facts were logically to be deduced from it? What aim had this mysterious man in compelling, by his strange influences, the ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... nobles a weeke, then, I will give thee, For this merry jest thou hast showne unto me; And tell the old abbot, when thou comest home, Thou hast brought him a ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... a Man that laugh'd to death. This is the traditional end of l'unico Aretino. On hearing some ribald jest he is said to have flung himself back in a chair and expired of sheer merriment. Later days elucidate his fate by declaring that overbalancing himself he broke his neck on the marble pavement. Sir Thomas Urquhart, the glorious translator of Rabelais, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... Hamilton's trailin's? Stopped agin—that's before Somerville's shanty. What's gone o' them now? Maybe they've lost the trail and got onto Gray's slide through the woods. It's no use lookin'; ye couldn't see anything in this nigger dark. Hol' on! If they're comin' through the woods, ye'll hear 'em again jest off here. Yes! ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... then," replied the crew, opening his mouth from ear to ear in one of his cheerful smiles. "She calls me Monkey, jest as other folks do. When I give her this dollar she'll be satisfied. Won't she open her ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... am not jesting, Lieutenant Mathers. I never jest. Obviously, I am not of the military. It would be quite impossible for me to gain such an award. But you are the ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... John would have maintained his ground she besought him not to jest in that direction, with eyes so ready for tears ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... of San Marco and San Teodoro,—every inch of the vast Piazza, without the circle of soldiery, occupied by eager spectators. Over this vast assemblage, amid the impending thoughts which the incidents of the hour and the memory of the Past inspired, reigned a profound silence; no laugh or jest, such as bespeaks a holiday, no heartless curiosity, such as accompanies a mere public show, no vulgar excitement was evident; on many faces dwelt an expression of awe and pity,—on others an indignant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... "Jest drove off that way; Mrs. Flynn's baby's in a fit," cried a stout lady from the piazza, never ceasing to rock, though several passers-by paused to hear the news, for she was a doctor's wife, and used to the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... and jest we were worrying away the leaden-winged hours, when suddenly thug, splash, and like a huge turtle we were floundering in the mud. 'No moving,' said the captain, 'till the tide comes up;' and so for three mortal ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... girl could do. He cared no more about her than he did about whatever woman cleaned his rooms. She was not angry, but a feeling of weariness came upon her. (It is odd that one can be so in earnest when one is in jest.) Once or twice she shook her head at the moon, and as she stared, moody and quiet, it seemed that the moon had slid beyond her vision and she was looking into great caverns of space, bursting with blackness. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... was trying to make a jest of it; but Samuel was in deadly earnest. "I hope," he said, "that you are not dependent upon the money of ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... the cottage eaves, when, at the close of day, Kind-hearted mirth and social ease the toiling hour repay; Though coarse the fare, though rude the jest, that cheer that lowly board, There loving hearts and honest ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... to the sensitive "novus homo." With Pompey, though he trusted him politically as he never trusted Caesar, Cicero was never so intimate. They had not the same common interests; Cicero could laugh at Pompey behind his back, but hardly once in his correspondence does he attempt to raise a jest about Caesar. ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... that sots and knaves should be so vain, To wish their vile remembrance may remain And stand recorded at their own request, To future days a libel or a jest." ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... emancipation. She persuaded old nurse to teach her to be useful, and Margaret used to declare that she witnessed scenes as good as a play in her room, where the little dexterous scholar, apparently in jest, but really in sober, earnest, wiled instruction from the old woman; and made her experiments, between smiles and blushes, and merrily glorying in results that promised that she would be a notable housewife. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... her hands. Macalister had bought him two hundred and fifty shares and sold them at the half-crown profit he had suggested. The commission note was to follow next day. For one moment Philip was furious with Mildred for her cruel jest, but then he could only think ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... contrast with the faces on each side and in front of her—faces of rude intelligence, faces of fathomless stupidity, faces degraded into something less than human. But all were listening, all straining towards her. There were a few whispers of honest admiration, a few of vile jest. She ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... little rim of cold steel pressed against his temple. With that touch all Evan's agony rolled away. After all, what was life but a jest? Thank God! he was ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... the young soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been considered as cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye upon the Prince, and smiling all the time, as if he took what his Highness had done in jest, said 'Man Prince,—'(I forget the French words he used, the purport however was.) 'That's a good joke; but we do it much better in England;' and threw a whole glass of wine in the Prince's face. An old General who sat by, said, 'Il a bien fait, mon Prince, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... to know whether Labat (tom. iv. p. 53—57) be in jest or in earnest, when he supposes that Anagni still feels the weight of this curse, and that the cornfields, or vineyards, or olive-trees, are annually blasted by Nature, the obsequious handmaid ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... in the mood for joking?' he said, at last. 'Have you ever heard me jest on such subjects, Miss Garston? I thought we agreed on ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... "Found there wasn't a glass-blower in all Californy. Bought 'n old machine, put up to the mines with it, blew all sorts 'f jigmarigs 'n' thingumbobs, 'n' sold 'em to the miners 'n' Injuns. Them critters is jest like sailors ashore; they'll buy anything they set eyes on. Besides, I sounded my horn; advertised big, so to speak; got up a sensation. Used to mount a stump 'n' make a speech; told 'em I'd blow Yankee Doodle in glass, any color they ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... had been adorned at the expense of different emperors he inscribed his own name, and that, not as if he were the restorer of old works, but their founder. This same fault is said to have characterized the emperor Trajan, from which the people in jest named him "The Pellitory ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... good-nature, with comparatively little brilliancy, quietly and unobtrusively take the helm. There is the excellent talker who, by his talents and his acquirements, is eminently fitted to delight and to instruct, yet he is so unable to repress some unseemly jest or some pointed sarcasm or some humorous paradox that he continually leaves a sting behind him, creates enemies, destroys his reputation for sobriety of thought, and makes himself impossible in posts of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Richmond; Sherman was marching tump-tump through Georgia. I was a stripling lad den and boy-like I got to see and hear everything. One day more than all, de overseer sent my pappy to Ashepoo junction to get de mail. I gone 'long wid him. Seem like I jest had ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... can't yeh give a poor feller a couple of cents t' git a bed? I got five, and I gits anudder two I gits me a bed. Now, on th' square, gents, can't yeh jest gimme two cents t' git a bed? Now, yeh know how a respecter'ble gentlem'n feels when he's down on his luck, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... brilliant, daring girl; Mary, witty and playful, though frank and warm-hearted; but it made me love them more than ever. The gaiety and audacity of the one was forgotten in the presence of the thoughtful, timid Lily: and the other checked the merry jest which trembled on her lips, and sobered that roguish eye beside the earnest, sensitive girl; so that, though we were together almost daily, dear Lily did not understand the character ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... There, darling of the lotus eye, I see thee, and 'tis vain to fly, Wilt thou not speak, dear love? I see Thy form half hidden by the tree. Stay if thou love me, Sita, stay In pity cease thy heartless play. Why mock me now? thy gentle breast Was never prone to cruel jest. 'Tis vain behind yon bush to steal: Thy shimmering silks thy path reveal. Fly not, mine eyes pursue thy way; For pity's sake, dear Sita, stay. Ah me, ah me, my words are vain; My gentle love is lost or slain. How could her tender bosom spurn Her husband on his home-return? Ah no, my ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... "You jest put your hand on me, you big, overgrown sawney! That's all I'm a-waitin' for. You 'tack me and I'll have you in the caboose, sure's my name's Gedney Raffer. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... great Council in London doth dvell; Jest vot they are arter 'tvould floor me to tell. They're qvite a young body—not seving years old— But they've spent a large fortin in silver and go-o-old. Singing, Ills ve vill cure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... is the camp-fire represented as a rude humorist? It causes faces and forms that are haggard and care-worn to appear fresh and healthy, thus playing a grim jest ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... anticipation on the alert, which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast, without discounting, your effects—that is all the Law and the Prophets. In the first act of Children of the Ghetto, for instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine, followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies. This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... superior ingenuity—as having been "done," in short. So, if a lark succeeded, the authorities aforesaid were decidedly done, and laughed at accordingly; if it failed, why the other party were done, and there was still somebody to laugh at. No doubt, the jest was richer in the first case supposed; but, in the second, there was the additional gusto, so dear to human philanthropy, of having the victim present, and enjoying his discomfiture, which, in the case of the dons being the sufferers, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... "That's jest what this is goin' to be. We're lettin' you off of a poundin' so's to show what can be done, an' if you say so much as a word to old Donovan we'll pretty near ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... watch that Ball, how high he goes,' The Bat exclaimed with glee, 'But yet he never says he owes His rise in life to me. No, no, that's not his way at all; And though I do my best, His graceless growls at every fall Are something past a jest.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the tail: it is done every season. Nothing can put them beside this, and they insist that, take a horse tired in traces and put him to work by the tail, he will draw better: quite fresh again. Indignant reader, this is no jest of mine, but cruel, stubborn, barbarous truth. It is ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. This humorist (like Alceste) was once "funnier than he had supposed," when he sat down with a certain classical author, to study the topography of Epipolae. But his talent is his own, and very agreeable, though he once so forgot himself as to jest on the Deceased Wife's Sister. When we think of those writers to whom we all owe so much, it would be sheer ingratitude to omit the name of the master of them all, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here is a wit who is a scholar, and almost a poet, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... purloining Father Pandoza's shoes, when the soldiers in their fury about the ammunition destroyed the Mission. At the time of its destruction a rumor of this nature was circulated through camp, started by some wag, no doubt in jest; for Ord, who was somewhat eccentric in his habits, and had started on the expedition rather indifferently shod in carpet-slippers, here came out in a brand-new pair of shoes. Of course there was no real foundation for such a report, but Rains was not above small things, as ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... give ocular demonstration in such cases before so many beautiful women; but that if all of them would retire, except the young lady to whom I pointed, (selecting the youngest and handsomest,) I would satisfy her curiosity. The ladies enjoyed the jest, and went away laughing heartily; and the young damsel herself, to whom I had given the preference, (though she did not avail herself of the privilege of inspection,) seemed no way displeased at the compliment; for she soon afterwards sent ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... instrument to be sent for at any minute, stood among a strange body of semi-feudal retainers below, where he was soon singled out by the duchess's chasseur, a Styrian, who, masking his fury under jest, in the South-German manner, endeavoured to lead him up to an altercation. But Beppo was much too supple to be entrapped. He apologized for any possible offences that he might have committed, assuring the chasseur that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... His hands above her hair — the same black hair That once he made a jest of, praising it, While Martha's busy eyes had left their work To flash with laughing envy. Nothing of that Was to be theirs again; and such a thought Was like the flying by of a quick bird Seen through a shadowy doorway in the twilight. For now she felt his hands ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... were merely furnishing me with a fresh subject of arousing attack, and of pointing out more clearly that I have not found in your books any subject of laughter which is not in itself intensely ridiculous; and that in making a jest of your moral maxims, I am as far from making a jest of holy things as the doctrine of your Casuists distant from the holy doctrine of the Gospel? In truth, sirs, there is a vast difference between laughing at religion and laughing ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... without a struggle, and on the way out grew plaintive. "Jinnie, gal," he kept saying, "I'm liable to get dry before mornin', I shore am; ef you'd only jest let me had one ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... Nat was up here early and took his hat off to the ground to C. "Came to thank you for what you send me yesterday, Sar—much obliged to you, Sar (with another flourish and scrape). I well sat-is-fy, and jest as long as the Lord give me life and dese ole arms can do so (imitating the motion of hoeing), I work ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... revolution, and, retiring from the field, grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and contempt? Can you consent to wade through the vile mire of dependency, and owe the miserable remnant of that life to charity which has hitherto been spent in honour? If you can—go—and carry with you the jest of tories, and the scorn of whigs;—the ridicule, and, what is worse, the pity of the world. Go,—starve and be forgotten. But if your spirit should revolt at this; if you have sense enough to discover, and spirit enough to oppose, tyranny ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... play with their fellows in an ever-widening circle of social activity. "Baby's Hush-a-byes" in cradle or mother's lap will now give place to the quiet cribside talks called "The Palace Bed Time" and "The Queen Mother's Counsel"; and in the story hour "The Palace Jest-Book" will furnish merriment for the youngsters who laughed the year before over the simpler nonsense of ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... one decisively. "Couldn't mistake it. Didn't that owl hoot sharp and short fur an owl? Jest like Tom Ross. Don't waste any words that he kin help, an' makes them that he has to use ez short ez ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... her wholly immersed in wedding-clothes and fashions. What a remarkable, many-sided woman she is! a perfect queen of all society, and an admirable one at that. Everything she says is fresh and crisp, and her little jest well told and well chosen. The professor beams and smiles, though he is no great lady's man. She might be a bon camarade, so free is she from the airy little nothings of society that puzzle scholarly men. There ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Aguirre; the denomination of the river is therefore erroneously attributed to the nickname of maranos (hogs), which this adventurer gave his companions in going down the river Amazon. Was not this vulgar jest rather an allusion to the Indian name of the river?) He called this river Rio Dolce—a name which, since Ribeyro, was long preserved on our maps, and which has sometimes been given erroneously to the Maroni and ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... "I jest want a (decorated) word wiv you. See?