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More "Observant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy. Few authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are so destitute of observant faculty as to be unable to chronicle the broken syllables and languid movements of an invalid. The easily rendered, and too surely recognized, image of familiar suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... your mother," said Arabella. "You are not yet a Swiss peasant. Pending your metamorphosis, be a little more observant of the conventions and courtesies of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... natural reflections which youthful ebullitions of animal spirits and instinctive feelings inspire, will enter the world with warm and erroneous expectations. But this appears to be the course of nature; and in morals, as well as in works of taste, we should be observant of her sacred indications, and not presume to lead when ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... was sensitive and imaginative on dress, but she was not imaginative or even very observant with regard to anything else. She understood Dora's protest to refer to an actual engagement between Dr. Harry Ironside ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... service, and went away again. A few minutes ended it all. When the undertaker and his men had also departed, she sat down on a bench near to watch the sexton filling up the grave—Tom's grave. She was very quiet, and none but a closely observant person watching her face could have penetrated into the truth of what your impulsive characters, always in the extremes of mirth or misery, never understand about quiet people, that ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... standing face to face on the brown earth of the clearing—the Englishman's ruddy countenance, light auburn hair and whiskers, and well-opened bold blue eyes, contrasting with the pale complexion, the keenly-observant look, the dark closely-cut hair, and the delicately-lined face of the American. It was only for a moment: I had barely time to feel uneasy before they controlled themselves and led us back to the carriage, talking as pleasantly as if nothing had happened. ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... eight, the two Miss Mees entered the breakfast room; they kissed Mavis on the cheek before sitting down to the meal. They asked each other and Mavis how they had slept, as was their invariable custom; but the sensitive, observant girl could not help noticing that the greetings of her employers were a trifle less cordial than was their wont. Mavis put down this comparative coldness to their pride at the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... now imagine that gradually, by becoming more closely observant than they had been, by combining together to make more complete observations, and above all by preserving the records of observations made by successive generations, these creatures began to obtain clearer ideas respecting their world and the surrounding regions of space. They would ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... of good recitations, strict observance of rules, lady-like behavior in all places and at all times, than a prayer-meeting in your room every night in the week. Now it is late; go back, and if you do not wish to tell me what is wrong with Susan, I must be all the more observant of her ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... related to any other, or of many facts not known as having any mutual relations or as comprehended under any general law, does not reach the meaning of science; science is knowledge reduced to law and embodied in system. The knowledge of various countries gathered by an observant traveler may be a heterogeneous medley of facts, which gain real value only when coordinated and arranged by the man of science. Art always relates to something to be done, science to something to be known. Not only must art be discriminated from science, but art in ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... who, Indian like, was wise and observant, only said, "Wait a minute or two and I will show you." Then she quickly hurried back into a swampy place and soon returned with a thick juicy leaf, to the under side of which several mosquitoes were still clinging, with their bodies ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... supply of life-giving oxygen. This causes paleness of the skin, often noticed in the face of the young smoker. Palpitation of the heart is also a common result, followed by permanent weakness, so that the whole system is enfeebled, and mental vigor is impaired as well as physical strength. Observant teachers can usually tell which of the boys under their care are addicted to smoking, simply by the comparative inferiority of their appearance, and by their intellectual and bodily indolence and feebleness. After full maturity is attained the evil ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... animation towards the path, beheld Aunt Victoria, wonderful and queen-like in a white dress, a parasol, like a great rose, over her stately blond head, attended by Sylvia adoring; Mrs. Marshall quiet and observant; Mr. Rollins, the tutor, thin, agitated, and unhappily responsible; and Professor Marshall smiling delightedly at ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... gravity, when he was proposing some colossal impossibility, the observant novelist would naturally seize on, for Dickens was always on the lookout for exaggerations in human language and conduct. It was at Procter's table I heard Dickens describe a scene which transpired after ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... for with her troubled feelings, she could better answer talking girls than parry the remarks of her shrewd, observant brother. ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... loved her, and that very dearly, was patent to the most superficial observer. Maude, who was not very observant of others, used to notice how his eyes followed her wherever she went, brightened at the sound of her step, and kindled eagerly when she spoke. The Dowager saw it too, with considerable disapproval; and thought it desirable to turn her observations ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... prisoner both when I entered the witness-box and when I left it. The lowering brutality of his face was unchanged, but his faculties seemed to be more alive and observant than they were at the police-office. A frightful blue change passed over his face, and he drew his breath so heavily that the gasps were distinctly audible while I mentioned Mary by name and described the mark or the blow on her temple. When they asked me if ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... good Recommendation from my Countrymen, I was admitted to ride among 'em. But here I had a fresh Difficulty to struggle with. My Countrymen finding me pretty flush of Money, and that I was very generous, was as observant as a Spaniel, and so very Officious both early and late, that I found it impracticable to steal an Hour of Privacy to recollect my self, in order to model my Conduct after the best Precedents I ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... by the Chouans, they flung themselves headlong into the road with fixed bayonets and made the battle even for a few moments. Both sides fought with a stubbornness intensified by the cruelty and fury of the partisan spirit which made this war exceptional. Each man, observant of danger, was silent. The scene was gloomy and cold as death itself. Nothing was heard through the clash of arms and the grinding of the sand under foot but the moans and exclamations of those who fell, either dead or badly ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... she would show him whether it was a triumph. He had destroyed for ever her faith in David Gemmell. The quiet, observant doctor, who had such an eye for the false, had been deceived as easily as all the others, and it made her feel very lonely. But never mind; Tommy should find out, and that within the hour, that there was one whom he could not cheat. Her first impulse, always her first impulse, ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... such a world as this, health and leisure and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate? Shall Ambition and Avarice never sleep? Shall they never want objects on which to fasten? Shall they be so observant to discover, so acute to discern, so eager, so patient to pursue, and shall the Benevolence of Christians ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... travel in wild places is too arduous for one so young; and Elias has little acquaintance with the desert ways, and that little disastrous, he and all his party having been captured and held to ransom by the Bedu, because he forgot to pay the tribes their proper dues. Be cautious and observant. In sh' Allah we shall all ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... our party at The Grange, and were fostered by the lovely calm of nature, which is so observable on Sunday in the country, where the very animals seem to know that they are included within the merciful commandment of rest. Mr. Wyndham was religiously observant of the day, but exceedingly disliked the gloom by which many worthy people think it a duty to lessen their own happiness, and to throw a chill and constraint upon that of others on this joyful festival. He thought that the weekly commemoration of ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... lawyer by profession, and, if I was not greatly mistaken, was first cousin to the wife of my host. I knew also that he was a man eminently "well-to-do," both as regarded his professional and private means. The Jelfs entertained him with that sort of observant courtesy which falls to the lot of the rich relation, the children made much of him, and the old butler, albeit somewhat surly "to the general," treated him with deference. I thought, observing him by the vague mixture of lamplight and twilight, that ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... found it. We swabbed the decks so thoroughly before leaving Bridgeboro. One of our boys might have dropped some change and never known it But how did the key happen to be there? We know how it happened in Alfred's pocket, but how did it happen on the deck? We scouts claim to be observant, and yet that key was right on the deck from Bridgeboro all the way down to St. George. That's ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... through this and the cornfields which had been the scene of Hooker's and Mansfield's fierce fighting. We visited the Dunker Church and then returned to camp by Bloody Lane and the central stone bridge. The President was observant and keenly interested in the field of battle, but made no display of sentiment. On another day he reviewed the troops which were most accessible from headquarters. As my own corps was among the first on the list, I did not join the escort of the President at the general's ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... par mes mains! C'est peu qu'il ait sur moi remport la victoire; Malheureux, j'ai servi de hraut sa gloire. Le tratre! Il insultait ma confusion; 850 Et tout le peuple mme avec drision, Observant la rougeur qui couvrait mon visage, De ma chute certaine en tirait le prsage. Roi cruel! ce sont l les jeux o tu te plais. Tu ne m'as prodigu tes perfides bienfaits 855 Que pour me faire mieux sentir ta tyrannie, Et m'accabler ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... was no relation of the diplomat of the same name attached to the Austrian chancellery. He was of the Reformed religion, very faithful in the performance of his religious duties; and I can assert that I never knew a man with more simple tastes, or who was more observant of his duties as a man and a magistrate. I would not like to risk saying what were his inmost thoughts concerning the Emperor; for he rarely spoke of him, and if he had anything unpleasant to say it may be readily understood that he would not have chosen me as his confidant. One ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... discovered by them; but there was another at Chetwynde Castle who very quickly discovered all, one who was led to this perhaps by the sympathy of his own feelings. There was that secret within his own heart which made him watchful and attentive and observant. No change in her face and manner, however slight, could fail to be noticed by this man, who treasured up every varying expression of hers within his heart. And this change which had come over her was one which affected ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Gifford observed, new and original, and though, by his own admission, Byron was indebted to Vathek (or rather S. Henley's notes to Vathek) and to D'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale for allusions and details, the "atmosphere" could only have been reproduced by the creative fancy of an observant and enthusiastic traveller who had lived under Eastern skies, and had come within ken ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... acquainted with social pageants might have been in the first instant quite evidenced by her comportment here. Many eyes turned toward her as she approached the head of the line. She was unconscious of all, lazily, half-insolently observant, yet wholly unconcerned. Some observers choked back a sudden exclamation. A hush fell in the great room, then followed a low buzzing of curious or interested, wise ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... a charity as this may be reasonably supposed to have walked through life with a steady pace, and an observant eye, neglecting no opportunity of assisting those who were not possessed of the experience necessary for their own guidance. In supposing his efforts directed to the benefit of a young nobleman, misguided by the aristocratic haughtiness of his own time, and the prevailing ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... recalling the fervid style and thought of the Nouvelle Hlose. They are substantial letters, concise and interesting, such as a good husband might write after ten years of marriage, but not at all a lover's letters. Josephine, who was quite observant, must have noticed the difference, but she had enough tact and prudence to avoid complaint. 1805 was not 1796; Napoleon still loved Josephine, but from habit, gratitude, and a sense of duty, not with mad passion. He paid her much attention, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... It was remarkable how observant of passengers the drivers would be, while the passenger all the time laboured under the impression that the driver's time was taken up with ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... in Barnstaple, went up and down Boutport Street, the old street that half encircles the town, running "about the port," that he acted here, lodged here, if only for a week or two, talked in the tavern and walked in the old town, with that observant inner eye which noted the veriest detail of life, the swing of a flower, the swallow under the eaves, the idiosyncrasy of dress or gesture in the passers-by, and at the same time comprehended and recorded the springs of action, the fumbling thoughts, the consciences, the strivings, and the ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... happiness, and whose neat and nimble fingers turned out quantities of daily work. There was a considerable section of the blind, who were systematically treated, and had a library of their own. In one of the rooms were two dying men, one already past consciousness, the other still observant and even lively, but not expected to survive the night. Amongst so many and such aged people this sight was too familiar to greatly disturb the others. One of these was understood to be related to an English ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... property, as he had treated John of Cappadocia. All those who held this office during his reign became wealthy to an extraordinary degree, and suddenly, with two exceptions. One of these was Phocas, of whom I have spoken in my previous writings—a man in the highest degree observant of integrity and honesty; who, during his tenure of office, was free from all suspicion of illegal gain. The other was Bassus, who was appointed later. Neither of them enjoyed their dignity for a year. At the end of a few months they were deprived of it as being ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... Shatter'd the bone, and prone to earth he fell. The warlike Menelaus aim'd his spear Where Thoas' breast, unguarded by his shield, Was left expos'd; and slack'd his limbs in death. Phyleus' brave son, as rush'd Amphiclus on, Stood firm, with eye observant; then th' attack Preventing, through his thigh, high up, where lie The strongest muscles, smote; the weapon's point Sever'd the tendons; darkness clos'd his eyes. Of Nestor's sons, Antilochus, the first, Atymnius wounded, driving through his flank He brazen spear; prone on his ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... conception, because they have no experience. It is evident that the remark proceeds in most cases from the speaker's own consciousness of the unoccupied monotony of an ocean passage, in which, unless exceptionally observant, he has not even detected the many small but essential functions discharged by the officers of the ship, whom he sees moving about, but the aim of whose movements he does not understand. The passenger, as regards ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... the criminal. Let us take up these two points, and first of all ask ourselves how the murder of the Marquise de Langrune ought to be 'classified' in the technical sense. The first conclusion which must be impressed upon the mind of any observant person who has visited the scene of the crime and examined the corpse of the victim is, that this murder must be placed in the category of crapulous crimes. The murderer seems to have left the implicit mark of his character ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... his own accord, or else become the object of such violent hatreds that the Home Government would feel compelled to recall him. Thus they would be rid of the presence of a personage possessed of a sufficient energy to oppose them, and they would no longer need to fear his observant eyes. Sir Alfred Milner saw himself surrounded by all sorts of difficulties, and every attempt he made to bring forward his own plans for the settlement of the South African question crumbled to the ground almost before he could ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... the United States she turned to good account, examining with a keen observant eye the manners and customs of the people. She made the acquaintance of Channing and Emerson; she went from town to town, and village to village; she investigated the character and influence of American institutions; ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... made a desperate effort to seem calm, for the servant's observant eye warned him that he was not acting himself. "Will you please ask Miss Lee to favor me with a few ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... a moment looking steadily at her with that cold, observant glance, as if he would have this last picture of her this way to cut away all tender memories that might cause pain in the future. Then he turned as if to One who stood by his side. Not looking back again, he ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... 