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More "Luckless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... modern days, a similar avidity was shewn to obtain a relic of the luckless Masaniello, the fisherman of Naples. After he had been raised by mob favour to a height of power more despotic than monarch ever wielded, he was shot by the same populace in the streets, as if he had been a mad dog. His headless trunk was dragged through the mire ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... marry Chiquita. A grim smile flitted across her countenance as the knowledge of this fact flashed through her mind, the only ray of light in the chaos into which she had been plunged by that misguided, luckless decision on her part—her refusal to follow the Captain ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life, death, and burial into fewer words, or more impressive ones; at least, we found them impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the inscription by scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced letters. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which he was part proprietor. And I always associate this my only recollection of his venerable white hair and beautiful face, full of an expression of most benign dignity, with the earliest mention I remember of that luckless property, which weighed like an incubus upon my father all his life, and the ruinous burden of which both I and my sister successively endeavored in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of routine slave-labor was very often broken by some scene of cruelty to one or another of the poor blacks, either by the master or his overseer; and woe unto the luckless one if the master should happen to be in a good mood to break bones. Although slaves were worth money in the South at that time, yet the ungovernable passions of some if not most masters found free vent in cruelty to their own property—that is, their slaves. This was the case with Wilson, ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... assembled in the afternoon, and turned out those skilfully and often artistically made rugs, so comfortable to lie under during the cold winter nights. There was often a great deal of sport at the close of one of these social industrial gatherings. When the men came in from the field to supper, some luckless wight was sure to be caught, and tossed up and down in the quilt amid the laughter and shouts of the company. But of all the bees, the apple-bee was the chief. In these old and young joined. The boys ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... Franches (which date in French literature back to Villon and no doubt earlier) follows. With this, as such, we need not trouble ourselves. But Olivier, the friend, takes upon him the duty of providing the wine, and does so by persuading a luckless vintner that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... untied, and forthwith sprung towards that unfortunate person, to set him an imposition. Everything, in fact, but tobacco he could forgive. Why did cursed fortune bring him into the rooms over mine? The odor of the cigars made his gentle spirit quite furious; and one luckless morning, when I was standing before my "oak," and chanced to puff a great bouffee of Varinas into his face, he forgot his respect for my family altogether (I was the second son, and my brother a sickly creature THEN,—he is now sixteen stone in weight, and has ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to act as Fraeulein's champion, Gipsy tried her utmost to sway popular opinion in favour of the luckless singing mistress. It was a far harder task, though, than she had anticipated, and put her powers of leadership to a severe test. It had been easy enough to induce the Juniors to stand up for their own rights, but it ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... country,"—a pathetic expression, which represents Burke's perpetual mood, as long as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land. Of the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of Trinity College in the eighteenth century, Burke was only contemporary at the University with one, the luckless sizar who in the fulness of time wrote the Vicar of Wakefield. There is no evidence that at this time he and Goldsmith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone to Oxford some time before. The one or two companions whom Burke mentions in his letters are only shadows ...
— Burke • John Morley
... take the worst advice, got ready for his task, and on Easter Eve embarked upon the river, leaving his Vicar-General under orders to proclaim the general ban. This was done, and the edict so contrived as to catch the luckless Governor in every church. The practical effect was to close all the churches, for to whatever church the Governor went the priest refused to celebrate the Mass. Several other persons were mentioned in the ban, which was posted ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... man whose doom in the world is disappointment,—who excels in it,—and whose luckless triumphs in his meek career of life, I have often thought, must be regarded by the kind eyes above with as much favour as the splendid successes and achievements of coarser and more prosperous men. As I sat with ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the ceremony was about to take place, a wild-looking lad, or, as some said, an unclean spirit, started up from no one knew where, and spoke such impertinent words to Grettir that he felled him with a blow of his fist. After this the king would not allow the ceremony to go on: 'Thou art far too luckless a man to abide with us, and if ever man has been cursed, of all men must thou have been,' said he; and advised him to go back to Iceland in the summer. Meanwhile Asmund the Greyhaired died, and was buried ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... Thornton Hastings one of those strong, peculiar friendships which sometimes exist between two men, but rarely between two women, of so widely different temperaments. They had roomed together four years in college, and countless were the difficulties from which the sober Arthur had extricated the luckless Thorne, while many a time the rather slender means of Arthur had been increased in a way so delicate that ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... whole of the French fleet; and, even latterly, no bad prospect of securing six sail of the line. Instead of which, they had only taken a single ship, the Alcide; and that, such was the fortune of this luckless day, took fire about half an hour after it had struck, and before being taken into possession—said to be occasioned by a box of combustibles in the fore-top—and the whole ship was soon in a blaze. Several boats, from our fleet, were instantly dispatched to rescue as many as possible of the unhappy ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... but suddenly it is clouded. Some unseen intruder casts a baneful shadow on the ungrasped prize; the features of the usurer contract, the hand is clenched, the brow is wrinkled, and woe betide the luckless debtor whose misfortunes would lead him to the banker's bureau during the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... bitter end of the high-spirited captain of this luckless expedition; an almost solitary death on the wide western plain, after enduring weeks of hunger and starvation. What must have been King's feelings at finding himself thus left without a companion to cheer his last hours when his turn, as he then ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the travel of its meditations is daily and customary; insomuch that the very thought of all others which one was born to utter he may forget to mention, as presuming it to be no news. Indeed, if a man of fertile soul be misled into the luckless search after peculiar and surprising thoughts, there are many chances that be will be betrayed into this oversight of his proper errand. As Sir Martin Frobisher, according to Fuller, brought home ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... I loitered in ambush about the precincts of the dressing-room, hoping for the pleasure of conducting you down-stairs; but 'the best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft aglee', and I became the luckless prey of similar tactics. That marauding Tomyris, Mrs. Halsey, sallied out at the head of her column of daughters, espied me lurking behind the portiere, and proclaiming her embarras de richesse, 'paid me the compliment' of consigning one fair campaigner, Miss Eloise Hermione, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... same cheerful ship lying in mid-channel as helpless as an infant. However, the accident (something, I fancy, had gone wrong with the engines) appeared to be treated as more amusing than important. Still, perhaps, it would be better were the name of this luckless boat changed to Le Farceur; then travellers would know what to expect. But I must confess that my experiences were perfectly pleasant. The steamer in which I journeyed crossed the Channel in the advertised time, and if I wished ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... original, and continued as follows: The enraged jeweller is on the point of tearing down his unfortunate signboard when a curious apparition leads him to pause in the act. He sees a bear- leader in the street making his clumsy beast dance, in whom the luckless lover recognises at a glance his own father, from whom he has been parted ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... scruples, of a refinement of loyalty. Certainly it added at the same time hugely to the price of Vereker's secret, precious as that mystery already appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix, as they say, my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which I am for ever conscious. But this only helped me the more to be artful, to be adroit, to allow time to elapse before renewing my suit. There were plenty of speculations for the interval, and one of them was ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... him first months since when he had entered the headquarters of the German high command in East Africa and carried off the luckless Major Schneider, of whose fate no hint had ever reached the German officers; and she had seen him again upon that occasion when he had rescued her from the clutches of the lion and, after explaining to her that he had recognized her in the British camp, had made her prisoner. It was then that ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... These luckless adventurers at length saw themselves surrounded by all the horrors of famine. Many of them were reduced to devour the leaves of trees; the majority were altogether destitute of sustenance. In this state of severe privations, and with very light clothing, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... about the great English rebellion. 'Pride's Purge,' the 'elective kingship without a veto of the 'New Model,' and the merciless mystification of Bradshaw, tell their own story. Steering to avoid the Scylla of Strafford, the luckless Parliamentarians ran the ship of State full into the Charybdis ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... lucubration was the unfortunate Stephen's examination paper, with the answers thereto embellished, and in many cases bodily supplied, by the fertile Anthony. The luckless Stephen, who was wedged up in the front row of readers, could have sunk into the earth on meeting once more that hateful paper face to face, and feeling himself an object of ridicule to the whole school. For the wonderful answers which now appeared were ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... mud and blacker ice, a yellow halo surrounds the gas lamps, even the Bude lights look quenched and uncomfortable; cabmen, peevish at the paucity of fares, curse with triple intensity the wood pavement and the luckless garrons that slide and stumble over it; the blue and benumbed fingers of Italian grinders can scarcely turn the organ handles; tattered children and half-starved women, pale, shivering, and tearful, pester the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... covers them all—those who donated guineas and those who donated "gifts," the rogues and the hypocrites, and the wedding-drolls, the observant and the lax, the purse-proud and the lowly, the coarse and the genteel, the wonderful chapmen and the luckless Schlemihls, Rabbi and Dayan and Shochet, the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and the cantors who trolled it off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men who never listened to it; the grimy Russians of the capotes and the earlocks, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... be or wise? Yet, though lonely seem the wood, Therein may lurk the beast of blood; Often bashful looks conceal Tongue of fire and heart of steel; And deem not thou in forest gray, Every dappled skin thy prey, Lest thou rouse, with luckless spear, The tiger for the fallow-deer! ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... befell the luckless Jack. For a long time he had, as senior, acted as orderly sergeant of Company K. This officer is virtually the executive functionary in the company. It is his place to form the men in rank, make out details, and prepare everything for the captain. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... swaying subaltern in fatigue uniform; the calm, deliberate man in riding dress. A faint color, as of annoyance, quickly spread over Loring's face, but for a moment he spoke not a word. Angrily the post, commander came hurrying forth, bent on the prompt annihilation of his luckless subaltern, and was about to speak, ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... excruciating entreaty, he consented to explore the surface of the water with a clothes-prop, but reported that the luckless trousers had disappeared in the depths, Herman having forgotten to remove some "fishin' sinkers" from his pockets before making the ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... hold, but in vain. The maternal instinct had awakened all its fierceness, and as the blood commenced to flow in streams from the deep scratches and bites inflicted by its teeth and claws, its ferocious appetency redoubled. It tore and bit as if nothing would appease it but the luckless victim's death. Mrs. Page would doubtless have fallen a prey to its savage rage, but for a happy thought which flashed across her mind in ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... the charge of a servant, he ushered me into a saloon adjoining his study, and introduced me to his family, consisting of two grown-up sons, three daughters, and their mother, to whom I had to tell my luckless adventures over again. That, however, was not the worst of it. As the hour of dinner drew near, the house began to fill with visitors: it was plain that my arrival, and the circumstances connected with it, had been regularly advertised through the town, and all the world ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... The luckless cause of these unnatural divisions now announced his presence in the halt by a loud crack ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... sound buffet from Little John. But right cunning was the shooting, for the men had spent a certain time in daily practice, and many were the shafts which sped daintily through the circle. Nathless now and again some luckless fellow would shoot awry and would be sent winding from a long arm blow from the tall lieutenant while the glade roared with laughter. And none more hearty a guffaw was given than came from the Sheriff's own throat, for the spirit of the greenwood ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of their sons bringing in their young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their mothers. Usually the female portion ruled the house, and were doubtless clannish enough about it. The stores were in common, but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge, and after such orders it would not be healthful for him ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... the whole Colony is its fisheries—the ever-recurrent pursuit of the luckless cod, salmon, herring, halibut, and lobster in summer, and the seal fishery in the month of March. It is increasingly difficult to overestimate the importance, not merely to the British Empire, but to the entire world, of the invaluable food-supply procured by ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Gothic chief slain, and again a shout of triumph. Then the signal to shoot was given to the soldiers, and hundreds of bolts from Wild Ass and Balista were hurtling through the air, aimed not at Gothic soldiers, but at the luckless oxen that drew the ponderous towers. The beasts being slain, it was impossible for the Goths who were immediately under the walls and exposed to a deadly discharge of arrows from the battlements, to move their towers either backward or forward, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... Alice, 't was all for thy locks so bright, And 't was all for thine eyes so blue, That on the night of our luckless flight ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... speed straight toward the gully. At the bushes she spoke a low word in his backlaid ears, raised him quickly with the bit, leaning forward as he rose in air. Like a bird that animal took the bushes and the gully beyond, while close behind him crashed the two luckless troopers. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thus the dear glance of my lady slay, On her sweet sprightly speech if dangers wait, If o'er me Love usurp a power so great, Oft as she speaks, or when her sun-smiles play; Alas! what were it if she put away, Or for my fault, or by my luckless fate, Her eyes from pity, and to death's full hate, Which now she keeps aloof, should then betray. Thus if at heart with terror I am cold, When o'er her fair face doubtful shadows spring, The feeling has its source in sufferings old. Woman by nature is a fickle thing, And female hearts—time ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... notes resound, And the sweet cider trips in silence round. The laws of husking every wight can tell; And sure, no laws he ever keeps so well: For each red ear a general kiss he gains, With each smut ear he smuts the luckless swains; But when to some sweet maid a prize is cast, Red as her lips, and taper as her waist, She walks the round, and culls one favored beau, Who leaps, the luscious tribute to bestow. Various the sport, as are the wits and brains Of well-pleased lasses and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... inmates and capture the fortress, is the saddest and most tragic of all. We saw high up in the wall, frowning over the river, the window of the chamber from which she had thrown herself after slaying her recreant lover in her rage and despair. A weird story it is, but if the luckless maiden still haunts the scene of her blighted love, an observant sojourner who fitly writes of Ludlow in poetic phrase never saw her. "Nearly every midnight for a month," he says, "it fell to me to traverse the quarter of a mile of dark, lonely lane that leads beneath the walls of the castle ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... in an awful tone, pointing to where the luckless Terence is crawling home in the fond belief that he is defying all detection; whereupon Kit, with much presence of mind, looks scrutinizingly in just the opposite direction. "It is somebody carrying a gun. Good gracious! it ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... talk about British gold, And opinions that are bought and sold, But facts, no matter how hard to face, Are facts, and the horrors taking place In that little land, pledged to honor's creed, Make your cause a luckless one to plead. There are two sides? True. But when both are heard, Our sad hearts echo a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the House of Preventive Detention a system of communication between the luckless prisoners carried on by means of tapping on the wall. Sigismund, being a clever fellow, had become a great adept at this telegraphic system, and had struck up a friendship with a young student in the next cell; this poor fellow had been imprisoned three ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... I was walking along a narrow old road which leads from Le Crotay, a fishing-village in Picardy, to the town of St. Valery-sur-Somme. It was in the month of February, and one of those luckless days on which cold, wind and rain all seem banded in league against the comfort of mankind: the sky, dull and lowering, presented to the eye nothing but a bleak, cheerless desert of gray, relieved only by troops of dark, inky clouds, which would at moments, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective—though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the present!—The last is always his best hit—his "Cynthia of the minute."—Alas! how many a mild Madonna ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... says Kit, expanding into the wildest affection. She kisses Monica fondly, and (though you would inevitably have suffered death at her hands had you even hinted at it) is beginning to enjoy herself intensely. Once again this luckless couple look to her for help. She is to be the one to raise them from their "Slough of Despond,"—difficult but congenial task! "Then you have been existing on lemon tart and one glass of sherry since breakfast time?" she says, ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... swung the shaft a second time and it fell a second time on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on one side and then on the other, trying to move the cart. But the six whips were attacking her in all directions, and the shaft was raised again and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... then bend, slowly, and once it was wrenched out of the horizontal, the motion was more and more rapid. Until, when the giant was done with his labor, the ends of the iron over-lapped around the necks of the two luckless brothers. Mac Strann stepped back and surveyed his work; the rest of the room was in silence, saving that the red-headed man was coming back to consciousness and now writhed and groaned feebly. He could not rise; that was manifest, for the thick ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... As I am outlaw'd from my fame and state, Be this day outlawed from the name of days. Day luckless, outlaw luckless, both accurs'd! [Flings away his napkin and hat, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... sport adjourned. Presages are not vain; when she departed, Nape by stumbling on the threshold, started. Going out again, pass forth the door more wisely, And somewhat higher bear thy foot precisely. Hence luckless tables! funeral wood, be flying! And thou, the wax, stuffed full with notes denying! Which I think gathered from cold hemlock's flower, Wherein bad honey Corsic bees did pour: 10 Yet as if mixed with red lead thou ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Then the luckless knight's very virtues (as, no doubt, my respected readers know,) made him enemies amongst the men—nor was Ivanhoe liked by the women frequenting the camp of the gay King Richard. His young Queen, and a brilliant court of ladies, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... prayers!" commanded Rupe, and continued to twist the luckless finger until Penrod writhed ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... translated spirit of his lady. Romance has touched the book here with her magic, as she has touched the lines where we read how Consuelo came by moonlight to the Canon's garden and the white flowers. The pleasure here is the keener for contrast with the luckless hind whom Aucassin encountered in the forest: the man who had lost his master's ox, the ungainly man who wept, because his mother's bed had been taken from under her to pay his debt. This man was in that estate which Achilles, in Hades, preferred above the kingship of the dead outworn. He ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... shortcomings. She was the only one who could meet Farrar on his own ground, and rarely a meal passed that they did not have a tilt. They filled up the holes of the conversation with running commentaries, giving a dig at the luckless narrator and a side-slap at each other, until one would have given his oath they were sworn enemies. At least I, in the innocence of my heart, thought so until I was forcibly enlightened. I had taken rather a prejudice to Miss Trevor. I could ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... crossed, her cheeks livid, her lips trembling. It was a terrible interview. This time it was she who threatened, the man who entreated pardon. Marie was deaf to his prayers, and the head of the luckless man fell bleeding at her feet, and her men threw the body into the sea. But God never allows a murder to go unpunished: James preferred the queen to her sister, and the widow of Charles of Durazzo gained nothing by her crime but the contempt of the man she loved, and a bitter remorse which ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... aged man who lived alone not far from the old church and visited the graveyard almost daily to pray over the resting place of some relative was foully murdered for the store of gold he was supposed to have hidden about his hermit abode. The robbers and murderers escaped justice, and the luckless graybeard was buried in the graveyard where he spent so much time. Just as French and his wife drew within sight of the white headstones in the churchyard the horses reared back on their haunches and snorted in terror. French was alarmed, and suspecting highwaymen had been scented by ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Swallowfield Park is an old English country home, a fastness still piled up against time; whose stately walls and halls within, and beautiful century-old trees in the park without, record great times and striking figures. The manor was a part of the dowry of Henry the VIII.'s luckless queens. The modern house was built by Clarendon, and the old church among the elms dates from 1200, with carved signs and symbols and brasses of knights and burgesses, and names of strange sound and ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... and we saw him no more. We regret to say that the popular indignation was so precipitate in its results; otherwise the special artist who sketched Hum, the son of Buz, intended to have made a sketch of the old villain, as he sat with his luckless victim's hind legs projecting from his solemn mouth. With all his moral faults, he was a good sitter, and would probably have sat immovable any length of time that ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... James to make himself absolute, and to restore Romanism in England, caused leading Englishmen to enter on a conspiracy—kept secret with extraordinary success—with William of Orange. The luckless monarch was abandoned on every hand, and fled from his kingdom to France, an object of universal mockery. Yet Louis resolved to aid him. A French force accompanied him to Ireland, and Tourville defeated the united fleets of England and Holland. At last France ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... in tuning his instrument, the teacher proceeded with his lucid explanations:—"Now, boys, start fair; give a grand chord. What sort of a noise do you call that? (giving a luckless boy a thump over the head with his fiddle-stick). You bray through your nose like a jackass. I tell you to quit; I don't want discord." The boy slunk out of the class, and stood blubbering behind ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the luckless captive was led away by his enemies to their neighboring village, which was situated at Messessaga Point, near the fortress. The warriors sadly bore, on a litter of branches, the body of their slain chieftain, leading beside it their pinioned captive. As they approached ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... an old and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own improvident family. Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly been conscious of including them in the carefully drawn will which, following the old American convention, scrupulously divided his hoarded millions among his kin. It was by a mere genealogical accident that ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... scramble on to the ladies' knees, or trample out the gathers of their dresses, and fidget with their ornaments, startling some luckless lady by the announcement, "I've got your bracelet undone at last!" who would find one of the divisions broken open by force, Amelia not understanding the working of ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... murderer aroused their passion to the utmost; Konrad's escort was overpowered and thrust aside. "Awa' wi' him to the Papist's pillar!" cried a voice. Down they went with him to the North Loch, and tied him there to an oaken stake about five feet deep in the water—a spot where many a luckless Catholic had perished. The mob retired, and Konrad was left alone, helpless, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... his throat, and there was an end of his dreams. Four other sleepers were despatched in like manner, without time given them to utter a syllable. After them went another, who had entrenched himself between two horses; then the luckless Grill, who had made himself a pillow of a barrel which he had emptied. He was dreaming of opening a second barrel, but, alas, was tapped himself. A Greek and a German followed, who had been playing late at dice; fortunate, if they had continued to do so a little longer; but they ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... the dark, incident after incident of her luckless evening coming back upon her, her heart grew hungry for David. Nay, her craving for him mounted to jealousy and passion. After all, though he did get on so much better in grand houses than she did, though they were all kind ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... visitation. Malcourt's marriage to an heiress was the perfectly obvious incentive of the visit. And when they wrote that they were coming to New York, it amused Malcourt exceedingly to invite them to Luckless Lake. But he said nothing about it to Portlaw or ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... "Yes—unpleasant, luckless, little persons. I quite understand. They never appeared before. They will not appear again. Thank you, ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... The luckless hour I curse, in very deed, When I, alas! said yea, Vesture to change,—so fair in that dusk wede I was and glad, whereas in this more gay A weary life I lead, Far less than erst held honest, welaway! Ah, dolorous bridal day, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... from English, or rather Irish, history is supplied by Macaulay and belongs to the year 1689. It is one of the incidents in James the Second's brief and luckless government of Ireland: ...
— The Paper Moneys of Europe - Their Moral and Economic Significance • Francis W. Hirst
... the river!" shrieked the smaller boys, with an impetuosity that made Mr. Grimshaw smile in spite of himself. One luckless urchin said, "Chucked it," for which happy expression he was kept in ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... old lady took them, but began again at once in a tearful voice complaining of the dog, of Gavrila, and of her fate, declaring that she was a poor old woman, and that every one had forsaken her, no one pitied her, every one wished her dead. Meanwhile the luckless Mumu had gone on barking, while Gerasim tried in vain to call her away from the fence. 'There ... there ... again,' groaned the old lady, and once more she turned up the whites of her eyes. The doctor whispered to a maid, ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... prophetess[5] of the fairy-folk, came [6]in the form of a bird,[6] and she perched on the standing-stone in Temair of Cualnge giving the Brown Bull of Cualnge warning [7]and lamentations[7] before the men of Erin. Then she began to address him and what she said was this: "Good, now, O luckless one, thou Brown Bull of Cualnge," so spake the Morrigan; "take heed; for the men of Erin. [8]are on thy track and seeking thee[8] and they will come upon thee, and [9]if thou art taken[9] they will carry thee away to their camp ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... heard her sparkling story. You consider yourself happy because you are sitting by her and helping her to a lady-finger, or a macaroon, for which she smiles. But I was her theme for ten mortal minutes. She was my bard, my blithe historian. She was the Homer of my luckless Trojan fall. She set my mishap to music, in telling it. Think what it is to have inspired Urania; to have called a brighter beam into the eyes of Miranda, and do not think so much of passing Aurelia the mottoes, my ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... Aegon, thy very kine will go to Hades, while thou too art in love with a luckless victory, and thy pipe is flecked with mildew, the pipe that once thou ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... rejects me also!' responds the luckless youth, the tears flowing from his eagle eyes onto ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... half-way to the Natal border I encountered heavy rain. One-tenth of the thunderstorms that broke over my luckless head would, had they but visited the mountain saddle a couple of weeks previously, have made an independent man of me. This was quite typical of ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... Corinth. He should have known better with whom he had to deal. The enchantress, indignant at such treatment, determined on revenge. Pretending to be reconciled to the coming marriage, she prepared a poisoned robe, which she sent as a wedding-present to the hapless Glauce. No sooner had the luckless bride put on this perilous gift than the robe burst into flames, and she was consumed; while her father, who sought to tear from her the fatal garment, met with the ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... appearance of my crew, who had all, excepting the two Kanakas, aged perceptibly during that night of torment. But we lost no time in getting back to the ship, where I fully expected a severe wigging for the scrape my luckless curiosity had led me into. The captain, however, was very kind, expressing his pleasure at seeing us all safe back again, although he warned me solemnly against similar investigations in future. A hearty meal and a good rest ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... is the fate of simple bard, On life's rough ocean luckless starred! Unskilful he to note the card Of prudent lore, Till billows rage, and gales blow ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... well bedight With ruffles blue, and I, oh, luckless wight, Must send to her—she said, exchange is fair— My college pin in gold. Her cushion's where With half-closed eyes I lie. Is't not aright I dream ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... This luckless adventure not only nipped in the bud a little scheme he had been revolving, for materially befriending Ethan Allen and his comrades, but resulted in making his further stay at Falmouth perilous ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... themselves to their sight, or to their mind: that "they would send forward that band with prosperity and success, and soon send them back safe into their country to their parents." In vain were these prayers sent up. Having set out on their luckless road by the right-hand postern of the Carmental gate, they arrive at the river Cremera: this appeared a favourable situation for fortifying a post. L. AEmilius and C. Servilius were then created consuls. And as long as ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... was distinctly visible, although they themselves were so far hidden by the German sandbags; but as Dennis looked back over his shoulder, he saw the luckless Tiddler lying prone and helpless in the open, and the white face of Hawke telling out ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... beauteous youth, But, luckless, in the wave his face beholding, Himself he fascinates, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... bequilted my jacket, that in a rain-storm I became a universal absorber; swabbing bone-dry the very bulwarks I leaned against. Of a damp day, my heartless shipmates even used to stand up against me, so powerful was the capillary attraction between this luckless jacket of mine and all drops of moisture. I dripped like a turkey a roasting; and long after the rain storms were over, and the sun showed his face, I still stalked a Scotch mist; and when it was fair weather with others, alas! it was foul weather ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... stripped from his fore arms, they are seen to be of great size, with muscles as firm to the touch as so much rubber. Long practice has made him immensely strong, and quick as a flash to ward and strike. Woe be to the luckless dog, however large, that ventures in the excitement of the hunt within reach of his paw. A single swift stroke will generally put the poor brute out of the ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... understanding what a fate was in store for me, I passed the time in childish amusement with the other lads in the steerage, for we were never allowed to go on deck while the vessel stayed in the harbor, which it did till they had imprisoned as many luckless boys ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... entangled in thy clue, By magic seeks to dissipate the strife, Thy furtive fingers snatch his faulchion too; The luckless wizard ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... Pricked by the first hook it touches, the sturgeon gives a startled leap and comes into contact with half a dozen more hooks. Then it threshes about wildly, until it receives hook after hook in its soft flesh; and the hooks, straining from many different angles, hold the luckless fish fast until it is drowned. Because no sturgeon can pass through a Chinese line, the device is called a trap in the fish laws; and because it bids fair to exterminate the sturgeon, it is branded by the ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... prince who ruled the coasts between the Dovey and the Ystwith, came down on a May-day morning to his father's fishing- weir. All that was taken that morning was to be Elphin's, had Gwyddno said. Not a fish was taken that day; and Elphin, who was ever a luckless youth, would have gone home empty-handed, but that one of his men found, entangled in the poles of the weir, a coracle, and a fair child in it. This was none other than he who was to be the father ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... that almost continually sweep over that part of Siberia. They never seem to cease, and there are treacherous air currents and 'pockets' that engulfed more than one luckless aviator. Oh, you may be sure the Russian government spared no means of finding the lost platinum mine, but they could not locate it, or even get near the place where they supposed it ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... strife, our futile praying, Our luckless Present and our bloodstained Past. Poor players, who make a trick or two in playing, But know that death must win ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... fellow composed into the steady affectionate husband, and the fond careful parent. For me, I am just the same will-o'-wisp being I used to be. About the first and fourth quarters of the moon, I generally set in for the trade wind of wisdom; but about the full and change, I am the luckless victim of mad tornadoes, which blow me into chaos. Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom; and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow,[57]who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... speech, kept his own counsel as to the events of the afternoon, and bided the time when he might turn them to his own ends. Eudemius also was more silent than his position as host seemed to warrant. That he was in bad humor was to be seen from the threatening glances he cast at the luckless slave when a dish was delayed or a wine too warm. He was an old man, this latter, white-haired and bent and very skilful, with a sunken face as pale as parchment. Marius, as keen to observe as he was silent, saw that always the old ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... the darkness, close on their captain's heels. And the lady walked beside him and stood beside him without a word, in the falling rain. The boat went backwards and forwards twice; before the hour had run out, the luckless cargo was all once more landed, and the captain heard with infinite relief the last oar-strokes dwindling away in the distance, and saw the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... associates it with The Pickwick Papers, we remember that Mrs. Bardell and her friends, Mrs. Sanders, Mrs. Cluppins, Mr. and Mrs. Raddle, Mrs. Rogers and Master Tommy Bardell, bent on having a day out, had taken the Hampstead Stage to the "Spaniards" Tea Gardens, "where the luckless Mr. Raddle's very first act nearly occasioned his good lady a relapse, it being neither more or less than to order tea for seven; whereas (as the ladies one and all remarked) what could have been easier than for Tommy to have drank out of any lady's cup, or ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... eagerness with which it danced into full view left but little for meddlers to covet. A crash was inevitable; it was the clash that Grover & Dickhut were trying to avert. Old Wharton, worn to a slimmer frazzle than he had ever been before his luckless marriage, was determined to divorce his insolent younger half. It was to be done with as little noise as possible, more for his own sake than for hers. Wharton was proud in, not ...