—just a friendly word or two. Just to clear up any blooming errors. That's all I want. No need to be so (richly decorated) proud, if you are the noo bloke at Potwell Inn. Not a bit ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the East, did tell us of the war as they waged it in France. Also, it introduced Bairnsfather to us. "The Better 'Ole" became almost an institution; we could speak with authority on "'oles." And "When the 'ell's it goin' to be strawberry?" was the unfailing jest at meal-times, as we scraped the layer of flies from the top of the ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... Crossthwaite off; for what was jest to the soldiers, I saw, by his face, was fierce enough earnest to him. We walked on a ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... and I know that it is one which cannot fade. Are there any sorrows like these sorrows of our youth? Can any bitterness equal the bitterness of such good-byes? I know but one of which I was fated to taste in after years, and that shall be told of in its place. It is a common jest to mock at early love, but if it be real, if it be something more than the mere arising of the passions, early love is late love also; it is love for ever, the best and worst event which can befall a man or woman. I say it who am old and who have ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... song, another began; his tune was different as to the composition, but had the same serious style which strongly marked the general turn of the people. They were indeed seldom seen to laugh so heartily, and jest so facetiously, as the more polished nations of the Friendly and Society Islands, who have already learnt to set a great value on these enjoyments. On the afternoon of this day, our friends importuned us to sing to them again. We readily complied with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... his name became a by-word And a jest among the people; And whene'er a boastful hunter Praised his own address too highly, Or a warrior, home returning, Talked too much of his achievements, All his hearers cried: "Iagoo! Here's Iagoo ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... of Aphrodite's good will, and in revenge the goddess turns Phaon's affection away from Sappho, back to Thalassa, the mother of his children. Sappho's infatuation for Phaon, the slave, seems a cruel jest of Aphrodite, who fills Sappho with a wholly blind and unreasoning passion. In all three of Swinburne's Lesbian poems, Aphrodite's anger is mentioned. This is the sole theme of Sapphics, in which poem the goddess, displeased ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... principle, is confined to those small cases of personal assault which meet with but slight punishment at the hands of the law, or even none at all, for de minimis non,—mere trivial wrongs, committed sometimes only in jest. The consequence of this limited application of the principle is that it has forced itself into an exaggerated respect for the value of the person,—a respect utterly alien to the nature, constitution or destiny of man—which it has elated into a species ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... beans and seed-pods in the baskets of the street-vendors around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; stepping back into an archway to avoid a bag-footed camel, or a gaily caparisoned horse, or a heavy-laden donkey passing through a narrow street; exchanging a smile and an unintelligible friendly jest with a sweet-faced, careless child; listening to long disputes between buyers and sellers in that resounding Arab tongue which seems full of tragic indignation and wrath, while the eyes of the handsome brown Bedouins who use it remain ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... go up there jest yet," the woman whispered. "He did get away from us yesterdy and had a terrible time over there." She hitched her shoulders in the direction of Stoney Island Avenue. "We ain't found out till he'd been gone 'most two hours, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... sister Mrs. Able, and had passed about four weeks in New Salem, after which she returned to Kentucky. Three years later, and perhaps a year after Miss Rutledge's death, Mrs. Able, before starting for Kentucky, told Mr. Lincoln probably more in jest than earnest, that she would bring her sister back with her on condition that he would become her—Mrs. Able's—brother-in-law. Lincoln, also probably more in jest than earnest, promptly agreed to the proposition; for he remembered Mary Owens as a tall, handsome, dark-haired ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... for the loan of it, For one year shall you pay— You may do me a good turn Before my dying day; But we will have a merry jest, For to be talk[^e]d long; You shall make me a bond," quoth he, "That shall be ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... a reasonable interval, long enough for it not to seem that she was too much elated over it, she remarked, "An', by-de-way, Mr. Peters, I must tell you what a lovely Christmas gif' I have just received by de hand of Mr. Pier. He has jest presented me with his yaller-wheeled buggy, an' I sho' is proud of it." Then, turning to Pierre, she added, "You sho' is a mighty generous gen'leman, Mr. Pier—you ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... Jackson—which was the name of the pup—Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else—and the bets being doubled and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up; and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int of his hind leg and freeze to it—not chaw, you understand, but only just grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once that didn't have no hind legs, because ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the Allan an' Darling team," exclaimed Mart Barclay with vicious conviction. "It's that there cur leader they got—Baldy. There's enough Scotch stubbornness in Allan t' try to make a leader outen a cur jest becus folks said he couldn't. Up in Dawson I heered once he trained a timber wolf t' lead a team o' McKenzie huskies; but he'd find that a heap easier 'n puttin' the racin' sperit inter that low-down Golconda ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... upstairs at our tea; in he comes drunk, and says many things we had to look at one another and excuse. Presently he tells us all that he has made a mistake; he has wedded Patty, and I'm the one he likes the best. But I thought the fool was in jest; but Patty she gave a cry as if a knife had gone through her heart. Then my blood got up in a moment. 'That's an affront to all three,' said I: 'and take your answer, ye drunken sow,' said I. I took him by the scruff of the neck and just turned him out of the room and sent him to the bottom of ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... a quarrel between Harry Esmond and his comrade, good-natured, phlegmatic Thomas Tusher, who never of his own seeking quarrelled with anybody: by quoting to the latter some silly joke which Harry had made regarding him—(it was the merest, idlest jest, though it near drove two old friends to blows, and I think such a battle would have pleased her)—and from that day Tom kept at a distance from her; and she respected him, and coaxed him sedulously whenever ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... began to think it was all a joke; someone's spite, the jest of some wag; and besides, if she were dead, one would have known it. But no! There was nothing extraordinary about the country; the sky was blue, the trees swayed; a flock of sheep passed. He saw the village; he was seen ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Laugh, jest, and dance ruled the fleeting hours in the halls of the old country-house that night, and the presiding genius of the revel was still the beautiful hostess—never more beautiful, never so winning before. No one noticed that, by her orders, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... to me and, with a serious air, pulling out his old gold watch, with a gold dial plate, gravely said to me, while he inwardly laughed—"Pray sir what is the time of the day by your watch,—let us see, do our watches agree, sir:" I blushed.—"Nay, said he, I do but jest with you my child—you must not be angry with me. Come, come; if you have not a gold watch, you shall have a silver seal to tie to your riband," saying which he brought me home and, taking one from the drawer of a black inkstand, gave it to me. What ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... Tall and thin, with a face pale as marble, but full of intelligence, he looks, when bending on his gold-headed cane, the very beau ideal of a physician of la Vieille Cour, and he still retains the costume of that epoch. His manner, half jest and half earnest, gives an idea of what that of the Philosopher of Ferney must have been when in a good humour, and adds piquancy to his narrations. Madame C——, who is an especial favourite of his, and who can draw him out in conversation better than any one else, ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... voyaged in a skinless coracle, Cambro-British Saints, pp. 186, 499), they were ferried over in safety, no water finding its way into the boat. Then follows the episode of the cloak, omitting, however, Senan's jest of carrying it secretly. A glossator has added in LA the marginal note "Priests formerly wore cowls." There are slight discrepancies between the versions as to the precise garment given by Ciaran and restored ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... waggery, burlesque, humor, playfulness, waggishness, drollery, jest, pleasantry, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... a bit taken aback. He had burnt his bridges—he could not return to Concho—yet he wanted a definite wage. "I kin pack—make and break camp—and sure cook the frijoles. Pop learned me all that; but he was payin' me a dollar a week. He said I was jest as good as a man. A dollar ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... if ye put jest the tip of yer finger between them slats, that 'ere ol' rooster 'll bite it almost off'n yer!" he remarked, "I know, 'cause I ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... poor Jock steadiness appeared renunciation of all "jest and youthful jollity," and religion seemed tedious endurance of what might be important, but, like everything important, was to him very wearisome and uninteresting. To him all zest and pleasure ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rejected the result of poor JONES's three months' hard labour at the Joe-Millery mill. This, however, was no joke to JONES, who straightway decided that this time he would give the inimitable ARTHUR something quite new in the way of a jest; and so, dropping the dialogue, he came to "the action," which, in this instance, was an action-at-law. Whatever Mr. ROBERTS may have thought of the words, he will hardly have considered the result of this case as "good business" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... are the Traitors, Who lye and swear in jest, To cheat unguarded Creatures Of Virtue, Fame, and Rest! Whoever steals a Shilling, Through Shame the Guilt conceals: In Love the perjur'd Villain With ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... while Sue, at the foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night, with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... upon the case, returns, capias, alias capias, demurrers, venire facias, replevins, supersedeases, certioraries, writs of error, actions of trover and conversion, trespasses, precipes, and dedimus. This was matter of jest to the learned in law; however Hocus and the rest of the tribe encouraged John in his fancy, assuring him that he had a great genius for law; that they questioned not but in time he might raise money enough by it to reimburse him ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... flappin' caps all the time scoldin' them poor little girls for laughin' too loud or gettin' off the line or somethin' like that. An' them with long-tailed frocks an' choky kind of aperns an' big sunbonnets, lookin' right at my basket o' peanuts an' never tastin' a single one. Oh, jest catch me! I'll be a newspaper boy, first, but—but, Jane dear, do you s'pose anything—any single thing, such as bein' terrible hungry, or not gettin' paid for frames or singin'—could that make my ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... well-ordered home which would have been nothing to a properly trained girl were unendurable to me. I resisted from sheer perverseness and dislike of control. I do not mean to say that I was always ill-tempered; I was lively and merry enough, and your uncle used to tease me, and jest with me, which I enjoyed very much, and ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... hurled them into the crowd, with a smirk of delight. 'My father and mother often told me,' he cried, 'that I should die with my shoes on; but you may all see that I have made them both liars.' A great man dies not with so mean a jest, and Tyburn was untouched to mirth ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... out of Germany long ago to the effect that all the males there, with the exception of decrepit old men and small children, have been called to the army. The peculiar "crisis in men" in Berlin has frequently served as a subject of jest in the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... Capuchin," as the soldiers were accustomed to designate Eugene, through fondness. At such times, he smiled, nodded, and, when his officers would have chided the men for their familiarity, besought them not to reprove them for a jest so harmless. ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... it a jest: it was the truth. Daniel did regret even the worst days of his mission. At that time his grave responsibility, overwhelming fatigues, hard work, and daily danger, had procured him at least some hours of oblivion. Now idleness left him, without respite or time, face to ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... thought, apparently to impress us with the conviction of her perfect happiness; for it is a great point of honour amongst girls similarly situated to look as cheerful and gay as possible; the same feeling, though in a different degree, which induces the gallant highwayman to jest in the presence of the multitude when the hangman's cord is within an inch of his neck, the same which makes the gallant general whose life is forfeited, command his men to fire on him; the same which makes ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... no one could enjoy more than Corwin himself; for he was not only an impassioned orator, but a delightful humorist. He could put a principle or a reason in the form of a jest so that it would go farther than even eloquence could carry it with the whimsical Western people; and perhaps nothing more effective was said against the infamous Black Laws which forbade the testimony of negroes in the courts than Corwin put in the form of self-satire. He was ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... followed her young mistress in with the carriage-cloak, giggled into her hand as at a royal jest and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... slaves marry? She replied, "Ah jest don't 'member seeing any marry 'cause ah wuz so small. Ah wuz jest eleven years old de time of de war but ah' members hearing some of dem say dat when two slaves wanted to git married dey would hafta ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... could not choose but believe in him. The sun shone brightly, the crops ripened, the hum of the threshing-machine droned on the wind—all was life and happiness. In the summer evenings pleasant groups met upon the lawn; the song, the jest went round; now and then an informal dance, arranged with much laughter, whiled away the merry hours till the stars appeared above the trees and the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... sacred ties were severed by the cruellest mistrust. The husband trembled at his wife, the father at his son, the sister at the brother. The dishes remained untouched, and the wine at the dinner, which a friend put before his friends; and there where formerly jest and mirth had reigned supreme, savage glances were now spying about for the masked murderer. Fathers of families were observed buying provisions in remote districts with uneasy looks and movements, and preparing them themselves in the first dirty cook-shop they ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured jest about the farmer's wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and was allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon their shoulders, and now the drenching sack-cloth would flap ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which they coveted. They brought home three less valuable, but remunerative, prizes. Don Pedro Sarmiento de Genaboa, Governor of the Straits of Magellan, and other captives were worth heavy ransoms. Ralegh repeats in the History, 'a pretty jest' told him 'merrily' by the worthy Don Pedro, on whom he clearly did not allow thraldom to weigh heavily, how the draftsman of the chart of the Straits invented an island in them at his wife's instance, that she might have ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... of her heart, she kept her voice light, and Gerald, all unsuspecting, answered, as if it were a harmless jest they were bandying, 'What a horrid score! But, yes, it's quite true; I want my time for hunting and farming and studying a bit, and then you mustn't forget that I enjoy dabbling at my painting in my spare moments and have the company of my wise ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... range of ridicule, which takes "every creature in, of every kind." No fastidious delicacy spoils their sports of fancy: though ten times told, the tale to them never can be tedious; though dull "as the fat weed that grows on Lethe's bank," the jest for them has all the poignancy of satire: on the very offals, the garbage of wit, they can feed and batten. Happy they who can find in every jester the wit of Sterne or Swift; who else can wade through hundreds of thickly-printed pages to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... later, the old professor could have bitten out his tongue for his unholy jest. His penitence was in no wise lessened by the quality of Scott's answering laugh. Best leave those fellows to their ministerial sackcloth, without questioning the quality of the flax from which it was spun. A man of Scott Brenton's calibre would do no harm by his preaching. What was the sense ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... sayings from of old Ranging and ringing thro' the minds of men, And echo'd by old folk beside their fires For comfort after their wage-work is done, Speak of the King; and Merlin in our time Hath spoken also, not in jest, and sworn Tho' men may wound him that he will not die, But pass, again to come; and then or now Utterly smite the heathen under foot, Till these and all men ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... Committee are well aware that the matters submitted to them have been, and still are, the subject of ridicule and jest; but they are also aware that ridicule and jest never yet effectually put down either truth or error; and that the development of our times and the progression of our age is such, that many thoughts laughed at to-day ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful jollity, Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles, Nods and becks and wreathed Smiles, Such as hang on Hebe's cheek And love to live in dimple sleek; Sports that wrinkled care derides And Laughter holding ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... 