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More "Pell-mell" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to keep away from his friend. He stayed at home longer than usual on purpose. Finally he grew afraid of being late and tumbled pell-mell downstairs, intent on turning to his old route by way of East Long Street. But no sooner had he reached the lane than his legs seemed to be moving regardless of his will, and they took the familiar turn toward the Quay. At that moment he caught sight of Murray ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... 'Shaitan, Shaitan!' was the cry, as the inhabitants tumbled pell-mell out of the hovel, and Victorine and Punch remained ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from the Coding Officer tumbled pell-mell up the ladder and handed a piece of folded paper to the Captain, saluted, turned on his heel and descended the ladder again. The Captain unfolded the signal and read with knitted brows. Then he turned ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... They all crowded pell-mell into Von Barwig's room. Was this the usually calm, dignified professor? Could it really be Von Barwig who was now almost shouting at the top of his voice, telling them to send in their resignations ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... of glory over the great lake-like expanse studded with black rocks; this is the huge dam or reserve of water held up for the use of the crops when the Nile goes down. The scene beggars description; bags, bundles, bales, boxes are pitched out pell-mell. Gleaming black faces are lit up by the flames of leaping fires lit on the sand. Petticoated porters thrust metal numbers at us so that we may be able to recognise them again and reclaim our luggage safely. ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... furniture, and wound a long iron chain, that dangled from his neck, round legs of chairs and tables, and then tugged at it until his eyes became unnaturally visible, in consequence of their nearly starting out of his head; and when he growled at Mr Toots, who affected familiarity; and went pell-mell at Towlinson, morally convinced that he was the enemy whom he had barked at round the corner all his life and had never seen yet; Florence was as pleased with him as if he had ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... if I only had written them down! Pell-mell they came down the sequestered avenues of my mind, this merry throng. With bacchanal song and shout they came, and eye hath not since ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... bravely throughout an exhausting day, now quite lost their heads. Heedless of the Austrian's prayers and imprecations, heedless of Mrs. Haxton's shrill appeal that they should beat off the few assailants then perilously close at hand, they yielded to the blind instinct of self-preservation, and rushed pell-mell for the camels. At once these men of a martial tribe, men who had cheerfully faced the far greater danger of the Hadendowa general attack, became untrammeled savages, each striving like a maniac to secure ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... think,) confronts me with his linstock, ready to give fire; I, spying his intendment, discharged my petronel in his bosom, and with these single arms, my poor rapier, ran violently upon the Moors that guarded the ordnance, and put them pell-mell, to the sword. ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... of such troublesome and dangerous companions. The horses soon reached a stream, which Crockett afterward learned was called the Navasola River. The whole herd, following an adventurous leader, rushed pell-mell into the stream and swam to the other side. It was a beautiful sight to behold these splendid animals, in such a dense throng, crossing the stream, and then, refreshed by their bath, sweeping like a ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... their prey, the band stormed the door, and thrust and struggled and battled a way down the narrow staircase, and along the narrow passage. "A bas les Huguenots! Mort aux Huguenots!" they shouted; and shrieking, sweating, spurning with vile hands, viler faces, they poured pell-mell into the street, and added their clamour to the boom of the tocsin that, as by magic and in a moment, turned the streets of Paris into a hell of blood and cruelty. For as it was here, so it was in a dozen ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... fell upon us, and forced the entrance to the citadel. The drum was silent; the garrison threw down their arms. I had been knocked down, but I rose and entered, pell-mell, with the crowds into the fortress. I saw the Commandant wounded on the head, and closed upon by a small troop of bandits, who demanded the keys. I was running to his aid when several powerful Cossacks seized ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... richness of the dresses, the yards and yards of fine stitchery, the endless ruching, the hints, more or less incautious, of nether treasures of embroidered linen; and, leaping over all this to the eye, the vivid colourings of silks and muslins, veils, plumes and flowers, piled as it were pell-mell in heaps on the universal green cushions to the furthest vista of the restaurant, and all multiplied in gilt mirrors—the spectacle intoxicated Sophia. Her eyes gleamed. She drank the soup with eagerness, and tasted the wine, though ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... wall; and three-and-twenty of our fellows jumped after me. By the Pope of Rome, friend Tummas, that was a day!