'prentice-fashion. Many a journeyman has broken up his narrative and skipped about and rambled around, but he did it for a purpose, for an advantage; there was art in it, and points to be scored by it; the observant reader perceived the game, and enjoyed it and respected it, if it was well played. But Mrs. Eddy's performance was without intention, and destitute of art. She could score no points by it on those terms, and almost ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Observant of the way she told So much of what was true, No vanity could long withhold Regard that was her due: She spared him the familiar guile, So easily achieved, That only made a man to smile And ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... her mind no observant person could fail to see, and Estelle was not unprepared to hear her say as she did on the third morning at breakfast, after fidgeting a moment ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... chagrin, offended vanity, acute disappointment, all blended with a dull heartache to which he was a stranger. He was a dangerous man in a dangerous mood, and so Wolf Struve was likely to discover. But the convict was not an observant man. His loose upper lip lifted in the ugly sneer ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... on this raiment are clothed with humility; they readily perceive the excellence of other believers, but can only discern their own in the glass of God's Word. At the same time, they become very observant of their own defects, and severe in condemning them, but proportionally candid to their brethren; and thus they learn the hard lesson of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fresh eye, without preconceptions. While his lack of larger vision held him down as an artist, it contributed to his feeling for natural textures and story-telling detail. His approach to illustration, therefore, was the spontaneous expression of an observant but unimaginative nature, coated with a bitter-sweet sentiment. It was this quality, so homely and common and yet so charged with integrity, that delivered the shock of ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... us into our talk about the White People. He said he did not think he was exactly an observant person in some respects. Remembering his books, which seemed to me the work of a man who saw and understood everything in the world, I could not comprehend his thinking that, and I told him so. But he replied that what I had said about my White People ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... unusually observant," answered Copplestone. "I seem to see things—all at once, don't you know. I saw that since we made her acquaintance—and were unceremoniously bundled off her—the Pike has got a new and quite different coat of ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... to visit her face "from the right or from the left" when her portrait was a-painting. She was an observant woman, and liked to be lighted from the front. It is a light from the right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows. And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing and parting caress that infancy has given to his face. The down will then ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... individuality is readily believed when the date of his birth is recalled, the period when the excitement over the discovery of Gabriel Prosser's plot was at its height. Nat's mind was very restless and active, inquisitive and observant. He learned to read and write with no apparent difficulty. This ability gave him opportunity to confirm impressions as to knowledge of subjects in which he had received no instruction. When not working for his master, he was engaged in prayer or in making sundry experiments. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... to the choristers' chamber at the east end of the College hall, "a dark nasty room, very unfit for such a purpose, which made the scholars often complaine, but in vaine." From this time onward Wood, a clever and observant boy, kept both his ears and eyes open, and accumulated from all quarters materials for his narrative which covers fifty years, the most interesting and important half century in ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... Mr. Hardyman was at the stables, Lady Lydiard gave the servant her card. "Take that to your master, and say I won't detain him five minutes." With these words, her Ladyship sauntered into the grounds. She looked about her with observant eyes; not only noticing the tent which had been set up on the grass to accommodate the expected guests, but entering it, and looking at the waiters who were engaged in placing the luncheon on the table. ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... Elizabeth's time understood her better than her courtiers did. To Drake she was still the keen-minded woman who, like the jeweled silent birds he had seen in tropical jungles, sat in her palace, with enemies all about her alert and observant, and ready to seize her if she came within their grasp. He knew her waywardness to be half assumed, since to let an enemy know what he can count on is fatal. He had not much doubt of her action, but he must wait for her to give ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... after information. Frankly, I was somewhat disappointed with Chester. I had imagined its quaintness that of a genuine old country town and was not prepared for the modern city that surrounds its show-places. In the words of an observant English writer: "It seems a trifle self-conscious—its famous old rows carry a suspicion of being swept and garnished for the dollar-distributing visitor from over the Atlantic, and of being less genuine than they really are. ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... has the grave revealed its secrets to observant men? Dr. Donne sauntered about among graves, and saw a sexton turn up a skull. He examined it, found a nail in it, identified the skull, and had the murderess hung. She was safe from the sexton and the rest of the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... went to church, leading her young companion by the hand; both were in deep mourning, and yet the very least observant of the congregation remarked, that they had never seen Miss Bond look so happy as when, coming out after service, and finding that the wind had changed to the north-east, she took off her scarf in the church ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... leaves asked of the wind," he answered. "An observant eye is better than a yearning ear, and ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... to which it appealed. In the first place, no effort was made to prevent the recurrence of the disaster; in the second place, philanthropy of this type attempts to sweep back the tide of miseries created by unrestricted propagation, with the feeble broom of sentiment. As one of the most observant and impartial of authorities on the Far East, J. O. P. Bland, has pointed out: "So long as China maintains a birth-rate that is estimated at fifty-five per thousand or more, the only possible alternative to these visitations would be emigration ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... climbing the fence, mounted the levee and stood upon the brink of a wide and muddy river. Taking off his hat, the old man wiped the sweat from his face, then turned an observant eye upon the river, whose muddy waters were already lapping the boughs of the overhanging trees, and with a long-drawn breath exclaimed, ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... and authority and unity upon the letters of his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing, was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic, uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... rural France, and she had undertaken the journey purely as a lover of nature and art, not at all as a student of political economy, agriculture, or statistics. Peasant property was no more in her way than the Impressionist school of modern art in mine. But being keenly observant, and feeling, as any other member of the propertied class must do, aghast at the condition of rural affairs in England—vast tracts of cultivated land deteriorating into waste, agricultural wages lowered to nine shillings a week, vagrancy ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of Graham Spencer, all had gone fairly well. But with his installment in the mill, Rudolph's relations with Anna had changed. She had grown prettier—Rudolph was not observant enough to mark what made the change, but he knew that he was madder about her than ever. And she had assumed toward him an attitude of almost scornful indifference. The effect on his undisciplined ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... whether he is or is not. Unfortunate as we are, we have a thread in one, known as Jaratkaru. The unfortunate one has gone through the Vedas and their branches and is practising asceticism alone. He being one with soul under complete control, desires set high, observant of vows, deeply engaged in ascetic penances, and free from greed for the merits or asceticism, we have been reduced to this deplorable state. He hath no wife, no son, no relatives. Therefore, do we hang in this hole, our consciousness lost, like men having none to take care of them. If thou meetest ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... feeling, which dictated to the Christian knight a bold, blunt, and somewhat careless bearing, as one too conscious of his own importance to be anxious about the opinions of others, appeared to prescribe to the Saracen a style of courtesy more studiously and formally observant of ceremony. Both were courteous; but the courtesy of the Christian seemed to flow rather from a good humoured sense of what was due to others; that of the Moslem, from a high feeling of what was to be expected ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... admiral, smiling. "I'm not an observant man over such matters; in fact, I woke up only three months ago to find how blind I could be; but in your case I did have a few suspicions; for you ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... can be overdone. A great meeting, attended by five thousand people, was recently held in London to deal with the White Slave question. And I was greatly struck by the fact that one of the most experienced and observant of the speakers—the Rev. J. Ernest Rattenbury, of the West London Mission—declared with deep emotion and impressive emphasis that 'it is the girls who come from the sheltered homes who stand in the greatest peril.' Perhaps I shall render ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... everything—to being present in the fields, at the threshing-floor, at the kilns, at the wharf, at the freighting of barges and rafts, and at their conveyance down the river: wherefore even the lazy hands began to look to themselves. But this did not last long. The peasant is an observant individual, and Tientietnikov's muzhiks soon scented the fact that, though energetic and desirous of doing much, the barin had no notion how to do it, nor even how to set about it—that, in short, he spoke by the book rather than out of his personal knowledge. Consequently things ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... her in the first illustration, with a young woman in it, which they discover in the window. The one noticeable peculiarity in Mrs. Glenarm's purely commonplace and purely material beauty, which would have struck an observant and a cultivated man, was the curious girlishness of her look and manner. No stranger speaking to this woman—who had been a wife at twenty, and who was now a widow at twenty-four—would ever have thought of addressing ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... who were secretly endeavouring to make political capital of that new and immense motive power, that not yet available, and not very easily organised political power which was already beginning to move the masses here then, and already threatening, to the observant eye, with its portentous movement, the foundations of tyranny, the fact, too, that these men were understood to have made use of the stage unsuccessfully as a means of immediate political effect, are facts which lie on the surface ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... sovereign's curious eye, Parents and children, fine, fat, hopeful sprigs, All snuffling, squinting, grunting in their style, Appeared the brewer's tribe of handsome pigs: On which the observant man, who fills a throne, Declared the pigs were ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... this of Dickens, for all the Diplomatists, and a discerning public generally, are much struck with the Event at Custrin; and take to writing of it as news;—and "Mr. Ginkel," Dutch Ambassador here, an ingenious, honest and observant man, well enough known to us, has been out to sup with the Prince, next day; and thus reports of him to Dickens: "Mr. Ginkel, who supped with the Prince on Thursday last," day after the Interview, "tells me that his Royal Highness is ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his dark head towered above other heads in the throne room, it was observed even by those not usually observant, that never ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... mankind had their origin in prehistoric times, many of them existing then with little essential difference. Any one of them affords a lesson in the gradual elaboration of the simple. A step minute in itself leads on and on, and so all the practical arts are built up, a readier and more observant mind imitating and adapting the work of predecessors, as we imagined the first man making his first flint axe. The history of the plough goes back to the elongation of a bent stick. The wheel would arise from cutting out the middle of a trunk used as a roller. House architecture ...
— Progress and History • Various
... her eager criticism, shrewd, observant, often strangely to the point, aroused the attention of some of the bystanders; they smiled as the pretty child and the beautiful girl walked slowly by together. Judy's intelligent face was commented on; the pathetic, eager, ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... and sits down with admiration on your hat. He protects his mamma when he goes out with her, and scolds the dog, although he is very much afraid of him; all to be like papa. Have you caught him at meals with his large observant eyes fixed on you, studying your face with open mouth and spoon in hand, and imitating his model with an expression of astonishment and respect. Listen to his long gossips, wandering as his little ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... for themselves—those elegant guests;—they jested and sipped rich wines;—they pledged, and hoped, and loved, and promised, with never a thought of the morrow, on the night of the tenth of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-six. Observant parents were there, planning for the future bliss of their nearest and dearest;—mothers and fathers of handsome lads, lithe and elegant as young pines, and fresh from the polish of foreign university training;—mothers and fathers of splendid ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... own patrol saw you down there a week ago, Hervey; saw you run out of a candy store to follow a runaway horse. You know, Hervey, horses' tracks aren't the kind you're after. Those boys were observant. They were on their way to the post office. I heard them telling ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... often advisable for the author writing in the third person to restrict his point of view still further, and, foregoing absolutely the prerogative of omniscience, to limit himself to an attitude merely observant and entirely external to all the characters. In such a case the author wears, as it were, an invisible cap like that of Fortunatus, which permits him to move unnoticed among his characters; and he reports to us externally their looks, their actions, and their ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... said than done. Clambering from rock to rook, always observant and watchful, the resolute youth pursued his way. Suddenly, however, he stood still, and threw himself ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... he noticed something in Whittemore's face he had not observed before, a tenseness about the muscles of his mouth, a restlessness in his eyes, rigidity of jaw, an air of suppressed emotion which puzzled him. He was keenly observant of details, and knew that these things had been missing a short time before. The pleasure of their meeting that afternoon, after a separation of nearly two years, had dispelled for a time the trouble which he now saw ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... had said about me to Edmee; but it seemed to me that he might have insisted somewhat more on the good side of mine to which he had given a merely passing word, and which could not have escaped the notice of a man so observant as himself. I had determined, therefore, to be very cold and very proud in my bearing towards him. To this end I judged with a certain show of logic, that I ought to display great docility as long as the lesson lasted, and that immediately afterwards I ought to leave him with a very curt expression ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... than might have been expected. The action of political conventions, State and National, has been significant. If the articles on suffrage are vague as to principle, they are striking as the record of the conclusions of observant politicians in respect to the currents and tendencies of the public mind. They felt the need of saying something, and if they did it reluctantly, it is all the more significant. While then I can not be with you personally, I am with ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of State, which was laid before Parliament in due course. Few documents more thoroughly unofficial have ever appeared in a Blue Book. The excellence of the paper as a literary essay is conspicuous. But its chief value lies in the impression produced by South African politics upon a penetrating and observant mind trained under wholly different conditions. Froude would not have been a true disciple of Carlyle if he had felt or expressed much sympathy with the native race. He wanted them to be comfortable. For freedom he did not consider them fit. It was the Boers who really ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... loses much in the translation, I have given rather fully, as it shows an observant mind. The policy recommended was wise, and the deaths of the "senoga" and of the two men he had named, added to the destruction of their village, having all happened soon after, it is not wonderful that Sebituane followed implicitly the warning voice. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the accumulation of their hard industry, or their patient self-denial, can be distinguished at a glance from those who are receiving the proceeds of unexpected and unearned legacies. The first have a faded, anxious, almost disappointed look, while the second are sprightly, laughing, and observant of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... whole situation, some indefinite sympathy which unconsciously sought for an outlet—made her smile. Jacinth's smile was charming. Already to her thin young face it gave the roundness and bloom it wanted—every feature softened and the clear observant eyes grew sweet. ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... between men consists, in great measure, in the intelligence of their observation. The Russian proverb says of the non-observant man, "He goes through the forest and ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... of classification," Dennis explained. "In any case his overcoat was made in the States; the cut of the lapels is quite unmistakable. I knew an American who tried everywhere to get a coat cut like that over here, and failed. As to his being observant, you seem to have overlooked one important fact. There the man stands, apparently half asleep. Occasionally he displays a certain amount of life—tucks his papers more tightly under his arms, and so on. Now, the man ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... When Dingley Dell took their turn at the wickets their champions were Mr. Luffey and Mr. Struggles. The latter made a magnificent off-drive, and invited his colleague to "come along," with the result that the observant spectators applauded them for what was supposed to have been three sharp runs. But the umpires declared that there had been two short runs at each end—four in all. To what extent, if any, did this manoeuvre increase Mr. ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... way. I have decided to see the servants, and to search their thoughts and actions, Mr. Betteredge, instead of searching their wardrobes. Before I begin, however, I want to ask you a question or two. You are an observant man—did you notice anything strange in any of the servants (making due allowance, of course, for fright and fluster), after the loss of the Diamond was found out? Any particular quarrel among them? Any one of them not in his or her usual spirits? Unexpectedly out of temper, for instance? ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... my doubts." Then, explosively, "On my word, for three moderately intelligent boys you aren't very observant. I suppose you were too busy making things warm for your house-master to see what lay under your noses when you were in the ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... Lucindy, observant and sullen, kept herself informed of all their movements, and was continually having the blush brought to her cheek and the bitterness of comparison to her heart, as she noted the wide difference there was between herself and them. It never ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... leaves of a kind of hemp that grows in the hot climates. It is prepared, and I believe used, in all parts of the east, from Morocco to China. In Europe it is found to act very differently on different constitutions. Some it elevates in the extreme; others it renders torpid, and scarcely observant of any evil that may befal them. In Barbary it is always taken, if it can be procured, by criminals condemned to suffer amputation, and it is said, to enable those miserables to bear the rough operations of an unfeeling executioner, more than we Europeans can the keen knife of our most ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... out of your lap, and go away shaking your head, and looking so!