— The Purple Parasol • George Barr McCutcheon
... playing at?" laughed the luckless officer, feigning to treat the affair as a joke, even while the iron truth was entering his ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... but seeing that his movement would be too late, he rushed to the topping-lift, and cast it off, causing the swinging boom to drop into the water, just as the last boy was about to slide down into the professors' boat. Of course the luckless fellow went into the water; but he was promptly picked up by his companions ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... branches. I saw him that chanted it. I saw his fool's bauble. I knew his old grief. I knew that old greenwood and the shadow that haunted it,— My fool, my lost jester, my Shadow-of-a-Leaf! And "why," I said, "why, all this while, have you left me so Luckless in melody, lonely in mirth?" "Oh, why," he sang, "why has this world then bereft me so Soon of my Marian, ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... mermaids filled her with the joy of the dance, the free ecstatic movements of free things in the waves. The filching of the Rheingold, the hoarse shout of laughter from Alberich's love-foresworn lips, and the terrified cries of the luckless watchers were as real as life. Walhall did not confuse her, for now she caught clues to the meaning of the mighty epic. Wotan and Fricka—ah, Meg did not look so stout, and how lovely her voice sounded!—Loki, mischief-making, diplomatic Loki; the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of fish after this, that's all! Hulloa, there, you red-haired varmint, what are you looking after? Three boys looking about them; what's all this? Won't I be among you?" and he sprang forward and seized the luckless ears of the first apprentice he could get hold off, and wrung them ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... same, and after the brutes we raced, inhaling dust, expectorating mud, and cursed by every transport officer. Happy men, without horses to look after, were looting fowls and porkers, for the district was a good one; but such was not for us luckless Yeomen. Even when we got into camp we had to stand for nearly two hours in the dark, looking after the brutes till some more Yeomanry, the Roughs, relieved us, I cannot help it—it's the twelfth, ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... the play protract! Behold our Sharon in his last mad act. With man long warring, quarreling with God, He crouches now beneath a woman's rod Predestined for his back while yet it lay Closed in an acorn which, one luckless day, He stole, unconscious of its foetal twig, From the scant garner of a sightless pig. With bleeding shoulders pitilessly scored, He bawls more lustily than once he snored. The sympathetic Comstocks droop to hear, And Carson river sheds a viscous tear, Which sturdy ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... houses (communistic households of several families) ... a certain clan (gens) always reigned so that the women chose their husbands from other clans. The female part generally ruled the house; the provisions were held in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too indolent or too clumsy to contribute his share to the common stock. No matter how many children or how much private property he had in the house, he was liable at any moment to receive a hint to gather up his belongings ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... been prepared for the solace and well-being of a colony of seedling onions. Little showers of earth-mould and root-fibres went spraying before the hen and behind her, and every minute the area of her operations widened. The onions suffered considerably. Mrs. Saunders, sauntering at this luckless moment down the garden path, in order to fill her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of the weeds, which grew faster than she or her good man cared to remove them, stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a more magnificent grievance. And then, in the ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... come in your sketch, Which, designed by a hand unaccustomed to etch, With a luckless result may be branded; Wherefore add this particular rule to your code, Let all vehicles take the wrong side of the road, And man, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... pursued a remorselessly logical and improving course. Having got his wish, the luckless Henry found that his only moments of pleasure were those during which he was enduring the tawse, getting out of bed on a cold morning, or doing something equally unpleasant. On the other hand, his comfortable bed had become so painful that he could only obtain ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... in that posture which is the distinctive characteristic of man, he did not attempt to administer his vindictive retribution by proxy. Laying hold on a tough cudgel, he gave it one ominous swing, describing an arc of sufficient magnitude to have laid an army prostrate. He then pursued the luckless emissary of the Evil One, roaring and foaming with this unusual exertion. There was now no lack of activity. A hawk among the chickens, or a fox in a farm-yard, were nothing to it. Sometimes was seen the doughty Sir Ralph driving the whole herd before him like a flock of sheep; but the original ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... striking distance of Tynes and his Tories, scarcely one of his troops was fit for action. He prudently retreated, very much mortified with the transaction. Marion captured a part of Tynes' force a few days after, and this luckless loyalist seems to have disappeared from the field from ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... red flame that burst from Wetzel's rifle came a sharp yelp of agony from the leader. He rolled over and over. Instantly followed a horrible mingling of snarls and barks, and snapping of jaws as the band fought over the body of their luckless comrade. ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Harlequin, entangled in thy clue, By magic seeks to dissipate the strife, Thy furtive fingers snatch his faulchion too; The luckless wizard ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... springal loved, And to have it fully proved Up she got upon a wall Tempting to slide down withal: But the silken twist untied, So she fell: and, bruised, she died. Love, in pity of the deed, And such luckless eager speed, Turned her to this plant we call Now the 'Floweret ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Mrs. Travers," said Lingard. "The wife of one of the luckless gentlemen Daman got hold of last evening. . . . This is Jorgenson, the friend of whom I have ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... every-day occurrence,—something excusable in any respectable man's family. It was beauty rivalling, fierce and jealous of its compliments. Again, the wretch-found incorrigible, and useless for the purpose purchased-is sold. Poor, luckless maiden! she might add, as she passed through the hands of so many purchasers. This time, however, she is less valuable from having fractured her left wrist, deformity being always taken into account when such property is up at the flesh shambles. But Mr. Blackmore Blackett has a delicacy about ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... luckless tramp liner which set down on FX-31 in search of water, their water-producing equipment having been damaged by carelessness. They found water, a great river of it, and sent a party of five men to determine its fitness for human consumption. They were snapped up before ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... passed, every intrigue was practised, every remonstrance was urged, every stratagem of courtesy was tried; but never ceasing to deplore the failure of his hopes, it preyed on his spirits, and the luckless caligrapher went down to his grave—without dining at the Academy! This authentic anecdote has been considered as "satire improperly directed"—by some friend of Mr. Tomkins—but the criticism is much too grave! The foible of Mr. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in compliance with the rather pressing request of Mrs. Raddle, the luckless Mr. Bob Sawyer was left alone to meditate on the probable events of the morrow, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... among the luckless throng That here have found a quiet home; Or rising there, in lofty air, A snowy ...