45'.] When the people of the prize were allowed to depart, the pilot's boy told the admiral, that the English ship ought now to be called the Cacafuego, not theirs, as it had got all their rich loading, and that their unfortunate ship ought now to be called the Cacaplata, which jest excited much mirth.[29] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... success with it, I quite got out of the way of concealment, and spoke of myself openly as her slave. She used to laugh at me, pretend to think me an absurd boy; and now and then threatened (and that half in jest) to tell her husband. I know very well that she never did. The padron, we used to call him to each other, having taken the name from old Nonna. It was one of our little foolish jokes to pretend the house an inn, he the landlord, and ourselves travellers ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... solo speaking Members still feel an avidity; If they burn to make orations of most uncommon zest, Let them just take our precaution against intense stupidity! Let them study PUNCHINELLO and learn how to make a jest; But away with dreams chimerical and projects vain, though clever! The power of tongue's proportionate to wondrous length of ear; The beast that carried BALAAM is as garrulous as ever, And still the lobby listener ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... old feller, ain't he?—wouldn't think it, jest to look at him! Face looks like an ear of last summer's sweet corn, all dried up; but I tell ye he's got the juice in him yit! Aunt Polly's gittin' old, ain't she? They say she can't walk half the time—lost the use of her limbs; but it's all gone to her tongue. That's as good as a razor, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Miss Aline," the Princess answered. "I remember that when my father made a joke—it was always a good, old, time-honoured favourite—he would look about to see that all the servants were smiling at the jest. They had heard it a hundred times before, but he always liked to see that they were enjoying it ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... the affair the Knights of the Round Table launched many a quip and jest, but that simply proved the fineness of their sentiments toward a certain delicate human relation which forms mankind's single awful approach to the creative and ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... to be lifted to a higher standard on these matters. The subject of marriage is too sacred to jest about, and people in general think it no harm to toy with the word and all that pertains to it ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... metters: Some canderdates air dead an' gone, an' some hez ben defeated, Which 'mounts to pooty much the same; fer it's ben proved repeated A betch o' bread thet hain't riz once ain't goin' to rise agin, An' it's jest money throwed away to put the emptins in: But thet's wut folks wun't never larn; they dunno how to go, Arter you want their room, no more 'n a bullet-headed beau; Ther' 's ollers chaps a-hangin' roun' ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... It was no jest of Valmond's that he would, or could, have five hundred followers in two weeks. Lagroin and Parpon were busy, each in his own way—Lagroin, open, bluff, imperative; Parpon, silent, acute, shrewd. Two days before the feast of St. John the Baptist, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... beneath the tempest's frown Round his tir'd limbs to wrap the purple vest; And mix'd with nails and beads, an equal jest! Barter for food, the jewels ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent's counting-house in the city of London: that this room of state, in short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain's, invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed:- these were truths which I really could not, for the moment, bring ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. It pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate upon ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... intellectual appreciation. Thus, Nero made a pun on the name of Seneca, when the philosopher was brought before him for sentence. In speaking the decree that the old man should kill himself, the emperor used merely the two Latin words: "Se neca." We admit the ghastly cleverness of the jest, but we do not ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... ringin' as if the world wouldn't stand another minnit? Next time you want to get in, Haneran, you jest come down the aree! And me ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... we'll hope it is," he said affably, and to the quartermaster: "Ellison, this gentleman'll, maybe, take a finger of whisky to his own health—and ours," he added, with a relaxation of his grim face at his jest. "Ye'll find a bottle ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... at him, to see if he was in jest or earnest. Her look staggered him a little, but he repeated his question. She cast her eyes down, and ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... know, vile slave! quoth he, How impious 'tis to jest With sacred things, and to profane The office of ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... making some impatient reply, but discretion restrained him. He turned to Eve's own affairs, questioned her closely about her life in the tradesman's house, and so their conversation followed a smoother course. Presently, half in jest, ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... last word—"two minutes more in which to recover from your merriment. At the end of that time I shall expect you to be quiet and orderly and ready to begin this recitation." He drew his watch from his pocket and laid it on the desk. "So that you may enjoy this—this brilliant jest to the full, I'll ask the nine young gentleman in the front rows to stand up and face you. If you please, Hall, Stearns, Draper, ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... caused to be imported from farther in the country some straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called Sugar-Maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and more than they have cost,—though one of the selectmen, while setting ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... This land suffers from a constant and pressing need of reenforcements, on account not only of its unhealthful climate, but of the many emergencies which continually arise when I must send aid. These occasions now are not so much a matter of jest as they have been hitherto; for the Chinese and Japanese are not Indians, but people as valiant as many of the inhabitants of Berberia [Barbary], and even more so. I entreat your Majesty to give careful attention to this, and to order that in all vessels as many men as possible be sent; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... the expression of a doubt, but he regards the doubt as gratuitous; "I think nobody can, in earnest, be so skeptical as to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and feels." As we have seen (section 12), he meets the doubt with a jest. ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... out to me (not by Henry Irving, but by others concerned) that although I was too old for Margaret, I might play Martha! Well! well! I didn't quite see that. So I redeemed a promise given in jest at the Lyceum to Frank Benson twenty years earlier, and went off to Stratford-upon-Avon to play in ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... said, "Learn of me how gold is to be made; I do it by painting, you by serving his majesty—diligence in business is the only true alchemy." The officers departed somewhat crest-fallen, neither relishing the jest, nor likely to reap ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... as well to carry it off as a jest? So his hat came off with a flourish, and he said jocosely as he took the next heap, 'Keeping-apples, Mr. James. I'll put it ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... didn't play poker in Siwash would get run out by the Faculty. You ought to see our president put up his pile and draw to a pair of deuces. What!—a Reverend! I beg your pardon, friend. 'S all right. Jest name the game you're strong at and we'll try to accommodate you later on. Here, you fellows, watch my chips while I show the Reverend around our diggin's. You nip one like you did last time, Turk Bowman, and there'll be the all-firedest row that this shack has ever ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms. The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... that it was the quickest scheme for extinguishing life ever invented—patented Anno Christi Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five. Verily we live in the age of the Push-Button! And as I sat there I heard a laugh that was a quaver, and the sound of a stout cane emphasizing a jest struck against ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... says dat Ah should see if yo'all is heah yet and does yo'all want anythin'. Lucy, she's bin a-livin' heah, dat is, her mammy and pappy and her pappy's mammy and pappy has bin heah since befo' old Massa Ralestone done gone 'way. So Lucy, she jest nachely am oneasy 'bout yo'all ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... "I'll jest bet yer a million dollars ter a piece o' custard pie yer don't," said Bud Morgan, rising from the lounge where he had been resting after a strenuous day in the ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... then; a thousand compliments," exclaimed De Guiche, upon whose lips a courtier's jest was already fitting, but to whom the word "affianced," addressed by Malicorne with respect to Mademoiselle de Montalais, recalled ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... beckonings, she saw him smiling down at her with the same radiant, beseeching, worshipping smile. In Helen's ears Latimer's commands to the sailorman rang as clearly as though Latimer stood before her and had just spoken. Only now they were no longer a jest; they were a vow, a promise, an oath of allegiance that brought to her peace, and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... literature begins, still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to predict that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that no literary fashion is more subject to change than the fashion of a jest, and that jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the next. But there is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called "the great jester of France;" and though the puns of Shakspere's clowns are detestable the clowns themselves ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and the State could give. When an earth-shock makes the soil under your feet quiver, and gape, and mutter, you feel that unnatural forces are being hurled against you, you feel that you are the mere sport and jest of an unjust deity. This was ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... no time. She is already under a sentence of death, and will die. Go! go! Great God! what a death. Oh that I might die for her! The Ephesians gathered together to make sport—to make sport of Saronia the beautiful, my love! Polluted by the touch of a coarse gaoler. A sight to gratify the Romans, a jest for the rabble of Ephesus, and a cruel death ending all. She who has wielded the sceptre of power, highest and brightest among the women of Ionia, commanded spirits in legions from the underworld, stopped the eagles in their flight, turned the courses of the clouds, baring the face ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... ourselves. Us our bulk and impetus charmed against peril in any collision. And I had ridden through too many hundreds of perils that were frightful to approach, that were matter of laughter to look back upon, the first face of which was horror, the parting face a jest—for any anxiety to rest upon our interests. The mail was not built, I felt assured, nor bespoke, that could betray me who trusted to its protection. But any carriage that we could meet would be frail and light in comparison ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... stay with my wife, I took coach again, and to the King's playhouse again, and come in the fourth act; and it proves to me a very silly play, and to everybody else, as far as I could judge. But the jest is, that here telling Moll how I had lost my journey, she told me that Mrs. Knepp was in the house, and so shews me to her, and I went to her, and sat out the play, and then with her to Mrs. Manuel's, where Mrs. Pierce was, and her boy and girl; and here I did hear Mrs. Manuel ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the thoroughfares meet at an angle Of ninety degrees (this angle is right), You may hear the loafers that jest and wrangle Through the sun-lit day and the lamp-lit night; Though day be dreary and night be wet, You will find a ceaseless concourse met; Their laughter resounds and their Fife tongues jangle, And now and ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... "Don't jest all the time," said Toni, really angry now. "It's only in your presence he's so silent; when we're alone he can ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... same as Murad (Le Desire, or the wished-for one). Scott, in his genteel life of Bonaparte, says that "when Murat was in Egypt, the similarity between the name of the celebrated Mameluke Mourad and that of Bonaparte's Meilleur Sabreur was remarked, and became the subject of jest amongst the comrades of the gallant Frenchman." But the writer of the novel of Bonaparte did not know that the names were one and the same. Now which was the best pedigree, that of the son of the pastry-cook, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... would bring disagreeable consequences to Mr. Montfort and to all concerned. What was Margaret to do? The absurdity of the whole thing presented itself to her keenly, and she would have been glad enough to turn it all into a jest, and take it as the "story" with which Rita had tried to rouse her cool-blooded cousins; but that could not be. Rita had meant every word she said, and more; that was evident. What was Margaret to do? Her first thought was of Mrs. Cheriton; ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... one asks the "who" or "why"; Where no one doth the sinner ply With his embarrassments of guile; Where's ne'er a frown but brings a smile, And cares are crimes,—'tis sin to sigh, 'Tis wrong to let a jest go by, And hope is truth, and life is nigh, The bourns of the Enchanted Isle— In ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... obeyed. The smile faded gradually as he listened, and an expression of anxious astonishment took its place. He shook his head as she proceeded, and twice ventured a faint suggestion that she was only speaking in jest. Convinced at last, against his will, he walked ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... 'le ipu o VAILIMA' and it was explained that he had 'taken his chief-name'! a jest at which the plantation still laughs. Kava done, I made a little speech, Henry translating. If I had been well, I should have alluded to all, but I was scarce able to sit up; so only alluded to my guest of all this month, the Tongan, Tomas, and to ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I also discovered that they had been having an argument, in jest, about money-matters, as they rode along to our cottage. Mrs. Knifton had accused her husband of inveterate extravagance, and of never being able to go out with money in his pocket without spending it all, if he possibly could, before ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... almost impossible to get Mr. Daly to laugh at an actor's joke; he was too generally at war with them, and he was too often the object of the jest. But he did laugh once at one of the solemn frauds perpetrated on me by this same ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... his pint, came up to me and, with a serious air, pulling out his old gold watch, with a gold dial plate, gravely said to me, while he inwardly laughed—"Pray sir what is the time of the day by your watch,—let us see, do our watches agree, sir:" I blushed.—"Nay, said he, I do but jest with you my child—you must not be angry with me. Come, come; if you have not a gold watch, you shall have a silver seal to tie to your riband," saying which he brought me home and, taking one from the drawer of a black inkstand, gave it ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... friend a man ever had," said Hone gently. "It's an old story, and I can't tell you all. It was just a game, you know; it began in jest, but it ended in grim earnest, as some games do. It happened that time we travelled out together, eight years ago. I was supposed to be looking after her; but, faith, the monkey tricked me! I was a fool, you see, Teddy." A faint smile crossed his face. "And she gave me an elderly ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... ghost," I began, when the other bade me in God's name not to jest. There were some things, he said, not to be broached ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... congregation the loan of two barias (ounces of gold), he proceeded to read to the whole assembly instead the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed in Romany. Happening to glance up, he found not a gypsy in the room, but squinted, "the Gypsy fellow, the contriver of the jest, squinted worst of all. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... forgotten some particular, for Sister Hyacinthe, a glance from whom had foreshadowed the doctor's jest, now softly prompted her "And what was it you said to Madame la Comtesse, the superintendent of your ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... you're not in earnest," he added to soothe himself. "I know you know me better; but even in fun it isn't right to jest lightly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... a pasear up hyer to explain this, and to thank you for yore kindness. Fac' is, Mr. Morse, it would have jest about killed me if anything had happened to my little 'Lissie. I want to say that if you had a-be'n her brother you couldn't ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... keeping anticipation on the alert, which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast, without discounting, your effects—that is all the Law and the Prophets. In the first act of Children of the Ghetto, for instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine, followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies. This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have seen some people, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... watch the unfolding of a play— Nor this, nor that was King Admetus' way, For neither midst the sweetness of his life Did he forget the ending of the strife, Nor yet for heavy thoughts of passing pain Did all his life seem lost to him or vain, A wasteful jest of Jove, an empty dream; Rather before him did a vague hope gleam, That made him a great-hearted man and wise, Who saw the deeds of men with far-seeing eyes, And dealt them pitying justice still, as though The inmost heart of each man he ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... if ever, was the golden opportunity for remaining silent and looking intelligent; but Wunpost forgot his early resolve and gave way to an ill-timed jest. ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... solemn, and, in the next, with the anxiety of his own parent, while laboring, under age and infirmity, to wean him from a course of dissipation and vice. Little indeed did he suspect that his virtuous offspring was absolutely enacting his part, for the purpose of having a good jest to regale Norton with in the course of their ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... loneliness. He knew now that he had grown to love the man; Blake's quick resourcefulness had overcome many of the obstacles they had met with, his whimsical humor had lightened the toilsome march, and often when they were wet and worn out be had banished their dejection by a jest. Now it looked as if they would hear his cheerful laugh no more; and Harding felt that, if the worst came, he would, in a sense, be accountable for his partner's death. It was his sanguine expectations that had drawn Blake into ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... unspilt,—the cup unbroken. Then laughed out the thunderer Elias: "O my brother! O thou holy Nicholas: Often drank we cooling wine together; But it was our duty not to slumber. Not to drop the cup—And tell me, brother, Why to-day does slumber's power subdue thee?" Him thus answer'd Nicholas the holy: "Jest not thus with me, thou sainted thunderer! For I fell asleep, and dreamt three hundred, Dreamt three hundred friars had embark'd them In one vessel on the azure ocean; Bearing offerings to the holy mountain, Offerings,—golden wax, and snowy incense. From the clouds ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... loud laugh at his own jest. Then they proceeded to count their booty, and while so engaged it seemed to me that I had better escape before my position became more exposed, as it would be sure to be as soon as the business of carrying the guns through the recess began. So I took advantage of the darkness, when they were engaged ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... an' syne as white's the aisse, an' luikit to be i' the awfu'est inside rage 'at mortal wessel cud weel hand. Sae yer gran'father, no 'at he was feart at 'im, for Is' be bun' he never was feart afore the face o' man, but jest no wullin' to anger his ain kin, an' maybe no willin' onybody sud say he was a respecter o' persons, heeld his tongue an' said nae mair, an' the markis hed the second best bed, for he sleepit in ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the host than he, Black of hue as a shrivelled pea; He believes not in Holy Mary's Son; Full many an evil deed hath done. Treason and murder he prizeth more Than all the gold of Galicia's shore; Men never knew him to laugh nor jest, But brave and daring among the best— Endeared to the felon king therefor; And the dragon flag of his race he bore. The archbishop loathed him—full well he might,— And as he saw him he yearned to smite, To himself ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... a becoming jest for such serious personages? M. Le Blanc went into the midst of the people with great firmness, and made a speech to them; he afterwards had Law escorted home ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... not so bad, and miniatures can be handled very easily," answered Tim Crapsey. His small eyes began to twinkle. "Jest you let me git my hands on 'em, and I'll show you wot I kin do. I know a fence in New York who'll take pictures jest ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... orter be punished. But doan't ye kill him, gintlemen! Guv it ter him 'cordin' ter his natur an' his merits.' Just luk at him. Hev ye ever seed sech a face, an' sech an eye as thet, in ary human bein'? Why, his eye ar jest like a snake's; an' its natural, ye knows, fur snakes ter crawl; the' karn't do nuthin' else, an' the' hain't ter blame fur it. No more ye karn't blame Mulock for bein' whot he ar. So guv him a coat uv tar—a ride on a rail—a duckin' in th' pond—arything thet's 'cordin' ter his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... done; and to have done mischief, is of some importance. He sets his invention to work again, and produces a narrative of a robbery or a murder, with all the circumstances of time and place accurately adjusted. This is a jest of greater effect and longer duration: if he fixes his scene at a proper distance, he may for several days keep a wife in terrour for her husband, or a mother for her son; and please himself with reflecting, that by his abilities and address some addition is ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... tuh a feller? Zing, zing, zing—I hate your old heat a-singin' in my ears all the gosh-blamed time! Why don't yuh do something? Huh? Yuh don't make it so's anything kin live. Yuh don't give no water, yuh don't give no grass, yuh don't do nothin'! Yuh jest ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... such a man before! She actually said to Caroline Lee, who was trying to jest with her a little, that Fisher was one of the most pure-minded, honourable ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... Miss Cross, with Horden, spoke the prologue to D'Urfey's Don Quixote, Part III. In the cast, however, when she enacted Altisidora, she is described as Mrs. Cross, A Miss Howard acted Kitty in Motteux's Love's a Jest(1696) and, 'in page's habit,' spoke the epilogue to Dilke's The Lover's Luck the same year. After that date 'Miss' instead of the heretofore ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Some, who knew Foster's quiet but resolute disposition, bantered and teased Hall, which wrought him to such a pitch of excitement that, on meeting James Foster a little while after in front of the tavern, he made the demand of him. Foster at first treated it as a jest; then, when he found Hall was in earnest, decidedly, but civilly, refused; and in such a manner as to put at rest all further conversation. Enraged, Hall instantly turned, swearing to the laughing politicians that surrounded the tavern steps, and who had witnessed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... doubt that he was quite in earnest, and would enjoy the holiday vastly. She was used to such kind offers and knew how to laugh at them, though she was very well aware that they were not made in jest. ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... of love," she said, half reproachfully, "as if it were so common a thing! You know it is sacred—why will you speak as if it were all a jest?" ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... only serves to make us grieve With oft and tedious taking-leave, 45 Like some poor nigh-related guest, That may not rudely be dismist; Yet hath outstay'd his welcome while, And tells the jest without the smile. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... criticism on Milton, if not hostile, is apologetic, and it is considered quite correct to say we "do not care" for him. Partly this indifference is due to his Nonconformity. The "superior" Englishman who makes a jest of the doctrines and ministers of the Established Church always pays homage to it because it is RESPECTABLE, and sneers at Dissent. Another reason why Milton does not take his proper place is that his theme is a theology ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... wid dis train, gen'lemens an' ladies," came in the porter's important voice. "Jest nothin' at all's happened. It's done happened up ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... prudence in some persons. I hear only of a monstrous sum already named; and if others, do not soon hear of it too, and hear of it with a vengeance, then am I a gentleman of less sagacity, than myself and very few besides, take me to be. And the jest will be still the better, if it be true, as judicious persons have assured me, that one half of this money will be real, and the other half only Gasconnade.[22] The matter will be likewise much mended, if the merchants continue to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... Grandmother's engagement ring and she was heart-broken. Although they searched everywhere no trace of it could they find, but as they were walking up the hill a week or so afterwards they thought they saw Mattie Hastings through the trees. They called as a jest, "We've seen you and you're discovered—come out!" Whereupon someone shrieked, and proceeding to the spot they found Mattie lying upon the ground. She had walked in the sun and had started to run and had fallen over some stumps. Instantly they saw that she had been prostrated by the heat, ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... how high he goes,' The Bat exclaimed with glee, 'But yet he never says he owes His rise in life to me. No, no, that's not his way at all; And though I do my best, His graceless growls at every fall Are something past a jest.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... advertisement, of a certain American typewriting machine commences by informing the public that "The —— typewriter is founded on an idea." When I saw this phrase I secured it for my collection, for I felt that, without jest, it contained the kernel of a true philosophy of Nature. The forms, the phainomena, of Nature are innumerable, multifarious, interwoven, and infinitely perplexing, and you may spend a happy life in unravelling their relations ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... they are. At least, I've come out here to see. You'll forgive my jest, Mr. Scott, in writing my name under that of your party on the register, won't you? As Mademoiselle Lannes has doubtless told you, I carried the letter from her brother, directing her to join him in Chastel, and, ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... I was most afeard of," said the borderer, with a hasty glance skyward. "Down on your hunkers, Chief, and help me read this sign afore the good Lord takes to sending His rain on the jest and the unjest," and therewith these two fell to quartering all the ground like trained dogs ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... to give the incident a subtlety that struck Miss Nevil's fancy. "It reminds me," he said in her hearing, "of ole Kernel Frisbee, of Robertson County, one of the purlitest men I ever struck. When he knew a feller was very dry, he'd jest set the decanter afore him, and managed to be called outer the room on bus'ness. Now, Bob Rushbrook's about as white a man as that. He's jest the feller, who, knowing you and me might feel kinder restrained about indulging our appetites afore him, kinder drops out easy, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... are often resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers. Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the magar (or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... probably some up in the foothills, and around the Pike. They had a better chance to git among rocks. We hed jest made up our minds to go hunting for 'em when we ketched sight o' you, and then we concluded to stay and see ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... makin' out one of them yellow-covered books, sech as the summer boarders bring out here to read; always chock full of doin's that never would come to pass in this or any other Christian country. You jest lay down and snuff your camphire, an' I'll go out an' pump that boy drier ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a rude jest of Nature, that tempest of yesterday. But if you have taken it in good part, you are all the more ready for her caressing mood to-day. And now you must be off to get your dinner—not to order it at a ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... destructives was a-beatin' old Mrs. Norris to death they hid in the fence-hedge. An' they both of 'em might agot clean off, only the littlest one screamed when they tore the skelp off'n the old woman; an' he run off, but a Tory he chased him an' ketched him by the fence, an' he jest held the child's legs between his'n, an' bent him back an' cut his throat, the boy a-squealin' something awful. Then the Tory skelped him an' hung him acrost the fence. The only Norris what come out of it ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... as Millamant herself, is an eternal type. His little exclamations, his assurance of sympathy, his terror of the commonplace—surely one knows them well? His tolerance of any impertinence, lest he should be thought to have misunderstood a jest, is a great distinction. But Congreve's gibe in the dedication at the critics, who failed 'to distinguish betwixt the character of a Witwoud and a Truewit,' is hardly fair: as Dryden said of Etherege's Sir Fopling, he is 'a fool so nicely writ, The ladies ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... we are?" asked his sister, with something of the antagonistic tone which both in jest and earnest is too ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... me to the test, Mr. Trollop. But let's drop the matter. I have had my joke and you've borne the infliction becomingly enough. It spoils a jest to harp on it after one has had one's laugh. I would much ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... last week's ashes And pray for coal and sedulously "rest," Where rain and wind contemn the empty sashes, And blue lips frame the faint heroic jest, Till some near howitzer goes off and smashes The only ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... policeman is looking at him fixedly from the other side of the street, his nightstick twirling in a very prepared sort of way. For an instant Oliver sees himself going over and asking that policeman for his helmet to play with. That would be the cream of the jest—the very cream—to end the evening in combat with a large blue policeman after having all you wanted in life break under you suddenly ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... perfectly right, madam. This is no place for me. I have been sported with. My good name has been treated as a jest. ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... with whom he seemed to be acquainted, amongst whom was the man Bartot. He waved his hand to others further down the room. His circle of acquaintances, indeed, seemed unlimited. Then, with a long hand-shake and some parting jest, he took leave of Monsieur Carvin and disappeared. Somehow or other one seemed to feel the breath of relief which went shivering through the room as he departed. Louis answered then ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... smiled at the grim jest. "He will never see the rope, Mark, you may be sure of that. But there will be no more murdering. The situation of the Ministry is bad enough as it is. His Excellency looked very much perturbed—for a diplomat—before I was done with him. There is nothing more certain than that he ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... Tarquins from Rome—and that Cava brought the Moors to Spain—that an insulted husband led the Gauls to Clusium, and thence to Rome—that a single verse of Frederick II.[369] of Prussia on the Abbe de Bernis, and a jest on Madame de Pompadour, led to the battle of Rosbach—that the elopement of Dearbhorgil[370] with Mac Murchad conducted the English to the slavery of Ireland that a personal pique between Maria Antoinette and the Duke of Orleans precipitated ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Mr. Clarkson, "that an obsolescent jest is, like middle-age, occasionally vapid, possessing neither the interest of antiquity nor ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... unmistakably such an aura or atmosphere about in Trinity College, Cambridge, during the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties of the nineteenth century—a spirit of literature and humour, of seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical poetry—which produced things as diverse as The Dying Swan and Clarke's Library of Useless Knowledge, Vanity ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... his ministers within the city. Which, by Jupiter and all the gods, you can not and will not do! You have arrived at such a pitch of folly or madness or—I know not what to call it: I am tempted often to think, that some evil genius is driving you to ruin—for the sake of scandal or envy or jest or any other cause, you command hirelings to speak, (some of whom would not deny themselves to be hirelings,) and laugh when they abuse people. And this, bad as it is, is not the worst: you have allowed these persons more ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... the foe in thine own soul, The sloth, the intellectual pride; The trivial jest that veils the goal For which our fathers lived and died; The lawless dreams, the cynic Art, That rend thy ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... some sager sing) The frolic wind that breathes the spring Zephyr, with Aurora playing, As he met her once a-Maying— There, on beds of violets blue And fresh-blown roses wash'd in dew Fill'd her with thee, a daughter fair, So buxom, blithe, and debonair. Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful jollity, Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides:— Come, and trip it as you go ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the Spain of 1860, immemorially old, immutably the same, splendidly frank, acquainted with grief and sin, shameless and free; like some brown gipsy wench of the wayside, with throat and half her bosom bare, who would laugh and show her teeth, and be free with her jest; but if you touched her honour, ignorant that she had one, would stab you without ruth, and go her free way, leaving you carrion in the ditch. Such was the Spain which Mr. Manvers visited some ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... Bessie's question, but, looking down at her with grave, searching eyes, she said,—'Dear Bessie, it was a very foolish jest. I know it is not in your nature to mean unkindly to anyone, least of all to me, to whom you have been an angel of light; but all practical jokes of that kind are liable to inflict pain and humiliation upon the victim—however innocently meant. Whose idea ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... earn his living," said Mrs. Corey, refusing her husband's jest. "There's still enough for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... she cried affectionately, "you jest set to it to spoil your old mother." Then her eyes fell on the figure on the kitchen table. "La sakes, boy, what's—what's this?" Then as she bent over the unconscious child. "Oh, ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... about excessive impedimenta. Lord Derby, Minister of War and a bluff and honest aristocrat, sat near me and he whispered to me—"That's me." "Yes," I said, "that's you," and the group about us made merry at the jest. The meaning of this is, they now joke about what was the most solemn thing in life ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... you, and you, Happiness crowned the night; I too, Laughing and looking, one of all, I watched the quivering lamplight fall On plate and flowers and pouring tea And cup and cloth; and they and we Flung all the dancing moments by With jest and glitter. Lip and eye Flashed on the glory, shone and cried, Improvident, unmemoried; And fitfully and like a flame The light of laughter went and came. Proud in their careless transience moved The changing ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... who speak slightingly of boyhood and its feelings, scoffing at the early yearnings of the heart, and finding only food for jest in those innocent and childish raptures and regrets. We do not envy such. That man's heart must be made of doubtful stuff, who jeers at the fresh dreams of youth; or rather, he must have no heart at all—above all, no sweet and affecting recollections. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... pen against the duke of Grafton, the earl of Bute, and the princess of Wales. He had just despatched one of his political diatribes to the Middlesex Journal, when he sat down on Easter Eve, I7th April 1770, and penned his "Last Will and Testament," a strange satirical compound of jest and earnest, in which he intimated his intention of putting an end to his life the following evening. Among his satirical bequests, such as his "humility" to the Rev. Mr Camplin, his "religion" to Dean ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... only once, when a day or two later he drove up by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was lodging. He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem off his mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood, through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... world, this is, old man, It's a purty good world this is; For all its follies and shows and lies, Its rainy weather, and cheeks likewise, And age, hard hearing, and rheumatiz; We're not a faultin' the Lord's own plan; All things jest At their best, It's a puny ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... now, missis," said the Mopoke; "you jest mind what yer about, or I 'll let daylight ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... she goes a-lopin', stranger, Khaki-gowned, with flyin' hair, Talk about your classy ridin',— Wal, you're gettin' it right thar. Jest a kid, but lemme tell you When she warms a saddle seat On that outlaw bronc a-straddle She is one that ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.... Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late, He had his jest, but they had ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee, calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball—better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest—laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... the month's Six Selling Best The Bookman scored with elephantine Jest, Have sold a half a Million in a Year, Yet no one ever heard ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... valuable institution for any member of it who has no distinction, neither character, talents, nor estate. But a peer who possesses all or any of these great qualifications, would find himself an immeasurably more important personage in what, by way of jest, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... and lauds, all remained in their private cells, where they read the holy scriptures, and some copied books. All met in the church at the canonical hours of tierce, sext, none, and vespers, but returned to their cells, none being allowed to speak, to jest, or to be one moment idle. The time which others spend a table, or in diversions, they employed in honoring God; even their meal took up very little time, and after a short sleep, (according to the custom of hot countries,) {236} they resumed their exercises, conversing not with ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... that I had gone too far, for to jest at the expense of the family pride was an unpardonable offence, so I ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hoarsely to Sara one night when she had crept into the attic—"'twarn't for you, an' the Bastille, an' bein' the prisoner in the next cell, I should die. That there does seem real now, doesn't it? The missus is more like the head jailer every day she lives. I can jest see them big keys you say she carries. The cook she's like one of the under-jailers. Tell me some more, please, miss—tell me about the subt'ranean passage we've ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Jenkins, if it was like this they felt! But was it her fault? No man could say she had led him on—except, perhaps, the Hon. Reginald, and towards him her intentions were honourable, she told herself smiling. But the jest carried itself farther and more stingingly. Could he make an "honourable" she told herself her? Ah, God, was she worthy of him, of his simple manhood? And would he continue proposing, if she told him she was Nelly O'Neill? And what of his ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... a man, nevertheless; had a humorously wrinkled mouth, and an eye that twinkled responsive to a jest; and was the best judge of wine in Oxford. On the strength of this undeniable gift the dons had long since elected him steward of Common-room; and he valued the responsibility, abstaining from tobacco—which he loved—to keep pure his taste for vintages, and preserve ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Is this some jest to punish me, my dear?" But then a new and graver trouble kindled in his face, and his eyes narrowed, for there was something odd about his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... punishment;—which remains, though we do not recognise the fact, solely because it has been in vogue all these centuries, and is a habit hard to break with. History would go; yes;—but a mort of pernicious lies would go with it. Well, well; one speaks of course in jest (partly). But when all is said, China was not unfortunate in having a strong giant of a man, a foreigner withal, at her head during those crucial decades. Ts'in Shi Hwangti guarded China through most of that perilous intermission between the cycles. It was the good ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... not ask, when back on Blighty's shore My frozen frame in liberty shall rest, For pleasure to beguile the hours in store With long-drawn revel or with antique jest. I do not ask to probe the tedious pomp And tinsel splendour of the last Revue; The Fox-trot's mysteries, the giddy Romp, And all such folly I would fain eschew. But, propt on cushions of my long desire, Deep-buried in the vastest of armchairs, Let ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... skunk wanted it for an ornament, and he took it, too, and thinks more of it than any out of his hundred and more. Arter getting yer home among his people, and arter he'd found out thar's a good show fur a big ransom from yer father, jest as like as not he'd make up his mind that the best thing he could do would be to knock ye on ther head and raise yer ha'r, and he'd do ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... sheep you was, too, my lads, to run through a gap that way. And now look here, you, jest recklect all this; you've both got your necks in nooses, and Mr Brymer here's got hold o' the other ends of the ropes, so as he can pull 'em any time he likes, and he will too if you don't stick pretty close to your dooty. ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... engine, a baggage car, express car and two sleepers. The first train down jumped the track twice, and the up train from Salt Lake was wrecked and nearly thrown into the Snake River. Then the trains ran from four to six hours behind time, and the people and the papers began to jest about the 'Mormon Flyer,' and ask for a return of the old Salisbury coach line. The manager complained from time to time, and said it was all the fault of the engineers; said that we did not know our business, and that he would get some ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... suspected a jest: but on my repeated assurances took the letter thankfully, and at parting, on our release, pressed on me the end of his sausage wrapped in a piece of newspaper. I ate the sausage moodily and was about to throw the paper away when my eye caught sight of an advertisement in the torn ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... into Bantu, and added: "A jest is a jest, Macumazana, though often there is meaning in a jest, and you shall see Mameena if you will. I come here to ask you to do my people a service for which you shall not lack reward. We, the White Kendah, the People of the Child, are at ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... these things made a great impression on the young girl. Jenkins became immediately her friend, confidant, a vigilant and kind guardian. Occasionally, when, in the studio, somebody—her father most likely of all—uttered a risky jest, the Irishman would contract his eyebrows, give a little click of the tongue, or ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... tormented himself with this idea; the more convinced that he was right in his conjecture, because she almost always posted her reply with her own hands, when going out for her daily walk, or sent it by her faithful Chloe; but one day, venturing a jest upon the subject, she answered him, with a merry laugh, "Ah, you are no Yankee, Mr. Egerton, to make such a guess as that! I have a number of correspondents, it is true; but the daily letter I am so eager for comes from ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... ponies was known as the Merry Jest. He had a terrifying but harmless trick. The moment the saddle was cinched, down went his head and he began to buck in the most vicious style. This he would keep up until further orders. In order to put an end to the performance all one had ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... our land is ill-furnished of carles, so that we women, high and low, go afield and do many things, as crafts and the like, which in other lands are done by carles.' In sooth it seemed of them that they were both of stouter fashion, and defter than women are wont to be. So the champions, part in jest, part in earnest, bade them do on the armour of the slain Burgers, and take their weapons, and fell to teaching them how to handle staff and sword and bow; and the women took heart from the valiant countenance of their new lovers, and deemed it ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... was over late to reach the town, but that there we hoped to come next day. And she said she would fain see those two, "and maybe Grendel also," smiling again a little to please me. And I knew how much that little jest cost her to make, and loved her the more for her thought for me. Then she was ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... creepy satisfaction in living the scene over again. "It was kinder dark in the other room, and there he was, laying in his night-gownd, with his face turned towards me, so, looking mighty severe-like, jest as if he was a-going to say, 'It's late with the milk ye are, ye hussy!'—a way ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... attachment to the true cause: these are assembled to shape-out a plan. They sanctioned what was past; shaped as they could what was to come. They were scornfully called Barebones' Parliament, the man's name, it seems, was not Barebones, but Barbone—a good enough man. Nor was it a jest, their work; it was a most serious reality—a trial on the part of these Puritan Notables how far the Law of Christ could become the Law of this England. There were men of sense among them, men of some quality; men of deep piety I suppose the most of them were. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... odd one. I mind her when she was a girl—a saucy, black-eyed baggage she was! Handsome, some folks called her. I never c'd see it. Her people were a queer crowd and Min was never brung up right—jest let run wild all her life. Well, Rod Palmer took to dancin' attendance on her. Rod was a worthless scamp. Old Palmer was well off and Rod was his only child, but this Rose lived there and kept house for them after Mis' Palmer died. She was a quiet, well-behaved ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... This broad Neapolitan jest, spoken with an aristocratic good manner, made Emilio smile; he allowed the Duke to take his arm ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... Bolingbroke and Prior set out for France last Saturday. My lord's business is to hasten the peace before the Dutch are too much mauled, and hinder France from carrying the jest of beating them too far." ("Journal to Stella," August 7th, 1712. See vol. ii., p. 381 of present edition). The result of Bolingbroke's visit was the signing, on August 19th, of an agreement for the suspension of arms for four months. Torcy's reception of Bolingbroke was so managed ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... fog, we went on deck to find the ship lying inside a long breakwater bristling with cannon, which looked formidable enough: but the whole thing, I was told, was useless against modern artillery and ironclads: and there was more than one jest on board as to the possibility of running the Channel Squadron across, and smashing Cherbourg in a single night, unless the French learnt to keep a better look-out in time of war than they did in time ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... praising were his usual themes; And both, to show his judgment, in extremes: So over violent, or over civil, That every man with him was God or Devil. In squandering wealth was his peculiar art: Nothing went unrewarded but desert. 560 Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late; He had his jest, and they had his estate. He laugh'd himself from court; then sought relief By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief: For, spite of him the weight of business fell On Absalom and wise Achitophel: Thus, wicked but in will, of means bereft, He left not faction, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... thoughtlessness of youth' indulgently, I had infinitely rather hear of thoughtless old age, and the indulgence due to that. When a man has done his work, and nothing can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will; but what excuse can you find for wilfulness of thought, at the very time when every crisis of future fortune hangs on your decisions? A youth thoughtless! when all the happiness ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... And now themselves shall make our pageant, And common soldiers jest [244] with all their trulls. Let them take pleasure soundly in their spoils, Till we prepare our march to Babylon, Whither ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... proposed to elect, instead of either Medici or Colonna, the son, some say of a weaver, others of a brewer of Utrecht, of whom no one had ever thought till then, and who was for the moment acting head of affairs in Spain, in the absence of Charles the Fifth. The jest prospered in the ears of those who heard it; all the cardinals approved their colleague's proposal, and Adrien became ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "the matter is this; it is very likely that we shall win his money. The Piedmontese, though otherwise good fellows, are apt to be suspicious and distrustful. He commands the horse; you know you cannot hold your tongue, and are very likely to let slip some jest or other that may vex him. Should he take it into his head that he is cheated, and resent it, who knows what the consequences might be? for he is commonly attended by eight or ten horsemen. Therefore, however he may ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... two hundred thousand But give us a hundred instead; Send five thousand men towards Reno, And soon we won't leave a red. It will save Uncle Sam lots of money, In fortress we need not invest, Jest wollup the devils this summer, And the miners ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... law, and even in the old and important Latin colony of Cales. In the Latin colony of Venusia a free peasant had been seized by a young Roman diplomatist not holding office but passing through the town, on account of a jest which he had allowed himself to make on the Roman's litter, had been thrown down, and whipped to death with the straps of the litter. These occurrences are incidentally mentioned about the time of the Fregellan insurrection; it admits of no doubt that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that he might come up with one or two on the way, and that in any case he wotted well that they could look after themselves; so he turned back, not going very swiftly. All this seemed like enough, and a little matter except to jest about, so no man made any question concerning it: only old Stone- face ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... the light jest was hushed; each one looked silently into the future, and none could tell in whose favor this great contest would finally be decided, whether Austria or Prussia would ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... holy man who died from the ill-treatment which they inflicted upon him. In short, without detailing at length the glorious ministries of the Society in Filipinas, suffice it to say that fathers who have been through it all affirm that Paraguai [33] was but matter for jest compared with this; for the Society has no field more glorious, nor more to the honor of our Lord. This is well seen through the marvelous events which his Majesty has brought about through us, without which it would be impossible ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Various
