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More "Narrator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plot itself but from your handling of it. The question of the proper method of narration is to a considerable extent a matter of suitability—of giving the narrative an appropriate setting; it is also a matter of the point of view of the narrator—whether he is to tell the story as one of the actors, or simply as an impersonal observer. A dozen master story writers would tell the same tale in a dozen different ways, and each of them would seem to be the right way; for each writer would view the events from a particular angle, and would ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... in California was drawn entirely from his travels on the Pacific slope, tedious to the narrator, but interesting because of the lad's interest, and because of the picture which the rapt listener made. His study-desk near by, strewn with papers and books, the white bed and bookcase farther off, pictures and mottoes of his own selection on the white walls, a little altar in the depths of the ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... mentioned by name. Their itineraries were wholly dedicated to the interests of their co-religionists. The first of the line is Eldad, the narrator of a sort of Hebrew Odyssey. Benjamin of Tudela and Petachya of Ratisbon are deserving of more confidence as veracious chroniclers, and their descriptions, together with Charisi's, complete the Jewish library ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of Aesop is confined to instruction by examples; nor by Fables is anything else[1] aimed at than that the errors of mortals may be corrected, and persevering industry[2] exert itself. Whatever the playful invention, therefore, of the narrator, so long as it pleases the ear, and answers its purpose, it is recommended by its merits, not by ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... on reliable authority, that the original Mr. Black, whose Christian name was Andrew, was a famous teller of stories and narrator of facts regarding the persecution of the Covenanters, especially of the awful killing-time, when the powers of darkness were let loose on the land to do their worst, and when the blood of ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... threatening look at me. She had just sense enough left, after emptying her goblet of wine, to be on the watch for a new interruption on my part. I took care, of course, that nothing of the sort should happen. I was now as eager as Ariel to hear the story. The subject was full of snares for the narrator. At any moment, in the excitement of speaking, Dexter's memory of the true events might show itself reflected in the circumstances of the fiction. At any moment he ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... paused, overcome as much by his feelings as by weakness, and, during the silence that followed, Cabot stole away, ostensibly to see that the dynamo was running smoothly. When he returned the narrator had recovered his calmness, and was ready ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... Smith more remarkable for chronicling what passed before his senses or for explaining what he saw? How does his account of the Indians (p. 18 of this text) compare with modern accounts? Is he apparently a novice, or somewhat skilled in writing prose? Does he seem to you to be a romancer or a narrator ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of Mr. Blunt's facial muscles. Very slight; but I, staring at the narrator after the manner of all simple souls, noticed it; the twitch of a pain which surely must have been mental. There was also a suggestion of effort before he went on: "I suppose you know how he got hold of her?" in a tone of ease which was astonishingly ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... meagre were the fact that the eggs of wild geese did not grow on trees its only recorded discovery. But the investigations made into the dread mysteries of the north, and the actual problems solved, were many, while the simplicity of the narrator marks the infantine character of the epoch in regard to natural history. When so illustrious a mind as Grotius was inclined to believe in a race of arctic men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders; the ingenuous mariner of Amsterdam may be forgiven for his earnestness in combating ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it must have been forged by the narrator or some other party. There must have been a motive in either case; and that may be either to obtain notoriety or money, to injure the reputation of the priests accused, or ultimately to remove the unfavorable impressions thrown upon them by their former accusers, by ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... by Dionysius (in Euseb., l.c.) is especially characteristic, as the narrator was an extreme spiritualist. How did it stand therefore with the dry tree? Besides, Tertull. (de corona 3) says: "Calicis aut panis nostri aliquid decuti in terram anxie patimur". Superstitious reverence for the sacrament ante et extra usum is a very old habit ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... sense of detachment about this description that has been possessed by the narrator even in the most anxious moments of his career. He was determined to see all that could be seen, and, quitting his perch on the telegraph booth, sought the more secluded headquarters of the pool forces. "A friend of mine was an operator who worked in the office of Belden & Company, 60 Broadway, which ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... showed no emotion, it was clear to both boys that he felt the most concern in the experience of Fred Linden. He said nothing until the narrator was through, including the account of the cyclone. Deerfoot had heard the noise made by the latter, but he was so far removed from its path that he saw none of its fearful effects, and in fact cared ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... tumble into a fountain at Versailles, when attempting a feat of agility in presence of the fair Hornecks. Water was destined to be equally baneful to him on the present occasion. "Some difference of opinion," says the fair narrator, "having arisen with Lord Harrington respecting the depth of a pond, the poet remarked that it was not so deep, but that, if anything valuable was to be found at the bottom, he would not hesitate to pick ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... cannot tell," briskly said the fair narrator. "But I know that the ladies of the court did not. As the king retired, and we remained in the opera boxes to amuse ourselves a little with the display, we heard, to our astonishment, a proposal that the tables should be cleared away, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... fully aware that he has not been able to present this affecting narrative in the simplicity and vivid freshness with which it fell from the lips of the narrator. He has, however, as closely as possible, copied his manner, and in many instances his precise language. THE SLAVE HAS SPOKEN FOR HIMSELF. Acting merely as his amanuensis, he has carefully abstained from ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... man, woman, and child in England were made to read him; and I would that you in America would take him to heart. He is a tonic, a deep refreshing drink, with a strange and wonderful flavour; he is a mine of new interests, and ways of thought instinctively right. As a simple narrator he is well-nigh unsurpassed; as a stylist he has few, if any, living equals. And in all his work there is an indefinable freedom from any thought of after-benefit—even from the desire that we should read him. He puts down what he sees and feels, out of sheer love of ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... account whispered cautiously in Wolfert's ear by the narrator, Peechy Prauw, as he held him by the button in a corner of the hall, casting a wary glance now and then toward the door of the barroom, lest he should be overheard by the ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... and the rest of them drank down every word. The narrator led them by their venerable noses, and this least convincing of colossal bogies, this hundred-yarder, was the object of their mute adorations. And these (I was reflecting all the time)—these are the admired teachers from whom our youth ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... drum fellow; a dull tedious narrator, a bore; also a set of gentlemen, who (Bailey says) used to meet near the Charter House, or at the King's Head in St. John's-street, who had more of pleasantry, and less of mystery, than the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... were to be banded with those from Europe, to reduce the young republic to subjection. Congress named an especial and a secret committee, therefore, for the express purpose of defeating this object. Of this committee Mr.——, the narrator of ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... the narrator informed me, was left unmolested, being entertained by companions of his age until the moment for the sacrifice arrived, when he was seized and quickly bound to a tree. The warrior priest, who was the father of the sick one, then shouted out in a loud voice to his war spirits asking them ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of Richard Watts in 1579, to give lodging and entertainment for one night, and fourpence each, to "six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors". It furnished the theme to the Christmas cycle of stories, The Seven Poor Travellers, the narrator, who treats the waifs and strays harboured one Christmas eve at the Charity to roast turkey, plum pudding, and "wassail", bringing up the number to seven, "being", as he says, "a traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... next hour he became auditor rather than narrator. It was Iris who told of his wild fight against wind and waves, Iris who showed them where he fought with the devil-fish, Iris who expatiated on the long days of ceaseless toil, his dauntless courage in the face of every difficulty, the way in which he rescued her from the clutch of ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... ransomed only by an enormous sum. The extensive travels of the Duke probably originated this tale. The people at large still preserve that traditional fable-loving train of ideas which is so pleasantly shown in their "Duke Ernest." The narrator of this news was a tailor, a neat little youth, but so thin that the stars might have shone through him as through Ossian's misty ghosts. Altogether, he was made up of that eccentric mixture of humor ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... pervaded with what seems to be the true spirit of artistic impartiality. The author is simply a narrator. He stands aside, regarding with equal eye all the issues involved and the scales dip not in his hands. To sum up, the first romance of the new day on the Ohio is an eminently readable one—a good yarn ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... however, one historical event, the narrator of which represents the Indians to have been in an entirely different condition from what they are now, or have been since. This is the account of Ferdinand de Soto's expedition to Florida. There are two historians of this ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... beautiful narrator, as she enacted before her this poetry and tragedy of real life, so much beyond what dramatic