—Had you seen how the Mounseers looked when four-and-twenty rampaging he-devils, sword and pistol, cut and thrust, pell-mell came tumbling into the redoubt! Why, sir, we left in three minutes as many artillerymen's heads as there were cannon-balls. It was, "Ah sacre!" "D——- you, take that!" "O mon Dieu!" "Run him through!" "Ventrebleu!" and it WAS ventrebleu with him, I warrant ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Ye got to know how to offset the wobble. They didn't skeer me. I went an' hauled that runt out o' the water an' with him under my right arm an' the two rifles under the left un I started treadin' logs headin' fer the north shore. They quit shootin' but come on a'ter me pell-mell. They got to comin' too fast an' I heard 'em goin' down through the roof o' the bay behind me an' rasslin' with the logs. That put meat on my bones! I could 'a' gone back an' made a mess o' the hull party with the toe o' my boot but I ain't overly fond o' killin'. Never have ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... later on. I am indebted to a friend for the following note: "Passionate friendships among girls, from the most innocent to the most elaborate excursions in the direction of Lesbos, are extremely common in theaters, both among actresses and, even more, among chorus-and ballet-girls. Here the pell-mell of the dressing-rooms, the wait of perhaps two hours between the performances, during which all the girls are cooped up, in a state of inaction and of excitement, in a few crowded dressing-rooms, afford every opportunity for the growth of this particular kind of sentiment. In most of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... engagement had really commenced. It would be difficult to describe the scene as I found it. About twenty boats were jammed together, forming one confused mass; some bottom up; the bows or sterns of others only visible; mixed up, pell-mell, with huge rafts; and among which were nearly all our advanced little division. Headless trunks, as well as heads without bodies, were lying about in all directions; parties were engaged hand to hand, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... upon a well of bad, brackish water. Notwithstanding all drawbacks, the supply was eagerly hailed. Our people shouted, scolded, and pushed each other to get the best places; camels, horses, asses, and men rushed pell-mell towards the well, and happy was he who could seize upon a little water. There are barracks near this well, and soldiers are posted here to promote peace—by ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... The captain's order seemed to imply some new scheme. Men who, a moment ago, would have killed any one who sought to restrain them from clearing the boat's falls, now raced pell-mell after their officers. No heed was paid to those who lay on the deck, wounded or insensible. Herein alone did these Chilean sailors differ from wolves, and wolves have the excuse of fierce hunger when ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers had fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the scholars who had been the first to show the way were the first to deplore the pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was the unintended result of the inroad on insularity which had already begun. They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to meet it as it came. Ascham in his Schoolmaster ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... midnight air was startled with a joyful "Hurrah!" followed close by a shout of "Bert's all right—he's here," that brought the people in the house tumbling pell-mell against each other in their haste to reach the door and see what it ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... still I held converse with Zabarell, Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws Of antique Donate: still my spaniel slept. Still on went I: first an sit anima, Then, an' 'twere mortal. O hold, hold! At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears, Amain [pell-mell] together—still my spaniel slept. Then whether 'twere corporeal, local, fixed, Ex traduce; but whether 't had free will Or no, hot philosophers Stood banding factions all so strongly propped, I staggered, knew not which was firmer part; But thought, quoted, read, observed and pried, Stuffed ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... porter, and, sword in hand, I stepped out What I beheld was the usual spectacle upon such occasions. A mob of all classes; labourers in blouses, dandies in tall hats, college youths, street boys, market women, and veiled "ladies" in flashy dresses and with painted cheeks, all huddled pell-mell ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... and Conrad Lagrange determined to go back from the mountains, the way they had come. Said the novelist, "It is as unseemly to rush pell-mell from an audience with the gods as it is ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... they had come so near that the party about the shop-door could see what they were. In front, running desperately with leaps and bounds, and panting for breath, came a tall slim man all in tight-fitting white clothes, with a dead white face and a white hairless head; and after him, tumbling on pell-mell, was a perfect riot of little red imps, with little horns on their foreheads, and little tails behind them, all trying to spear the white man with the wicked little pitchforks which they carried, and to seize him with their ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... war-whoop, and threw himself right across the middle of the board, and shook it with all his might, so that it jiggled awfully right up and down. Before we had time to scream or to paralize our danger, over we all went, pell-mell, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, down, down, down into the foaming water! What do you think of that, Clytie? Every single one of us—dogs, Jane, carriage, and all! 'Twas worse, a thousand-fole, than when we lost Lucille. Fan sat right down ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... gratitude Mrs. Clarke rose to take her leave, until she could return and enter upon her duties. But a boy came whistling through the hall, and presently—oh, the joy of it!