—" and here the observant little creature attempted a childish imitation of the sad action and the strange, moody gestures with which he had put her down when he was retiring from the room—gestures and looks which the less quick eyes of her mother had failed ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... said Pen; "my companion here went through all that I did. He was keenly observant, and would be of great assistance to me if at any ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch So nightly toils the subject of the land; And why such daily cast of brazen cannon, And foreign mart for implements of war; Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week; What ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the circumstances were extended by each. They gave such information as possible through the Count, and declared that the Princess must die within a few hours. They now stood powerless by, very curious and observant of ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... somehow, been through all a sort of simplicity, a sort of quiet, so that I had not thought of the establishment and its operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs. Makely's far inferior scale of living; or else, what with my going about so much in society, I was ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts as I had been at first. But I was better qualified to judge of what I saw, and I had now a vivid sense of the costliness of Mrs. Strange's environment. There were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot; there were tens of thousands in the pictures ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... educated he commenced that course of patient and observant travel which was to render his name illustrious as a philosophic tourist and historian. The shores of the Hellespont, Scythia, and the Euxine Sea; the Isles of the AEgaean; Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Colchis, the northern parts of Africa, Ecbatana, and even Babylon were the objects of his unwearied ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... he looked down at her; but his smile conveyed anxiety rather than amusement to her observant eyes. "Oh, if things are said by Gershom, they generally mean hell," he responded. "Perhaps I'll find out Thursday night; there's to be a meeting then, and it looks as if somebody might make trouble." ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... character she formed by degrees some remote conception; he was Steel by name and steel by nature, as the least observant might discern, and the least witty remark; a grim inscrutability was his dominant note; he was darkly alert, mysteriously vigilant, a measurer of words, a governor of glances; and yet, with all his self-mastery and mastery of others, there were human traits that showed themselves ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... such a man be, and cause others to be! He should go through the world laughing, merry, observant, kind-hearted. He should love everything in the world, because his profession regards everything. With books of lighter literature (for I do not recommend the genteel auctioneer to meddle with heavy antiquarian and philological ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... interrupted by a rush and dash. Attention had been diverted for the moment from the prisoner to the one who was pleading for him and to him who held his fate in his hands. The observant Vesey saw the inevitable trend of events, and, taking advantage of the chance, was off like ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... health and leisure and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate? Shall Ambition and Avarice never sleep? Shall they never want objects on which to fasten? Shall they be so observant to discover, so acute to discern, so eager, so patient to pursue, and shall the Benevolence of Christians ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... perhaps, and suddenly lost my recollection of everything since my good fortune had been announced. Perhaps if I waited a little, things would be clearer to me again. Yet my dinner with old Elvesham was now singularly vivid and recent. The champagne, the observant waiters, the powder, and the liqueurs—I could have staked my soul it all happened ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... promise of amusement, looking involuntarily grave and almost embarrassed as if by the sight of something unfitting; while Lydgate, who had habitually an air of self-possessed strength, and a certain meditativeness that seemed to lie behind his most observant attention, was acting, watching, speaking with that excited narrow consciousness which reminds one of an animal with fierce eyes ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... when I washed before supper was top-heavy. It had two big coins at the top and sixpences and shillings beneath. Now it is one of my oddities that ever since I was a small boy I have arranged my loose coins symmetrically, with the smallest uppermost. That made me observant and led me to notice a second point. The English classics on the top of the chest of drawers were not in the order I had left them. Izaak Walton had got to the left of Sir Thomas Browne, and the poet Burns was wedged ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... exaggerated terms of his philosophical pretensions; whilst, in treating of Wordsworth, he points out with great skill the fallacy of some of his theories and the inconsistency of his practice. But whilst keenly observant of some of the failings of his friends, he reproduces others in even an exaggerated type. He shows to the full their narrow-minded hatred of the preceding century, of all forms of excellence which did not correspond to their favourite types, and of all speculation which did not lead to, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... devised and provided beforehand by Varvara Pavlovna! What charming knick-knacks appeared from various snug corners, what fascinating toilet-cases and coffee-pots, and how delightfully Varvara Pavlovna herself made the coffee in the morning! Lavretsky, however, was not at that time disposed to be observant; he was blissful, drunk with happiness; he gave himself up to it like a child. Indeed he was as innocent as a child, this young Hercules. Not in vain was the whole personality of his young wife breathing with ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... the planting of the acorn; scattered from the lap of some wandering wind! Nay, when our oak flowered, or put on its leaves (its glad Events), what shout of proclamation could there be? Hardly from the most observant a word of recognition. These things befell not, they were slowly done; not in an hour, but through the flight of days: what was to be said of it? This hour seemed altogether as the last was, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... absurd about wanting the close circle of just his old friends to be unbroken when he's home. Where is he to-day?" As she spoke Mrs. Cherry had looked at Caroline Darrah with a glance in which Phoebe detected a slight insolence and at which the major narrowed his observant eyes. ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... later in life president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain, but at the time of his American tour a young man of twenty-two. His journey in 1796-97 gave him a wide experience of stage, flatboat, and pack-horse travel, and his genial disposition, his observant eye, and his discriminating criticism, together with his comments on the commercial features of the towns and regions he visited, make his record particularly interesting and valuable to the historian. * Using Baily's journal as a guide, therefore, one can today journey with him across ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... eighty millions. Pamphleteers, historians and orators pronounced that now, at all events, our case was desperate. Yet the signs of increasing prosperity, signs which could neither be counterfeited nor concealed, ought to have satisfied observant and reflecting men that a debt of eighty millions was less to the England which was governed by Pelham than a debt of fifty millions had been to the England which was governed by Oxford. Soon war again broke ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... economy. For the proof of this, we would refer our readers, among other arguments more or less appropriate and powerful, to the tract already alluded to.[A] In all the external relations and visible arrangements of life, the Jews, during our Savior's ministry among them, seem to have been scrupulously observant of the institutions and usages of the "Old Dispensation." They stood far aloof from whatever was characteristic of Samaritans and Gentiles. From idolatry and slaveholding—those twin-vices which had always so greatly prevailed among the heathen—they seem at length, as ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... o'clock Joe quietly rose from his desk, took his hat, and unostentatiously walked out of the office. He punched the time clock gently so that it would attract the attention of only the most observant of clerks, and hurried away, feeling that this repeated dereliction was bound to bring him some notice, even if the first offense had not. But for some reason ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... guests who for several days filled both the manse and Tollman's house, were two who were not entirely beguiled by Conscience's gracious and buoyant demeanor. One pair of these observant eyes was violet blue and full of starry freshness. Intimate letters from Conscience, in the old days, had invested Stuart Farquaharson with a romantic guise for their possessor and Eben Tollman scarcely measured up to ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... prejudice and dislike. He was too clever, too keen-sighted and appreciative. Had he been indifferent toward her, and not so observant, she would have soon learned to like him and enjoy his society, for he had a bright, piquant way of talking, and was seldom at a loss for words. In fact, he had plenty of ideas, and was fast gaining more. One reason why Mildred shrank from him ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of the nineteenth century there were even to observant eyes no signs of the coming blast. The Act of Queen Anne, restoring Patronage, though long protested against, had been sullenly acquiesced in by the Church. Moderates and Evangelicals, though contending together in the several Church Courts, kept themselves carefully within ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... a bird story too," said an observant-looking boy; "but the kindness was done by birds, instead of by people. Last week when a bill-poster was pasting up some advertisements on our barn, a sparrow perched on the edge of the bucket, and got his feet and the tips of his wing-feathers all ...
— Master Sunshine • Mrs. C. F. Fraser
... why gold veins grow poorer as they descend into the earth; why whirlwinds rotate in opposite directions in the two hemispheres; why the earthenware vessels of the Indians are rounded at the bottom and require to be placed in a little stand—on all the varied matters that come under his observant eyes he has something interesting to say. You learn how the natives obtain sugar, palm-wine, and rubber; what is the use of the toucan's huge beak, and how plants secure the fertilisation of their flowers. You watch the tricks of the monkey, the humming-bird's ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... put my helm hard aport and the two ships met and rammed each other, port bow to port bow." There could have been no time to think and, for Eblis's commander on the bridge, none to gather information. But he had observant subordinates, and he writes—and I would humbly suggest that the words be made the ship's motto for evermore—he writes, "Those aft noted" that the enemy cruiser had certain marks on her funnel and certain ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... close-penetrating tyrant, as he had done with a generous inexperienced King, he thought an air of inexorable cruelty to the royalists must remove, or at least lull the suspicions of the serpent, who lay wrapped round in observant coil, ready to spring upon him. As to the feelings of those whom he persecuted, for the sake of prolonging his own worthless life and preserving his ill-acquired fortunes, he either entirely forgot that they had any, or considered that ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... other games which we simply mention without describing. There are three games played by the hands, which every observant foreigner long resident in Japan must have seen played, as men and women seem to enjoy them as much as children. In the Stone game, a stone, a pair of scissors, and a wrapping-cloth are represented. The stone signifies the clenched fist, ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... this personage without taking any notice of her, as Americans are wont to do under such circumstances; but presently the observant Katy noticed that every one else, as they went in or out of the room, addressed a bow or a civil remark to this lady. She quite blushed at the recollection afterward, as she made ready ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... to one and all versions with fierce attention, he repaired to his dinner and consumed it in a silence which his observant wife knew betokened affairs of unusual weight. But it was not until he finished his dessert and pushed back from table ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... was all; but to Annixter it was a revelation. Never more alive to his surroundings, never more observant, he suddenly understood. For the briefest lapse of time he and Hilma looked deep into each other's eyes, and from that moment on, Annixter knew that ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... from one of his influential countrymen; in the absence of his fair entertainers at their domestic duties, he extracted infinite satisfaction from Foo-Yup, the Chinese servant, who was particularly detached for his service. From his invalid coign of vantage at the window he was observant of all that passed upon the veranda, that al-fresco audience-room of The Lookout, and he was good-humoredly conscious that a great many eccentric and peculiar visitors were invariably dragged thither by Miss Macy, and goaded into characteristic exhibition ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... smilingly suggested, "stand for the circumstance of the Grand Duke leaving Paris for Cadiz which is—well, nearer to Puntal—and less observant than Paris." He laid another on the marble table-top with its sulphur head close to the first, so that the two radiated from a common center like spokes from a hub. "Regard that as a coincidence of the arrival of the Count Borttorff from the other ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... MALWOOD faithful at his post, but he, too, observant of the Truce. Everyone tired to death of dullest Session ever lived through, and chiefly anxious to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... behind her coffee-pot, while the gentlemen went back and forth between the two tables, bringing cups and cake and what else was needed for this "German cotillion," as Mr. Linden called it. During which interlude Miss Essie, after taking an observant view of Faith, gave her a significant private admonition, that "somebody" would not like her being there. Faith in vain endeavoured to get some light on this dark information; Miss Essie was startling but enigmatical, and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... a man of rather less than the usual stature and the usual weight, with a quick, observant, agreeable dark eye, a small quantity of thin dark hair, and a small mustache. He had been standing with his hands in his pockets; and when Eugenia looked at him he took them out. But he did not, like Mr. Brand, look evasively and urgently at their host. He met Eugenia's eyes; he appeared ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... she did not know him very well now. All the years hitherto she had joined in the general admiration of him shyly and from a distance, the pretty waiting-lady's attitude toward the dazzling young crown prince. She was observant, and so she could not fail to observe now the cordiality with which people of all sorts saluted him, the touch of deference in the greeting of not a few. He was scarcely thirty, but it would have been clear to a duller eye that he was already something of a personage. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... I quite understand that," rejoined Helmsley. "Present-day people like to think that God takes no interest whatever in His own creation. It's a more comfortable doctrine to believe that He is indifferent rather than observant. But, so far as I'm concerned, I don't go ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... author's wit must not blind us to the ripeness of his wisdom, nor the general playfulness of his O'Dowderies allow us to forget the ample evidence that underneath them lurks one of the most earnest and observant spirits of the present ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over again. He worked upon a principle of elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail, which the most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a process of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to recall; and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... everything au grand serieux, and to consider it. When other people were laughing she would be gravely observant, as if she were solving a problem; and she would sooner have thought of trying to discover what combination of molecules resulted in a joke, with a view to benefiting her species by teaching them how to produce jokes at will, than of trying to be witty herself. She had, too, a quite irritating trick ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... set down Root and Branch (ALLEN AND UNWIN), by R. ALLATINI, as the very clever first book of a very clever and observant writer of the (alleged) weaker sex. But I find the title-page gives two previous novels to her pen—I still guess a woman's hand. And I by no means withdraw the "clever." The characterisation of the various members of the Arenski family—the branches are better done than the root, old ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... hypocrisy!' exclaimed Ixion. 'It is not my forte. But if I began life anew, I would be more observant in ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... answered the American. "There are thousands of Jews in America as observant of the ordinances as the most pious in Kief. Yet it seems to me that a Jew can remain a Jew even if he neglect some of those ceremonials which have very little to do with Judaism pure and simple. Some are remnants of an oriental symbolism, others comparatively ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... of it; the nobleness of his family, and his own personal merit, procured him respect from all the world, as well as from his pupil. No quarrel happened: the earl was reclaimed, being always very observant of his governor. He left Paris, and passing down the Loire went to the south of France, received in all places by the governors of towns and provinces with great respect and uncommon marks of honour and distinction. From thence he went into ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... within three lengths of Brazen-nose when we bumped," says the all-observant Miller in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... twelve and thirteen: Edward the elder, but scarcely as tall as Bertie, and far slighter, with a grave reserved air, and rather thoughtful face; Bertie sturdy, gay, careless, and frank, with restless, observant blue eyes, and a somewhat unceremonious way of dealing with people and things. Eddie called him rough and boisterous, and gave way to him in everything, not at all because Bertie's will was the stronger, but that Eddie, unless very much interested, was too indolent to assert himself, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... is important to translate as adequately as possible the positive side of Mr. Abbey's activity. None to-day is more charming, and none helps us more to take the large, joyous, observant, various view of the business of art. He has enlarged the idea of illustration, and he plays with it in a hundred spontaneous, ingenious ways. "Truth and poetry" is the motto legibly stamped upon his pencil-case, for if he has on the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... have I left thee? Where, Euryalus, shall I follow thee? What clue Shall trace the mazes of this silvan snare, The tangled path unravelling?" Back he flew, Picking his footsteps with observant view, And roamed the silent brushwood. Steeds he hears, The noise, the signs of foemen who pursue. A moment more, and, bursting on his ears, There came a shout, and lo, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... to reach the enemy, run along the ground and, scaling his legs, inflict punishment on the first convenient patch of unprotected skin. Detachments muster in blobs, fall in a mass to the ground, and charge. If one of these forlorn hopes happens to be successful, the observant man will retire with little ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... thought the lad, and he stepped quickly over the leaves, to throw himself down close to Archie as if he were asleep, but keeping one half-closed eye fully observant of ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... to the other, amused, observant, and perceiving that they were all under that form of shyness which brings up family wit ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... lips is nay simply, yet we must not take that word as the whole locution, but as a mere text, to which the situation of the speaker and the matter spoken of form a commentary, legible to any observant eye. The word is an annotated text; nay in the body of the page, with secrets apart inscribed in the margin. The adequate utterance is the whole page, text and gloss together; that speech answers to the thought in the speaker's mind; therefore ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... feet rested on the edge of the brass fender. A nimbus of smoke surrounded his swarthy features, his shock of black hair, his large, rather morose, dark eyes. He was a man of about twenty-five, with an almost horribly intelligent face, so observant that he tried people, so acute that he frightened them. His intellect was never for a moment at rest, unless in sleep. He devoured himself with his own emotions, and others with his analysis of theirs. His mind was always ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Phoenix, thoughtfully, 'it didn't speak, but I gathered my information from something in its manner. I was always a singularly observant bird.' ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... to meet, say, Mrs. Bellward, if the gentleman has got a wife, or his mother. Keep out of a strong light; don't show your profile more than you can help, and remember that a woman is a heap more observant than ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... ourselves have." They build retiring places over the water, "but their language is quite unlicensed."[1500] In Micronesia reserve as to natural functions is lacking.[1501] Amongst central African negroes the king alone had a hut for retirement. "The heathen negroes are generally more observant of decorum in this respect than any Mohammedan."[1502] In Lhasa, Tibet, there are no latrines either public or private. The street is used.[1503] The Andamanese women are modest and very careful about decency of dress ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman, travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest—nobody, herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which. The rest of the party were of the usual materials: travellers on business, and travellers for pleasure; officers from India ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... I am, by nature, not overly observant; and in those moments, when I stood out there beside the pool, I think I came most forcibly to appreciate how little I habitually observe that which is not readily apparent. An incident now occurred to bring it home to me; and, quite ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... enlightenment of others, he is accepted as strong, sounds and wise; but let him add to practical sagacity a love of poetry and some skill in the practice of it; let him be not only honest and trustworthy, but genuinely religious; let him be not only keenly observant and exact in his estimate of trade influences and movements, but devoted to the study of some science, and there goes abroad the impression that he is superficial. It is written, apparently, in the modern, and especially in the American, consciousness, ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... more significant is the poet's development in the conception of character. In no other way, probably, does an observant mind change and expand so much as in this. For the infant all men fall into two very simple categories:—people whom he likes {91} and people whom he doesn't. The boy of ten has increased these ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Grayson to lead the way, and he noticed that he chose a course that did not take them back to the hotel. Moreover, he did not speak again for a long time, and Harley walked on by his side, silent, too, but thoughtful and keenly observant. He saw that his friend was troubled, and he divined the great struggle that was going on in his mind. Whether he could do it if he were in the place of the candidate he was unable to say, and he was glad that the decision did not lie ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... imposed design and authority and unity upon the letters of his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing, was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic, uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's luxuriance ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... other, was highly characteristic. Chingachgook, a noble, tall, handsome and athletic young Indian warrior, first examined his rifle with care, opening the pan to make sure that the priming was not wet, and, assured of this important fact, he next cast furtive but observant glances around him, at the strange habitation and at the two girls. Still he spoke not, and most of all did he avoid the betrayal of a ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... did not see Miss Moore's contemptuous smile, or Mrs. Davis's grave glance. One of the pitiful things about jealous people is that they don't know how amusing—or else boring—or else irritating—they are to an observant and entirely unsympathetic world! Eleanor had no idea that the whole tableful of people knew she was jealous, and found her ridiculous. She only knew that Maurice seemed to like them—which meant that her society "wasn't ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... Doctor's talks, many of which I can but barely mention, had opened my eyes a little to the possibility of accurate inferences, that is to say, his philosophy of cause and effect, or purpose, as he liked better to call it, had been urged upon me so frequently and so profoundly that I had become more observant; he had made me think of the relations of things. Philosophy, he had said, should be carried into everyday life and into the smallest matters; that was what made a good fisherman, a good farmer, a good merchant, and a good soldier, provided, ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... such of its contents as were indispensable for the night. There was the usual parade of trunks and writing-desks, and portfolios, and dressing-boxes, and those other oppressive conveniences which burden a comfortable man. The observant loiterers about the inn door, wrapped up in great dirt-colored cloaks, with only a hawk's eye uncovered, made many remarks to each other on this quantity of luggage that seemed enough for an army. And the domestics of ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... longer able to converse, and very soon he found it difficult to sit still. Observant of his face and movements, the elder brother proposed that they should resume their walk together, and forth they went. But both were now taciturn, and they did not walk far ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... flustered, but it struck me that he overdid the thing. He waited on Mr. Rickman as if he positively loved him. That won't do, you know. He'll be raising fatal hopes in the bosom of the Savage Keith. Let us hope that Mr. Rickman is not observant." ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... impunity—the poor patient will not. That is, the patient will suffer, although neither he nor the inflictor of the injury will attribute it to its real cause. It will not be directly traceable, except by a very careful observant nurse. The patient will often not even mention what ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... Then, explosively, "On my word, for three moderately intelligent boys you aren't very observant. I suppose you were too busy making things warm for your house-master to see what lay under your noses when you were ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... further than the Empress intended that reprisals for lese-majeste should go. Still, she was curious to see how her strange acquaintance would bear himself under the test. She watched him from the corner of an observant eye. Would he be disconcerted by the brusqueness of the attack? Would he lose his temper? Would he cheapen himself to answer in kind? What would ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... they may not unnaturally be expected to be of a peculiar type. They live under peculiar conditions of descent, of climate, of government, and are hence very different from their European sisters. No testimony is more concurrent than that of observant foreigners on this point. More nervous, more sensitive, more rapidly developed in thinking power, they scarcely need to be stimulated so much as restrained; while, born of mixed races, and reared in this grand meeting-ground of all nations, they gain at home, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... sundown when Michael and Millicent got back to the camp. Abdul had come a little way to meet them. To an observant eye, the calm of his Eastern countenance showed some anxiety. Millicent did not see it. Michael was riding on ahead when Abdul met him. Abdul turned his mule and rode by ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... rose as they approached, and was immediately recognised by the Bossnowls as an old acquaintance, and saluted with the exclamation of "Captain Fitzchrome!" The interchange of salutations between Lady Clarinda and the Captain was accompanied with an amiable confusion on both sides, in which the observant eyes of Miss Crotchet seemed to read the recollection of ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... after a while there were several young men living there, pupils of Mr. Butt, so that there was often a large party. The two little children were never allowed to interrupt, but had to sit and listen, "whether willing or not"; and in this way the shrewd and observant Mary picked up endless scraps of knowledge while still very young. She tells us a good deal about her education in these early days. "It was the fashion then for children to wear iron collars round the neck, with a backboard ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... correct reply at once to all the voluminous questions that he put to me on these occasions, but he meant to make me observant and a ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... the Honourable Hilary thoughtfully; and although the gubernatorial candidate was not an observant man, he was suddenly struck by the fact that the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the placid yellow face of Shaik Tsin appeared, as if materialized bodily out of the shadows. With folded arms he waited, dispassionately observant. Presently Prince Victor nodded to him over the head of the girl. Immediately the Chinaman moved round her chair and, employing both hands, in one instant switched off the hooded bulb and ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... wonder therefore, if Voice be natural to a Man, though he be Deaf, because Deaf Men Laugh, Cry out, Hollow, Weep, Sigh, and Waile, and express the chief Motions of the Mind, by the Voice which is to an Observant Hearer, various, yea, they hardly ever signifie any thing by Signs, but they mix with it some Sound or Voice. Thus the Exclamations of almost all Nations are alike; [a] is the Sound of him chiefly, who rejoyceth; [i] of him who is in Indignation, and Angry; ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... Cassion is not observant," returned the younger man pleasantly, "as I accompanied the Sieur de la Salle in his attempt to ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... then, to increase your vocabulary. Of course you must become observant of words and inquisitive about them. For words are like people: they have their own particular characteristics, they do their work well or ill, they are in good odor or bad, and they yield best service to him who loves ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... was really seizing an opportunity and fixing an observant look on Grandcourt, who now for the first time, turned his eyes toward his companion, but slowly and without speaking until he had given two long luxuriant puffs, when he said, perhaps in a lower tone than ever, but with a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... waist; sooty black was her hair, with a broad forehead, perpendicular but low; she had a pair of very fine, dark, lustrous eyes, and no other good feature—unless I may so call her teeth, which were very white and even. Her face was rather short, and swarthy as a gipsy's; observant and sullen too; and she did not move, only eyed us negligently from under her dark lashes as we drew near. Altogether a not unpicturesque figure, with a dusky, red petticoat of drugget, and tattered jacket of bottle-green stuff, with short sleeves, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... footsteps. But the fence is too high. Then he turns his back upon the direction in which you are departing, and runs around the yard. He is frantic with affection and desire. But he is not blind. He is observant. He is looking for a hole under the fence, or through the fence, or for a place where the fence is not so high. He sees a dry-goods box standing against the fence. Presto! He leaps upon it, goes over the barrier, and tears down the street to overtake ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... observant Betsy on re-entering the kitchen, "dey'se a man in yonda, look like he gwine eat somebody up. I was fur gittin' 'way ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... freckle-faced little girl with light bobbed hair and incredibly thin arms and hands. Nina Edmonds talked incessantly and, after a few ineffectual attempts to carry on a conversation with his aunt, the young doctor devoted himself to his dinner, keeping, however, an observant eye on the guest and on Rosemary who listened in evident fascination to the steady stream of words. He had a call to make, immediately after dinner and was surprised and distinctly annoyed when he returned at half-past ten to find Nina and Rosemary still talking animatedly, their arms around ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... alone is enough to impress it forever upon the observant mind. Its rich, deep, perfect splendor is a constant surprise. One steps from his hotel, not thinking of the Lake—the blue of it rises through the trees, over the rocks, everywhere, with startling vividness. Surely ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... guard in a way that gained him an advantage. Experts in the art of killing, know that, of two antagonists, the ablest takes the "inside of the pavement,"—to use an expression which gives the reader a tangible idea of the effect of a good guard. That pose, which is in some degree observant, marks so plainly a duellist of the first rank that a feeling of inferiority came into Max's soul, and produced the same disarray of powers which demoralizes a gambler when, in presence of a master ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... was immediately assured by the observant Jack. "All the same it was a smart trick, and somebody's bound to be hauled over the coals on account of ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... grateful affection—touching, because real. His handsome face, so like Amelie's, was peculiarly so when it expressed the emotions habitual to her; and the pleasure both felt in the presence of Pierre brought out resemblances that flashed fresh on the quick, observant eye of Pierre. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... had listened to this conversation with an air of shrewd, observant gravity; and she still kept her lips tightly compressed, as if determined fully to ascertain her longitude and ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Whitehall. He was small and thin, and possessed a pair of extraordinarily bright and intelligent brown eyes, which saw a good deal more of what happened around him than perhaps any other eyes within a radius of a mile from where he sat. He was, in other words, observant to a very high degree; and, what was more remarkable, he knew how to use his powers of observation. There was not a criminal in the length and breadth of the country who did not wonder uneasily whether he had really left the scene of his crime as devoid of clues as he imagined, when ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... end of a sentence, as though addressing a meeting. When they met Emma, it was always with a little startled look of surprise, followed by something that bordered on disapproval. Emma, the keenly observant, watching them, felt vaguely uncomfortable. She tried to be politely interested in what they had to say, but she found her thoughts straying a thousand miles away to the man whom she loved and who loved ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... all the twice-born(29) train. Forth to the woods he fared to meet His brother, fell before his feet, And cried, "Thy claim all men allow: O come, our lord and king be thou." But Rama nobly chose to be Observant of his sire's decree. He placed his sandals(30) in his hand A pledge that he would rule the land: And bade his brother turn again. Then Bharat, finding prayer was vain, The sandals took and went away; Nor in Ayodhya would he stay. But turned to Nandigrama, where He ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... a bench in one of the city parks led him to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to persuade the city editor of one of the daily journals that he possessed an observant mind and a ready pen, and that he could "do good work for your paper, sir, as a reporter." This, then, he did, standing at a most unnatural angle between the editor and the window to conceal the ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... whose doings in my absence pulled at my curiosity and keyed my interest to breaking point. But if you think that I tore open those envelopes and greedily absorbed their contents the moment they were put into my hands, you have never been a conductor or even an observant passenger on a "pleasure yacht." When the letters arrived I was engaged in persuading breakfast-lingerers (they of the eggs-and-bacon habit, who ought never to leave their peaceful English homes) that it would give them more real pleasure to be first ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... has sworn, oaths sworn, all falsehoods. He at a time deceived me when he should have been of all oaths most observant." ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... Labour is indeed, from one point of view, little else than the correlative of what has been happening to the more prosperous classes in the community. They have lost their self-discipline, their gravity, their sense of high aims, they have become the victims of their advantages and Labour, grown observant and intelligent, has discovered itself and declares itself no longer subordinate. Just what powers of recovery and reconstruction our system may have under these circumstances the decades immediately before us ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... light to visit her face "from the right or from the left" when her portrait was a-painting. She was an observant woman, and liked to be lighted from the front. It is a light from the right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows. And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... is said that when the individual referred to first presented himself en militaire to his wife and little daughter, the latter, after gazing at him for a few minutes, turned to her mother, and exclaimed: "Why, Ma, that's not a real soldier—it's Pa!" Equally observant was another youngster, who was sent by his parent to take a letter to the post-office and pay the postage on it. The boy returned highly elated, and said: "Father, I seed a lot of men putting letters in a little place; and when no ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... herself they were a splendid spur. The young girl copied her manners, her gait, and her vocabulary. She watched her own conversation to see that she did not say "have went" and "those kind"; she became observant of the state of her finger-nails; if she had to lace her shoes with twine string, she blackened the string with soot from the under side of the stove lids, and polished her shoes from the ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... in silk pyjamas of very excellent quality, swung himself out of the bunk and sat upon the side of it. The captain was an observant man and of somewhat luxuriant tastes himself, and he fully appreciated the texture and quality of the suspected man's night apparel. "This sounds remarkably interesting," Jocelyn said. "Very kind of you, Captain, I am sure, to come and tell ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in its heart to treat them as brethren and to feel toward them as brethren. Its protest against what it regards as their errors and defects is nowise weakened by the most unreserved manifestations of respect and good will as toward fellow-Christians. Thus it comes to pass that the observant traveler from other countries, seeking the distinctive traits of American social life, "notes a kindlier feeling between all denominations, Roman Catholics included, a greater readiness to work together for common charitable aims, than between Catholics ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Mall, through the park, out at Buckingham House, and on to Chelsea, a little beyond the church (5,748 steps), he says, in less than an hour, which was leisurely walking even for the contemplative and observant dean. Smollet laid a scene of his "Humphrey Clinker" in Chelsea, where he lived ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the husks of oats, and who were seen picking those husks, like chickens, from amidst dust and cinders, [683] Yet, even under such disadvantages, the natural fertility of the country, the rich green of the earth, the bays and rivers so admirably fitted for trade, could not but strike the King's observant eye. Perhaps he thought how different an aspect that unhappy region would have presented if it had been blessed with such a government and such a religion as had made his native Holland the wonder of the world; how endless a succession of pleasure houses, tulip gardens and dairy farms would have ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... labor in the formation and growth of the poor discalced Augustinians, the first provincial [i.e., Fray Joan de San Geronimo] gave a heroic end by beginning the very observant province of San Nicolas [26] de Tolentino, in the islands adjacent to Asia ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... the doors of death being set wide open, and the door of birth almost closed. Thus, in the half-year ending July 1888 there were twelve deaths and but one birth in the district of the Hatiheu. Seven or eight more deaths were to be looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel, the observant gendarme, knew of but one likely birth. At this rate it is no matter of surprise if the population in that part should have declined in forty years from six thousand to less than four hundred; which are, once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the estimated figures. And ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who knew Maggie Oliphant, but did not know Prissie, was observant of the silent young stranger through all the delights of her pleasant talk. Almost imperceptibly she got Prissie to say a word or two. She paused when she saw a question in Prissie's eyes, and her timid and gentle words were listened to with deference. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... rigid preparation. In each culture province the Indians studied the heavenly bodies. The Arctic peoples regulated their lives by the long day and night in the year; among the tribes in the arid region the place of sunrise was marked on the horizon for each day; the tropical Indians were not so observant, but they worshipped the sun-god above all. The Mayas had a calendar of 360 days, with intercalary days; this solar year was intersected by their sacred year of twenty weeks of thirteen days each, and these assembled ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... empire, chanced on a certain occasion to be stopping at Bussora. And one evening, disguised, as was his wont, as a merchant, and, as usual, accompanied only by his faithful Grand Vizier, Giafer, he strolled through the bazaars silent and observant. Meeting with nothing worthy of arresting his particular attention, he wandered on until he came at length to some very narrow and mean lanes near the waterside. In one of these, and when passing the door of a low caravanserai, or public-house, frequented chiefly by sailors, they noticed some ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... Sorrento was doubtless not the only visit across the bay. Behind Naples along the ridge of Posilipo,[2] below which Vergil was later buried, in the mountains about Camaldoli, and behind Puteoli all the way to Avernus—a country which the poet had roamed with observant eyes—there could have been nothing but shepherd country. Here, then, are the crags and waterfalls and grottoes that Vergil describes in ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Fabians. Yet what a difference may be detected in Bluebooks on the selfsame subject, and what an exciting hide-and-seek for souls we may there enjoy! Behind one we catch sight of the cautiously official mind, obsequious to established power, observant of accepted fictions, contemptuous of zeal, apprehensive of trouble, solicitous for the path of least resistance. Behind another we feel the stirring spirit that no promotion will subdue, pitiless ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... patient's forehead and gently presses the latter's eyelids with his thumb and forefinger. As soon as the patient shows signs of weariness, he carefully gets up, takes a seat next to the patient and continues carefully observant of the latter's behavior and expression of countenance. He makes note of everything that shows itself and rouses the patient after about a quarter of an hour, unless the latter awakes spontaneously. Now he talks over with him the material which has been procured and then has the patient go ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... pretty fruitful, for they had all children, more or less: I think the cook's mate's wife was big of her sixth child; and the mothers were all a good sort of well-governed, quiet, laborious women, modest and decent, helpful to one another, mighty observant and subject to their masters, I cannot call them husbands; and wanted nothing but to be well instructed in the Christian religion, and to be legally married; both which were happily brought about afterwards by my ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... their demands the better will be the supply with which the drama will respond. This being not only so, but seen to be so, the stage is no longer proscribed. It is no longer under a ban. Its members are no longer pariahs in society. They live and bear their social part like others—as decorously observant of all that makes the sweet sanctities of life—as gracefully cognizant of its amenities—as readily recognized and welcomed as the members of any other profession. Am I not here your grateful ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... quickly to her mind, with the plain living, to her share of which she had been made a thousand times welcome; while by this richer house, of which she was also heir, such rightful trinkets and treasures had been withheld. But at the next minute she could meet Miss Prince's observant eyes without displeasure, and wisely remembered that she herself had not been responsible for the state of affairs, and that possibly her aunt had been as wronged and insulted and beaten back as she complained. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Wallace only, the object of my search, was present to my fancy. Pervaded with remembrance of the Hadwins; of the agonies which they had already endured; of the despair which would overwhelm the unhappy Susan when the death of her lover should be ascertained; observant of the lonely condition of this house, whence I could only infer that the sick had been denied suitable attendance; and reminded, by the symptoms that appeared, that this being was struggling with the agonies of death; a sickness of the heart, more insupportable than ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... Missouri Compromise, and who gave you, four years ago, full warning that their growing strength would probably result as it has resulted, have carried the late election; but I did not suppose that would disturb the equanimity of this body. I did suppose that every man who was observant of the signs of the times might well see that things would result as they have resulted. Nor do I understand now that anything growing out of that election is the cause of the present ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... unfounded, that these cold pulpit moralities were in a great measure the recoil from Methodist extravagances. But far more generally, as the century advanced, Methodism promoted the beneficial change which had already been noted in the case of Secker. The more zealous and observant of the Clergy could not fail to learn a valuable lesson from the wonderful power over the souls of men which their Methodist fellow-workmen—the irregulars of the Church—had acquired. And independently ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... view either way; Agnes was fair, slight and small-featured with observant grey eyes and a good deal of detached humour. Since the incubation of his first unsuccessful play, he had argued out every character and situation with her; when feminine psychology was in dispute, her ruling was ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... should he keep silence on such an occasion? No one could know the good qualities of Cassiodorus so well or so intimately as Cassiodorus himself, and accordingly the Quaestor sets forth, with all the rhetoric of which he had such an endless supply, the virtues and the accomplishments which his observant eye has discovered in himself, the new Praetorian Prefect. Such a course would certainly not be often pursued by a modern statesman, but there is a pleasing ingenuousness about it which to some minds will be more attractive than our present methods, the "inspired" ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... children among this race is marvellously precocious, perhaps from the habit of having intrusted to them, at so early an age, the toils and responsibilities of middle age. Indeed, in conversing with Taee, I felt as if talking with some superior and observant man of my own years. I asked him if he could form any estimate of the number of communities into which the race of the ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... The study of theologians more considerable and even more typically conservative than Liddon does not confirm the description of religious intolerance given in good faith, but in serious ignorance, by a disputant so acute, so observant and so candid as Huxley. Something hid from each other's knowledge the devoted pilgrims in two great ways of thought. The truth may be, that naturalists took their view of what creation was from Christian men of science who naturally ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... were peculiarly observant of the defective modes of conveyance then in use. Thus, one Don Manoel Gonzales, a Portuguese merchant, who travelled through Great Britain, in 1740, speaking of Yarmouth, says, "They have a comical way of carrying people all over the town and from the seaside, for six pence. ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... rested upon his ear too frequently when reading for the purpose of criticism other works of mine. He declared in his paper that Nina Balatka was by me, showing I think more sagacity than good nature. I ought not, however, to complain of him, as of all the critics of my work he has been the most observant, and generally the most eulogistic. Nina Balatka never rose sufficiently high in reputation to make its detection a matter of any importance. Once or twice I heard the story mentioned by readers who did not ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... she betrayed somehow a barbaric taste for color in the dull ruddy hue of her dress, which was subdued with black braid, yet she looked quite a well-bred woman. All the same, her whole appearance gave an observant onlooker the idea that she would be more at home in a scanty robe and glittering with rudely wrought ornaments of gold. Perhaps Peru, where she came from, suggested the comparison, but Lucy's thoughts flew back to an account of the Virgins of the Sun, which the Professor had once described. ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... expression of his understanding of arrangements, etc. In it all, the essential thing is to bring him out in some kind of expression; both for the sake of the improved balance it gives himself, and as an indication to the observant teacher of his progress and of the next step to be ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... Had she been more observant, she would have wondered at the intense stillness of the bazaar, which, no matter at what hour of the night, is full of little sounds; the song of a woman, or her laugh, or her cry; the crack of a whip; the baying ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... satisfied with his son's progress in Latin, he got leave for him to enter, as was the custom, the house of cardinal Morton as a sort of page. Thomas was then about twelve, quick and observant, and though fond of joking, good-tempered and prudent, taking care to hurt the feelings of nobody. Morton was both a clever and a learned man, a good speaker and excellent lawyer, and the king, Henry VII., frequently ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... that the water of the aqueducts (formae) is being diverted to turn mills and water gardens—a thing which would not be suffered even in the country districts. Even in redressing this wrong we must be observant of law; and therefore if it should be found that those who are doing this can plead thirty years' prescription, they must be bought off, but the misuser must cease. If the diversion is of less ancient date[298], it must of course be at once stopped ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... tongue, brisket, and tenderloin of the two cows, while fresh, these being the tenderest and best parts of the buffalo, they added the rest of the meat to their stores in the Annex. As they had done already in several cases, they jerked it, a most useful operation that observant Dick had learned when they ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know that, Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me unsympathetic—but don't you think we must sooner or later be thinking of what's to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr Bethany as to the wisdom of hushing ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... business man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than intakes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men—I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures—without marvelling at their ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Giray, with downcast eye, As though some spell in sorrow bound him, His slavish courtiers thronging nigh, In sad expectance stood around him. The lips of all had silence sealed, Whilst, bent on him, each look observant, Saw grief's deep trace and passion fervent Upon his gloomy brow revealed. But the proud Khan his dark eye raising, And on the courtiers fiercely gazing, Gave signal to them to begone! The chief, unwitnessed and alone, Now yields him to his bosom's ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors
... stumbled across the shingle towards the open shed which marks the landing-place of the only ferry across the Ebro that Saragossa possesses. The ferry-boat was moored to the landing-stage. It is a high-prowed, high-sterned vessel, built on Viking lines, from a picture the observant must conclude, by a landsman carpenter. It swings across the river on a wire rope, with a running tackle, by the force of the stream and the aid of a ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... all dying to make a laugh about the equerries " wanting the ladies ; " and Colonel Fairly began ; but the gravity of my behaviour soon quieted him. Mr. Hagget was content to be observant of a new person ; General Harcourt scarce ever speaks but from necessity; and Major Price was as grave ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... seldom to write: their hushed tenderness over all this was like a religion, and was also an attributive honour, to fall away from which was a form of treachery. This wasn't the way people usually felt in London, she knew; but strenuous ardent observant girl as she was, with secrecies of sentiment and dim originalities of attitude, she had already made up her mind that London was no treasure-house of delicacies. Remembrance there was hammered thin— ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... and Margaret Ellison, and certainly no one made a fuss over him on account of it. Why should anybody make a hero of a young fellow just because he is not quite sure of himself in crossing the street, and because his mouth twitches? Boy scouts are both observant and patriotic, but they could not see that there was anything missing about Tom. All they had noticed was that in resuming his duties at the office he had seemed to be drifting away from them—from the troop. And when he came on Friday ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... attached to this church are the state archives of Venice. We did not see them, but they are said to number millions of documents. "They are the records of centuries of the most watchful, observant and suspicious government that ever existed—in which every thing was written down and nothing spoken out." They fill nearly three hundred rooms. Among them are manuscripts from the archives of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mode, sometimes art. Just now the latter is in the ascendant, though, as a rule, only in that inferior phase which has not reached the "concealment of art"—the point where extremes meet and the perfection of artifice presents all the appearance of artlessness. No one of an observant turn of mind, who is accustomed to the sight of English maids and matrons, can deny that making-up, as at present practiced, partakes of the amateurish element. Impossible reds and whites grow still ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... the ardent, passionate, romantic epistles recalling the fervid style and thought of the Nouvelle Hlose. They are substantial letters, concise and interesting, such as a good husband might write after ten years of marriage, but not at all a lover's letters. Josephine, who was quite observant, must have noticed the difference, but she had enough tact and prudence to avoid complaint. 