... Satire first began, Were pleasant Pasquins on the life of man; At mighty villains, who the state oppress'd, They durst not rail, perhaps; they lash'd, at least, And turn'd them out of office with a jest. No fool could peep abroad, but ready stand The drolls to clap a bauble in his hand. Wise legislators never yet could draw A fop within the reach of common law; For posture, dress, grimace, and affectation, 10 Though foes to sense, are harmless to the nation. Our last redress is dint ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... nature, and to interest her audience. Her voice, notwithstanding its sweet inflections, was broken, or "cracked," as singers term it, a circumstance occasioned, perhaps, by the constant use she made of it, for she was not a little remarkable for that volubility which a rude jest attributes to her sex in general. She was a very successful beggar, too, amongst the rest of her accomplishments, for munition and strong drink. Just before the battle of Dodowah commenced, she passed along ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... gander, I suppose!" says poor Dick, with tears in his eyes, being both moved and cheered by his own jest. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the first on entering the fair, being situated on the north side of the high road. Here were three companies of players, viz. the Norwich company, a very large booth; Mrs. Baker's, whose clown, Lewy Owen, was "a fellow of infinite jest and merriment;" and Bailey's. The latter had formerly been a merchant, and was the compiler of a Directory which bore his name, and was a work of some celebrity and great utility. Fronting these were the fruit and gingerbread stands. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... will fire upon any one who opens the door." He turned and fixed his eyes steadily upon the pale face of the secretary. "I said to you that you were the prisoner of your king to-day. You would not understand my jest. I will force you to see that I am in earnest. The guards stand before this, door; the other door leads to my apartment, and I will close it. You shall not work with me to-day; you are not worthy of it. You are a bold rebel, deserving punishment, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... How hard to masque dull grief in joy! A sad heart's jest—what bitter mockery! With vain deceit my laughing lips employ Loud mirth that is ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... "Between Cousin and Simeon!" he repeated. "What did you think I said? You could be of assistance to me, Calvin. You know Sim and me ain't havin' any dealin's jest at present, and direckly you come along I says to myself, 'Calvin,' I says, 'is the one who can be of ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... shall learn it, in spite of you, and I know to whom to apply. Do you think you can play fast and loose with me and my love? No, no! I used to believe in you; I turned, a deaf ear to your traducers. My mad passion for you became known; I was the jest and the butt of the town. But you have opened my eyes, and at last I see clearly on whom my vengeance ought to fall. He was formerly my friend, and I would believe nothing against him; although I was ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... with counter-charges against Ord, whom he accused of purloining Father Pandoza's shoes, when the soldiers in their fury about the ammunition destroyed the Mission. At the time of its destruction a rumor of this nature was circulated through camp, started by some wag, no doubt in jest; for Ord, who was somewhat eccentric in his habits, and had started on the expedition rather indifferently shod in carpet-slippers, here came out in a brand-new pair of shoes. Of course there was no real foundation for such a report, but Rains was not above small things, as the ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... Aurora playing, As he met her once a-Maying— There, on beds of violets blue And fresh-blown roses wash'd in dew Fill'd her with thee, a daughter fair, So buxom, blithe, and debonair. Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful jollity, Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and men in women's parts. He makes Rosalind say, laughingly and saucily, to the men of the audience in the epilogue to As You Like It: "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me." "If I were a woman," she says. The jest lies in the fact that the speaker was not a woman but a boy. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in Antony and Cleopatra, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... looking at her, asked, "Why dost thou veil thy face when there is none in presence save the women and eunuchs who wait on thee and thy husband?" Answered she, "O King, this bird is no bird, but a man like thyself." He rejoined, "Thou liest, this is too much of a jest. How should he be other than a bird?"; and she "O King, by Allah, I do not jest with thee nor do I tell thee aught but the truth; for verily this bird is King Badr Basim, son of King Shahriman, Lord of the land of the Persians, and his mother is Julnar the Sea-born."—And Shahrazad ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream, or jest. Still, I do not absolutely ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Ambrose, when I feel in sooth that mine office is the only honourable one, since who besides can speak truth? I love my lord; he is a kind, open-handed master, and there's none I would so willingly serve, whether by jest or earnest, but what is he but that which I oft call him in joke—the greater fool than I, selling peace and ease, truth and hope, this life and the next, for yonder scarlet hat, which is after all of no more worth than this jingling ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Radborough Medical Clubs, of both of which Jenner was a member, he so frequently enlarged upon his favorite theme, and so repeatedly insisted upon the value of cow-pox as a prophylactic, that he was denounced as a nuisance, and in a jest it was even proposed that if the orator further sinned, he should then and there be expelled. Nowhere could the prophet find a disciple and enforce the lesson upon the ignorant; like most benefactors of mankind he had to do his work unaided. Patiently and perseveringly he pushed forward ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... ye would that others should do to you, do ye even so to them." If a man smite you upon the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Prefer others before yourself. "Do all things without murmuring." Do not wear gold or pearls or costly array. Pray when you are afflicted. Do not jest or talk foolishly, but have a sound speech. Greet one another with a kiss. Wash one another's feet. You must all speak the same thing. You must be of one mind. If ye do these things you shall receive the inheritance, but he that offends in one ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... began a-shooting against us in the grove, And their long lances toward the pious Federates move: Hei! the jest it was not sweet, With branches from the lofty pines down rattling at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... anything rather than leave you. We all love you dearly. Pierre would not for the world live with anybody else. You know he would not. And that is just what I feel. But I will do everything you wish. I will never refuse again—I will never jest, or try, even for your own sake, to prevent your having all your own way. Only be so kind, grandpapa, as never to say anything against yourself again. Nobody else would dare to do such a thing to me, ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... cried. "That jest yeas worthy of a courtier's deepest flattery. Let me say that I am proud to owe my gratitude to you. You will not permit it ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... (reinforced by SIR JOHN FALSTAFF, who brought up four hundred waggons laden with salt herrings and other provisions for the troops, and, beating off the French who tried to intercept him, came victorious out of a hot skirmish, which was afterwards called in jest the Battle of the Herrings) the town of Orleans was so completely hemmed in, that the besieged proposed to yield it up to their countryman the Duke of Burgundy. The English general, however, replied that his English men had won ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... indoors, followed by the still bawling Emma Jane, while the wrathful Polly goes to the back of the house. Stripping the twigs from a switch, she mutters: "I knows what you's arter; you tuck yoursef to dat watermillion patch, dat whar you gone; but ne' mine, boy, you jest le' me git hold o' you." Then, after a time given to unsuccessful search, calls of "Da-a-vie—oh, oh, Dave!" fall upon the stillness, to be answered only by weird echo from the lonely swamp. Returning from her search, she finds Wat ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... "Alas! it is no jest," rejoined the drawer, in a tone that convinced the apprentice of his sincerity. "His entertainers quitted him about two hours ago, and in spite of my efforts to detain him, he left the house, and sat down on those steps. Concluding he would fall asleep, I did not disturb him, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was forty, the boyish love of teasing was not yet dead in him, and, being much elated at his victory, he could not resist the temptation of shocking Mrs. Clara by suggesting dreadful possibilities, so he answered, half in earnest, half in jest, "Physiology, Rose. Wouldn't you like to be a little medical student, with Uncle Doctor for teacher, and be ready to take up his practice when he has to stop? If you agree, I'll hunt ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... this (13) that his attention was drawn to the men of Argos. They had appropriated Corinth, and were reaping the fruits of their fields at home. The war to them was a merry jest. Accordingly he marched against them; and having ravaged their territory throughout, he crossed over by the pass (14) down upon Corinth and captured the long walls leading to Lechaeum. And so having thrown ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... keep counsel, whatever other virtues he may run short of. Suppose you had joined your fortunes to sighing Luke's, Rachel, and gone out with him to grow rich together?" added Frederick Massingbird, in a tone which could be taken for either jest or earnest. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... become so hardened to the dangers of war that, like thousands of others, they could jest ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... said lightly, but like many words uttered in jest, it sounded as if there might be some truth back of it. Both grew silent and ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... scout? Wal, I hope you will run across Old Abe Linkum. If you do, jest take his skelp for ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... medicine, Asklepias by name, he would please this personage by beheading and burning a cock? Yet he ordered this to be done in acknowledgment of the speedy effect of the poison that killed him; this at a moment when a sensible man does not usually jest or act. This poor cock of Socrates has often come to my mind; also on the day when I left my books and microscopes, my sprouting seeds and growing salamander larvae to array myself for the wedding ceremony. Even the very wisest ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and contempt? Can you consent to wade through the vile mire of dependency, and owe the miserable remnant of that life to charity which has hitherto been spent in honour? If you can—go—and carry with you the jest of tories, and the scorn of whigs;—the ridicule, and, what is worse, the pity of the world. Go,—starve and be forgotten. But if your spirit should revolt at this; if you have sense enough to discover, and spirit enough ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... were serious or in jest, might have caused Philemon to conceive a very great awe of the elder stranger, if, on venturing to gaze at him, he had not beheld so much beneficence in his visage. But, undoubtedly, here was the grandest figure ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... brig or sloop, my boy, An' fight her like 'er man. He could steer 'er barque or barquentine, An' make her act jest gran! 'Ole Si' wuz 'er rip-dazzler, His flag wuz never struck, Until 'er British squadroon, Jest catched him ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... was a high hill. It was five miles high, she said. An' she said thar was water at the top, which was foolish, but she couldn't help that, an' God knows women go through enough to make them foolish! An' she said thar was jest one path, an' thar was two children playing on it, an' she couldn't make them understand. She begged us all night to tell the children thar was a wounded soldier wantin' to get by. An' at dawn she said the water was cold ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... especially prone to mirth and fun in the society of those he liked; to jest and laugh with any one was a great proof of his sympathy for them. When he wrote to absent dear ones, he would constantly say, "I have many things to tell you for us to laugh over together." In several letters addressed from Greece to Madame G——, he informs her of these treasures ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... wanted to make holes in his good skin. But he sprang away, have you have never seen one running? and sheltered himself in a sentry-box without the soldier being aware of it. Then the dogs came and wanted to have him out, but the soldier did not understand a jest, and struck them with the butt-end of his gun, till they ran away yelling and howling. As soon as the hare saw that the way was clear, he ran into the palace and straight to the King's daughter, sat ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... a glass—sir, here's to your tragedy. Now, pray, no more interruption; for this scene is one continual joke, and if you open your lips in it you will break the thread of the jest. ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... welcomed? With your confirming billet; yes, Sylvia, how! Let Dorillus inform you, between whose arms I fell dead, shame on me, dead—and the first thought my soul conceived when it returned, was, not to die in jest. I answered your commands, and hastened to the grove, where——by all that is sacred, by thyself I swear (a dearer oath than heaven and earth can furnish me with) I did resolve to die; but oh, how soon my ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... I will give thee, For this merry jest thou hast shown unto mee; And tell the old abbot, when thou comest home, Thou hast brought him a ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... bowed and smiled and shrugged as if at a gracious jest, and Mrs. Fowler observed in her crisp, matter-of-fact manner: "Yes, my daughter has a genuine instinct for dress, and, as you say, that is very rare. She carries her clothes well, doesn't she? It's such a blessing to be tall—though ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the place, the charm; perhaps a magic was working stronger than I knew; but words came to my lips that I stubbornly refused to speak. I fought against them; they, too, fought with grim insistence; so as a compromise, looking straight ahead and pretending to jest even ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... very grave. "It ain't very pleasin' to tell of, and ef it's jest de same, I won't scare de ladies with ...
— 'Our guy' - or, The elder brother • Mrs. E. E. Boyd
... she said, hurriedly drooping one knee as she walked, "I'm sorry you had to read all them long prayers jest for me." ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... her father, made a deep impression on the girl. Jenkins soon became the friend, the confidant, a vigilant and gentle guardian. Sometimes in the studio, when some one—the father himself most frequently—made a too equivocal remark or a ribald jest, the Irishman would frown and make a little noise with his lips, or else would divert Felicia's attention. He often took her to pass the day with Madame Jenkins, exerting himself to prevent her from becoming ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... confirms this. 'Mr. Murphy,' she writes (Anec. p. 205), 'always said he was incomparable at buffoonery.' She adds (p. 298):—'He would laugh at a stroke of genuine humour, or sudden sally of odd absurdity, as heartily and freely as I ever yet saw any man; and though the jest was often such as few felt besides himself, yet his laugh was irresistible, and was observed immediately to produce that of the company, not merely from the notion that it was proper to laugh when he did, but purely out of want of power to forbear it.' Miss ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... little to show now toward a possibility of the Blue Poppy ever being worth anything near the figure which he had been offered for it. And yet, if that offer had not been made as some sort of stiletto jest, why had it been made at all? Was it because Rodaine knew that wealth did lie concealed there? Was it because Squint Rodaine had better information even than the faithful, hard-working, unfortunate Harry? Fairchild suddenly took hope. He clenched his hands and he ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... were days at the House of Commons during the Autumn Session of that year when the leading ministers would just shut themselves up in their Private Rooms and scream on end for a quarter of an hour.... Of course an exaggeration, a sorry jest. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... ever since, as a frail boy with an unreasonable and dominating male parent, he had discovered that they were one way in which he could compete with hardier souls, at times even surpass them. Never mind the audience, he thought. The jest was the thing! ...