—what should rush, with a scamper and joyous bark, pell-mell upon little Ned, but his own Fido! Such a shout of gladness! and Ned sat fairly upon the floor, and hugged his dog again and again, while the boy—none other than the doctor's grandson—explained to the bewildered old gentleman that ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... society became firmly established, the ancient continent was thrown into confusion. Everything was pulled up by the roots. Events, destined to destroy ancient Europe and to construct a new Europe, trod upon one another's heels in their ceaseless rush, and drove the nations pell-mell, some into the light, others into darkness. So much uproar ensued that it was impossible that some echoes of it should not reach the hearts of the people. It was more than an echo, it was a reflex blow. Man, withdrawing within himself in presence of these imposing vicissitudes, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... without regard to dignity or station. "Carpenters and shipwrights sit next to the czar; but senators, ministers, generals, priests, sailors, buffoons of all kinds, sit pell-mell, without any distinction." And they were crowded so closely that it was with great difficulty they could lift their hands to their mouths. As for foreigners, if they happened to sit between Russians, they were little likely to have any appetite to eat. All this Peter encouraged, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... a mistake for some other person. Robert, nineteenth earl of Oxford having died in 1632, and Aubrey de Vere, his successor, the twentieth Earl, living till 1703.] To the Park, where I saw how far they had proceeded in the Pell-mell, and in making a river through the Park, which I had never seen before since it was begun. Thence to White Hall garden, where I saw the King in purple mourning for ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... soon as he found that he could run about on his injured leg. Then, showing his teeth, he growled menacingly and bounded through the woods, Dick & Co. following pell-mell. ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... ever heard before. Poor old Joan thought her last hour had really come, and gave herself up for lost, for when she looked round she saw the fearful great creature she had been riding, disappearing in the distance in flames of fire, and tearing after it, helter-skelter, pell-mell, was a horrible crew of men and dogs and horses. Two or three hundred of them there must have been, and not one of the lot had a head on ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... given me a heavier case of Weltschmerz than I have ever experienced at a performance of "Tristan und Isolde." It was the fact of those little children advancing in unison; that is the word. If they had trudged or scurried along, pell-mell, I should not have minded. But May parties move forward in procession, and the movement of a compact crowd is, to me, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... and strokes prevailed; they turned at once, and shouting out, Down with Baal and his worshippers! they charged the malignants so unexpectedly home, that they not only drove them back into their house of garrison, but entered it with them, as the phrase is, pell-mell. I also was there, partly hurried on by the crowd, partly to prevail on our enraged soldiers to give quarter; for it grieved my heart to see Christians and Englishmen hashed down with swords and gunstocks, like curs in the street, when there is an alarm of mad-dogs. In this way, the soldiers fighting ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Ocean," the wind took pity on him, and came with its cool breath and fanned him, with all his brothers, into a heavy gray cloud, after which he blew them apart and told them to join hands and hurry away to the earth. Helter-skelter down they went, rolling over each other pell-mell, till with a patter and clatter and spatter they touched the ground, and all the people ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Emboldened by his potations, Tam faces the astounding infernal revelry with unabashed curiosity, which rises and rises till, in a pitch of enthusiastic admiration for Cutty-Sark, he loses all discretion and brings the "hellish legion" after him pell-mell. We reach the serio-comic ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... was a great babble of voices, some shrieks, and more confusion, and the guests ran pell-mell down the great stairs and out the castle door. To Peter's dismay, Aunt Jane was not among them. So into the castle he rushed again, calling at the top of his voice, "Aunt Jane! Aunt Jane!" He ran through the brilliantly ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... place was intolerable. All this office practice got on his nerves. It was too "intensive." He could not keep his head and enter thoroughly into the complications of a dozen cases, when they were shoved at him pell-mell. He realized that he was falling into a routine, was giving conventional directions, relying upon the printed prescriptions and mechanical devices. All these devices were ingenious,—they would do no harm,—and they might do good, ought to do good,—if the cursed human system would only come ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... first place, that it is my decided conviction that the Gipsies were neither more nor less, before they set out upon their pilgrimage, than a pell-mell gathering of many thousands of low-caste, good for nothing, idle Indians from Hindustan—not ashamed to beg, with some amount of sentiment in their nature, as exhibited in their musical tendencies and love of gaudy colours, and except in rare instances, without any true ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... moral, humane human beings of this period? Or are you one of your robust English brotherhood worthy of a Caligula in his prime, lions in gymnastics—for a time; sheep always