art can ever furnish. Her eyes grew splendid in their depth and brilliancy; sometimes they were full of tears, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... inaugurator inceptor incisor inheritor initiator innovator insinuator institutor instructor interlocutor interpolator interrogator inventor investor juror lector legator legislator lessor mediator modulator monitor mortgagor (law) multiplicator narrator navigator negotiator nonjuror numerator objector obligor (law) observator operator originator pacificator participator peculator percolator perforator perpetrator persecutor perturbator possessor preceptor precursor predecessor predictor prevaricator procrastinator procreator procurator professor ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... be "swep away," and rumours of spreading death and disaster were popular. Tread, the advanced blacksmith at Stornham, having heard in his by-gone, better days of the Great Plague of London, was greatly in demand as a narrator of illuminating anecdotes at ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Audubon, visited him in his solitary retreat, and spent a night with him. In his Ornithological Biography he gives the following narrative which he received from Boone, that evening as they sat at the cabin fire. We give the story in the words of the narrator: ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... equal to the situation; settles down to do himself and his subject justice; begins, we may be sure, with a preamble about the providence of God and its wisdom and consistency in preserving the narrator and preparing his life for this great deed; putting in a deal of scientific talk which had in truth nothing to do with the event, but was always applied to it in Columbus's writings from this date onwards; and going on to describe the voyage, the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... will read it, I have no guess. I am in an off time, but there is just the possibility it might make a hit; for the yarn is good and melodramatic, and there is quite a love affair - for me; and Mr. Wiltshire (the narrator) is a huge lark, though I say it. But there is always the exotic question, and everything, the life, the place, the dialects - trader's talk, which is a strange conglomerate of literary expressions and English and American slang, and Beach de ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appreciation of the present! How many of us have listened over and over to the same tale of past annoyances, until we wonder how it can be possible that the constant repetition is not recognized by the narrator! How many of us have been over and over in our minds past troubles, little and big, so that we have no right whatever to feel impatient when listening to such repetitions by others! Here again we have, in nervous disease, the extreme of a common trait in humanity. With increased nervous fatigue ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale. During it ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... in this universal comedy. The passions or the weaknesses of humanity were attributed to them, and the narrator makes the lion, rat, or jackal to utter sentiments from which he draws some short practical moral. La Fontaine had predecessors on the banks of the Nile of whose existence he ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... William the Conqueror and the graceful, richly ornamented Abbaye-aux-Dames of Queen Matilda. Sincerity and truth Wace ever aims at, but he embellishes his narrative with countless imaginative details. As a narrator he has the tendency to garrulity, which few mediaeval poets altogether escaped, but he is by no means without conversational charm, and in brief sentences abounding in colloquial turns, he leads ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... certainly did not propose to tell her. Other reasons apart I did not desire to seem madder than I admittedly am,—and I lacked sufficient plausibility to enable me to concoct, on the spur of the moment, a plain tale of the doings of my midnight visitor which would have suggested that the narrator was perfectly sane. So I fenced,—or ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... cypress, planted upon his grave the day after his funeral, only three years' growth; and if he go and sit under the tree, beneath which Alvinzi reposed his withered and broken frame for thirty summers, will perhaps agree with the narrator of this mournful story, that mercy was mingled in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... anecdotes are probably false, (a thing that hereafter I shall have much pleasure in making out to the angry reader's satisfaction,) but to a dead certainty those anecdotes, in particular, which bear marks in their construction that a rhetorical effect of art had been contemplated by the narrator, —we may take for granted, that the current stories ascribing modern wars (French and English) to accidents the most inconsiderable, are false even in a literal sense; but at all events they are so when valued philosophically, and brought out ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... donor inventor odor conqueror senior tenor tremor bachelor junior oppressor possessor liquor surveyor vapor governor languor professor spectator competitor candor harbor meteor orator rumor splendor elector executor factor generator impostor innovator investor legislator narrator navigator numerator operator originator perpetrator personator predecessor protector prosecutor projector reflector regulator sailor senator separator solicitor supervisor survivor tormentor testator transgressor ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... as to the interrupted narrative, even in despite of the evident frivolity of the narrator. The arrangement of the party in the coach compelled me to hear it at second hand, and I found it less frivolous than I had anticipated: it was an amour between the King and a peasant's daughter, in which the King conducted himself in a manner as little excusable in a monarch, as in a more ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... the Queen" is Mary, daughter of James II., into whose service the narrator, a girl of 16, enters just before the marriage of Mary to William III. The descriptions of persons and manners at the courts of Charles II. and William III. are life-like and accurate. The language is simple, and imitative of the quaint quiet style ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... write narrative that should suggest and represent the continuity of life. He could pause for description or dialogue or reflection without interrupting this stream of life. Nothing need be, and nothing was, alien to the narrator with this gift; for his writing would now assimilate everything and enrich ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... individuals now, there is a human mass which is itself lost amid elemental forces. "More than six thousand miles of French trenches, more than six thousand miles of such miseries or of worse; and the French front is only one-eighth of the whole." Instinctively the narrator is compelled to borrow his images from the rough mythology of primitive peoples, or from cosmic convulsions. He speaks of "rivers of wounded torn from the bowels of the earth which bleeds and rots unendingly"—"glaciers of corpses"—"gloomy ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... relief, and he remained blind in that eye to the end of his life. [Footnote: Long afterwards Chantrey the sculptor, who had suffered a similar misfortune, exclaimed, "What! are you too a brother Cyclops?" but, as the narrator of the story used to add, Mr. Murray could see better with one eye than most people with two.] His father withdrew him from Dr. Burney's school, and sent him in July 1793 to the Rev. Dr. Roberts, at Loughborough House, Kennington. In committing him to the schoolmaster's charge, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... listened with the closest attention, fixing upon the narrator her splendid eyes, and in them, despite their feminine beauty and softness, seemed to smoulder a deep fire of resentment at the treatment accorded her kinsman, a luminant of danger transmitted to her down the ages from ancestors ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... leaning forward, breathlessly intent. Naturally such close attention flattered the narrator, who went ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... and the source from which it sprang are revealed by the fate which befell another denouncer of the land in the Name of the Lord. Of him, the narrator uses a form of the verb to prophesy different from that which he uses of Jeremiah, thus guarding himself from expressing an opinion as to whether the man was a genuine prophet. This is a further tribute to the moral effect of Jeremiah's person ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... as to create in the mind of him who has never looked upon the original, anything like a correct idea of what it is? The painter may indeed accomplish this, though even he will accomplish it imperfectly; but the mere narrator,—in good sooth, his words, however appropriate, must ever fall comparatively dull upon the ear, which is not the organ through which to convey to the mind any notion, however incomplete, of external scenery. When, then, I have stated, that our path carried ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... GEORGE SIMS, of Horrible London and other emotional tales, good to have seen the Baron chuckling over this capital short story, which is as ingenious as it is genuinely droll. It belongs to the same genus as the Danvers Jewels, though, in this latter, the idea of the character of the narrator is more humorously conceived than is Mr. SIMS's Baronet who acts as an amateur detective. The Baron highly recommends this story, as he also does a short tale in Blackwood, for this month, entitled, A Physiologist's Wife, by A. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... a philosopher united by a caprice of nature to an artist, and by that of fortune and of education to a worldly man and a traveller. The abstract speculations of the metaphysician would not have sufficed for him, nor would the continuous and simple creation of the narrator who narrates to amuse himself, nor would the ardor of the semi-animal of the man-of-pleasure who abandons himself to the frenzy of vice. He invented for himself, partly from instinct, partly from method, a compromise between his contradictory ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... accomplished his task, the dispute about the domain of Little Zwornik arose, on which he and his companion, a German, were thrown into prison, being accused of being a Servian captain in disguise. They were subsequently liberated, but shot at; the ball going through the leg of the narrator. This is another instance of the intense hatred the Servians and the Bosniac Moslems bear to each other. It must be remarked, that the Christians, in relating a tale, usually ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... may be interested in the problem. I don't mean to say that the problem is worth the trouble. What I am certain of, however, is that it is not to be solved, for I am not at all clear about it myself by this time. All I can say is that the personality of the narrator was extremely suggestive quite apart from the story he was telling me. I heard a few years ago that he had died far away from his beloved Naples where that "abominable adventure" did ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... boy, so much the same as that I had read in Gilbert, that it scarcely seemed to differ from it in a word. The name of Mr. Bligh, the father of the boy, was, however, omitted; and Dr. Ruddell could only be known as the author of the account by the lad's father calling the narrator Mr. Ruddell, in their discourse about the youth. The account is so strangely inserted in the Appendix to the volume, without comment or reference, that, had I not previously known the circumstances above names by Mr. Arundell, I should have fancied ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... "So," concluded the narrator, "here I am, a tenderfoot of the ocean, having marketed my ore-reducing process for a sufficient profit to give me a vacation, and also to permit of my buying a little old house ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... is politely encouraging. Hagen joins his invitation to the half-brother's. The listeners place themselves at ease on the ground about the narrator, seated in their midst on a mossy stump. Then Siegfried, with his beautiful, bottomless zest in life, recounts in vivid running sketches the story we know. One after the other the familiar motifs pass in review. From them alone one could reconstruct the tale. Of his childhood in Mime's cave, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... this recital the chorus remained unnecessarily idle and superfluous, that the next improvement was as natural in itself, as it was important in its consequences. This was to make the chorus assist the narrator by occasional question ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and Lady Sale paid the Queen a visit at Windsor, while Miss Liddell was maid-of-honour in waiting. The lively narrator of the events of these days describes Lady Sale, as tall, thin, and rather plain, but with a good countenance, while Sir Robert was stout. Lady Sale told these wondering listeners, in a palace that she started from Cabul in a cloth habit, which got wet the first day, and became like a sheet of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... enamoured poet, but cannot condemn his friends who never saw his lady-love, and that is why I tremble lest my constant rhapsodies on India should bore my readers as much as Saadi bored his friends. But what, I pray you, is the poor narrator to do, when new, undreamed-of charms are daily discovered in the lady-love in question? Her darkest aspects, abject and immoral as they are, and sometimes of such a nature as to excite your horror—even these aspects are full of some wild ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... however, and we had reached the cigars, Mark Twain started in telling a story in his most captivating way. His peculiar drawl, his habit in emphasizing the points by shaking his bushy hair, made him a dramatic narrator. He never had greater success. Even the veteran Mark himself was astonished at the uproarious laughter which greeted almost every sentence and ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... a book!" she sighed ecstatically when the narrator had finished. "And what a picture for one of the characters!" She fell to studying Peace with a new interest in ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Mr. Tescheron, who, I am informed, was fearful that the narrator might be interrupted by ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... themselves before the king to prevent him from entering it, the queen falls at his knees, and he says to her, weeping, "Ah, my wife, our dear child is dead, since they do not wish me to see him." And the narrator adds with admiration; "I always seem to see a good farmer and his excellent wife a prey to the deepest despair at the loss of their beloved child." Tears are no longer concealed, as it is a point of honor ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Immortal Bard, "dressed" the part in a most elaborate "neck-or-nothing tile." Upon being expostulated with by the manager, he triumphantly referred to the description of the chivalrous Prince in which the narrator particularly states— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... much to go on with now, my boy," continued the narrator; "for Mowla Buksh being down, the fighting elephants took good care to punish him well before they let him up again. But as the encounter had aroused the combative propensities of Chand Moorut, it was thought wise to remove him from the scene before he became too excited. This being managed by ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... the writer who introduced into France with his Gil Blas what has been called the personal novel—in other words, that story of adventures of which the narrator is the hero, the aim of the story being to illustrate first and foremost the vicissitudes of life in general and those of a single person in particular. The subsequent introduction of letters into the personal novel, which allowed more than one character to assume the narrator's role, brought about ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the course of our intimacy. While thus acknowledging a debt, I must also avow that another motive strongly prompts me upon this occasion. I am not aware of any one, to whom with such propriety a volume of anecdote and adventure should be inscribed, as to one, himself well known as an inimitable narrator. Could I have stolen for my story, any portion of the grace and humour with which I have heard you adorn many of your own, while I should deem this offering more worthy of your acceptance, I should also feel more confident of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... folded arms and attentive mien, kept his eyes fixed steadily upon the narrator, as if he doubted the evidence of his senses. Without, the marshals had taken their places in the lists and another stentorian dissonance greeted these officers of the field from the good-humored gathering, which, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... argument is neatly introduced to account for the narrator's staying in the city at all, when he ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... account of all that had happened. He was one of those never-to-be-sufficiently-praised individuals who never interrupt and always understand, and at the close of Viner's story he said exactly what the narrator was thinking. "The real truth of all this, Mr. Viner," he said, "is that this is probably one of the last chapters in the history of the Lonsdale Passage murder. For if you find this woman and the men who are undoubtedly her accomplices, you will most likely have found, in one or other of ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... Instead of carrying out the plan originally formed, seizing the cashier at his window and getting to the safe without interruption, they leaped right over the counter and scared Heywood at the very start. As to the rest of the affair inside the bank I take the account of a Northfield narrator: ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... and rich the men were," the narrator continued, "they sat under awnings of silk; the buckles of their saddles were of gold, as was the fringe of their bridles; the bells were of silver, and made real music. Nobody knew them; they looked as if they had come from the ends of the world. Only one of them spoke, and of everybody on the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of valor, he gains no consideration, but is regarded nearly as a woman. In their great war-dances all the warriors in succession strike the post, as it is called, and recount their exploits. On these occasions their auditory consists of the kinsmen, friends, and comrades of the narrator. The profound impression which his discourse produces on them is manifested by the silent attention it receives, and by the loud shouts which hail its termination. The young man who finds himself at such a meeting without anything to recount is very ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Jesus, our precious Saviour, I beg you to pray with my husband: it maybe God will bless him." "My sister, God will bless him: this your anguish shall be turned into joy." "My own heart was moved," adds the narrator. "I saw my own love very little, compared with hers, and ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... daughter, for you have won her heart.' He immediately provided an outfit for his daughter, and when it was completed, my father and his bride rode away on horseback, while the trousseau of the Princess followed on three hundred camels." The passage proceeds (the narrator being Daruma, the offspring of the marriage), "When my father had returned home, and was desirous of celebrating his marriage Kandarin (his Wazir) said to him, 'Your wife will be destroyed if you touch her, for you are created of fire, and she is created of earth, which the fire devours. You ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of humour, enjoying themselves quite uproariously one night at a club, over a story one of them was relating of an unsatisfactory German son-in-law who had demanded an income. He was a man of small title, who had married the narrator's daughter, and after some months spent in his father-in-law's house, had felt it but proper that his financial position should be ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... We must remember that the narrator is a loyal Muhammadan. Mudkal was in the tract always in dispute between ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... on Lady Byron are, to be sure, less skilful and adroit than those of Lord Byron. They want his literary polish and tact; but what of that? 'Blackwood' assures us that even the faults of manner derive a peculiar grace from the fact that the narrator is Lord Byron's mistress; and so we suppose the literary world must find grace in things ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... animated gesture, her expressive countenance, the solemn and thrilling air and accent with which she related the dark passages in her strange story; and, above all, that I could communicate the impressive consciousness that the narrator had seen with her own eyes, and personally acted in the scenes which she described; these accompaniments, taken with the additional circumstance that she who told the tale was one far too deeply and sadly impressed with religious principle to misrepresent or fabricate what ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Her narrator was not to be balked. He pointed to the coat-rack on the wall in front of them both. "There is Henry de Spain's coat. He hung it there just before he went down to the inn. Under it, if you look, you'll find his belt of cartridges. Don't take ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... of woe, and his audience was thrilled and horrified. "Lord" Bill alone appeared unmoved. A close observer even might have noticed the faintest suspicion of a smile at the corners of his mouth. The smile broadened as the sharp doctor launched a question at the narrator ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... elderly gentleman were hushed, I drew a long breath and looked round the room, striving, with the best energy of my imagination, to throw a tinge of romance and historic grandeur over the realities of the scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a scent of cigar smoke, clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way of visible emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale. Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were wofully disturbed by the rattling of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey punch, which Mr. Thomas Waite was mingling for a customer. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... of prefixing a list of their personages;—and the dramatists of old used to tell us who was in love with whom, and what were the blood relationships of all the persons. In such a narrative as this, any proceeding of that kind would be unusual,—and therefore the poor narrator has been driven to expend his first four chapters in the mere task of introducing his characters. He regrets the length of these introductions, and will now begin at once ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... it was that the doctor himself remained awake when such a powerful narcotic was administered, the narrator did not lose his presence of mind nor his absence of conscience, and said the doctor had, during the operation, held his nose tight with his two fingers. The doctor had since been offered thousands of tomans for the precious bottle, but would ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... impression upon outsiders who happened to meet him. There is a curious anecdote told by some one who met Arthur Hallam travelling with his father on the Continent only a short time before his sudden death. The narrator says that he saw with a certain satisfaction how mercilessly the young man criticised and exposed his father's statements, remembering how merciless the father had often been in dealing summarily with the arguments and statements ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... topic as a backdrop for a cultural study. He presents us with several characters, each at a different place in the gray zone between Jewish and Christian cultures: two Cantonists, one clinging to the Jewish side (Jacob); one closer to the non-Jewish side (Samuel, the narrator); as well as a Jewish convert unhappy with her lot (Anna, whose abuse of Samuel we later understand as the 'self-disdain' often seen among those who had left Judaism); her daughter Marusya, who although fully Christian is ostracized as being a Jewess, and struggles unsuccessfully to find her place ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... it—the murder. A stranger is found in a wood, hung to a tree. Nobody knows who he is. But he and the narrator had met in Paraguay. He, the murdered man, came home, visited the narrator, and fell in love with the beautiful being to whom the narrator was engaged. So the narrator lassoed ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... through the blinded giant's legs in the skin of a slaughtered animal, are a series of incidents that could not have arisen independently and casually. Yet till lately the mill stood to prove if the narrator lied, and every circumstance of local particularity seemed to vouch for the autochthonous character of the myth. The incident is an instructive one, and I have therefore included it in this volume, though it is little more than an anecdote in ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... evidenced by the remark of a small boy who, at the end of a story relating the necessary sequence of activities common to the countless thousands of heroic mothers, washing and ironing the family linen, waggishly shook his finger at the narrator, and with a beaming smile, said: "Now you know that it is my Ma and Tootsie you are telling about!" John had not discovered the fact that the story which reflected the daily service of his beloved mother reflected ...
— All About Johnnie Jones • Carolyn Verhoeff
... on whose lips thousands and thousands of his countrymen had hung entranced. He was, what is less generally remembered now, perhaps the ablest and most accomplished diplomatist ever in the public service of the United States. Jared Sparks was a profound student of history, somewhat dull as a narrator, but of unerring historic judgment. I suppose he would be placed by all our writers of history with great unanimity at the head of American historic investigators. James Walker was a great preacher and a profound thinker. In the judgment ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... you. You see, I have lived so long in the East that I have lost much of my European training. Then, my name is unfortunate. Herod killed one of your Christian saints, while Voltaire was an infidel. You English people have strong prejudices, and thus my story would be injured by the narrator." ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... had heard the story of Lyttelton's dream, something in the manner of the narrator conveyed to ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... had listened without comment or interruption during the recital of the narrator, his eyes fixed, the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... formation of theoretic views, and illustrating an obscure but most interesting chapter in the marvelous history of human nature. It is written with perfect modesty, and freedom from pretense, doing credit to the ability of the author as a narrator, as well as to her fairness and integrity ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... charms really tempted the friend to endeavour to supplant George, or whether he considered the latter's attentions to the young Greek to be without definite object, and undertaken in a spirit of indifference, the narrator could not explain; but it was not long before Delancey considered himself as a principal in the transaction. Acme, whose knowledge of the world was slight, and whose previous seclusion from society, had rendered her timidity excessive, considered that ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... these results and observations are merely experimental. In another place I hope to reproduce the stories in the original, by phonetic methods. I have here given English versions of some of the stories recorded, as translated for me by the narrator, or by Mrs. Brown, and added some explanations which may be of assistance to a person listening when songs or stories are ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... began to grow very large, and the hushed, dramatic voice of the narrator caused her listeners to hold their breath, until occasionally they burst into fits of hearty laughter. But the hour had come. The bowls of bread-and-milk smoked on the sideboard, and all the girls hurried to begin and finish their food. After supper they ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... perceived a sudden change in the appearance of our eldest darling; his heavy lids veiled his eyes, an unnatural colour burnt in his cheeks, his breath became short. Clara looked at the mother; she slept, yet started at the pause the narrator made— Fear of awakening and alarming her, caused Clara to go on at the eager call of Evelyn, who was unaware of what was passing. Her eyes turned alternately from Alfred to Idris; with trembling accents she continued her tale, till she saw the child about to fall: starting ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... these rumours, when sifted, amount to? They have no origin but this,—a silly old man of eighty-six, quite in his dotage, solemnly avers that he saw this same Zanoni seventy years ago (he himself, the narrator, then a mere boy) at Milan; when this very Zanoni, as you all see, is at least as young as ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the historic mise-en-scene in which James Morier penned his famous satire. I next turn to the work itself. The idea of criticising, and still more of satirising, a country or a people under the guise of a fictitious narrator is familiar in the literature of many lands. More commonly the device adopted is that of introducing upon the scene the denizen of some other country or clime. Here, as in the case of the immortal Gil Blas of Santillane, with whom Hajji Baba has been not inaptly compared, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... the story did not entirely deviate from fact, and was very artfully framed to excite sympathy for the narrator and indignation against the perpetrators of the supposed outrage. Tom Hadley, who had not the prolific imagination of his comrade, listened in open-mouthed wonder to the fanciful tale, but did not offer to corroborate ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... winter was already making itself felt, James decided to withdraw to Dublin; as our narrator says, "the young commanders were in some haste to return to the capital, where the ladies expected them with great impatience; so that King James, being once more persuaded to disband the new levies and ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... discover if she were a witch, and, in case she were, to have her apprehended. With this explanation, Harvey was able to get away. He related the story to the king, whose leave he had to go on the expedition. The narrator adds: "I am certayne this for an argument against spirits or witchcraft is the best and most ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... dens," they fired a gun through the roof of a house on the declivity of a mountain; upon which an old woman or two came crawling out, and scrambled up the hill; but no other persons appeared. "Whereupon," adds the narrator,[115] "the Paisley men, under the command of Captain Finlason, assisted by Captain Scot, a half-pay officer, of late a lieutenant of Colonel Kerr's regiment of dragoons, who is indeed an officer, wise, stout, and honest; the Dumbarton men, under the command of David Colquhoun and James ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... From one subject to another she moved by insidious transitions, fearing the least silence, fearing almost to give him time for an answer lest it should slip into a hint of separation. Like so many people of her class, she was a brave narrator; her place was on the hearth-rug and she made it a rostrum, mimeing her stories as she told them, fitting them with vital detail, spinning them out with endless "quo' he's" and "quo' she's," her voice sinking into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific; until she ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... down. In our time the printed record, such as it is, checks the exuberance of each individual's fancy. But against rumor there is little or no checks and the original story, true or invented, grows wings and horns, hoofs and beaks, as the artist in each gossip works upon it. The first narrator's account does not keep its shape and proportions. It is edited and revised by all who played with it as they heard it, used it for day dreams, and passed it on. [Footnote: For an interesting example, see the case described by C. J. Jung, Zentralblatt ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... man at the time," said the narrator, drawing at his pipe and glancing good-humouredly at the company. "I, had just come back from China, and my own people being away I went down into the country to invite myself to stay with an uncle. When I got down ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... his mouth, and with hammer uplifted in the air, prepared to listen. At the beginning of the story, many glanced involuntarily towards the portrait; but later on, all bent their attention solely on the narrator, as his ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... camel, and ass he could find in all Israel to carry the oil, and that on nearing his city the people turned out to meet him and compliment him for the service he had done them. "Don't praise me," said the agent, "but this, my companion, to whom I owe eighteen myriads." This, says the narrator, illustrates