— This is Klon Calling • Walt Sheldon
... don't be botherin' me, 'case I don't feel like bein' bothered—now, mind I tell yer.—Here, you Cad, set down on dis stool, and let that cat alone; I don't let any one play with my cat," continued she, "and you'll jest let him alone, if you please, or I'll make you go sit in de entry till your mother's ready to go. I don't see what she has you brats tugging after her for whenever she comes here—she might jest as well leave yer at home to darn your ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... his eyes seemed looking through hers deep into her heart, to see if this incredible thing could be true. What little colour there was in his face faded slowly out of it and his lips quivered as he whispered, "You—you ain't—jest foolin'? ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... bitter jest to bid the pen Of one so worn with life, so hating men, Depict a scene of joy. Would you exult in sight to one born blind, Or—cruel! of a mother's love ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... is used here probably in its early sense of 'weary' (as in Middle English) or 'resolute' (as in Chaucer and old Ballads). In 2 Henry IV, V, i, 92, is the expression "a jest with a sad brow," where 'sad' evidently means ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... for they both lost their hearts to her simultaneously, though both had known her before. And she inspired in both of them the most violent, characteristically Karamazov passion. We have her own confession: 'I was laughing at both of them.' Yes, the sudden desire to make a jest of them came over her, and she conquered both of them at once. The old man, who worshiped money, at once set aside three thousand roubles as a reward for one visit from her, but soon after that, he would have been happy to ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... incessu patuit dea!' he said, speaking in the tone between jest and earnest which he had used before. '"And all the goddess in her step appears." Which means that you have the prettiest walk in the world, my dear—but whither are ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... nothing ridiculous; but we fancied his description of Streatham village truly so; when we read that he called it Luogo assai popolato ed ameno[Footnote: A populous and delightful place.], an expression apparently pompous, and inadequate to the subject: but the jest disappeared when I got into his town; a place which perhaps may be said to possess every other excellence but that of being popolato ed ameno; and I sincerely believe that no Ferrara-man could have missed making the same or a like observation; as in this finely-constructed city, the ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... carved. Black Tom, who had been invited by way of truce, served out the liquor from an eighteen-gallon cask, and sucked it up himself like the sole of an old shoe. Then Caesar said grace, and the company fell to. Such noise, such sport, such chaff, such laughter! Everything was a jest—every word had wit in it. "How are you doing, John?"—"Haven't done as well for a month, sir; but what's it saying, two hungry meals make the third a glutton."—"How are you doing, Tom?"—"No time to get a right mouthful for myself Caesar; kept so busy with the drink."—"Aw, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... which people attribute to the basilisk; his forehead, full of transverse wrinkles, was not without certain significant protuberances; his yellow-grayish hair was said to be silver and gold by certain young people who did not realize the impropriety of making a jest about Monsieur Grandet. His nose, thick at the end, bore a veined wen, which the common people said, not without reason, was full of malice. The whole countenance showed a dangerous cunning, an integrity without warmth, the egotism of a man long used to concentrate every feeling upon the enjoyments ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... The question was in jest; but aunt Helen saw instantly into the heart of her niece. For a moment their eyes lingered in each other; then Alice looked ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... following poem, which originally appeared in 'Fraser's Magazine,' could have reached America, intelligence was received in this country of an affray in Congress, very nearly the counterpart of that which the Author has here imagined in jest. It was very clear, to any one who observed the then state of public planners in America, that such occurrences must happen, sooner or later. The Americans apparently felt the force of the satire, as the poem was widely reprinted throughout the ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... etc. Baum, ii., App., 102, 103. Nemours, after his conspiracy was discovered, fled from court. He wrote, however, disclaiming any ulterior object in his invitations to the young Prince of Orleans, to whom he had in jest proposed to go ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... two purtier farms in the state Than the couple of which I'm about to relate;— Jinin' each other—belongin' to Brown, And jest at the edge of a flourishin' town. Brown was a man, as I understand, That allus had handled a good 'eal o' land, And was sharp as a tack in drivin' a trade— For that's the way most of his money was made. And all the grounds and the orchards about His two pet ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... heralds, hey!" "Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, gone—who knows where?—on the wind. "'Dead and gone'—a sorry burden of the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his Death's Jest Book. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... with a strong consciousness of the chaoticness of her state; but then, again, at other times she would have a presentiment that all this would clear itself away, and then that something which was quite out of the common way would come forth; and then she was accustomed to say, half in jest and half in earnest, to her sisters, "You'll see what I shall turn out sometime!" But in what this extraordinary turning out should consist nobody knew, and least of all poor Petrea herself. She glanced full of desire towards many suns, and was first attracted ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... me, Mr. Johns, for droppin' a word about this matter?" says the Deacon, rising to leave. "And while I think on 't, Parson, I see the sill under the no'theast corner o' the meetin'-house has a little settle to it. I've jest been cuttin' a few sticks o' good smart chestnut timber; and if the Committee thinks best, I could haul down one or two on 'em for repairs. It won't cost nigh as much as pine lumber, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... wholly immersed in wedding-clothes and fashions. What a remarkable, many-sided woman she is! a perfect queen of all society, and an admirable one at that. Everything she says is fresh and crisp, and her little jest well told and well chosen. The professor beams and smiles, though he is no great lady's man. She might be a bon camarade, so free is she from the airy little nothings of society that puzzle scholarly men. There is something charming, too, in the way Mrs. Grandon is made one of the circle,—a ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... and yonder stands a knot of grizzled colonels with the professional air of men awaiting orders. Here is the old Duke of Bayswater, listening through his eyeglasses, while Geoffrey Ripon and Featherstone have a quiet jest with Mr. Sydney. ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... means of a rope, because the Indians would not trade outside of their canoes, and the packages were opened, it was found that only the top layer was rice and the rest straw and stones. The Indian who had practiced this jest would clap his hands in glee, and laugh long and loud, and go from that vessel to another, to play the same trick. Then again they would take the nails, and take flight without giving anything in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... girl, in lilac quaintly dressed; A mammoth bonnet, lilac like the gown, Hangs from her arm by wide, white strings, the crown Wreathed round with lilac blooms; and on her breast A cluster; lips still smiling at some jest Just uttered, while the gay, gray eyes half frown Upon the lips' conceit; hair, wind-blown, brown Where shadows stray, gold ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... looking glass held before me, and every wrinkle must be made as conspicuous as a furrow—And what, pray, is to succeed to this reformation?—I can neither fast nor pray, I doubt.—And besides, if my stomach and my jest depart from ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... things a begging! If my lord was capable of such a thought, though he was my own brother instead of my cousin, I should scorn him too much ever to enter his doors." "O dear madam!" answered Amelia, "you take Mr. Booth too seriously, when he was only in jest; and the children shall wait upon you whenever ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... you don't know who I met on the up trip? Well, sir, Dock Taggert. I was sailin' along up the main line near Bob's, and who should I see but Dock backed in on the sidin'—seemed kinder dilapidated, like he was runnin' on one side. I jest slammed on the wind and went over and shook. Dock looks pretty tough, John—must have been out surfacing track, ain't been wiped in Lord knows when, oiled a good deal, but nary a wipe, jacket rusted and streaked, tire double flanged, ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... as he seemed. I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when next I did see him, that I hoped 'Fungoids' was 'selling splendidly.' He looked at me across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. His publisher had told him that three had been sold. I laughed, as at a jest. ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... ghost come out yere jest ez easy ez he kin' go inter ther house—that is, if he's a ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... not in jest at any thing of importance: if you deliver any thing witty and pleasant, abstain from ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... have it, my dear," said he. "You see, my ambition to found a country of my own, where a man may have a real ambition. This dirty village here is too narrow a field for talents like yours or mine. Let me tell you, Napoleon has played a great jest with Mr. Jefferson. There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States—I am lawyer enough to know that—which will make it possible for Congress to ratify the purchase of Louisiana. We cannot carve new States from that country—it is ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy of language. The whole world was stunned. It confronted that blight of the human brain, the unprecedented. Human endeavour was a jest, a monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island, who owned a yacht and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The scientists lay down ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of death which meets him; and before them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses; Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... and, lo! the king's son received a box on the ear. Pazza had been told that she was witty to the ends of her fingers, and had been stupid enough to believe it; it is never right to jest with children. ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... between the dream and the reality. Was it the ripple of the mill-stream, or was it the sighing of the wind among the roses? She had slept for an hour. Had he come? Had she slept while he entered the garden? Was he hiding in jest? ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... not tried. Pandanus fruit is made, in the Gilberts, into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle with at the end of a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no use for it. The rest of the food-supply, in a destitute atoll such as Fakarava, can be summed up in the favourite jest of the archipelago—cocoa-nut beefsteak. Cocoa-nut green, cocoa-nut ripe, cocoa-nut germinated; cocoa-nut to eat and cocoa-nut to drink; cocoa-nut raw and cooked, cocoa-nut hot and cold—such is the bill of fare. And some of the entrees are no doubt delicious. The germinated ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... myself have heard a very good jest, and have scorn'd to seem to have so silly a wit as to ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... said she acidly, and rustled to the bench. "Be seated, pray." She continued to watch them with her baleful glance. "We have heard fine things from you, sir, of what you have both done for my Lord Rotherby," she gibed, mocking him with the spirit of his half-jest. "Shall I tell you more precisely what 'tis ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... nor for being puzzled. And I'm some puzzled myself. But I reckon Paul Downes was jest repeatin' what he'd heard his ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... you up when the time comes," she repeated, simply, "but not now. I will not ask you to take me into any danger. I don't think," she went on, striving to make something of a jest of it, and to hide the deeper feeling which controlled her so strongly—"I don't think that I am fond of danger or that I should like it at all; but there is no real reason why I should not be with you ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... was of a proud, sensitive spirit, and had miscalculated her strength when she thought she could bear dishonor. After that duel with which Austria rang, in which the best schlager in his brigade fell, horribly mangled, the day after he had whispered a jest about Caroline Mannering, men were very cautious how they even looked askance at her; but the women—who could bridle their tongues or blunt their scornful glances? Briareus, armed to the teeth, would not affright our modern dowagers, or deter them from their prey. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... and bustled back to the inn, to laugh and jest as though nothing was happening, and as though she had no trouble ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... whole lot o' work to farming. I'd rather plow the sea than plow the land, and that's no idle jest! Never could see how a man could be downright honest when he says he likes to putter with a garden. Why, it's working in one place all the time. When he looks up from his job, there's the same old reefs and shoals he's been beatin' about for years. No matter how often he shoots the sun, the ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... perfect human body and the perfect human soul, whose greatest harmony was achieved in the adolescent. Moreover, the superior mental endowment of the boy made an intelligent conversation—so highly appreciated by Platonists and neo-Platonists— possible, whereas with a girl a man could only jest. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... You've had your full revenge, and we have had Enough of laughter since the day began. We must not squander all these precious hours In jest and merriment; for when the sun Shall rise to-morrow, we shall separate, Not knowing we shall ever meet again. Meetings like this are rare this side of Heaven, And seem to me the best mementoes left Of ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... of action could possibly combine his own interests and those of France. Meanwhile the Protestants believed somewhat doubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat doubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned aside remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest or a proverb (if a little high, he liked them none the worse), joking continually as his manner was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously compared to Sancho Panza by persons incapable of appreciating one of the deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest romance ever written; ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... thing we sometimes see in the face of the young that is sadder than the ravages of any disease or the disfigurement of any deformity. Shall I tell you what it is? It is the mark that an impure thought or an unclean jest leaves behind it. No serpent ever went gliding through the grass and left the trail of defilement more palpably in its wake than vulgarity marks the face. You may be ever so secret in your enjoyment of a shady story, you may hide ever so ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... jested on the same principle that people are said to jest on their way to execution. Now, when he was so near Cameron Court and the Countess of Hurstmonceux, how ill at ease he had become; how he dreaded, yet desired, the interview that was to ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... of rolling his eyes about afterwards, and perform "Baroski in love" for the amusement of her husband and her mamma. The former had his reasons for overlooking the attentions of the little music-master; and as for the latter, had she not been on the stage, and had not many hundreds of persons, in jest or earnest, made love to her? What else can a pretty woman expect who is much before the public? And so the worthy mother counselled her daughter to bear these attentions with good humour, rather than to make them a subject of perpetual alarm ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me, half unwillingly, and then I hit a little harder, for a jest, and laugh, and ask if that doesn't make ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... for the gentleman from Siskyou to give the incident a subtlety that struck Miss Nevil's fancy. "It reminds me," he said in her hearing, "of ole Kernel Frisbee, of Robertson County, one of the purlitest men I ever struck. When he knew a feller was very dry, he'd jest set the decanter afore him, and managed to be called outer the room on bus'ness. Now, Bob Rushbrook's about as white a man as that. He's jest the feller, who, knowing you and me might feel kinder restrained about indulging our appetites afore him, kinder drops out easy, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... beside wine and beer, was staring at them with a white, panic-stricken gaze. But he turned to obey, none the less; he was in deadly fear, it was plain, of the boyish soldiers. They might be willing to jest now, but he knew that they were the same men who fought like devils, and if reports were true (which they were not!) cut off the hands of women ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... the role of advocate arguing the case against an emancipation policy.