in the dominions of mind; and all of one pattern, all in a rut! Favour me with an outline of your ideas. Pour them out pell-mell, intelligibly or not, no matter. I undertake to catch you somewhere. I mean to know you, hark you, rather with your ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... show us some tumbling tricks, which he did very well, and the greatest bending of his body that ever I observed in my life. Thence by water to White Hall, and walked over the Park to St. James's; but missed Mr. Coventry, he not being within; and so out again, and there the Duke was coming along the Pell-Mell. It being a little darkish, I staid not to take notice of him, but we went directly back again. And in our walk over the Park, one of the Duke's footmen came running behind us, and came looking just in our faces to see ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... about awhile with skewers, and finally, just as it was caught, it changed into an imp, with horns and hoofs, and a sabre by its side. Of course the company were greatly frightened, and tumbled down on the stage, pell-mell, all in a heap. But one sad day a performer thrust too hard with his sharp skewer, and poor little Louis performed and played no more. They laid him away in the pleasant cemetery, and very soon a heartbroken little sister, who could not be ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Piper children and a host of others saw that she was comfortably established in the big car, much to the evident amusement of the loitering tourists. She must have kissed at least twenty people before the conductor came briskly on the scene and sent them pell-mell on to the platform. The whistle shrieked and the train glided slowly away. Nancy, a strange figure, with widow's bonnet, bright colored shawl and face wreathed in smiles, leaned far out of the window, waving an answer to the ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... Moniteur, June, 1899, says: "Mlle. Chauchet, a very young girl, in her picture of a 'Breton Interior' shows a vigor and decision very rare in a woman." Of the "Maree," the Depeche de Brest says: "On a sombre background, in artistic disorder, thrown pell-mell on the ground, are baskets and a shining copper kettle, with a mass of fish of all sorts, of varied forms, and changing colors. All well painted. Such is the picture ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... who had been watching attentively from a distance the different phases of the interview, considered it prudent to beat a hasty retreat, and, mounting their steeds with unmistakable dispatch, galloped pell-mell down the hill, and then along the valley of the river, until they were lost to sight in the mist, while the poor ambassadors, who had been unable to rejoin their ponies, followed as quickly as possible under the circumstances, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... all greasy fellows; burrs too, the parasites, off we will rub. That verminous plague of insensate place-seekers soon between thumb and forefinger we'll crack. All who inside Athens' walls have their dwelling into one great common basket we'll pack. Disenfranchised or citizens, allies or aliens, pell-mell the lot of them in we will squeeze. Till they discover humanity's meaning.... As for disjointed and far colonies, Them you must never from this time imagine as scattered about just like lost hanks of wool. Each portion we'll take and wind in to this centre, inward to ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... Shelley, impressed somehow or other with the belief that Stockdale was the poet's friend, rushed pell-mell into the publisher's Pall Mall shop, and besought him to do the friendly thing by him, and help him out of a scrape he had got into with his printer by ordering him to print fourteen hundred and eighty copies of a volume of poems, without having the money at hand to pay ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... now there,—fierce shouts above, below, behind,—shrieks of agony, choked groans and gasps of dying men,—scaling-ladders hurled down with all their rattling freight,—dull mine-explosions, ringing cannon-thunder, as the old fortress blasts back its besiegers pell-mell into the deep. It is all there: truly enough there, at least, to madden yet more Elsley's wild angry brain, till he tries to add his shouts to the great battle-cries of land and sea, and finds them as little audible ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... gold, each with his bow in one hand and his arrows in his belt. But the calmest had his equanimity disturbed by the consciousness that the main body of his comrades, all noblemen and gentlemen of Scotland, were running pell-mell behind, in a desperate effort to form into rank and march in due order. One eager confused glance, one long-drawn breath, one vehement heart-throb for her who was the centre of all, and the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... covering them with sand left to the winds. The lid is fastened with the same mortar which is used in the brick masonry surrounding the coffin, where such a receptacle has been made for it; but they more usually lie pell-mell, separated only by thin layers of loose sand. There are mounds which are, as one may say, larded with them: wherever you begin to dig a trench, the narrow ends stick out from both sides. In these coffins also various ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... work was finished—how fearful, could be seen by the wounded, the dying lying pell-mell upon the battle-field amidst the dead, too exhausted to move. But the day had passed. The cries and shouts of the flying enemy had now ceased—the victory, the battle-field, belonged to the Prussians. What was now most needed by them was ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... country people were working in such haste, to keep the plague from completing the work war began! I saw