1805 was not 1796; Napoleon still loved Josephine, but from habit, gratitude, and a sense of duty, not with mad passion. He paid ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... face, resting lightly on the palm of one white hand, while the other supports the elbow—a position which gives to her countenance a keen, enquiring expression which is very marked. Standing thus in repose, and yet keenly observant, was Florence Nightingale—that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... prove very good, and are very devout and observant in their religion; for only the desire for salvation incites them to adopt our religion, so that there are many Christians in Japon. Accordingly they return freely, and without opposition, to their own country. At most there are about five hundred Japanese of this nation in Manila, for they ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... Latitudinarians and Socinians. An acute controversialist, skilled in the critical knowledge of Scripture, thoroughly versed in the annals of primitive antiquity, he was an opponent not lightly to be challenged. A devoted adherent of the English Church, scrupulously observant of all its rites and usages, and convinced as of 'a certain and evident truth that the Church of England is in her doctrine, discipline, and worship, most agreeable to the primitive and apostolical institution,'[61] his only idea of improvement and reform in Church matters was to remove ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... in Kensal Green. The clergyman appeared, read the service, and went away again. A few minutes ended it all. When the undertaker and his men had also departed, she sat down on a bench near to watch the sexton filling up the grave—Tom's grave. She was very quiet, and none but a closely observant person watching her face could have penetrated into the truth of what your impulsive characters, always in the extremes of mirth or misery, never understand about quiet people, that "still waters ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... the encroachment of his rule upon that old, that true England whose strength and virtue were so differently manifested. This fair broad land of the lovely villages signifies little save to the antiquary, the poet, the painter. Vainly, indeed, should I show its beauty and its peace to the observant foreigner; he would but smile, and, with a glance at the traction-engine just coming along the road, indicate the direction ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... them all, and some were even willing to go the length of saying that it represented more, and stood for dirty, drivelling, desperate, and a few other choice words which it is quite unnecessary to mention. Only a few, and these were among the knowing and peculiarly observant ones of Gorman's intimates, said that "D" stood for "deep." But then, many of those who thus pronounced their opinion, were comparatively worthless characters, given to scandal and slander; so the reader must not allow himself to be biassed too ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... Flaming Flint), a title explained by the frontispiece, which represents a flinty heart glowing under the lightning stroke of God's call. Vaughan's chief traits are a very fine and calm philosophic-religious spirit and a carefully observant love of external Nature, in which he sees mystic revelations of God. In both respects he is closely akin to the later and greater Wordsworth, and his 'Retreat' has the same theme as Wordsworth's famous 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality,' the idea namely that children ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... good beginning is often made, and a habit initiated, which, if persevered in, very shortly exercises a most salutary influence on the entire domestic condition of the family. The observant mother is quick to observe the effects of this new practice upon the happiness of the home, and in course of time, as the younger children grow up and earn money, she encourages them to follow the elder boy's example. She herself takes them by the hand, leads them to the Penny Bank, and accustoms ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... task as soon as possible; but always to hold the other's attention, to permit his brain no chance to wander from the subject to any other. But the fellow seemed now to have become as tractable as before he had been sullen, stubborn; gave his version in his own vernacular, always keenly attentive, observant of the other's every motion. His strength had apparently returned; he seemed little the worse for his late encounter. At length came an interval; just for an instant John Steele's eyes shut; the fingers that had held the pen closed on the edge of the table. A quick passing ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... the world of to-day owes to that fore-world, in which man by skill, valour, and well-directed strength first replenished and subdued the earth. Our prehistoric fathers may have been savages, but they were clever and observant ones. They founded agriculture by the discovery and development of seeds whose origin is now unknown. They tamed and harnessed their animal antagonists, and sent them down to us as ministers, instead of rivals in the fight for life. Later on, when the claims of luxury added themselves to those ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... into those we hate, because annoyance fixes our thought on them to probe. We cannot keep our minds off them. "Why do they do it?" we snarl, and wondering why, we find out their character. Gourlay was not an observant man, but every man is in any man somewhere, and hate to-night driving his mind into Wilson, helped him to read him like an open book. He recognized with a vague uneasiness—not with fear, for Gourlay did not know what it meant, but with ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... one direction her wisdom proved scant. She presumed too much on her insignificance. She was a "study," the gossiping circle at Frowenfeld's used to say; and any observant hearer of her odd aphorisms could see that she herself had made a life-study of herself and her conditions; but she little thought that others—some with wits and some with none—young hare-brained Grandissimes, Mandarins ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... he shows his handsome dark eyes and his saucy smile. The men like him as much as the women do, he has such a ready, amusing tongue, and he never says a spiteful word; so that more than one of the keen, observant poultry-sellers standing beside their baskets near Marie's stall have commented on the scowl with which for full five minutes Leon Roussel has regarded Nicolas. Leon Roussel is a middle-sized, in no way remarkable-looking person, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... soaring lines; the great organ, the rich stall-work, and the beautiful fields with their great elms—all this gave him a dim delight. He was taken to school by his father, who was full of affection, hope, and anxiety. But it seemed to Hugh, with the curiously observant power that he already possessed, though he could not have put it into words, that his father, rather than himself, was experiencing the emotion that it would have been appropriate for him to have felt. His father was disappointed that Hugh did not seem more conscious of membership, of the dignity ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... while Giuditta held it open for her, and in the passage she was met by the one-eyed woman. But she was more unnerved and less observant than Bosio had been, and she did not notice the extraordinary resemblance between the colour of the woman's one eye and that of Giuditta's two. She descended the stairs slowly, feeling dizzy at the turnings, but steadying herself as ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... back and sides of his head; his forehead was so large it seemed to overbalance the rest of his face, which had, indeed, lost its natural contour by the absence of all the teeth. The eyes absolutely gleamed with intelligence; so keen, so observant, you felt as if they were almost wizard-like. Indeed, the whole room looked not unlike a wizard's dwelling. Instead of pictures were hung rude wooden frames of impaled insects; the little table was covered with cabalistic books; and beside them lay a case of mysterious instruments, one of which ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... visited by as many as three grave doctors—they used to assemble downstairs, and come up together—and the room was so quiet, and Paul was so observant of them (though he never asked of anybody what they said), that he even knew the difference in the sound of their watches. But his interest centred in Sir Parker Peps, who always took his seat on the side of the bed. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... these closing words of his, the affable doctor's seeming good-nature would have completely won Raphael over; but he was too profoundly observant not to understand the meaning of the tone, the look and gesture that accompanied that mild sarcasm, not to see that the little man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of his rejoicing patients. The florid-looking idlers, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... towards the tennis-court in which he was standing. The three Professors left their places and stood at one end of the net, Messrs Hartley and Van Huysman indulging in audible growls of baffled scepticism, and Franklin Marmion silently observant, divided between interest and amusement. He could not help imagining what would happen if he were to stand in the middle of the circle and remove himself to the Higher Plane, and then go round shaking ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... things at their proper value; which is low, for they have little to do with life itself. His work was tiring in the extreme—merely having to remain upright on his hind legs for such long hours WAS an ordeal—but it did not penetrate to the secret observant self of which he was always aware. This was advantageous. If you have no intellect, or only just enough to get along with, it does not much matter what you do. But if you really have a mind—by which is meant that rare and curious power of reason, of imagination, and of emotion; very different ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... now followed the career of Lincoln throughout. It is fitting that this book should conclude with a record of what some observant men have said about him. Accordingly this, the last, chapter is willingly given up to these testimonies. Of course such a list could easily be extended indefinitely, but the quotations here given are deemed sufficient for ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... imagine that gradually, by becoming more closely observant than they had been, by combining together to make more complete observations, and above all by preserving the records of observations made by successive generations, these creatures began to obtain clearer ideas respecting their world and the surrounding regions of space. They would ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... character to be at large. Likewise an ode to the nettle, or to the autumn splendor of the poison-sumac, which ignored its venom would scarcely be a wise botanical guide for indiscriminate circulation among the innocents. Think, then, of a poetic eulogium on a bird of which the observant Gilbert could ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... pleasure. They were nearly of the same age, and possessed equal external advantages; but their characters were very different. Sarah Corbin, who was a few months older than her friend and almost constant companion, Harriet Wieland, was quiet, thoughtful, and observant; while Harriet, who had great personal attractions, never appeared to look beneath the surface. She believed every thing to be true that bore the semblance of truth, to her all that glittered was gold. ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... Observant Travellers of every time! Ye Quartos published upon every clime! 0 say, shall dull Romaika's heavy round, Fandango's wriggle, or Bolero's bound; Can Egypt's Almas [13]—tantalising group— Columbia's caperers to the warlike Whoop— Can aught from cold Kamschatka to Cape Horn With ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... descriptions of Nature in the Casentino, and of life in the streets of Florence. And every piece of description is so filled with the character of the 'Italian person of quality' who describes them—a petulant, humorous, easily angered, happy, observant, ignorant, poor gentleman—that Browning entirely disappears. The poem retains for us in its verse, and indeed in its light rhythm, the childlikeness, the naivete, the simple pleasures, the ignorance and the honest boredom with ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... a knife and a six-shooter but no rifle. Nels actually lost his dignity in enthusiasm for the excursion, and they were miles away from a village and hours deep in an apparently leisurely journey before he subsided into that observant calm ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... affection—touching, because real. His handsome face, so like Amelie's, was peculiarly so when it expressed the emotions habitual to her; and the pleasure both felt in the presence of Pierre brought out resemblances that flashed fresh on the quick, observant eye of Pierre. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and about three o'clock Buck held up an empty cartridge belt to the gaze of the curious Hopalong. That observant worthy nodded and threw a double handful of cartridges, one by one, to the patient and unrelenting Buck, who filled his gun and piled the few remaining ones up at his side. "Th' lives of mice and men gang aft all wrong," he remarked ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... even with images and thoughts. What we are told of the poem of the 'Beggars' might be said of I know not how many more. 'The sister's eye was ever on the watch to provide for the poet's pen.' He had a most observant eye, and she also for him; and his poems are sometimes little more than poetic versions of her descriptions of the objects which she had seen; and which he treated as seen by himself. Look at the poem on the 'Daffodils' ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... Neither observant man nor woman would have passed her, even in a crowd, without a second glance. There was a cheerful light in her eye and a humorous curve to her not too-full lips that promised an uplifting spirit within ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... before, but he obeyed, slinking sidewise a reluctant pace or two, and then springing to the back of the stallion with a single bound. There he crouched, still snarling softly until his master raised a significant forefinger. At that he lowered his head and maintained a fiercely observant silence. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... him. "I examine all my personages closely," said he—"watch their mouth, eyes, and ears constantly." And what he heard and saw he noted down with extraordinary vividness and dash. Acute, keen, and observant, he pierced the masks of the courtiers, and detected their secrets. The ardour with which he prosecuted his favourite study of character seemed insatiable, and even cruel. "The eager anatomist," says Sainte-Beuve, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... of such violent hatreds that the Home Government would feel compelled to recall him. Thus they would be rid of the presence of a personage possessed of a sufficient energy to oppose them, and they would no longer need to fear his observant eyes. Sir Alfred Milner saw himself surrounded by all sorts of difficulties, and every attempt he made to bring forward his own plans for the settlement of the South African question crumbled to the ground almost before he could begin to work at it. Small wonder, therefore, ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... was no one left for him to talk to, Trenholme grew more observant. He remarked the sweetness and sense in the face of the house-mother as she bestowed their suppers upon the children. She was still comparatively young, but there was no beauty of youth about her, only the appearance of strength that is produced by toil ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... directed with great accuracy (a) at the Atlas Building; (b) at this city and some of its immediate suburbs. The peculiarity of this can not but strike an observant mind. How is this man able, at forty or fifty miles distance, to concentrate his efforts on one comparatively small objective? We can only surmise some system of insulating screens or focal mirrors. I might remark ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... to the adventure, he went forward with cool courage and an observant eye, to spy out, if possible, the secret upon which ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... lessening their employment. The politician who wishes to know the effect on agricultural life of that wise and just measure, may find it in Mr. Grey of Dilston's answers to the queries of the French Government. The country parson will not need to seek so far. He will see it (if he be an observant man) in the faces and figures of his school- children. He will see a rosier, fatter, bigger-boned race growing up, which bids fair to surpass in bulk the puny and ill-fed generation of 1815-45, and equal, perhaps, in thew and sinew, to the men who saved Europe ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of the European powers was generally observant of the requirements of neutrality in so far as governmental action could be proved. The frequent charges which Great Britain made that the Transvaal was recruiting forces in Europe were not proved against the States from ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... through the streets with a hasty step, but a quick and observant eye. Every now and then he exchanged a significant glance, a slight sign, with some passenger, whose garb usually betokened the wearer to belong to the humbler classes; for Christianity was in this the type of all other and less mighty revolutions—the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... us, entirely occupied with her own affairs, and quite regardless of our presence. Hence it is with bird-songs as it is with so many other things in nature—they are what we make them; the ear that hears them must be half creative. I am always disturbed when persons not especially observant of birds ask me to take them where they can hear a particular bird, in whose song they have become interested through a description in some book. As I listen with them, I feel like apologizing for the bird: it has a bad cold, ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... at all events that he was thus on terms with illustrious spirits, and also that—yes, distinctly—he hadn't in the least swaggered about it. Our friend hadn't come there only for this figure of Abel Newsome's son, but that presence threatened to affect the observant mind as positively central. Gloriani indeed, remembering something and excusing himself, pursued Chad to speak to him, and Strether was left musing on many things. One of them was the question of whether, since he had been tested, he had ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... could mistake this face for other than that of a physician, and an earnest and attentive one as well, as evidenced by the signs of "natural physician" in the cheek-bones, in the attitude of the head and neck, and by the thoughtful, observant expression of the eye. The combination of systems in this subject is such as is most frequently observed among physicians, viz., the supremacy of the osseous and brain systems. The muscular, thoracic, and vegetative ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... week by week appeared,—fresh to-day from Massachusetts with its Lawrence race issues of a different character, I feel a sense of satisfaction in discussing here in South Carolina this question and issue in a spirit the reverse of dogmatic, a spirit purely scientific, observant and sympathetic. And in this connection let me say I well remember repeatedly discussing it with your fellow-citizen and my friend, Colonel Alexander Haskell, to whom I have already made reference. Rarely have I been more impressed by a conclusion reached ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... let himself and the pearl-stringer in with his latch-key, regretted that he had done so. He did not want to see Beverley alone just then. It would be better to have her summoned by a servant. Miss Blackburne was too observant of tiny details not to notice that he stepped back and pushed the electric bell outside the door, which he had not yet closed. And when he said to the butler: "Please tell Mrs. Sands that I have been able to bring back Miss Blackburne," ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... not then so wonderful that this wise and holy woman should have faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths of faith and the facts of human life—a discord which is felt in every age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... his wanderings so much abject, repulsive misery among human beings in the most heathen lands, as that which startles him in his civilized Christian home, for nowhere are the extremes of wealth and poverty so painfully presented. He will learn, too, if he be observant, that very little is required after all to make mankind happy, and that the prizes of life worth contending for are, generally speaking, within the reach of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... It is a wearying life, away from all I love, but I hope that the time will soon begin to spin away. Among the many changes that I find here is the comfortable change that the people are in general extremely considerate, and very observant of my privacy. Even in this place, I am really almost as much my own master as if I were in an English country town. Generally, they are very good audiences indeed. They do not (I think) perceive touches of art ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... on guard from ten till twelve. As we have seen, he was sharply observant of everything that lay before him. But there was one point of the horizon to which his eye more assiduously turned. It was the high road leading from Levis over the table-land of the Beauce back to the forests. ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... of the observant Dartie his two guests did not appear to be making much running, standing there close together, without a word. Bosinney was a hungry-looking creature—not much ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... put me out of your lap, and go away shaking your head, and looking so!