— Within the Golden Gate - A Souvenir of San Fransisco Bay • Laura Young Pinney
... the general scandalized look on the faces of the others, Irene judged that luckless Peachy must have been on the verge of betraying some secret. She tactfully turned the conversation with a remark upon the beauty of the sunset, and the clanging of the garden bell opportunely broke up the gathering, and sent the girls hurrying helter-skelter ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... its wing, and with an unresisted power forces the bird to fall in a slanting direction upon the nearest shore. Pouncing downwards, the eagle is soon joined by his mate, when they turn the body of the luckless swan upwards, and tear it open ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... had come to enjoy his politeness, he felt little eagerness to secure the return of the compliment at the same price, and added, with the consequence of another set phrase, "Not at all." But the thought had made him the more anxious to befriend the luckless soul fortune had cast in his way; and so the two sallied out together, and rang doorbells wherever lights were still seen burning in the windows, and asked the astonished people who answered their summons whether any Mr. Hapford were known ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... pitiless! Ah, cruel snake! Ah, luckless doom of woes! Like a cropped summer rose, Or lily cut, she withers on the brake. Her face, which once did make Our age so bright With beauty's light, is faint and pale; And the clear lamp doth fail, Which shed pure splendour all the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... agree, and next moment they were all within the walls of the council-chamber, the warriors smiling grimly in their wigwams at this evidence of the universal feminine failing. A dim and fitful glare from the fire served to reveal the form of the luckless Indian youth seated upon a log, his eye fixed upon vacancy. For a moment curiosity kept the whole party silent, and then, education and habit exerting their influence, the group began to put in practice those arts which might be expected ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... underwriting affairs, as the questionable losses from Boston and other similar agencies began to arrive in faster and faster succession, and he clearly perceived the weakness and incapability of Gunterson's management, his irritation rightly directed itself more and more against the luckless Vice-President. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the brands and vented his rage on the luckless Eagle. The native was a big powerful man, but Mick took him by surprise. With a sudden twist the white man sent him sprawling on the ground, and, before he had a chance to get up again, was holding the black down with a wrestling ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... all her impositions with the resignation of a fakir through so many years of married life, at last on one luckless day had had his bad half-hour and administered to her a superb whack with his crutch. The surprise of Madam Job at such an inconsistency of character made her insensible to the immediate effects, and only after she had recovered from ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... while yet her glory shineth! There comes a luckless night That will dim all her light; And this the black ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... his voice, as every unfortunate individual will do who is bitten by the music mania. Then among the ladies there were a half-score of dubious pale governesses and professionals with turned frocks and lank damp bandeaux of hair under shabby little bonnets; luckless creatures these, who were parting with their poor little store of half-guineas to be enabled to say they were pupils of Signor Baroski, and so get pupils of their own among the British youths, or employment in the choruses ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... subordinate character or as heroine, this figure of a graceful feminine victim comes into nearly every novel. Virtuous heroes fare little better. Poor Colonel Chabert is disowned and driven to beggary by the wife who has committed bigamy; the luckless cure, Birotteau, is cheated out of his prospects and doomed to a broken heart by the successful villainy of a rival priest and his accomplices; the Comte de Manerville is ruined and transported by ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... driver understood but little of my directions; the sight, however, of a few guldens caused him to drive so recklessly that I thought my last hour had come. It seemed that we must be leaving the path strewn with luckless victims. Arriving at the Palace of Peace, where the nations had so unsuccessfully beguiled each other with "smooth words, softer than honey," I succeeded in inducing my charioteer to come to a standstill. Alighting, a policeman informed me that the building had just been closed, but ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... roots, nuts, and berries. Its dangerous fore-claws are normally used to overturn stones and knock rotten logs to pieces, that it may lap up the small tribes of darkness which swarm under the one and in the other. It digs up the camas roots, wild onions, and an occasional luckless woodchuck or gopher. If food is very plenty bears are lazy, but commonly they are obliged to be very industrious, it being no light task to gather enough ants, beetles, crickets, tumble-bugs, roots, and nuts to satisfy the cravings ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... moment Estelle and her husband discovered Oscar cowering in his corner. Moreau swooped down on the luckless lad like a hawk on its prey, took him by the collar of the coat and dragged him to the light of a window. "Speak! what did you say to monseigneur in that coach? What demon let loose your tongue, you who keep a doltish silence whenever I speak ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... heavy heart that I trudged off next day to see my luckless acquaintances. I secretly hoped—such is human weakness—that I should not find them at home, and again I was mistaken. Both were at home. The change that had taken place in them during the last three days must have struck any one. Punin looked ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... challenged that of its neighbour. The organ was sure that the vehicle lacked the true vehicular character; and the vehicle threw grave doubts on the organship of the organ. In somewhat less than half a year, however, the dispute came suddenly to a close: the vehicle—like a luckless opposition coach, weak in its proprietorship—was run off the road, and broke down; and the triumphant organ, seizing eager hold of the name of its defunct rival as legitimate spoil, hung it up immediately under its own, as a red warrior of the West seizes ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... guinea-pig bliss, and subjected the other, Pair B, to a course of discipline. They were trained to run. They, and their descendants after them, pair following on pair; first with slow-turning wheels as in squirrel cages, the wheel inexorably going, machine-driven, and the luckless little gluttons having to move on, for gradually increasing periods of time, at gradually increasing speeds. Pair A and their progeny were sheltered and fed, but the rod was spared; Pair B were as the guests at "Muldoon's"—they had to exercise. With ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... head to foot in some royal mantle, with a man's crown held over his baby head, receiving with large eyes of wonder and fright easily translated into tears, the sacred oil, the sceptre which his little fingers could scarcely enclose. Alas for the luckless Stewarts! again and again this affecting ceremony took place before the time of their final promotion which was the precursor of their overthrow. They were all kings almost from their cradle—kings ill-omened, entering upon their royalty with infant ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... same way the Artillery had all manner of codes for every conceivable occasion. Various messages were devised and entered in the Defence Scheme for retaliation, S.O.S., raid purposes, etc., and woe betide the luckless F.O.O. or Infantryman who sent the wrong message. There were "concentrates" and "Test concentrates," and "attacks" and "Test attacks," and "S.O.S." and many others. If anything serious really happened, the lines were always broken at ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... French survive! Surely none should be alive; Fair France should be one mighty morgue from Biarritz to Lille, If there's also phosphorus, bringing deadly loss for us, In Hygiene's new victim, luckless papier pur fil. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... delirious with joy. They cheered the ape. They cheered the boy, and they hooted and jeered at the trainer and the manager, which luckless individual had inadvertently shown himself and ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... maintained by von Salis, resigned in 1777, and the school was closed. At the invitation of the count of Leiningen-Dachsburg, Bahrdt now went as general superintendent to Duerkheim on the Hardt; his luckless translation of the Testament, however, pursued him, and in 1778 he was suspended by a decision of the high court of the Empire. In dire poverty he fled, in 1779, to Halle, where in spite of the opposition of the senate and the theologians, he ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... falling into the duck-pond, Melindy began to dry it in her apron, and I went to help her; I thought, as I was rubbing the thing down with the apron, while she held it, that I had found one of her soft dimpled hands, and I gave the luckless turkey such a tender pressure that it uttered a miserable squeak and departed this life. Melindy all but cried. I laughed irresistibly. So there were no more turkeys. Peggy began to wonder what they should do for the proper Thanksgiving dinner, and Peter turned restlessly on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the sad and bitter end of the high-spirited captain of this luckless expedition; an almost solitary death on the wide western plain, after enduring weeks of hunger and starvation. What must have been King's feelings at finding himself thus left without a companion to cheer his last hours ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... in its struggles to free itself it attracted the attention of a creeper—the larva of one of the aquatic flies called drakes (Ephemerae)—which pounced upon it as fiercely as the water staphylinus does on the luckless tadpole, but, fortunately for the Minnow, either the glittering of the knife-blade or the motion of my hand, scared it away again ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... word could Geordie distinguish. It was all guesswork. But, glancing up at Cullin, he called: "He's trying to talk. Perhaps I can get his name," and again inclined his ear and bent down over the luckless fellow's face. "Yes," he said, loudly, so that Cullin could hear—"yes, I understand.... Don't worry.... You're with friends.... Tell us your name and home.... What? Try once again.... Bry—what? Oh, Breifogle?... Yes. Argenta? That's just where we're going. We'll be there very soon. Don't ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... ago ceased to be embarrassed by the shabbiness of her toilette, or the inevitable disorder of her sitting-room. She found seats for her guests, and to do so pushed into the background the baby's cradle and an old easy-chair, in which the luckless Nina was sitting bundled ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... unfinished, and ordered her wedded retainer to dispose of what was left. 'I have swallowed all I can, I cannot swallow more, it is a physical impossibility,' he seemed to say; and his stern officer reiterated her commands with secret imperative signals. Luckless dog! but in mere humanity we came to the rescue and ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disengaging his fingers, and the string sliding down with a snap from the upper nock caught and pinched them sorely against the stave. A roar of laughter, like the clap of a wave, swept down the deck as the luckless bowman ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I've grown so used to it that it seems as though all my life I had been driving and struggling with the muddy roads. When it does not rain, and there are no pits of mud on the road, one feels queer and even a little bored. And how filthy I am, what a rapscallion I look! What a state my luckless clothes are in! ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... more trying injustice befell the luckless Jack. For a long time he had, as senior, acted as orderly sergeant of Company K. This officer is virtually the executive functionary in the company. It is his place to form the men in rank, make out details, and ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... certain Catholics in England have sought audience with those of their faith in Paris? Have we then fear of France? My word upon it, good Monteagle, that calm thought will quell thy doubts. Of this Thomas Winter I know something; a reminder of the luckless Essex, a gentleman whose zeal doth warp his reason, and who, should he presume too far, will feel the axe, I warrant. Thou sayest he is again in England; perchance he builds a castle which the sight of a line of soldiers will scatter to ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... marks, and the truth dawned on me that these were the prints of great wings. The Rabbit was fleeing from an eagle, a hawk, or an owl. Some twenty yards farther "k" I found in the snow the remains of the luckless Rabbit partly devoured. Then I knew that the eagle had not done it, for he would have taken the Rabbit's body away, not eaten him up there. So it must have been a hawk or an owl. I looked for something ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... now a speck; let us turn away, with the face to the Old. Amongst my fellow-passengers how many there are returning home disgusted, disappointed, impoverished, ruined, throwing themselves again on those unsuspecting poor friends who thought they had done with the luckless good-for-noughts forever. For don't let me deceive thee, reader, into supposing that every adventurer to Australia has the luck of Pisistratus. Indeed, though the poor laborer, and especially the poor operative from London and the great trading towns (who has generally more of the quick ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the luckless nephew had to laugh as he thought of the slim legs pursuing their travels in the short but enormous "priches" ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... reason to take the air in the dreariest province of their kingdom. Chambord therefore suffered from royal indifference, though in the last century a use was found for its deserted halls. In 1725 it was occupied by the luckless Stanislaus Leczynski, who spent the greater part of his life in being elected King of Poland and being ousted from his throne, and who, at this time a refugee in France, had found a compensation for some ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... My luckless Play, that sad instance of my duplicity, was never once mentioned to me afterwards, not even by any one of the children who had acted in it, and I must also tell you how considerate an old lady was at the time about our dresses. As ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... is up to Catch the Fish;" the worm, caught as bait, will in turn serve as captor for some luckless fish. This, possibly, is the Bornese version of our own proverb, "The early ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... the ocean, exceedingly wonderful in this world. People are loudly asking, 'How, indeed, could Drona, that master of the science of arms, be vanquished?' Even thus all the warriors are speaking in depreciation of thee. Destruction is certain for my luckless self in battle, when three car-warriors, O tiger among men, have in succession transgressed thee. When, however, all this hath happened, tell us what thou hast to say on the business that awaits us. What hath happened, is past. O giver of honours, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... great gray rocks among the sand and gravel below. The rest of the body, with the armor which incased it, still sat upright in its place; and to this day travellers sailing down the river are shown on moonlit evenings the luckless armor of Amilias on the high hill-top. In the dim, uncertain light, one easily fancies it to be the ivy covered ruins of some old castle of ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... was advice to the luckless animal, or a general adjuration to everybody and everything to be prepared for the worst, we know not; but instead of holding on, every one let go what he or she chanced to be holding on to at the moment, and made for a place of safety with reckless haste. The rhinoceros alone obeyed ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... Madame Merle defended the luckless lady with a great deal of zeal and wit. She couldn't see why Mrs. Touchett should make a scapegoat of a woman who had really done no harm, who had only done good in the wrong way. One must certainly draw the line, but while one ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... to go over the various signal codes again. Joe Hooker had not yet put in an appearance, and several of the substitutes were enjoying themselves punting the ball, doubtless also wondering if they were going to be as luckless as before about breaking into the game, ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... a fool, they've ruined me, a luckless orphan, you red-headed drunkard..." wailed Lukerya, wiping her face with a hand covered with dough. "I wish I had never ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... length, covered with a green cloth, with a red piece at one end, and a black, one at the other. It is surrounded by a crowd of persons of both sexes, squeezed together, who, all suspended between fear and hope, are waiting, with eager eyes and open mouth, for the favourable or luckless chance. I will suppose that the banker or person who deals the cards, announces "rouge perd, couleur gagne." The oracle has spoken. At these words of fate, on one side of the table, you see countenances smiling, but with a smile of inquietude, and on the other, long faces, on which ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Lajeunie, the luckless novelist, went to Pitou, the unrecognized composer, saying, "I have a superb scenario for a revue. Let us join forces! I promise you we shall make a fortune; we shall exchange our attics for first floors of fashion, and be wealthy enough to wear sable overcoats and Panama hats at the same time." ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... He was naturally humane, but possessed of no small share of moral courage; or, in other words, he was chary of the lives of his patients, and never tried uncertain experiments on such members of society as were considered useful; but, once or twice, when a luckless vagrant had come under his care, he was a little addicted to trying the effects of every phial in his saddle-bags on the strangers constitution. Happily their number was small, and in most cases their natures innocent. By these means Elnathan had acquired a certain degree of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... a lion-tamer with a whip!" And the old lady would explain what a hard and dangerous life was lived by lion-tamers, how their safety depended upon life-long distrustfulness of the creatures over whom they ruled. She would tell stories of the rending and maiming of luckless ones, who had forgotten for a brief moment the nature of the male animal! "Yes, my dear," she would say, "believe in love; but let the man believe first!" Her maxims never sinned by ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... historical story of the time of Charles I.; 'The Constable of the Tower'; 'The Lord Mayor of London'; 'Cardinal Pole,' which deals with the court and times of Philip and Mary; 'John Law,' a story of the great Mississippi Bubble; 'Tower Hill,' whose heroine is the luckless Catharine Howard; 'The Spanish Match,' a story of the romantic pilgrimage of Prince Charles and "Steenie" Buckingham to Spain for the fruitless wooing of the Spanish Princess; and at least ten other romances, many of them in three volumes, all appearing between 1840 and 1873. Two of these ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... better, cancel from the scroll Of universe one luckless human soul, Than drop by drop enlarge the flood that rolls Hoarser with anguish ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... knew him, and to Kundry softly spake, Who now drew near: "Thou knowest him. 'T is he Who long ago laid low the snow-white swan,— He whom in anger I thrust out-of-doors. Where has he wandered since that luckless day? But look! Behold the spear! It is the Spear For which my eager heart has longed and prayed! O holy day, on which the Spear comes home! O happy day to which ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... may flaunt a titled trail Proud as a cockerel's rainbow tail, And mine as brief appendix wear As Tam O'Shanter's luckless mare; To-day, old friend, remember still That I am Joe and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... once a beauteous youth, But, luckless, in the wave his face beholding, Himself he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to be "Luckless Jo", and she never had what she wanted till she had given up hoping for it,' ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... with more than the Susquehanna until the whole column drew out from behind her at a distance of a mile or less and bore down on them. This was the position of affairs when the Vaterland appeared in the sky. The red glow Bert had seen through the column of clouds came from the luckless Susquehanna; she lay almost immediately below, burning fore and aft, but still fighting two of her guns and steaming slowly southward. The Bremen and the Weimar, both hit in several places, were going west by south and away from her. The American fleet, headed by the Theodore Roosevelt, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... say so much. Meg had a touch of Hal, too. 'Twas ill turning her down one road an' she took the bit betwixt her teeth, and had a mind to go the other. There was less of it in Mall, I grant you. And as to yon poor luckless loon, Mall's heir,—if he wit his own mind, I reckon 'tis as much as a man may bargain for. England ne'er loveth such at her helm—mark you that, Robin. She may bear with them, but she layeth no ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... began to speak of his past. He told me of Hungerford's kindness to him on the 'Dancing Kate', of his luckless days at Port Darwin, of his search for his wife, his writing to her, and her refusal to see him. He did not rail against her. He apologised for her, and reproached himself. "She is most singular," he continued, "and different from most ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... run between two hills," the Dutch called it Sleepy Haven Kill, hence Sleepy Hollow. "Far in the foldings of the hills winds this wizard stream," writes the grand sachem of all the wizards, who wove the romance of the headless horseman and the luckless schoolmaster so tightly about the spot that they are to-day part and parcel of it. The bridge over which the scared pedagogue scurried was some rods further up the stream than is the present crossing, for in those days the Post Road ran along the north side of the church, and the entrance ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... pacify distempered spirits. No; no one railed at you. They wrapped them up, O Heaven! in such oppressive, solemn silence! Here is no every-day misunderstanding, No transient pique, no cloud that passes over; Something most luckless, most unhealable, Has taken place. The Queen of Hungary Used formerly to call me her dear aunt, And ever at departure ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... "Luckless mortal, why doth Poseidon hate thee so? He shall not slay thee, though he fain would do it. Put off these garments, and swim to the land of Phaeacia, putting this veil under thy breast. And when thou art come to the land, loose it from thee, ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... alarming nature of this incident, and the interference of a cloud that sought to neutralise the sun, our persevering traveller completed his observations, and proved the luckless spot to be situated in 56 ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... who in that illustrious and luckless household was omnipotent, insulted the Princess in the most outrageous manner. Finding such daily slights and affronts unbearable, Madame complained to the Kings of France and England, who both exiled ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... know of him! She did not see him remove his cap as he gently placed the luckless man in his last resting-place, or hear the short ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... to himself, the luckless Athanase had had an occasion to fling an ember of his own fire upon the pile of brush gathered in the heart of the old maid. Had he listened to her, he might have made her, then and there, perceive ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Fandango, 'faith, they had, At which they all set to, like mad! Never were Kings (tho' small the expense is Of wit among their Excellencies) So out of all their princely senses, But ah! that dance—that Spanish dance— Scarce was the luckless strain begun, When, glaring red, as 'twere a