them, too, from the top of the hill of Kaya, and turned away my eyes, horror-stricken. Russians, French, Prussians, were there heaped pell-mell, as if God had made them to love each other before the invention of arms and uniforms, which divide them for the profit of those who rule them. There they lay, side by side; and the part of them which could not die knew no more ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... force, and that Johannizza had caused all the people that were therein to be put to death, they fell in to such terror that they were utterly confounded and foredone. As God suffers misadventures to fall upon men, so the Venetians rushed to their ships, helter-skelter, pell-mell, and in such sort that they almost drowned one another; and the mounted sergeants, who came from France and Flanders, and other countries, went flying ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... circumstances prevented an effective combination of the various elements of sincere opposition, he and his friends accepted the result as popular approbation of their past conduct and warrant for its continuance. Things went from bad to worse with a pell-mell rapidity that ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... and peaceful that Horieneke, who had begun to sing, stopped in the middle and stood listening to the chaffinches and siskins chattering pell-mell. ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... commanded Thomond-bridge, and carried them sword in hand after an obstinate resistance. The garrison had made a sally from the town to support them; and this detachment was driven back with such precipitation, that the French officer on command in that quarter, fearing the English would enter pell-mell with the fugitives, ordered the bridge to be drawn up, leaving his own men to the fury of a victorious enemy. Six hundred were killed, two hundred taken prisoners, including many officers, and a great number were ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... came hither, in haste, to tell you." When my master's wife and daughters heard this, they shrieked aloud and tore their clothes and buffeted their faces, whilst the neighbours came round them. Then my mistress overturned the furniture of the house, pell-mell, tore down the shelves, broke up the casements and the lattices and smeared the walls with mud and indigo. Presently she said to me, "Out on thee, O Kafour! Come and help me tear down these cupboards and break up these ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... to her a great piece of luck that he had found that out. It made everything easy at once, and her words came out pell-mell. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as to the original use to which the building was put. On the first floor (above the ground-floor) was one room and the kitchen; on the floor above that were two bedrooms. The garret was used to put away articles more choice and delicate than those that lay pell-mell about the shop. ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the time. His tongue was decidedly Hanoverian, with its repetitions, its catchwords—"That's quite another thing! That's quite another thing!"—its rattling indomitability, its loud indiscreetness. His speeches, made repeatedly at the most inopportune junctures, and filled pell-mell with all the fancies and furies that happened at the moment to be whisking about in his head, were the consternation of Ministers. He was one part blackguard, people said, and three parts buffoon; ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... away, and nothing would do but that he should go back and speak to him. He said the boy would be disappointed. The men were visibly uneasy at his going, but that didn't affect him. He ordered them to wait, and back he went, pell-mell, all alone into that horde of fiends. They hadn't got over their funk, luckily, and he saw Blue Arrow and made his party call and got out again all right. He didn't tell that himself, but Sergeant O'Hara made the camp ring with it. He adores Morgan, and claims ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... I wish it were. I wish with my heart it were. Look at the crowds for yourself. There they go down the street, pell-mell, bewildered, blinded, some of them by will-o'-the-wisp lights, ditched and mired many of them. The thing is ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... newspaper in his lap, and crowds of people reading crowded newspapers standing round him in the aisles; but he can never be said to be seen at his best, in a spectacle like this, until the spectacle moves, until it is felt rushing over the sky of the street, puffing through space; in which delectable pell-mell and carnival of hurry—hiss in front of it, shriek under it, and dust behind it—he finds, to all appearances at least, the meaning of this present world and the hope of the next. Hurry and crowd have kissed each other ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... narrow fissure, and after a short time the stone moved and was raised. A staircase with high, steep steps, sinking into darkness, awaited the impatient travellers, who rushed down pell-mell. A sloping gallery painted on both walls with figures and hieroglyphs came next, then at the end of the gallery some more steps leading to a short corridor, a sort of vestibule to a hall in the same ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the barrier and the fires like a yelling flood. But now, finding all opposition so suddenly withdrawn, the flood divided upon the massive, thrusting figure of Ook-ootsk as upon a black rock in mid-stream. It united again behind him, surging pell-mell for the Cave-mouths, where in the crush the weaker and lighter were ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... running, the men now tumbled up, hurriedly salaamed, arid then each with gasps and choking stops, and pell-mell volubility, and amid a running fire of