—" and here the observant little creature attempted a childish imitation of the sad action and the strange, moody gestures with which he had put her down when he was retiring from the room—gestures and looks which the less quick eyes of her mother had ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... has been described might advance no farther. Conscious he might be, observant of everything going on within him and without; occupied too with inducing the very changes he observes, and yet with no aim to enlarge himself or improve the world through any of the changes so induced. Complete within himself at the beginning, ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... she saw a girl standing before an easel. She had laid down her palette and brushes, and with bold sure strokes of the pencil was sketching against time, leaning a little backwards, with her head in a critically observant pose. The voice reasserted itself in ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Boutport Street, the old street that half encircles the town, running "about the port," that he acted here, lodged here, if only for a week or two, talked in the tavern and walked in the old town, with that observant inner eye which noted the veriest detail of life, the swing of a flower, the swallow under the eaves, the idiosyncrasy of dress or gesture in the passers-by, and at the same time comprehended and recorded the springs of action, the fumbling thoughts, the consciences, the strivings, and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... fuller knowledge—an artist whose development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here and there an excellent model—he was devoted, conscientious, observant, industrious; but now that we've seen pretty well what can simply be learned do its best, these things help him little with us, because his imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its efforts never gave it the heartache. It ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... a matter that has long been suspected among the observant. Unfortunately, the Ruby Buttons of the past mistakenly formulated that the essence of continuous existence was imparted to a burial robe through the hands of a young maiden—hence so many deplorable experiences. The proper person to be so employed is undoubtedly ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... up before Rockford the next morning, and went out into the bright sunlight. He looked hopefully for Alonzo, not wanting to be seen mailing the letter in person. Rockford, despite his drunken stupors, could be shrewdly observant and he might deduce the contents of the letter before ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... Hawtrey had found it almost impossible to sustain a conversation. It was a relief to the girl to be able to sit silent and observant beside the man whom she had promised to marry. The string-patched trace still held, and the wagon pole was a new one. The white grass was tussocky and long, and the trail here and there had been churned into quagmire. Hawtrey had packed ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... expected? And although on the other side there be an infinite number of bad husbands (I should rail downright against some of them), able to discourage any women; yet there be some good ones again, and those most observant of marriage rites. An honest country fellow (as Fulgosus relates it) in the kingdom of Naples, [5943]at plough by the seaside, saw his wife carried away by Mauritanian pirates, he ran after in all haste, up to the chin first, and when he could wade no longer, swam, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... luckier ones are quite happy and ineffably comfortable. If a sunny day breaks, then the pallid battalions in the steerage come up to the air, and the ship's deck is like a long animated street. A thousand souls, we said? True! Now let some quiet observant man of the sailorly sort go round at night and count the boats. Twelve, and the gig aft makes thirteen! Allowing a tremendously large average, this set of boats might actually carry six hundred persons; but the six hundred would need to sit very carefully ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... servile amiability. The long, wiry white hair of his neck fell flat; he wagged his bushy white tail; he pawed the snow and playfully tossed his long, pointed nose as he crept near. But had Jimmie Grimm been more observant, more knowing, he would have perceived that the light in the lanky pup's ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... all," answered the American. "There are thousands of Jews in America as observant of the ordinances as the most pious in Kief. Yet it seems to me that a Jew can remain a Jew even if he neglect some of those ceremonials which have very little to do with Judaism pure and simple. Some are remnants of an oriental symbolism, others comparatively recent additions to the creed, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... blood flowing from the warrior's shoulder, was stuck a large eagle feather, the insignia of a chief. At his feet, where he had crumpled down under the enemy's bullets, lay the Indian lad in a huddled heap. It did not need the tiny eagle feather in the diminutive turban to convince Charley's observant eye that it was a case of father and son, a chief and son ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... letter book as he spoke and there was no doubt he noticed something now. Indeed, the haggard look on Simon's face and a bead of perspiration on his forehead were so striking, and so singular in the case of such a tough customer, that the least observant—or the most circumspect—must have stared. Carrington's stare lasted only for the fraction of a second, and then he was polishing his eyeglass with his handkerchief in ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... November, after the departure of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband and her children to their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for her to regale; she was very conscious of that; she was very observant, as we know, of what was good for her, and her effort was constantly to find something that was good enough. To profit by the present advantage till the latest moment she had made the journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers. She ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... no event at the Old Homestead. Uncle Nathan stationed his easy-chair by the kitchen fire, but insisted on resigning it to Isabel whenever she came down to sit with the family. Aunt Hannah became more and more lonesome, but was always keenly observant, and towards the young girls her kindness was exhibited in a thousand noiseless ways, that filled their warm hearts with gratitude. Young Farnham had been to the city, and it was only two evenings before his ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... when I came thither, for it was not much above seven years since they had fetched these five savage ladies over; they had all children, more or less: the mothers were all a good sort of well-governed, quiet, laborious women, modest and decent, helpful to one another, mighty observant, and subject to their masters (I cannot call them husbands), and lacked nothing but to be well instructed in the Christian religion, and to be legally married; both of which were happily brought about afterwards by my means, or at least in consequence ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... us stood the defendant, Sweeny, a tall elderly man, with a long, composed, shaven face, and an all-observant grey eye: Irish in type, Irish in expression, intensely Irish in the self-possession in which he stood, playing to perfection the part of calm rectitude and ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... great pride in his work, pointing out a thousand particulars in which his foresight had been displayed—but, to everybody's astonishment, he uttered no more warnings, and made no appeals. On the contrary, as some observant persons noticed, he seemed to avoid any reference to the fate of those who should not be ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... deftly concealed a pellet about the size of a five-grain allopathic pill. It was the erratic behavior of this tiny ball, its mysterious comings and goings, that had summoned Mr. Broad's audience and now held its observant interest. This audience, composed of roughly dressed men, listened attentively to the seductive monologue which accompanied the dealer's deft manipulations, and was greatly entertained thereby. "Three tiny tepees in a row and a little black medicine-man ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... face of the young smoker. Palpitation of the heart is also a common result, followed by permanent weakness, so that the whole system is enfeebled, and mental vigor is impaired as well as physical strength. Observant teachers can usually tell which of the boys under their care are addicted to smoking, simply by the comparative inferiority of their appearance, and by their intellectual and bodily indolence and feebleness. After full maturity is attained the evil effects of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... of Bass's letters to his mother is a misfortune which the student of Australian history must deplore. He was observant, shrewd, an untiring traveller, and an entertaining correspondent. He probably related to his mother, to whom he wrote frequently, the story of his excursions and experiences, and the historical value of all that he wrote would be very great. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... the crowd that followed, although they did not join in the cheers, not because they lacked faith, but because all three were thoughtful. Dick had soon discovered that Whitley, despite his lack of education, was an exceedingly observant man, with a clear ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... taboos, the American shows an extraordinary timorousness in all his dealings with fundamentals, and the fact that many of these taboos are self-imposed only adds to their rigour. What every observant foreigner first notices, canvassing the intellectual life of the land, is the shy and gingery manner in which all the larger problems of existence are dealt with. We have, for example, positive laws which make it practically impossible to ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... very critical and observant, and let no weakness pass without sarcastic comment; yet their jokes are rarely offensive, and in the end the victim usually joins in the general laughter. On the whole, the best policy is one of politeness, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... ill-founded confidence that he could play as successful a game with a close-penetrating tyrant, as he had done with a generous inexperienced King, he thought an air of inexorable cruelty to the royalists must remove, or at least lull the suspicions of the serpent, who lay wrapped round in observant coil, ready to spring upon him. As to the feelings of those whom he persecuted, for the sake of prolonging his own worthless life and preserving his ill-acquired fortunes, he either entirely forgot that they had any, or considered that self-preservation ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... surface was smooth, there was much beneath to disquiet an observant governor. It was not only that the Ministry was so weak, and so conscious of its weakness, as to be incapable even of proposing any measures of importance. This evil might be remedied by a change of administration. But there was no real political ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... was Hanson's satisfaction at this news that he had difficulty in concealing it, but Mrs. Gallito was not an observant person, fortunately, and, hastily changing the subject, he again ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... hung in straight folds to her feet, being innocent alike of trimming and the then prevailing fashion of crinoline. Further, she wore a little, round matador's hat, three black pompons planted audaciously upstanding above the left ear. Her eyes, long in shape and set under straight, observant brows, appeared at first sight of the same clear, light, warm brown as her hair. Her nose was straight, rather short, and delicately square at the tip. While her face, unlined, serenely, indeed triumphantly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... swallowed up in the sink of politics, and though noblemen smiled, and ladies of rank nodded their jewelled heads in approbation of every new song he sung and every witty sally he uttered, they reckoned any further notice or care superfluous: the poet, an observant man, saw all this; but hope was the cordial of his heart, he said, and he hoped and lingered on. Too active a genius to remain idle, he addressed himself to the twofold business of love and verse. Repulsed by the stately Beauty of the Devon, he sought consolation in the society ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest experience—an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties will be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all the varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12] or Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... youth thus reared in penury extreme, Could scarcely read or write ere he attained eighteen, And yet, by the observant force of a self-guided brain, He lived to benefit a world, and gain ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... These lines the observant student of nursery literature will perceive are satirical. Was there ever a poet who was not satirical? How could he be a genius and not be able to point out the folly he sees around him and comment upon it. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... or the best that I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence), yet she has a grasp of mind, which, if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound;—Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... platforms, and stretching away far into a dim and distant background; but even they could not record the impressive stillness of the vast multitude, its orderliness, which required the presence of not a single policeman, its spirit of almost religious solemnity which struck every observant onlooker. No profusion of superlative adjectives can avail to reproduce such scenes, any more than words, no matter how skilfully chosen, can convey the tone of a violin in the hands of a master. Even ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... note: The observant reader will have noted there is no Letter V. The original text did not contain one, and we have chosen to let the letters retain their original ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... Boston we know and love, than either of the others: and it perplexed her more than it need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. It made her suspicious of Mr. Arbuton's behavior towards her, and observant of little things that might very well have otherwise escaped her. The bantering humor, the light-hearted trust and self-reliance with which she had once met him deserted her, and only returned fitfully when some accident called ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... held enough decision to satisfy the driver, and he took the turn she had indicated, where the glint of the weeping white birch on the opposite side of the street had caught her observant eye. But on the cross-road no dark green auto was ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... inward conviction that you're not doing it because you think Brookville is such a pleasant place to live in," he went on, keenly observant of the sudden color fluttering in her cheeks, revealed by the light of Mrs. Solomon Black's parlor lamp which stood on a stand just inside the carefully screened window. "It looks," he finished, "as if you—well; it may be a queer thing ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... the floor had been diligently stained all over with some coffee-coloured preparation, for the second time in the evening his lordship swore. He was, in fact, in some dudgeon about to replace the lamp, when the torn edge of paper, showing between two boards, caught his observant eye.... ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... sounds at first rather an absurdity, and a mere popular superstition. Galileo chaffed Kepler for believing it. Who it was that discovered the connection between moon and tides we know not—probably it is a thing which has been several times rediscovered by observant sailors or coast-dwellers—and it is certainly a very ancient piece ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... companionship of common usage, however, it is exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native folly of men and women—and if his observation be conducted in a catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in others—when the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... result, in preserving to the future tourist the noblest monuments of the past. The abbeys and castles and tombs of England and Scotland are now so well cared for, that, ruins though they be, they will last for centuries. And yet the observant traveller can note, year by year, little changes, trifling alterations, which, though without great importance, are not destitute of interest; for he who has once visited Melrose, will be interested to learn that even one more stone ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... been observant enough of sea-going rules to recognize that this reason was final, and that it was equally futile to demand an interview with the captain when that gentleman was not visibly on duty. He turned angrily ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... and turning to the left, we soon come (past a hat shop which offers "Rooswelts" at 2.45 each), to the Goldoni Theatre. Leaving San Salvatore by the same door and turning to the right, we come to Goldoni himself, in bronze, in the midst of the Campo S. Bartolommeo: the little brisk observant satirist upon whom Browning wrote the admirably critical sonnet which I ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... journal of the things he saw in that wild country; and, among other matters, he made the following note about the habits of those curious animals the beavers, which I think is most likely to be correct, as Indians are very observant of the habits of wild animals. He says,—"The country here is marshy, covered with low evergreens. Here begins an extensive beaver settlement; it continues up the river for sixty miles. When travelling with a row-boat, the ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... girl's adoration of him, her wild beauty, her strange winning personality—as rare and as independent of birth and circumstances as genius—had soon made that phenomenon plain. And now what was to be done? The girl was quick, observant, imitative, docile, and in the presence of strangers, her gravity of manner gave the impression of uncanny self-possession. It really seemed as though anything might be possible. At Helen's suggestion, then, the three stayed where they were for a week, for June's wardrobe was sadly in need ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... presented to his regard a series of scenes well calculated to arouse a thoughtful mind to consideration of the deepest problems, both of politics and religion. What must have been the "long, long thoughts" of a youth, naturally reflective and acutely observant, as he witnessed the break-up of the old order in '48 and the years that followed. In the most impressionable age of life he was driven to contemplate a Europe in solution; the crash of the kingdoms; the Pope a Liberal, an exile, and a reactionary; the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... opposite Findlater's church. He was in a black sweater and had a hurley stick. Asked me was it true I was going away and why. Told him the shortest way to Tara was VIA Holyhead. Just then my father came up. Introduction. Father polite and observant. Asked Davin if he might offer him some refreshment. Davin could not, was going to a meeting. When we came away father told me he had a good honest eye. Asked me why I did not join a rowing club. I pretended to think it over. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... gratifying result of Seela's upturned hand, began to hold up their little hands with the same silent expectancy, till all round the table small hands were raised in perfect silence, by hopeful infants of observant habits and ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... the formation and growth of the poor discalced Augustinians, the first provincial [i.e., Fray Joan de San Geronimo] gave a heroic end by beginning the very observant province of San Nicolas [26] de Tolentino, in the islands adjacent to Asia which we commonly ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... broad-mouthed laughter of the Dutch negroes at Communipaw, who, like most other negroes, are famous for their risible powers. This is peculiarly the case on Sunday evenings, when, it is remarked by an ingenious and observant philosopher, who has made great discoveries in the neighborhood of this city, that they always laugh loudest, which he attributes to the circumstance of their ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... began our return journey, passing many more groups of skeletons which now we scarcely troubled to look at, perhaps because the heavy air filled with dust that once had been the flesh of men, was telling on our energies. Only I noticed, or rather the observant Quick called my attention to the fact, that as we went the kings in their chairs were surrounded by fewer and fewer attendants and women, and that the offerings placed at their feet were of an ever-lessening value. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... not see Miss Moore's contemptuous smile, or Mrs. Davis's grave glance. One of the pitiful things about jealous people is that they don't know how amusing—or else boring—or else irritating—they are to an observant and entirely unsympathetic world! Eleanor had no idea that the whole tableful of people knew she was jealous, and found her ridiculous. She only knew that Maurice seemed to like them—which meant that her society "wasn't enough for him "! So she tried to make it enough for him. At ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... South-West Coast, at Loando, the Lower Congo and Gaboon, but it is said not to have appeared in the Rivers until 1881, and then to have spread along the West Coast. My learned friend, Dr. Plehn, doubts this, and says people were less observant in those days, but the symptoms of this fever are so distinct, that I must think it also totally impossible for it not to have been differentiated from the usual remittent or intermittent by the old West Coasters if it had occurred there in former times with anything like the frequency ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and solemn shade of those dark avenues, where one might fondly hope to find some Druidess lingering beneath the shelter of the oaks, there is excitement of no common order to be found in the miniature watering-place of Foretdechene; and the reflective and observant traveller, on a modern sentimental journey, has only to enter the stately white building with the glittering plate-glass windows in order to behold the master-passions or the human breast unveiled for his pleasure ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... had come to live in her "possession" on the mountain side. He further recollected that the house had been pointed out to him—a long, low dwelling of the dull red stone quarried in this part of Catalonia. Being of an observant habit, he remembered that the house was overgrown by a huge wisteria, and faced eastward. He turned his head painfully, and now saw that his windows were surrounded by mauve fronds of wisteria. His room was, therefore, situated in the front of ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... OF DETROIT.—A shrewd and observant correspondent writes: "John R. Williams has been elected mayor, after a close election, disputed by Chapin. The enemy practised a good thing on him. During one of the delegate elections, when his ambition seemed to tower higher than it now does, he published a sort of memorabilia, like that of Dr. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... putting down his feet with such a firm tread. There were doubtless those among the crowd who saw in the tired face the indications of a life-story not without interest, for the crowd was not, nor ever is, in Munich, lacking in intelligent and observant persons. But in all the multitude there was not one man or woman who knew the name of the individual to whom the face belonged, and there were few who would have risked the respectability of their social position by making the acquaintance of a man so evidently poor, even ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... a slip for which he could be held responsible. It was a wire from the chief office of the Transcontinental in New York, a telegram inspired by sundry leakages from Pacific Southwestern sources, that gave him a silent and observant follower in all of his dodgings. Of this, however, he was in blissful ignorance. Twice, indeed, he sat in the same Pullman section with his "shadow," quite without suspecting it; and once he was saved ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... Pervaded with remembrance of the Hadwins; of the agonies which they had already endured; of the despair which would overwhelm the unhappy Susan when the death of her lover should be ascertained; observant of the lonely condition of this house, whence I could only infer that the sick had been denied suitable attendance; and reminded, by the symptoms that appeared, that this being was struggling with the agonies of death; a sickness of the heart, more insupportable ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... out quite suddenly. The doctor's observant eyes lost nothing of the change, although the sunshine on the dancing waters seemed to absorb his ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... to this conversation with an air of shrewd, observant gravity; and she still kept her lips tightly compressed, as if determined fully to ascertain her longitude and position, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... protestant side, 266, was less by ten, the result being a majority of six for the motion. A similar resolution was lost in the house of lords, as a matter of course; but the language held by the new lord chancellor, Lyndhurst, and by Wellington himself, as prime minister, prepared observant men for an impending change of policy. Then followed the Clare election, which revealed nothing which might not have been foreseen, but which had the same effect in precipitating the removal of catholic disabilities as the Irish famine afterwards had in precipitating the repeal ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the young man, feeling that the conversation set somewhat in his direction, did not desist indeed from his savoury viands, but helped himself generously to a piece of bread. Socrates was all-observant, and added: Keep an eye on our friend yonder, you others next him, and see fair play between the ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... the place was present at the moment and he was acting as bartender. Oscar staggered up to the bar, his eyes rolling in his head, but as they rolled, under their seemingly drunken glare shot forth a keen, observant glance. ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... admitted the superiority of the East: the last word has yet to be said. Few observant people will deny that there are signs of an awakening in Europe. The times are great with the birth of some new thing. A spiritual renaissance may be at hand. Meanwhile, we are not suffered to ignore the huge strides in material progress that are the chief glory ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Tom was the most observant of the two, and in that respect resembled George, and as they moved through the forest and over the table land, he would frequently stop and look around, and finally went to the Professor and said: "This part of the island looks very familiar to me." Then calling to Tom, he continued: ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... wrote to her, of course, and so did her uncle once or twice, but they did not tell her much of what she wanted to know. Bessie's letters were, it is true, full of allusions to what Captain Niel was doing, but she did not go beyond that. Her reticence, however, told her observant sister more than her words. Why was she so reticent? No doubt because things still hung in the balance. Then Jess would think of what it all meant for her, and now and again give way to an outburst of passionate jealousy which would have been painful enough to witness if anybody had ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... apt to neglect the objects their parents had in view in sending them to the capital. Having finished his studies in London, Dr. Garnett, in 1789, returned to his parents. At the time he left London, he had lost none of his ardour; still he continued indefatigable and observant. He had been flattered and respected by his fellow students, and praised by his seniors; and his previous success animated him with the strongest expectation of future advancement. At this time, it is supposed, he wrote the justly admired Treatise on Optics, which is in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... boy is himself again; but while it lasts, the disease will draw its sustenance from all manner of things—things, it may be, in themselves quite innocent. I avoid particularizing for many reasons; but any observant doctor will confirm what I have said. Now the moderately affluent boy who reads five-shilling stories of adventure has many advantages at this period over the poor boy who reads Penny Dreadfuls. To begin with, the crisis has a tendency to ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that they became fully conscious of their plight. German intrigue and subterranean scheming, under the mask of sympathy—now for the autocracy, now for socialism—had effected far-reaching changes in the Empire, which few even among observant politicians appear to have realized. These innovations were embodied in the thraldom of Russian banks to German financial institutions; in the splendid organization which kept old German colonies that were scattered ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... keyed my interest to breaking point. But if you think that I tore open those envelopes and greedily absorbed their contents the moment they were put into my hands, you have never been a conductor or even an observant passenger on a "pleasure yacht." When the letters arrived I was engaged in persuading breakfast-lingerers (they of the eggs-and-bacon habit, who ought never to leave their peaceful English homes) that it would give them more real pleasure to be ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... overturned table, and the rattle of pans and pots upon the floor. But the eyes, they were gone-no, they were close upon the floor, and coming toward them. Tom could not deny that he felt a creeping feeling, and poor Jackie, always observant of the goings on, was simply overcome with fright, and buried his head in Tom's side to shut out ...
— The Dare Boys of 1776 • Stephen Angus Cox
... business to be observant, and although many thousands of passersby must have cast their eyes in the same direction that day, there is small matter for wonder in the fact that Bristol alone took the trouble to inquire into the mystery—for his trained eye told him that ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... private; for he knew no fear. With him there was no need for writing which might fall into the hands of the enemy. If he died on the way the message would die with him. He had also the gift of getting at the sense of any situation and an observant eye. He was distinctly one of those men from whom trustworthy information can be obtained by the leaders of great enterprises. Lingard did put several questions to him, but in this instance, of course, Jaffir could have only very little to say. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... with his hands on the bulwark, and looked down at the tug, his head askew like an observant fowl. ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... in a day or two," said Mr. Woodcourt, looking at her with an observant smile, "as she ever will be. In other words, quite well of course. Have you ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Censure, blame of this Work of Mr. Hare's was naturally far from my thoughts. A work which distinguishes itself by human piety and candid intelligence; which, in all details, is careful, lucid, exact; and which offers, as we say, to the observant reader that will interpret facts, many traits of Sterling besides his heterodoxy. Censure of it, from me especially, is not the thing due; from me a far other thing ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... nature is singularly simple and frank, and who are as prompt to detail their own affairs as they are curious to know those of their fellows—a little play carried on during the passage opens to the observant gambler the habits of his prey, chiefly the planters of the up-country. These planters arrive in New Orleans or some other entrepot, settle with their agent or broker, and often receive very large sums in balance of the crop of the past season, ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... act of surrender was to set them free. Henceforth Manin was undisputed lord of the city. It is strange how, all at once, a man who was only slightly known to the world should have been chosen as spokesman and ruler. It did not, however, happen by chance. The people in Italy are observant; the Venetians had observed Manin, and they trusted him. The power of inspiring trust was what gave this Jewish lawyer his ascendancy, not the talents which usually appeal to the masses. He had not the advantage of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... to watch the wayfarer, whose quick step and the look in her eyes of being fixed on objects beyond their owner's immediate ken, might have suggested to the observant, inward perturbation. The lissom, swiftly moving figure was almost out of sight before the old man slowly wheeled round and continued on his way towards the hamlet of Craddock Dene, that lay in the valley about a mile further on. Meanwhile the young woman was speeding ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... artillery was encamped. The dragoman became involved in all sorts of discussions with other Greeks, but Coleman stuck to his elbow and stifled all aimless oration. The Wainwright party waited for them in the rear in an observant but patient group. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... into Hammerton's eye. Varney, watching that observant feature, knew that no detail of his story, or of his manner in telling it, would escape a ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... cars. On arriving at the city station, he took a coach and drove to one of the great hotels. Thither drove also a sagacious-looking, middle-aged man, who entered his name as "W. Thompson" in the book at the office immediately after that of "R. Venner." Mr, "Thompson" kept a carelessly observant eye upon Mr. Venner during his stay at the hotel, and followed him to the cars when he left, looking over his shoulder when he bought his ticket at the station, and seeing him fairly off without obtruding himself in any offensive way upon his attention. Mr. Thompson, known in other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... and I had noted with some awe my naval friend's scorn of the ill-provided in the course of the evening. He had described how a Belgian he had shared a room with, lacked certain accessories of civilization. So I was in the mood now to feel my own deficiency. But the censor was not so very observant, and he seemed sleepy. Soon ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... The least observant of the party could not fail to notice Madame d'Argeles's hesitation and confusion; but even the shrewdest were deceived. They supposed that she had seen the act committed, and had tried to induce the culprit to make his escape, in order to avoid ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... him into thinking me a scarecrow, companion to those adorning the "patch" at that moment. I sat motionless, not using my glass, but looking him squarely in the eyes. This seemed to impress him; he ceased squawking, and hopped a twig nearer, stopped, turned one calmly observant eye on me, then quickly changed to the other, as if to see if the first had not deceived him. Still I did not move, and he was plainly puzzled to make me out. He came nearer and nearer, and I moved only my eyes to keep them ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... education. No education can make a gentleman of a man who is not a gentleman at heart, for whether his station in life be that of a ploughboy or an Earl, the gentleman, like the poet, is born and not made. But it can and does if he be of an observant nature, give him a certain insight into the habits of thought and probable course of action of the members of that class to which he outwardly, and by repute, belongs. Such an insight Edward Cossey possessed, and at the present moment its possession was troubling him ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... on the principle of 'tinieo Danaos' etc., I instantly smelt a ruse, not that I dreamt that I was to be decoyed into captivity; but if there was anything here which we two might discover in the few hours left to us, it was an ingenious plan to remove the most observant of the two till the hour ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... who have not had babies. The only way to get acquainted with her is to have a baby. She assumes that a motherless woman has a motherless mind. The idea that a rich and bountiful womanhood, which is saving its motherhood up, which is free from the absorption and the haste, keenly observant and sympathetic, may come to a kind of motherly insight, distinctly the result of not being experienced, does not occur to her. The art of getting the result—the spirit of experience, without paying all the cost of the experience itself—needs ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... neutrality and indifferency in this cause; so that few are found valiant for the truth upon the earth. What strange laxness and Laodicean indifference has there appeared in this cause, through the whole conduct of affairs in church and state, since the revolution; whereby many discover to every observant eye that they are satisfied if they obtain a peaceful enjoyment of their own things, and liberty to dwell in their ceiled houses—albeit the Lord's house (in a great measure) lies waste? Where are there any acts of Assemblies, or proceedings of the church, which discover any due concern or zeal ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... disposition of the French might be, Robert Dinwiddie, a Scot, governor of Virginia, selected a trustworthy envoy to proceed to the French commanders in the disputed districts and ask their purposes. His choice fell upon George Washington, a young man of blameless character, steady, courageous and observant, wise in judgment and of mature mind, though he was but one and twenty years of age. He was the son of a Virginia planter, had had such schooling as his neighborhood afforded until he was sixteen, and had then begun life as a surveyor—a good calling in a country whose inhabitants were daily ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... and sultry, and, arriving at Hoag about five o'clock, I feel that I have done sufficient hillclimbing for one day. I have been wheeling through Austrian territory since 10.30 this morning, and, with observant eyes the whole distance, I have yet to see the first native, male or female, possessing in the least degree either a graceful figure or a prepossessing face. There has been a great horse-fair at Hoag to-day; the business of the day is concluded, and the principal occupation of the men, apart ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... approaching; I dropped my head to avoid meeting their glance, for my few minutes of contact with my dreadful nephews had made me feel inexpressibly un-neat. The carriage stopped. I heard my own name spoken. There, erect, fresh, neat, bright-eyed, fair-faced, smiling, and observant, sat Miss Alice Mayton, a lady who for about a year I had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... a properly lighted room, I took a more careful look at the former steward of Hathercleugh. He was a well-preserved, shrewd-looking man of between sixty and seventy: quiet and observant, the sort of man that you could see would think a lot without saying much. He smiled a little as he put his hands together on the table and glanced at our expectant faces—it was just the smile of a man who knows what he is ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... habill par mes mains! C'est peu qu'il ait sur moi remport la victoire; Malheureux, j'ai servi de hraut sa gloire. Le tratre! Il insultait ma confusion; 850 Et tout le peuple mme avec drision, Observant la rougeur qui couvrait mon visage, De ma chute certaine en tirait le prsage. Roi cruel! ce sont l les jeux o tu te plais. Tu ne m'as prodigu tes perfides bienfaits 855 Que pour me faire mieux sentir ta tyrannie, Et ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... and took the newspaper from his pocket. Mr. Albany Todd suddenly advanced to Harry Luttrell. He had been no less observant than Martin Hillyard. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... record the complete satisfaction with which I heard the substantial whack on the drum so descriptive of Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert-sans-Sullivan's heavy fall "at the ropes." This last effect, being as novel as it is effective, attracted the attention of the wily and observant DRURIOLANUS, who mentally booked the effect as something startlingly new and original for his next Pantomime. The combat between the Saxon Slogger, very much out of training, and the Norman Nobbler, rather over-trained as the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... about that," remarked an observant old settler, who had been silently regarding the different portents to which we have alluded. "I don't know about the ice staying here twenty hours, or even one. This has been no common thaw, that we have had for the last six or eight hours, let ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... lad was overwhelmed with embarrassment that amounted to fear. He never knew just what he said at first, but when he recovered sufficiently to realise that the faces turned toward him were kindly, and the smiles were encouraging, his self-possession returned. Observant always, and quick to see the right thing to do, William hoped that "Mister Watson and his wife would live happy ever after, and," he concluded, with a smile that was full of confidence, "I nearly snickered once when the marriage was on. That was when the minister says something ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... character as it appears in the Memoirs—sincere, intelligent, self-contained, and yet dependent; methodical, observant. Sometimes as one reads of her in early life one is reminded of some of the personal characteristics of the writer who perhaps of all writers least resembles Miss Edgeworth in her art—of Charlotte Bronte, ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
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