what is said (Prov. xiii. 7), "There is that maketh himself (appear to be) rich, yet hath nothing; there is that maketh himself poor, yet ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... with every word in its proper place. Here and there, perhaps once in a hundred times, a story turns up which needs no telling. The humour of it turns so completely on a sudden twist or incongruity in the denouement of it that no narrator, however clumsy, can altogether ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... seen the cold water rise into foam beneath the medicine-man's hand; it could not be told too often; not every companion of Cheschapah's had been accorded the privilege of witnessing this miracle, and each narrator in his circle became a wonder himself to the bold boyish faces that surrounded him. And after the miracle he told how the Piegans had been like a flock of birds before the medicine-man. Cheschapah himself passed among the groups, alone ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... trusted. I can vouch that he has not in the least exaggerated the slenderness and steepness of the rock-masses. One of them, it is said, has never been climbed; unless a myth which hangs about it is true. Certain English sailors, probably of Rodney's men—and numbering, according to the pleasure of the narrator, three hundred, thirty, or three—are said to have warped themselves up it by lianes and scrub; but they found the rock-ledges garrisoned by an enemy more terrible than any French. Beneath the bites of the Fer-de- ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... began to be very embarrassing indeed. What refuge could there be from one who spoke the truth so plainly? And how do you think I got out of it?" asked Mr. Armstrong of me, John Smith, who, as he told the story, felt almost in as great confusion and misery as the narrator must have been in at that time, although now he looked amazingly jolly, and breathed away at his cigar with the slow exhalations of ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... that you enjoy this sort of a thing and are willing and ready to receive the impression derogatory to the neighbor's esteem and good name. Of course, if mere curiosity makes us listen and our pleasure and amusement are less at the expense of the neighbor's good name than excited by the style of the narrator or the singularity of the facts alleged, the fault is less; but fault there nevertheless is, since such an attitude serves to encourage the traducer and helps him drive his points home. Many sin who could and should prevent excesses of this kind, but refrain from doing so; their ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... he is running about like a madman, and as if the fiend had got hold of him," continued the narrator; "for now the very thing of which he has bragged from morning to night, is at an end: he has not only been forced to see corn growing in the field, he has lain in the ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... fight. Other people believe that Kamehameha I. fought his first battle here. On this point, I have heard a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which have been written concerning these islands—I do not know where the narrator got it. He said that when Kamehameha (who was at first merely a subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii), landed here, he brought a large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki. The Oahuans marched against him, and so confident ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... examined many Indians in reference to these details," says the narrator, an Augustin monk writing in 1554, "and they have all confirmed them as eye-witnesses" (Lettre sur les Superstitions du Perou, p. 106, ed. Ternaux-Compans. This document ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... bettered. But I would not admit perfect excellence to any other of his stories. These two have a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others, the horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of the narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and Le Grand in the other. The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one of those great short story tellers who proved himself incapable of a longer ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... obtained for himself the glory of a night's imprisonment instead of a lecture." The third attack occurred on a Wednesday ensuing, while Lord Sidmouth was attending the Cabinet dinner. It was feeble, and of brief duration; and as no further annoyance was anticipated by the police officers, the narrator, who had been left in charge, retired to his lodgings in the same street. Shortly afterwards he heard the mob returning, and hastened back to his Lordship's door, against which the watchman had placed himself. Before, however, they could gain admittance, the Philistines were upon them, filling ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... a four-leaved clover completely protected any one from this power. I remember a story which I heard when a boy, and the narrator of it I recollect spoke as if he were quite familiar with the fact. A certain man came to the village to exhibit the strength of a wonderful cock, which could draw, when attached to its leg by a rope, a large log of wood. Many people went and paid to see this wonderful performance, ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... we quit what Mr. Moule appropriately calls "Marco's famous rhapsody of the Manzi capital"; perhaps the most striking section of the whole book, as manifestly the subject was that which had made the strongest impression on the narrator. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... themselves along the ground by their arms. (From this description and from native carvings, I am inclined to believe that a large cuttle-fish or octopus must have suggested this idea to the original narrator of this tradition.) Little by little, the body was brought into more compact form, and, in a later generation, legs appeared, but it was a long time before they became accustomed to legs and able to use them in moving about. A survival of this awkwardness, so say the Kayans, ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... of his wounds. Geoffrey's work apparently gave birth to a multitude of fictions, which came to be considered as quasi-historical traditions. From these, exaggerated by each succeeding age, and recast by each narrator, sprung the famous metrical romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, first in French and afterward in English, from which modern notions of Arthur are derived. In these his habitual residence is at Caerlon, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... The incensed narrator sank reluctantly back into his seat, his eyes yet glowing angrily. "Well, I crept carefully along a little gully until I got where them Indians were just exactly opposite me in a direct line. I had an awful heavy gun, carrying a slug of lead near as big as ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... tale of the afternoon's performances, beginning with his experience as a lobster catcher. Seth smiled, then chuckled, and finally burst into roars of laughter, in which the narrator joined. ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... plot for a book!" she sighed ecstatically when the narrator had finished. "And what a picture for one of the characters!" She fell to studying Peace with a new interest in ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... remember—from this side." [Footnote: NOTE.—In justice to Mr. Watson, the present writers have thought it best at this stage to transpose the story from the first to the third person. Any narrative, unless it is negative in its material, is hard to give in the first person; for where the narrator has played an active, positive part, he must either curb himself or fall under the slur of braggadocio. Yet, the world wants the details exactly as they ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... and gave a highly coloured account of a practical joke in several stages, which he had played on an irritating acquaintance. The elder members of the party listened with awe, if without approval, but Tim showed repeated signs of restlessness, and in a final outburst corrected the narrator on ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to make Gaston talk. To deepen a man's love for a thing, get him to talk of it to the eager listener—he passes from the narrator to the advocate unconsciously. Gaston was not to talk of England, but of the North, of Canada, of Mexico, the Lotos Isles. He did so picturesquely, yet simply too, in imperfect but sufficient French. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from Josiah's big toe to the longest hair on his head. It was the story of two boys who ran away and shipped aboard an Australian sailing packet, and contained more first-class horrors than any one of his beloved dime novels. As a finishing touch the narrator turned back the grizzled hair on his forehead and showed a three-inch scar, souvenir of a first mate and a belaying pin. He rolled up his flannel shirtsleeve and displayed a slightly misshapen left arm, broken by a ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... particular inquiries on that head. Here I was not equally frank; yet I did not feign any thing, but merely dealt in generals. I had acquired notions of propriety on this head, perhaps somewhat fastidious. Minute details, respecting our own concerns, are apt to weary all but the narrator himself. I said thus much, and the truth of my remark was eagerly ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... which cannot be accounted for by the revival of subconscious memory in sleep. Neither asleep nor awake can a man remember what it is impossible for him to have known. The dream contained no prediction for the results were now fixed; but (granting the good faith of the narrator) the dream did contain information not ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... wall in which my mind's eye can discern some traces of a rocky sea-coast, recalls to me a fearful story of travel derived from that unpromising narrator of such stories, a parliamentary blue-book. A convict is its chief figure, and this man escapes with other prisoners from a penal settlement. It is an island, and they seize a boat, and get to the main land. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... reason why the Jews would not eat swine's flesh was because Adonis was slain by a boar, and Bacchus and Adonis, he says, were the same divinities. Now, if we turn to Herodotus, we find that wonderful narrator saying: 'The only deities to whom the Egyptians offer swine are Bacchus and Luna; to these they sacrifice swine when the moon is full, after which they eat the flesh,' which at other times they disdained. The meaning of these sacrifices is understood by those interested, and I do not propose ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... and so were Folko and Gabrielle, all three pale and cold like images of the dead. At length the fearful narrator added in a low voice, and as if he were quite exhausted: "He has visited me since that time, but he will never again come through the little door. Have I not established peace and ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... life, he never attained a knowledge of the world and its ways; in all his transactions he retained the simplicity of the pastoral character. His Autobiography is the most amusing in the language, from the honesty of the narrator; never before did man of letters so minutely reveal the history of his foibles and failings. He was entirely unselfish and thoroughly benevolent; the homeless wanderer was sure of shelter under his roof, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... over, and we will admit that there was no doubt in his mind as to the genuineness of the story he had listened to. It did not appear that there was the least possibility of its being a false tale. It was not the beautiful face of the narrator and proposer that had led him to this conclusion. It was the probability and reasonableness of the story itself; but with his usual caution he determined to investigate. He was not prepared to accept any statement, ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... a marvelous tale is told to the new generation—to the little ones sitting around with open eyes and gaping mouths—they naturally ask, "Where did all this occur?" The narrator must satisfy this curiosity, and so he replies, "On yonder mountain-top," or ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... all the arts of graciousness and flattery. Beginning at the present he worked back through the past to the killing of Jim Dent and the flight of Joseph Weir, extracting tales of early fights, raids, accidents, big storms, violent deaths and killings, making elaborate notes, winning the narrator's confidence and gradually drawing forth ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... The same motive occurs in the famous tale called The Sickbed of Cuchulain. The idea is that some fairy potentate, whose realm is invaded and oppressed, entices a mortal champion to come to his aid and rewards him with magical gifts. But the eighteenth century narrator whose MS. was edited by Mr S.H. O'Grady, apparently had not the clue to the real meaning of his material, and after going on brilliantly up to the point where Dermot plunges into the magic well, he becomes incoherent, and the rest of the tale is merely a string of episodes having no particular connexion ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... excuse my friend,' said Michael; 'he's no hand as a narrator of stirring incident. The case is simple,' he went on. 'My friend is a man of very strong passions, and accustomed to a simple, patriarchal style of life. You see the thing from here: unfortunate visit to Europe, followed by unfortunate acquaintance ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... address what I wanted in activity, engaged the latter principle in my favor; and in the winter play hours, when hard exercise was impossible, my tales used to assemble an admiring audience round Lucky Brown's fireside, and happy was he that could sit next to the inexhaustible narrator. I was also, though often negligent of my own task, always ready to assist my friends, and hence I had a little party of stanch partisans and adherents, stout of hand and heart, though somewhat dull of head—the very tools ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... aside when he felt deeply—as deeply as he could feel—to allow a better man sea-room; and he was further capable of sufficient humility to think there could be a better man than himself, or so I adjudged him, and being the only narrator of this, the only history in which he is likely to receive mention, this delineation of his character will have ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... how the French built barricades during the night and adjusted their front in such a way as to present a solid wall facing the east, the narrator continues: ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... Dinomachus and Cleodemus and the rest of them drank down every word. The narrator led them by their venerable noses, and this least convincing of colossal bogies, this hundred-yarder, was the object of their mute adorations. And these (I was reflecting all the time)—these are the admired teachers from whom our youth are to learn wisdom! Two circumstances ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... that the language of the old man is rather that of a trained writer than of an ignorant fisherman, and here Poe sacrifices the personality of his hero to vividness of incident. What he wishes to accomplish is to impress us with a terrible experience. He does not care to make us see the narrator as a man, yet the story is not devoid of touches of strong human interest; if it were it would be less powerful. The fisherman and his brothers will not take with them their sons on their perilous fishing trip. The youngest brother is carried ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... especially during the last year. An idle story of a groom, who affirmed that he had been present at an interview between Mrs. Pennroyal and Sir Archibald, on horseback, a few weeks before the trial, when, according to this narrator, they had appeared to be rather friendly than otherwise, was not thought to be in any way ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... Harold, Canto II. stanza xlix. line 6, and note 21, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 130, 181. It is a hard matter to piece together the "fragments" which make up the rest of the poem. Apparently the question, "How name ye?" is put by the fisherman, the narrator of the first part of the Fragment, and answered by a monk of the fraternity, with whom the Giaour has been pleased to "abide" during the past six years, under conditions and after a fashion of which the monk disapproves. Hereupon the fisherman disappears, and a kind ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... presence of a nightingale." On another occasion a man of eminence in the book world was honoured with a visit from her. Afterwards he was asked whether he had chanced to see the most distinguished English poetess of the day. "He made no answer," continued the narrator, "but taking me by the arm, in solemn silence, led me into the back parlour, where stood a chair in the centre of the room, isolated from the rest of the furniture: and pointing to it, said, with the profoundest reverence, in a ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... level gaze narrator and listener regarded each other. Then they glanced at Cupid. His ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... dire[Fr], scandal, eavesdropping; town tattle, table talk; tittle tattle; canard, topic of the day, idea afloat. bulletin, fresh news, stirring news; glad tidings; flash, news just in; on-the-spot coverage; live coverage. old story, old news, stale news, stale story; chestnut*. narrator &c (describe) 594; newsmonger, scandalmonger; talebearer, telltale, gossip, tattler. [study of news reporting] journalism. [methods of conveying news] media, news media, the press, the information industry; newspaper, magazine, tract, journal, gazette, publication &c. 531; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... hardly be 'Pallas Armata.' The narrator anticipates Sir James Turner's ingenious treatise by several ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... progress of the story the narrator had become transfigured. The comic, or rather, the sardonic element was all out of him, and as he painted that strange scene it was with difficulty that I kept my composure. And this consummate actor had somehow so managed me that the sympathy due to his dramatis ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... gentlemen, if I may venture to take a small illustration of my present position from my own peculiar craft, I would say that there is this objection in writing fiction to giving a story an autobiographical form, that through whatever dangers the narrator may pass, it is clear unfortunately to the reader beforehand that he must have come through them somehow else he could not have lived to tell the tale. Now, in speaking fact, when the fact is associated with such honours as those with which you have ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... frolics at Fort Myers and everything went well until one of the number became intoxicated, terrorizing the Negroes with bullying, and fighting anyone with whom he could "pick" a quarrel. "Big Charlie" an uncle of the narrator was present and when the red man challenged him to a fight made a quick end of him by breaking his neck ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... house. He was started by two or three of Komag-Nils' stories, and wanted to show us that where he came from, down at Doenoe near Ranen, in Helgeland, there were as many and as wonderful stories and boats, as with us in Nordland. The narrator was a little, quick-speaking fellow, who sat the whole time rocking backwards and forwards, and fidgetting upon the bench, while he talked. With his sharp nose, and round, reddish little eyes, he resembled a restless sea-bird ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... felicitously expressed it, to "skip out." Thus the bridge passed into other hands, where it remained till it was partly washed away in 1863. The following little matter of history connected with its palmy days will be best given in the narrator's own words: "We had a blacksmith who misused his wife. The citizens took him down to the bridge, tied a rope around his body and threw him into the river. They kept up their lick until they nearly drowned the poor cuss, then whispered to him to be good to his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... a narrator of this historic function, "directly to the business in hand. And the business in hand was telling the officers of the navy of the United States that the submarine had to be beaten and that they had to do it. He talked—well, it must still remain a secret, but if you have ever ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... love, and languish with the hero in a misdirected amour, and burn with him in a glorious, futile, and tragic affection. Or you may take it as a novel of England, of the many currents of English life joining in one vast stream on which the barque of the narrator floats. "'This,' it came to me, 'is England. This is what I wanted to give in my book. This!'" And this, the vision which comes to Mr. Wells through a kind of instinct about the life he has experienced and sought to convey—the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... of the Monitoriale adversus Italogalliam, which some take to be Hotoman himself, has this Passage relating to the Francogallia: "Quomodo potest aliquis ei succensere qui est tantum relator & narrator facti? Francogallista enim tantum narrationi & relationi simplici vacat, quod si aliena dicta ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... evening passed rapidly and happily away; Ben smuggling Phronsie off into a corner, where she told him all the doings of the day—the disappointment of the cake, and how it was finally crowned with flowers; all of which Phronsie, with no small pride in being the narrator, related gravely to her absorbed listener. "And don't you think, Bensie," she said, clasping her little hand in a convincing way over his two bigger, stronger ones, "that Polly's stove was very naughty to make poor ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... her all the particulars which had yet transpired. Her aunt was no very methodical narrator, but with the help of some letters to and from Sir Thomas, and what she already knew herself, and could reasonably combine, she was soon able to understand quite as much as she wished of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Salem took little heed. One of them said that such an action showed Satan's prompting, but they all preferred to listen to the grander guilt of the blasphemous sacraments and supernatural rides. The narrator ended with saying that Hota was to be hung the next morning, in spite of her confession, even although her life had been promised to her if she acknowledged her sin; for it was well to make an example of the first-discovered witch, and it was also well that she was an Indian, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... his offspring." The "Mosses from an Old Manse" supply another link in this train of reflection; for "The Virtuoso's Collection" includes some of the elixir vitae "in an antique sepulchral urn." The narrator there represents himself as refusing to quaff it. "'No; I desire not an earthly immortality,' said I. 