cries, queries, and interjections from the mob, began to unfold their tale. There was an infuriated tigress at the other side of the nullah, or dry watercourse, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... answer this poser for along the road came the ambulance, pell-mell. Surely, the boys thought, Artie could not have spoken of Blythe's identity over the 'phone, yet following the ambulance came the touring car of Bridgeboro's police department with the chief in it, the policeman ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... reflecting how little numerical superiority avails in war against experience and tactics, they required to be led against the foe. They were so, and were defeated. The conquerors and conquered entered the city pell-mell; and Edward, enraged at the citizens for shooting upon his troops from the windows, issued orders that the inhabitants should be put to the sword, and the town burned. The mandate, however, was not executed: Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, with wise remonstrances, assuaged the anger of the ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... a rainy night," relates a French historian of the Revolution. "The crowd took shelter where they could; some burst open the gates of the great stables, where the regiment of Flanders was stationed, and mixed pell-mell with the soldiers. Others, about four thousand in number, had remained in the Assembly. The men were quiet enough, but the women were impatient at that state of inaction; they talked, shouted, ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... their heads, but Nanni was not a religious goat! She remembered the glimpse she had had the night before of green things growing in the garden and suddenly bolted down the steep path at a break-neck speed. All the rest of the flock followed pell-mell after her, and the children were obliged to cut short their prayers in order to save the carrot-tops from ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... would every moment go down. The working and rolling of the vessel, at one instant of dread, displaced and destroyed all the furniture of the cabin and saloons, and, broke it to pieces, throwing the passengers pell-mell about the cabin. Everything that occupied the upper deck was washed away, and a large part of the passengers' luggage was destroyed. Between twenty and thirty of those who were on board, including several ladies, had ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... jove, there are boats pulling after us with all the might the rowers can command. We lie to, the proas come nearer. Hurrah! the clothes, some wholly washed, some half-washed, and some not washed at all. Piles of fair white linen are bundled up the gangway pell-mell, Malay washerwomen bundled out ditto, and for payment, the revolving screws settle that ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Gray took it. She had scarcely reached the next block when the crowd behind her was being scattered pell-mell and without ceremony in all directions by the police, as the young man had predicted. She went on. There was nothing that she could do. The man's face and the woman's face haunted her. They had seemed stamped with such abject misery and despair. But there was nothing ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... fire-arms, the fall of their foremost chief, shot through the brain with the bullet of Arlac, filled them with consternation, and they fled headlong within their defences. The men of Thimagoa ran screeching in pursuit. Pell-mell, all entered the town together. Slaughter; pillage; flame. The work was done, and the band ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... "copy"; coming out in short, detached paragraphs of uneven length, ranging from three lines to twenty. Extracts from foreign newspapers, official news, provincial reports, money matters, religious announcements, accidents, everything comes out pell-mell—absolutely all "the voices of the flying day," in Madrid and everywhere else, in one jumble, without order or sequence, one paragraph frequently being a direct contradiction to another in the same sheet. There are three editions ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... of conflict smote his ears: not the rolling volleys and stately tread of victory, but the confused noise of fight and flight, betokening irretrievable disaster. The fresh troops were formed into a hollow square, and pell-mell the hunted fugitives came rushing into their place of refuge. Exhausted by their long march and hot fight, many of them fell prone upon the ground, "their tongues," says a high authority, "hanging ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... herewith two of Mr. Langlois' most interesting photographs. One of these shows the head of the corpse of a young miner whose face stands out in relief against the side of the gallery (Fig. 2) the other shows a wheel and a lot of debris heaped up pell-mell (Fig. 3). ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... abuse which would tend to diminish popular respect for government servants and to transform... transform, what a wealth of hidden things that word conceals. I cannot so much as pronounce it but a world of ideas and sentiments come thronging pell-mell to invade the secret recesses of my being." "I beg pardon, monsieur?" "What did you say, M. Boscheron?" "Please repeat, monsieur; I didn't ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... to the girl, nodded to his drowsy uncle, waved his cap to the rest - and off they flew pell-mell, as if all the witches in England were in their horses' legs. They were out of sight in ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... know how to put them on, and they rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned how to spell, but he does not know the true meaning, connections, and relations of words, the propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact significance of imagery;[1119] he strides on impetuously athwart a pell-mell of incongruities, incoherencies, Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly stumbling along through awkwardness and inexperience, but also through excess of ardor and of heat;[1120] his jerking, eruptive thought, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... challenge had rung from the upstairs window. This would have been ample time to carry the house by storm, front and back, had the invaders had the leadership and wit; but these things they lacked. They were still massed on the front porch, pell-mell, in a turbulent group, ramping, raging, thirsty for action, but as yet ineffective; though one of them had at that moment set a match to a torch of newspapers and kindling wood. Delay had loosed the hunter's instinct in the half-drunken band: it broke into flame at sight ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the flash of sabers, the jets of white smoke from rifle or pistol, and then the Northern line was cut through. But new regiments came up, threw themselves upon the cavalry, and all were mingled in a wild pell-mell among the thickets and through the forests. Clouds of smoke, thick and black, settled down, and horse and foot, saber and gun ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... hours before daybreak, but elation possessed them to the exclusion of all thought of fatigue. The sight of the field of action set Jim's sinews twitching; he longed for the strife, and found some difficulty in restraining himself from running with the preceding party pell-mell on to the creek. But he had nothing of the gold-seeker's fever in his blood; the thought of amassing a fortune had merely occurred to him: it was the free, strong, exhilarating life ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... violent storm arose, the sea became turbulent and there was much seasickness. No one could stand upright in the cabins, everything was tossed about pell-mell and sailors fell overboard and could not be saved; yet the fleet by the evening of the 9th was sailing with calmer weather through the dangerous region of the Scilly Islands, where, over a mass of rocks and reefs a warning lighthouse stood. After sunset the last ...
— The Voyage of The First Hessian Army from Portsmouth to New York, 1776 • Albert Pfister
... saw Jack, who had gained the forecastle, waving his cutlass in triumph. The Spaniards, who had hitherto shown a bold front, on hearing the shout, and seeing that their chance of victory was gone, threw themselves pell-mell down the hatchways among their companions, who had by this time regained their legs. What was bad, they had also kept possession of their arms, and began to fire upon the English. The seamen could easily have shot them, but the cowardly scoundrels retreated among the chained slaves, believing ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... at once upon the bank or dam, and distinctly perceived that he took a survey of the gutter, after which he instantly gave with all his force four blows with his tail; and had scarce struck the fourth, but all the beavers threw themselves pell-mell into the water, and came upon the dam: when they were all come thither, one of them muttered and mumbled to the {128} rest (who all stood very attentive) I know not what orders, but which they doubtless understood well, because they instantly departed, and went out on ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... And, as Masters Putnam and Raymond agreed in talking over the scene afterwards, he certainly did seem to effect an instantaneous cure of the "afflicted," for they came to their sober senses at the first cut of the leather strap, and rushed pell-mell down the passage as rapidly as they could regardless of the ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... they live in tribes composed of from fifty to sixty individuals. During the day, the old men, the infirm, and the children, remain near a large fire, while the others are engaged in hunting; when they have a sufficiency of food to last for some days, they remain round their fire, and sleep pell-mell among the cinders. ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... was, 25 As I came through the desert: Lo you, there, That hillock burning with a brazen glare; Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro; A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell 30 For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... were coming headlong down the almost perpendicular slope of a neve, with extended arms and clutching hands, seeking the broken rope which held this string of lives, and only served to drag them down to death in the gulf where the mass was to fall pell-mell, with ropes, axes, veils, and all the gay outfit of Alpine ascension, grown ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... did; for on Christmas morning, when the young Van Johnsons rushed pell-mell, helter-skelter, into the room prepared for his call, a new jacket hung on one chair, a new pair of trousers on the other; a doll's head peeped out of Queen Victoria's stocking; a new sled, gayly painted, announced itself in big letters "The Go Ahead"; lots of toys ...