(14) They met his argument with great Spirit and resolution. Taking them as an index, there could be little question that the country was ripe for the new policy. At the close of the interview Lincoln allowed himself to jest. One of the clergymen dramatically charged him to give heed to their message as to a direct commission from the Almighty. "Is it not odd," said Lincoln, "that the only channel he could send it was that roundabout route by the awfully wicked ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... was a favorite form of embroidery. In 1788 Madam Hesselius wrote thus in jest of her ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... you put my name to 'Don Juan' in these canting days, any lawyer might oppose my guardian-right of my daughter in chancery, on the plea of its containing the parody. Such are the perils of a foolish jest. I was not aware of this at the time, but you will find it correct, I believe; and you may be sure that the Noels would not let it slip. Now, I prefer my child to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the Fatherland, and the Almighty to be gay when the labours of the day are over as to be serious during business hours. He goes through it with a grave face and enjoys himself prodigiously. Your Latin when he fills the street with jest and laughter obeys the ebullience of his temperament; your Teuton always seems to be conscientiously obeying a ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... had been scared by the early morning's frost. The half-benumbed butterflies opened and shut their wings many times upon the bramble leaves before they could bring themselves to believe that that pinch of winter was only a joke. It seemed a cruel jest while the bloom of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... for purposes of business he wished to air his Biblical knowledge, "I jest takes the Scripter fur my motter an' foller that ol' passage where it says, 'Make hay while the sun shines, fur the night cometh when no man ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... have carried off the poor man's hat, or whether he was, as he said, merely in jest, we leave it to those who know his general ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... "No, he didn't; he jest said if Uncle was behind he wouldn't press him; and he did let Uncle get behind with the interest two times and never kicked. But he died; and now the woman, she wants ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... The jest practised so successfully upon our friend the Buck occasioned a general laugh at his expense, a circumstance which filled, him with serious mortification, if not with actual resentment, for it so happened, that one of ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... noise and glitter of the Toledo had been unbearable, so now I found it a relief and a distraction. Two maskers bedizened in violet and gold whizzed past me like a flash, one of them yelling a stale jest concerning la nnamorata—a jest I scarcely heard, and certainly had no heart or wit to reply to. A fair woman I knew leaned out of a gayly draped balcony and dropped a bunch of roses at my feet; out of courtesy ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... host came bustling in and exclaimed, "The kitchen is more pleasant than this room and there's a fire there, too." Then, catching sight of his lamp, he picked it up hurriedly and said, "Jest as shore as I leave anything undone, that shore somebody comes and sees how slouchy I am. Come on into the kitchen where you can warm, and I'll clean this lamp. One of the cows was sick this morning; I hurried over things so as to doctor her, and I forgot the lamp. I smoke and the lamp ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... solemn, like a man a-makin' his last will and testament, that they a'n't no sech another woman to be found outside the leds of the Bible betwixt the Bay of Fundy and the Rio Grande. I've 'sought round this burdened airth,' as the hymn says, and they a'n't but jest one. Ef that one'll jest make me happy, I'll fold my weary pinions and settle down in a rustic log-cabin and raise corn and potaters till death do ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... boundaries obliterated by the French inundation, news was brought to them that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and was in France. At first the members of the Congress were incredulous, regarding the thing as a jest, and were with difficulty convinced of the truth of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... stood all this time with my book ready, I was at last quite tired of the contest, and shutting it, 'I perceive,' cried I, 'that none of you have a mind to be married.'" We should like to have seen the dinner-party, and the two Miss Flamboroughs ready to die with laughing. "One jest I particularly remember: old Mr Wilmot drinking to Moses, whose head was turned another way, my son replied, 'Madam, I thank you.' Upon which the old gentleman, winking upon the rest of the company, observed that he was thinking of his mistress; at which jest I thought the two ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... riled so soon," again ventured Parsons. "I was jest goin' to tell you that I've been proposing to Carpenter Brown to ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... would do the efecktive work and fix him so he wouldn't interfear with him any more. When you come along we darted on you thinking you was Fred. I hit you a hard clip on the leg. Matthew was reddy to strike you on the head, but saw his mistake and stopped jest in ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... and see me at the tower. I am there in the mornings. Come as a caller, not as a prisoner, that's all." The Baron cackled at his little jest. "Au revoir! Till we meet again." They were shaking hands in the friendliest manner. "Oh, by the way, you were good enough to change your mind to-day about the personal attractiveness of our ladies. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... always seemed to me, void of all comfort or hope,—with this eminent character in it also, that it is capable of touching with its bitterness even the most fearful subjects, so that as the love of beauty retains its tenderness in the presence of death, this love of jest also retains its boldness, and the skeleton becomes one of the standard masques of the Italian comedy. When I was in Venice, in 1850, the most popular piece of the comic opera was "Death and the Cobbler," in which the point of the plot was the success ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... with her face as pale as death, she learned forward and touched his lips with hers, whereon he seized her round the middle, and, drawing her to him, covered her with kisses till even the brutes with him called to him not to push his jest too far and to let the girl go. This he did, uttering words which I will not repeat, and so weak was Suzanne with shame that when his arms were taken from her she fell to the ground, and lay there till the old Hottentot, her servant, ran to her, cursing and weeping with rage, and helped her ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... trenchers, And dance upon dishes, My mother sent me for yeast, some yeast, She bid me tread lightly, And come again quickly, For fear the young men would play me some jest. ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... disappear, but not before it has flung its cressets of light upon the black pall of doubt. Everyone now talks of psychic phenomena. In a paltry generation of superficial thinking the subject was one for jest, but there is far more in it than jesters are likely to discover. Mocking laughter never discovered anything except the vacuous fool. The appearances of spiritual beings give but scant opportunity for examination but serious investigation has now taken the place of cheap ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... laugh and jest; we talked incessantly all the time. I do not know what I said, I was so happy. She told me that she had seen me once before, a long time ago, in the theatre. I had then comrades with me, and I behaved like a madman; I must certainly have been ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... the procession that the guard became impatient. Here comes a foreigner! A Jew of Cyrene! Harmless and inoffensive, gladly would he make way for the crowd. Why should he not bear this burden under which Jesus of Nazareth is falling to the ground? The insolent soldiers, with oath and jest, constrain him, and he dares not resist. Probably Simon had no previous knowledge of Him for whom he bore this load, and loathed the service he was compelled to render; but that compulsory companionship ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... Ghost, he goes his way Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest; The mills of Satan keep his lance in play, Pity and innocence ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... purest hands. Forth from the heap she pick'd her votary's prayer, And placed it next him, a distinction rare! Oft had the goddess heard her servant's call, From her black grottos near the Temple-wall, Listening delighted to the jest unclean Of link-boys vile, and watermen obscene; 100 Where as he fish'd her nether realms for wit, She oft had favour'd him, and favours yet. Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... man. "Why, Freddie, I done jest see Snap paradin' down de road wif dat black dog from ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on a Houseboat • Laura Lee Hope
... Caskets, to have eluded the rock, was a victory for the shipwrecked men; but it was a victory which left them in stupor. They had raised no cheer: at sea such an imprudence is not repeated twice. To throw down a challenge where they could not cast the lead, would have been too serious a jest. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... persons; whom Solomon calls fools—though they often think themselves refined and clever enough—luxurious and "fashionable" people, who do not care to learn, who think nothing worth learning save how to enjoy themselves; who call it "bad form" to be earnest, and turn off all serious questions with a jest. These are they of whom Wisdom says—"How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity, and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? I also will laugh at your calamity, and ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... - - t and write, and mend honest Bog's Trade, For when you sh - - t Rhymes, you help him to Bread: He'el feed on a Jest, that is broke with your Wind, And fatten on ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... the tavern had lost its custom when the old stage line was broken up by the railroad. The introduction of steam was, in Mr. Sewell's estimation, a fatal error. "Jest killed local business. Carried it off, I 'm darned if I know where. The whole country has been sort o' retrograding ever sence ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... stout corsets well pulled in would improve her crude figure; but she dealt out compliments without ceasing as she exchanged the red bow for the blue, and laboriously pinned the headgear upon the bronze-brown coils, admonishing gravely, "Far over to one side, honey—jest the way they're a-wearin' them in New York ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... one day at the dinner-hour, he ate up what was provided for both; saying afterwards, when told of it, that the gentleman should have taken care of himself. This does not look very polite; but of course it was said in jest. His son attributed this carelessness at table to absorption in ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... being never so well pleased as when employed in the due chastisement of his master's lieges. He was, moreover, a man of infinite humour, generally consoling his dear unfortunates under their visitations by some coarse and galling jest. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... forced to go out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of our verse "jest growed," like Topsy. And the resulting state of things has but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets spend their days in correcting encyclopaedia proof, or clerking, or running, notebook in hand, to fires—inheres ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... "He's sure been runnin' a gantlet. His strike stopped work in the diggin's. What do you think of that, Kells? The news spread like smoke before wind. Every last miner in camp has jest got to see thet ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... fallen a Victim to the Fury of the Populace. This hazardous Experience of their Malice, brought her to lead a Life at Kofir very different to her Inclinations, being ashamed to shew herself in any Assembly, where she must have been their Jest and Scorn, and much less daring to appear in the public Walks. When she was not shut up in her Palace, she used to amuse herself for a while in a Garden, which, tho' one of the finest in all Kofir was the least frequented. Here it was that such a mortifying Accident befel ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... was only a morbid jest of a neurasthenic girl, amusing herself by annoying him. He would shrug his shoulders or pretend not to hear her: he would not take her seriously. But sometimes he would long to throw her out of the window: for neurasthenia and ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... imaginative,—of almost Norman energy, and differing from all the other western nations chiefly in this notable particular, that while the Celt is capable of bright wit and happy play, and the Norman, Saxon, and Frank all alike delight in caricature, the Lombards, like the Arabians, never jest. ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... it happened, that same day, I'd been lookin' Mollie's way;— Jest had saddled my ol' hoss To go canterin' across Parson Jones's pastur', an' Ax her fer her heart an' han'! So, when Bill had had his say An' done set his weddin' day, I lit out an' ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... work in the salt water. We got a boat and went aboard. When I came upon the deck I asked the black people, "Is there any one here for me?" "Yes," they said, "your mother." I thought they said this in jest—I could scarcely believe them for joy; but when I saw my poor mammy my joy was turned to sorrow, for she had gone from her senses. "Mammy," I said, "is this you?" She did not know me. "Mammy," I said, "what's the matter?" She began to talk foolishly, and said that she had been ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... observed that she was really restraining a genuine impulse he begged her to consider the protest he had once uttered as merely a jest, perhaps even an ill-considered one. But she said: "Let be, it is ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... Woodall), is decently noosed up in wedlock when the curtain is about to fall, Mrs. Behn's Willmore (Rover II), Gayman (The Lucky Chance), Wittmore (Sir Patient Fancy) end up without a thought of, save it be jest at, the wedding ring. But even this freedom can be amply paralleled. In the Duke of Buckingham's clever alteration of The Chances (1682), we have Don John pairing off with the second Constantia without ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... you are ordered to land first, why land first it must be. If you don't get orders to land first, just let them as is in a hurry land afore you. I ain't been teaching all these lads to know something about the woods, for the last six months, jest to see them killed off like flies, because a blundering wrong-headed colonel sends them out with two hundred and fifty ploughmen, for the redskins to see and ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... by the bright sayings that fell from her lips, the youth put forth some platitude, dim as the lamp in the expiring fire-fly. When he slipped in grammar she saw malice under it, when he retailed a borrowed jest she called it a good one, and when he used —as princes sometimes will —bad language, she discovered in ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... head and threw it over the walls into the city, with this inscription: "This is the head of Captain de Koning, who is on his way with reinforcements for the good city of Harlem." The citizens retorted with a practical jest, which was still more barbarous. They cut off the heads of eleven prisoners and put them into a barrel, which they threw into the Spanish camp. A Label upon the barrel contained these words: "Deliver these ten heads ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I dare not offend these people with whom I have promised to dine, and apart from that, I think it is very unwise that I should spend any time at all here with you. You know what sort of a person it is whom we both have to consider. She would turn us both into the street and treat it all as a jest, if it pleased her. I tell you frankly, Violet, I have been too near starvation once to care about facing it again. I am going to send you back to the station in the car now. You can catch a train to London almost ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... heard, and a plenty of frigates, too. The Frenchy must have suspicioned where I was bound, for he has followed us up sharp, and as we came by South Head I seen him jest a bilin' along 'bout ten mile astarn, and now he'll poke into every hole of the bay till he finds us. Anyhow, there won't be no chance to trade long as he's round, for you folks don't dare say your soul's your own when there's a Frenchy ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... call me that!" She laughed a little. "It wouldn't matter if I were twenty-five instead of—never mind! I don't want people to think, when they hear you, 'Many a true word spoken in jest.'" ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Porthos and Bicarat. Porthos made a thousand flourishes, asking Bicarat what o'clock it could be, and offering him his compliments upon his brother's having just obtained a company in the regiment of Navarre; but, jest as he might, he gained nothing. Bicarat was one of those iron ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not meant to be the cruel jest which it must have seemed to those about the Mexican Emperor who were better informed with regard to Napoleon's negotiations with the government of the United States. By those whose all was at stake it must have been ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... mountain road winds along in the bed of a stream. It is said to have a dry dirt floor, with an entrance through which one must crawl. After driving until the horses were tired out and being assured at several scattered cabins that it was "jest a leetle mite furder up thar," search for ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... the German, "but you are labouring under a mistake, Captain. The game was all a jest; they were playing a trick upon you. The cards ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
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