'Were man to live longer on earth, the spiritual would die out of him.... There is a celestial something within us that requires, after a certain time, the atmosphere of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Stories the narrator of the "Poor Relation's Story" who lived in a lodging in the Clapham Road, tells how, amongst other things, he used to sit in Garraway's Coffee House in the city to pass away the time until it was time to dine, afterwards returning to his lodgings ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... the place Portceaster, whence its present name 'Porchester,'" continued the narrator; "and, subsequently, the stronghold has played an important part in history, from the days of Canute up to the ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... most difficult problem in discussing the principles of Misson and Carracioli is to attempt an explanation of why Defoe, a Presbyterian, should have made his protagonists into deists. Defoe attacks Carracioli's deistic arguments through his narrator, Captain Johnson, who remarks that such ideas are pernicious only to "weak Men who cannot discover their Fallacy." But since similar ideas appear in Robert Drury's Journal published a year later, it may be assumed that the arguments of the deists held a certain ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... This is an incident taken from Goldsmith's novel, 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' The narrator throughout is the Vicar himself, who tells us the simple joys and sorrows of his family, and the foibles of ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... inspection trip to Sailing's Grove. Among the excursionists was General Sherman who gloried in the undertaking and expressed regret that at his age he could hardly anticipate living until the completion of the work. The party was very enthusiastic, and as the narrator naively puts it "as the commissary was well supplied, ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... said that Densie Densmore had heard less of that strange story than any one else, but her hearing faculties had been sharpened, and not a word was missed by her—not a link lost in the entire narrative, and when the narrator expressed his love for his daughter, she darted ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... story related by Dionysius (in Euseb., l.c.) is especially characteristic, as the narrator was an extreme spiritualist. How did it stand therefore with the dry tree? Besides, Tertull. (de corona 3) says: "Calicis aut panis nostri aliquid decuti in terram anxie patimur". Superstitious reverence for the sacrament ante et extra usum is a very ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... It has been well observed, that "place an Englishman in the field of battle, no matter what his political feelings, he will fight like a lion, by instinct, or the mere force of example;" so with the narrator of this contest. I had not, up to this time, the least knowledge of the original cause of the row. I have naturally an aversion to pugilistic contests and tumultuous sports, and yet I found by certain bruises, and ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... which made fantastic shapes of their worn and discolored garments. These various listeners, so diverse in their attitudes, all expressed on their motionless features the absolute abandonment of their intelligence to the narrator. It was a curious picture, illustrating the enormous influence exercised over every class of mind by poetry. In exacting from a story-teller the marvelous that must still be simple, or the impossible that is almost ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... to this story, cross-examined the narrator upon several points, and then dismissed him to get food and rest. That same afternoon the captain, accompanied, as before, by Lieutenant Hoskins, again visited the place of ambush, and presumably made final arrangements for the capture of the cauffle, but what they were I did not know, for I was ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... bad enough, but in addition to this the narrator makes further revelation of the behind-the-scenes secrets of a civic pageant sixty years ago. On the arrival of the procession it was found that no accommodation had been arranged for "Mr. Elliston's men," nor were any refreshments proffered them. "For seven hours ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... referring to this event, the two young men listened with unmistakable interest. It had taken place on the same road which they had just followed, and the narrator, the wine merchant of Bordeaux, had been one of the principal actors in the scene on the highroad. Those who seemed the most curious to hear the details were the travellers in the diligence which had just arrived and was soon to depart. The other guests, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... backs. The Russians and Poles, at this terrible moment, recognized each other as brothers, and rather than spill fraternal blood, they extricated themselves from a combat as if it were a crime. That is the version of an eyewitness and narrator, ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... what seems to be the true spirit of artistic impartiality. The author is simply a narrator. He stands aside, regarding with equal eye all the issues involved and the scales dip not in his hands. To sum up, the first romance of the new day on the Ohio is an eminently readable one—a ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... was known, these legends and myths were handed down from generation to generation, and from age to age. Familiar as we are with human nature, we may well imagine the additions and subtractions and divergencies introduced by each succeeding narrator, copyist or editor in every age. This is a very important feature to be considered in interpreting ancient scriptures, but there are also others. History reveals the fact that the books of the Old Testament were not written nor arranged in the order in which they now appear in the ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... acquaintances." Mr. Dodgson urged that a marble head would not have to be brushed and combed. At this the boy turned to his sister with an air of great relief, saying, "Do you hear that, Mary? It needn't be combed!" And the narrator adds, "I have no doubt combing, with his great head of long hair, like Hallam Tennyson's, was the misery of his life. His final argument was that a marble head couldn't speak, and as I couldn't convince either that ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... broke the seal. Alas for his futile hopes! Not at the close of the page, as in the one received by Ella, but at the very commencement of the letter, was the mournful intelligence communicated, and while the narrator deeply deplored the event, he intimated, at the same time, that not a doubt existed in his own mind, or in the minds of her friends, as to the ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... baronet listened with great attention; and that quick penetration which belongs to a man of the world enabled him to detect that I had smoothed over matters more than became a faithful narrator. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... place of its erection, on the 18th of April. So great a sensation had been excited by the expectation of this ceremony, and so anxious were all ranks to participate in it, that "the town," says the narrator, "swarmed like an ant-hill (fourmilloit) with strangers, the inns and private houses afforded no more room, and they who could find no quarters, covered the roads during the whole of ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... details; and Stanislas, thinking himself very witty, added a little to the tale every time that he told it. Every one flocked to Amelie's house that evening, for by that time the most exaggerated versions of the story were in circulation among the Angouleme nobility, every narrator having followed Stanislas' example. Women and men were alike impatient to know the truth; and the women who put their hands before their faces and shrieked the loudest were none other than Mesdames Amelie, Zephirine, Fifine, and Lolotte, all with more or less heavy ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... narrator gravely. "Everywhere they rejected him as unfit. So he became morbid. He hid himself away. Is it ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to perform," said the narrator. "He gets his breakfast early in the morning and starts out at once, mounted on horseback, and with a horse that is more or less unruly. Each stock-rider, or stockman, as we call him, has a particular part of the run assigned to him, and every morning he goes along the ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Bell."—The story of Ko-Ngai is one of the collection entitled Pe-Hiao-Tou-Choue, or "A Hundred Examples of Filial Piety." It is very simply told by the Chinese narrator. The scholarly French consul, P. Dabry de Thiersant, translated and published in 1877 a portion of the book, including the legend of the Bell. His translation is enriched with a number of Chinese drawings; and there is a quaint ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... possessed a daughter who amply made up for his 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 find no better reason ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... voyage might be deemed sufficiently meagre were the fact that the eggs of wild geese did not grow on trees its only recorded discovery. But the investigations made into the dread mysteries of the north, and the actual problems solved, were many, while the simplicity of the narrator marks the infantine character of the epoch in regard to natural history. When so illustrious a mind as Grotius was inclined to believe in a race of arctic men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders; the ingenuous mariner of Amsterdam ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Lord's last moments and Stephen's has been thought to have been the work of the narrator, and, consequently, to cast some suspicion upon the veracity of the narrative. I accept the correspondence, I believe it was intentional, but I shift the intention from the writer to the actor, and I ask why it should ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of these chronicles, was ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... Magistrates, consisting mainly of spectral testimony; and narrates the appearances and doings of spectres assaulting the "afflicted children," not as mere matters alleged, but as facts. It is true that he appears as a narrator; yet, in the manner and tenor of his statement, he cannot but be considered as endorsing the spectral evidence. Speaking of the examining Magistrates, and saying that it is "now," that is, in 1697, "generally thought they went out of the way," he expresses himself as follows: "The afflicted people ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... said Marian, eagerly. "Since you disclaim weariness we could listen for hours yet. You are a skilful narrator, for, intensely as your story has interested me, you have reserved its climax to the last, even though your search led you only among woful ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... listeners, at which Hippy, pretending anger, glared ferociously and vowed that he would not continue. Nora thereupon took up the narrative and convulsed her hearers with the remedies tried by the fat prince to reduce his weight. Then the story was passed on to Anne. With each narrator it grew funnier, until the party screamed with laughter over the misfortunes of the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... and baith his legs are broken, and the doctor says he'll dee; and that's a'.' And then, putting down the fourpence on the table, the poor child burst into great sobs. 