glance Shot from an angry Southern sun, A light thro' all the chambers flamed, Astonishing old Father Frost, Who, bursting into tears, exclaimed, "A thaw, by Jove—we're ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... that her expectations should have mounted high, as she drew aside the door curtain, for the Lady of Northampton was far from sulking. Partially disrobed, as she had sprung up from before her mirror, she was holding the luckless Dearwyn with one hand while with the other she administered pitiless punishment from a long club-like candle which she had snatched from its holder. Between her entreaties for mercy, the little maid was shrieking with pain; now, at sight of Randalin, she redoubled her struggles ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... more. Finally, entering his beloved quarter he resumed his tranquil occupation, and hearing that the Maison Edouard had been moved from the Rue Clauzel he rented a little shop, where he sold material to artists, bought pictures, and entertained in his humble manner any friend or luckless devil who happened that way. Cezanne and Vignon were his best customers. Guillemin, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Oller, Messurer, Augustin, Signac, De Lautrec, symbolists of the Pont-Aven school, neo-impressionists, and the young fumistes of schools as yet unborn, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... effected a change in the condition of the Jews. Never before had Judah undergone such torture and suffering as under the sceptre of Rome. The misery became unendurable, and internal disorders being added to foreign oppression, the luckless insurrection broke out which gave the deathblow to Jewish nationality, and drove Judah into exile. On his thorny martyr's path he took naught with him but a book—his code, his law. Yet how prodigal his contributions ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... on Joe's luckless head, Ollie had her reasons of selfishness and security for desiring him out of the way. With him in prison for a long time—people said it would be for life—the secret of her indiscretion with Morgan would be safe. And then, if Morgan ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Little John. But right cunning was the shooting, for the men had spent a certain time in daily practice, and many were the shafts which sped daintily through the circle. Nathless now and again some luckless fellow would shoot awry and would be sent winding from a long arm blow from the tall lieutenant while the glade roared with laughter. And none more hearty a guffaw was given than came from the Sheriff's own throat, for the spirit of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... this business than you reckon on,' I answered, covering him up and extinguishing the light. 'You are incurable, Heathcliff; and Mr. Hindley will have to proceed to extremities, see if he won't.' My words came truer than I desired. The luckless adventure made Earnshaw furious. And then Mr. Linton, to mend matters, paid us a visit himself on the morrow, and read the young master such a lecture on the road he guided his family, that he was stirred to look about him, in earnest. Heathcliff ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... upon green-fly. The baby did not feed nicely, and the picture of the glistening, corsleted devil queen-mother, with her lugubrious, mask-like face, and the wriggling, hanging sack babe, and the luckless, fool, helpless green-fly between them, was not a pretty one. Here maternity was not a Sunday-sermon subject, yet it ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... affected her in an entirely different fashion from the luckless dozen of those London days. He seemed to matter more, to be more important, almost—though she ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... with the king at their head, now arrived also, crowding on the walls; and the gate was opened to let the adventurers in. The Soldan issued forth at the same moment to cover the retreat. Argantes was forced through the gate by Clorinda in spite of himself; and she, but for a luckless antagonist, would have followed him; but a soldier aiming at her a last blow, she rushed back to give the man his death; and, in the confusion of the moment, the warders, believing her to have entered, shut up the gate, and the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... open your mouth without some luckless utterance. Beauty suffers no such liberty, however eagerly the ugly may invite it, making believe some quality of soul must ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... the two, and his glance when it rested on North was troubled and uncertain. The difficulties which beset this luckless fellow were only beginning, and ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... before a Judge to be tried for an assault with intent to commit murder, and it was proved that he had been variously obstreperous without apparent provocation, had affected the peripheries of several luckless fellow-citizens with the trunk of a small tree, and subsequently cleaned out the town. While trying to palliate these misdeeds, the defendant's Attorney turned suddenly to the ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... to leave the country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to return to. Come home and stay at home while there is a country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes and depart to some land ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of their maternal function, and the burden of unequal laws. "The moment which shall deliver the girl from subjection to her parents is come; her imagination opens to a future thronged by chimaeras; her heart swims in secret delight. Rejoice while thou canst, luckless creature! Time would have weakened the tyranny that thou hast left; time will strengthen the tyranny that awaits thee. They choose a husband for her. She becomes a mother. It is in anguish, at the peril ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... consort, young and fair, And watch'd her with a dotard's bootless care. Sure, Love these dotards dooms to jealous pain, And the world's laugh, when all their toil proves vain. This lord, howe'er, did all that mortal elf Could do, to keep his treasure to himself: Stay'd much at home, and when in luckless hour His state affairs would drag him from his tower, Left with his spouse a niece himself had bred, To be the partner of her board and bed; And one old priest, a barren lump of clay, To chant their mass, and serve them day by day. Her prison room was fair; from roof to floor With golden imageries ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... drowned the words of the luckless second speaker, and some one yelled vociferously, "Neddie the fortune-teller! Don't tell me he's shipped with ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... instantly settled the matter, as there was no possible means of following him), but the next moment he had dashed right up through the middle of the pool, tearing the water as he went, and frightening the luckless fisherman half out of his wits with this dangerously slackening line. That, however, was soon righted; and now the salmon lay in an eddy just below the fall. Would he attempt to breast that bulk of water in a mad effort to be free of this hateful thing that had got hold of him?—then good-bye ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... and pointed at the town." Almost simultaneously a panting little bell, not much louder than a London muffin-bell, but heard distinctly all over the town in the clear atmosphere, would give tongue, and luckless folk who were promenading the streets had about three seconds to seek shelter, the alarm being sounded as the flash was seen by the look-out. One afternoon they gave us three shots in six minutes, but, of ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... confident as the ship forged nearer to the Golden Gate; Jane more wistful and resigned to the new purpose which was to give life another colouring, if possible. They were but one day out from San Francisco when he found the opportunity to converse with her as she passed through the quarters of the luckless ones. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... entreaties of us both, that you will not deny those whom their constant love {and} whom their last moments have joined, to be buried in the same tomb. But thou, O tree, which now with thy boughs dost overshadow the luckless body of {but} one, art fated soon to cover {those} of two. Retain a token of {this our} fate, and ever bear fruit black and suited for mourning, as a memorial of the blood of us two.' {Thus} she said; and having fixed the point under the lower part ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... that very long minute, there expired the last moments of the life of Robert Carruthers. A stream of light fell from the little window high in the rock upon his luckless head as he stood as if frozen into a statue of great fear. And as he so stood, the eyes of the Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, fell upon him and he started forward as far as the length of the ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... days are a great blessing to men on earth; but the rest are changeable, luckless, and bring nothing. Everyone praises a different day but few know their nature. Sometimes a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother. That man is happy and lucky in them who knows all these things and does his work without offending the ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... rugs, so comfortable to lie under during the cold winter nights. There was often a great deal of sport at the close of one of these social industrial gatherings. When the men came in from the field to supper, some luckless wight was sure to be caught, and tossed up and down in the quilt amid the laughter and shouts of the company. But of all the bees, the apple-bee was the chief. In these old and young joined. The boys around the neighbourhood, with their home-made apple-machines, of all ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... act, when the two lovers are alone she knows no rest. Although her husband asks her to trust him, she fears that he may once leave her as mysteriously, as he came, and at last she cannot refrain from asking the luckless question. From this moment all happiness is lost to her. Telramund enters to slay his enemy, but Lohengrin, taking his sword, kills him with one stroke. Then he leads Elsa before the King and loudly announces his secret. He tells the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... whistling prevailed. This ridiculous buoyancy of youth! What luckless pigs are we who moon and fret and grow besodden with the waters of our misfortunes! This cheeky corkiness of youth! Shove it under the fretted sea of trouble, and free it will twist, up it will bob. Weight it and drop it into the deepest pool; just when it should ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... villain's power, but must I be denied, even the poor privilege of bearing my confinement unmolested? What, silent yet!" he added, in a tone of sarcasm; "methinks, thou art a novice in thy cunning trade, or thou wouldst not be so chary of thy ghostly counsel, or so slow to shrive the conscience of a luckless prisoner!" ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... men lay between us and the enemy. We could hear the Kurds shouting now and then, and once, when I climbed a high rock, I caught sight of the glow of their bivouac fires. Imagination conjured up the shrieks of tortured victims, for we had all seen enough of late to know what would happen to any luckless straggler they might have caught and brought to make sport by the fires. But there was no imagination about the calls of Kagig's men, posted above us on invisible dark crags and ledges to guard against surprise. We slept in comfortable consciousness that a sleepless watch was ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... listened to Ferminard thundering against all that over there, speaking as though he were addressing the Chambre, and as though he had known Africa intimately from his childhood, he noticed gradually and with alarm that the topic was changing; just a moment ago it was Africa and its luckless niggers; the Provencal imagination picturing them in glowing colours, and the Provencal tongue rolling off their disabilities and woes. One would have fancied from the fervour of the man that is was Ferminard who had just returned from ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... up in good humor what they lacked in grace; the older members of the craft looked up from their work with satisfaction and many shouts of applause wore sent down to them from the spectators on the Quai and the Pont Neuf. Not content with this, they seized on some luckless men who were descending the steps, and clasping them with their powerful right arms, spun them around like so many tops and sent them whizzing off at a tangent. Loud bursts of laughter greeted this performance, and the stout river ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... days. At cockcrow the stable boys were at work; at sunrise Bishop stalked into the stables, a muslin handkerchief in his hand, which he applied to the coats of the animals, and, if the slightest stain was perceptible upon the muslin, up went the luckless wights of the stableboys and punishment was administered instanter; for to the veteran Bishop, bred amid the iron discipline of European armies, mercy for anything like a breach of duty was altogether out of ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... to hear what his verdict would be. After all the old fighter bore no malice toward any of these reckless men who were so assiduously engaged in breaking the law of the land by running contraband goods into Uncle Sam's domains and he was just as willing to bind up the wounds of this luckless adventurer as if the other had only been an ordinary ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... Park is an old English country home, a fastness still piled up against time; whose stately walls and halls within, and beautiful century-old trees in the park without, record great times and striking figures. The manor was a part of the dowry of Henry the VIII.'s luckless queens. The modern house was built by Clarendon, and the old church among the elms dates from 1200, with carved signs and symbols and brasses of knights and burgesses, and names of strange sound ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... friends, Mrs. Sanders, Mrs. Cluppins, Mr. and Mrs. Raddle, Mrs. Rogers and Master Tommy Bardell, bent on having a day out, had taken the Hampstead Stage to the "Spaniards" Tea Gardens, "where the luckless Mr. Raddle's very first act nearly occasioned his good lady a relapse, it being neither more or less than to order tea for seven; whereas (as the ladies one and all remarked) what could have been easier than for Tommy to have drank out of any lady's cup, or everybody's, if that was all, when ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... little isolated jail, perhaps with an undefined hope that something would happen that might clear away their difficulties. But nothing happened; there seemed to be no angels or fairies interested in this luckless captive. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... as she listened to the drum beats growing fainter and fainter in the distance, and, after half a century had passed, he was still to her the young soldier in his brave, blue coat, who had kissed her for that long farewell. All that is left on Canadian soil to recall this gallant though luckless soldier is the low-ceiled cottage where his body was laid out, a small tablet on the precipice, which reads, "Here Montgomery fell, 1775," and another of white marble, in the courtyard of the military prison in the Citadel, recently erected by two patriotic American girls in memory of ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... said to him: "My good Sir, why need you carry in your embrace this living but luckless thing, which will involve father and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... might adorn, Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn: 330 Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled, Near her betrayer's door she lays her head, And, pinched with cold, and shrinking from the shower, With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour, When idly first, ambitious of the town, 335 She left her wheel and robes of ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... henceforth be his competitors—the complex brain, the fiery heart, passion to desire, and skill in attempting. If with such endowment he could not win the prize which most men claim as a mere matter of course, a wife of social instincts correspondent with his own, he must indeed be luckless. But he was not doomed to defeat! Foretaste of triumph urged the current of his blood and inflamed him with exquisite ardour. He sang aloud in the still lanes the hymns of youth and of love; and, when weariness brought him back to his lonely dwelling, he laid his head on the pillow, and slept ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... helped me skin old Mort Washer?" And, changing his mind about entering the jessamine bower, Mr. Courtney, explaining with great glee the skinning of his friend Mort Washer, took the other path and the two strolled away without having seen or heard the luckless eavesdroppers. ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... lovers that rumor gave to the Queen, poor Fersen is the most remarkable. He seems to have entertained for her a high and perfectly pure devotion. He was the chief agent in the luckless escape to Varennes; was lurking in Paris during the time of her captivity; and was concerned in the many fruitless plots that were made for her rescue. Fersen lived to be an old man, but died a dreadful and violent death. He was dragged from his carriage ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Luckless members of the Fairport Guard who had not had the precaution to tie on their head-gear, might be seen breaking rank and running indecorously in various directions in pursuit of hat or cap, while the skirts of the captain's time-honored coat ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... valleys with the gaudy foe; Th' insulted sea, with humbler thoughts, he gains; A single skiff to speed his flight remains; Th' incumber'd oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast Through purple billows and a floating host. The bold Bavarian, in a luckless hour, Tries the dread summits of Caesarean pow'r, With unexpected legions bursts away, And sees defenceless realms receive his sway;— Short sway! fair Austria spreads her mournful charms, The queen, the beauty, sets the world in arms; From hill to hill the beacon's ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... boldest of the race of man? Our eyes till now that aspect ne'er beheld, Where fame is reap'd amid the embattled field; Yet far before the troops thou dar'st appear, And meet a lance the fiercest heroes fear. Unhappy they, and born of luckless sires, Who tempt our fury when Minerva fires! But if from heaven, celestial, thou descend, Know with immortals we no more contend. Not long Lycurgus view'd the golden light, That daring man who mix'd with gods in fight. Bacchus, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... hand and foot with her magic girdle, and hangs him upon a nail; Siegfried pitying the condition of the king, promises his aid in depriving the haughty queen of the girdle, the source of all her magic strength. He successfully accomplishes the feat, and in a luckless hour presents the trophy to Chriemhild, and confides the tale to her ear. A dispute having afterwards arisen between the two queens, Chriemhild, carried away by pride and passion, produces the fatal girdle, a token which, if found in the possession of any save the husband, was regarded as an almost ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... volley of incoherent oaths, caught up his chair and hurled it at my head. Luckily, I had seen enough of his temper already, to keep my hand on the lock of the door for the last five minutes. I darted out of the room quicker than I ever did out of one before or since. The chair took effect on the luckless door; and as I threw a flying glance behind me, I saw one leg sticking through the middle panel, in a way that augured ill for my skull, had it been in the way ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... I'm a bit rusty after my holiday," she replied diplomatically, fondly hoping to pave the way for more lenient treatment than had been accorded to the luckless student of oratorio. ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Still in the same namby-pamby style, and with the same soft voice and sweet smile, Sir Amyas talked on of pictures and battles, and carnage and levees, and drawing-rooms and balls, and butterflies.—He has a museum for the ladies, and he took me to look at it.—Sad was the hour and luckless was the day!—Among his shells was one upon which he peculiarly prided himself, and which he showed me as an unique. I was, I assure you, prudently silent till he pressed for my opinion, and then I could not avoid confessing that I suspected it ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... machinery of the will and attend to the winding up? Or is this infusion of strength, whereby to continue its operations, a sudden tightening of those invisible cords which bind the All-Father to the spirits he has created? Truly, there is no Oedipus for this vexing riddle. Many luckless theories have been devoured by the Sphinx; when will metaphysicians solve it? One tells us vaguely enough, "Who knows the mysteries of will, with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... day; I was thinking over the memories of my miserable existence.) But I know how sincere Asie is. Still, I cannot repent of having caused you so much pain, since it has availed to prove to me how much you love me. This is how we are made, we luckless and despised creatures; true affection touches us far more deeply than finding ourselves the objects of lavish liberality. For my part, I have always rather dreaded being a peg on which you would hang your vanities. It annoyed me to be nothing else to you. Yes, in spite of all your ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... breast. Her eyes she fix'd on guilty Florio first, On him the storm of angry grief must burst. That storm he fled:—he wooes a kinder fair, Whose fond affections no dear puppies share. 'Twere vain to tell how Julia pined away;— Unhappy fair, that in one luckless day (From future almanacks the day be crost!) At once her lover and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... my friend! the proverb 'Luckless at cards, lucky at love,' does not seem to apply to you. Poor Fennimore, God ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... to be a part of the necessity of things, from what we see of the improvements they make, that all human improvement should proceed by the co-operation of human means. But what blinker into the night of next week,—what luckless prophet of the impossibilities of steam-boats and steam-carriages,—shall presume to say how far those improvements are to extend? Let no man faint in the co-operation with ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... or the grief and despair in which the luckless young man was at the time of the accident, must have brought on a deliquium presently; for he had scarce any recollection afterwards, save of some one, his mistress probably, seizing his hand—and then of the buzzing noise in his ears as he awoke, with two or three persons of the ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... expression. Had this strange monotonous life with that old brute of a Major brought him some new perception of those words, "Neither do I condemn thee"? But when he stopped reading, I, true to my character, forgot his affairs in my own, as we sat talking far into the night—talking of that luckless month at Mondisfield, of all the problems it had opened up, and of ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... the Dean's garden there is, as we have stated, Mrs. Creed's house, and the windows of the first-floor room were open to admit the pleasant summer air. A young lady of six-and-twenty, whose eyes were perfectly wide open, and a luckless boy of eighteen, blind with love and infatuation, were in that chamber together; in which persons, as we have before seen them in the same place, the reader will have no difficulty in recognising Mr. Arthur ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was right when he said that Colonel Masterly would be interested in meeting the luckless aviator. Innis took his cousin to the head of the school, and Mr. Vardon told of his invention, briefly, and also of the mishap ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... Indeed, with such recklessness had I bequilted my jacket, that in a rain-storm I became a universal absorber; swabbing bone-dry the very bulwarks I leaned against. Of a damp day, my heartless shipmates even used to stand up against me, so powerful was the capillary attraction between this luckless jacket of mine and all drops of moisture. I dripped like a turkey a roasting; and long after the rain storms were over, and the sun showed his face, I still stalked a Scotch mist; and when it was fair weather with others, alas! it was foul weather ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... the mind travels rapidly. I shall not attempt to record the thoughts that chased one another through the mind of the luckless adventurer. But they ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
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