'So I fed the little man,' said the narrator; 'and I went with him to see Sandy. The two little things were living almost alone; their father and mother were dead. Poor Sandy was lying on a bundle of shavings. He knew me as soon as I came in, and ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... impatience to communicate the delightful information he had received, and on his return found that the brindled ox had risen and left the place; and as he could not determine the spot, the gold still awaits the search of some more reflective and painstaking person. Of course, one and another of the narrator's auditors thought himself such a person, and hied him away to the conical hill that rises so conspicuously at the entrance to the estuary of the Forth. What success attended them there we have not the means of knowing, but we ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... had been so intimately connected with it, that he was a most excellent narrator. The episode with the Bellestres and Monsieur's kindly care, the efforts to subdue in some measure the child's wildness and passion for liberty, which made the father smile, thinking of his own exuberant spirits and adventures, her affection for the Indian woman, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... reproducing a plan which may be thought the politics of a chimney-corner, it is, nevertheless, necessary to sketch it so as to explain the author of it by his own work. Were the recital of his efforts to be omitted, the reader would not believe the narrator's word if he merely declared the talent and ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... were entertained in this part of the world. They have indeed one obvious defect, which it is proper the reader should keep constantly in mind. The mythology and groundwork of the whole is Persian: but the narrator is for the most part a Mahometan. Of consequence the ancient Fire-worshippers, though they contribute the entire materials, and are therefore solely entitled to our gratitude and deference for the abundant ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... requisite skill and discretion. Mr. Trevelyan is one of the exceptions to the rule. His book is such a piece of thorough literary workmanship as would have delighted its subject. By a rare felicity, the almost filial affection of the narrator conciliates the reader instead of exciting a distrust of the narrative. We feel that Macaulay's must have been a lovable character to excite such warmth of feeling, and a noble character to enable one who loved him to speak so frankly. The ordinary ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name, and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector's victim, there is no chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if Hector's victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor's speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the Maceman and his casse- tete from the mere word "maceman" in VII. 9, he must be credited ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... manoeuvres of the Balaninus, the acorn-weevil, "burying her drill" which "operates by means of little bites." The narrator calls our attention to the slightest episodes, even to those accidents which sometimes surprise the worker in the course of her labours; when, with the rostrum buried deep in the acorn, her feet suddenly lose their hold. Then the unhappy ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... charging foe. A flagrant example is the story which describes how the white man sees an Indian very far off making insulting gestures; how he forthwith loads his rifle with two bullets—which the narrator evidently thinks will go twice as far and twice as straight as one,—and, taking careful aim, slays his enemy. Like other similar anecdotes, this is told of a good many different frontier heroes; the historian usually showing ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... by Cooper, of the peculiar tortures inflicted by the Indians upon their prisoners in war; but unhappily with less complacent feelings than the reader of the skilful novelist experiences, whose terrors are tempered by the delightful art of the narrator. With Putnam the spectator and the sufferer were the same. He has been bound on the march with intolerable thongs, he has almost perished under his burdens, he has been tomahawked in the face; he is now to be roasted alive. A dark forest is selected ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... rebels from their dens," they fired a gun through the roof of a house on the declivity of a mountain; upon which an old woman or two came crawling out, and scrambled up the hill; but no other persons appeared. "Whereupon," adds the narrator,[115] "the Paisley men, under the command of Captain Finlason, assisted by Captain Scot, a half-pay officer, of late a lieutenant of Colonel Kerr's regiment of dragoons, who is indeed an officer, wise, stout, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... if he was remarkable at all, on the moral side of his character. Yet Raleigh can declare proudly, that all the time he was on the Oronoko, 'neither by force nor other means had any of his men intercourse with any woman there;' and the narrator of the incidents of Raleigh's last voyage acquaints his correspondent 'with some particulars touching the government of the fleet, which, although other men in their voyages doubtless in some measure ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Princess listened. The tears flowed as she heard the story, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes, and even trying to smile at times in grateful sympathy for the narrator's efforts at consolation. ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... Yorick, and was exploited, perhaps, more than any other feature of his creed, as then interpreted, i.e., the sentimental regard for the lower animals.[43] But there is lacking here the inevitable concomitant of Sterne's relation of a sentimental situation, the whimsicality of the narrator in his attitude at the time of the adventure, or reflective whimsicality in the narration. Sterne is always whimsically quizzical in his conduct toward a sentimental condition, or toward himself in the analysis of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... means a flawless book, though its defects are trivial enough. The illusion of Huck as narrator fails the least bit here and there; the "four dialects" are not always maintained; the occasional touch of broad burlesque detracts from the tale's reality. We are inclined to resent this. We never wish to feel that Huck is anything ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... existed, and that the voyage along the north coast of America would be as easy of accomplishment as one across the North Sea.[343] The way in which the icing down of a vessel is described indicates that the narrator himself or his informant had been exposed to a winter storm in some northern sea, probably at Newfoundland, and the spirited sketch of the sound appears to have been borrowed from some East Indian traveller, who had been driven by storm ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... feared that the two Americans were not as thrilled by this sad recital as the fair narrator had expected, and even Dick ventured to point out that those sort of things happened also to his countrymen, and were ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... that rule," thought I, for I remembered the stories which I had heard in the cabin; and I also recollected the conduct of their narrator, Captain Blake, towards the starving little ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... of this story is to show that supernatural knowledge is a curse to man. The narrator of the story is gifted with the power of divining even the most secret thoughts of those about him, and of beholding coming events. This knowledge brings him only evil and sorrow. His spiritual insight did not save him from folly, and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... side, so as to take up as little room as possible. The majority of these creatures were rattlesnakes; but there were black snakes among them, and one large spotted snake. Besides these, there were, as the narrator expressed it, at least a peck of spring frogs; these having probably crawled in to fill up all corners and vacant places. All these reptiles were of course dormant and insensible, ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... him with an opportunity to increase his glory. His victories over them obtained for him the honours of a second triumph, and restored peace to his kingdom. Now, Emily, I again resign the office of narrator to you. ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... Mary, daughter of James II., into whose service the narrator, a girl of 16, enters just before the marriage of Mary to William III. The descriptions of persons and manners at the courts of Charles II. and William III. are life-like and accurate. The language is simple, and imitative of the quaint ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... relating a story to another, which made him stare, "Did you never hear that before?" said the narrator. "No," says the other: "Pray, sir, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... rung his bell, the deputies were taking their seats, the curtain was about to rise. As a faithful narrator of the session we desire our readers to attend, we think it safer and better in every way to copy verbatim the report of the debate as given in one of the morning papers ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... is confined to instruction by examples; nor by Fables is anything else[1] aimed at than that the errors of mortals may be corrected, and persevering industry[2] exert itself. Whatever the playful invention, therefore, of the narrator, so long as it pleases the ear, and answers its purpose, it is recommended by its merits, not by ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... The inspired narrator notices, in the first place, the warmth of her hospitality, and its unabating continuance to Elisha. On a certain occasion, when he went to Shunem, she urged him to visit her, which issued in such a mutual esteem, that "as oft as he passed by, he turned in thither to eat bread." Among the ancients, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
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