— Harper's Young People, December 30, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... grabbed at handles—in fact at anything protruding from the carriages—in a desperate endeavour to be first on the footboard. Many were carried struggling and kicking along the platform. Women were bowled over pell-mell and their shrieks and cries mingled with the hoarse, exuberant howls of the war-fever stricken maniacs already tasting the ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... We entered pell-mell into the city, and passed over the dead bodies, and some not yet dead, hearing them cry under our horses' feet; and they made my heart ache to hear them. And truly I repented I had left Paris to see such a pitiful spectacle. Being come into the city, I entered into a stable, thinking to lodge my ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,—misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:—John Wilkes's—the ugliest man's in England—saying, that with half-an-hour's start he ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... 'tope walla,' or hat wearer, as they call the English, in full regimentals and cocked hat, seated on a clumsy, ill-formed thing meant for a horse. Then add to these English, French, and Dutch toys, which generally lie pell-mell in every corner where the listless, toy-satiated child may have thrown or ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... cellars and lanes and made a great slaughter. The dead lay all about the streets and in the bombed dugouts. Lieut. Rogers, O.C. No. 16 Platoon, was reputed to have killed eight himself. Those Huns who escaped ran pell-mell singly or in groups up the hill and along the Hargicourt road, flinging away their packs, with which the slope was littered. Captain James, who had led the Company so gallantly and successfully, got them ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... banged at every heel. Such a scene of confusion followed as is seldom witnessed. Knights in armour tumbled over their own steeds, donkeys ran snorting about, ladies shrieked, and fell over gentlemen, and gentlemen tumbled over ladies in pell-mell havoc and confusion, amid smoke and steam and hissing and cracking and banging ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... pending carnival, a complete confusion of ranks, of manners, and of sentiments: the crowd, the cries, the wit, and the comfits with which they inundate without distinction the carriages as they pass along, confound every mortal together and set the nation pell-mell, as if social order no ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... So pell-mell they went at it, half jest half earnest, and so the medley ended. Callias here called ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... my jewel, are you there?" exclaimed Dick, as he distinguished the Irishman. "Come, I have one friend among them whom I may welcome. So, they see me now. Off they come, pell-mell. Back, Bess, back!—slowly, wench, slowly—there—stand!" And Bess ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... my paper, my pen and my ink, First of this thing, and that thing, and t'other thing think; Then my thoughts come so pell-mell all into my mind, That the sense or the subject I never can find: This word is wrong placed,—no regard to the sense, The present and future, instead of past tense, Then my grammar I want; O dear! what a bore, I think I shall never attempt to write more, With patience I then my ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... impulse or every habitual prompting is to have neither satisfaction nor freedom. Reflection might be compared to the traffic policeman at the junction of two crowded thoroughfares. If everyone were to drive his car pell-mell through the rush, if pedestrians, street cars, and automobiles were not to abide by the rules, no one would get anywhere, and the result would be perpetual accident and collision. In thinking we simply control and direct our impulses in the light of the consequences we can foresee. To thus guide ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... a hundred. But no; those Russians argued that no single regiment would come browsing around there at such a time. It must be the entire English army, and that the sly Russian game was detected and blocked; so they turned tail, and away they went, pell-mell, over the hill and down into the field, in wild confusion, and we after them; they themselves broke the solid Russia centre in the field, and tore through, and in no time there was the most tremendous rout you ever saw, and the defeat of the allies ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... job, let's go to the jail and let out the debtors, come on," and suiting action to word he rushed out, and was followed pell-mell by the yelling crowd, all their truculent enthusiasm instantly diverted into ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... ordnance being very near unto himself; and thereupon hasted all that he might, to keep them from the recharging of the ordnance. And notwithstanding their ambuscados, we marched or rather ran so roundly into them, as pell-mell we entered the gates, and gave them more care every man to save himself by flight, than reason to stand any longer to their broken fight. We forthwith repaired to the market-place, but to be more truly understood, a place of very spacious ...
— Drake's Great Armada • Walter Biggs
... own work is one of the most singular of his characteristics. He hardly seems to have known at all what he was about. He wrote feverishly, desperately, under the impulsion of irresistible genius. His conceptions crowded upon him in vivid, serried multitudes—the wildest visions of fantasy mixed pell-mell with the most vital realizations of fact. It was not for him to distinguish; his concern was simply, somehow or other, to get them all out: good, bad, or indifferent, what did it matter? The things were in his brain; and they must ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Jack Hayes, the noted Texas Ranger, was raised. Hungerford was the beau-ideal of a soldier, as he was already the hero of three wars, and one of the best tacticians of his time. This command drove the Indians pell-mell for three miles to Mud Lake, killing and wounding them at every jump. Colonel Hungerford and Jack Hayes received, and were entitled, to great praise, for at the close of the war terms were made which have kept the Indians peaceable ever since. Jack Hayes ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Wrotham! Death of the Murderer! Appalling Tragedy at Blue Anchor!" And, for a few seconds, amid the confusion caused by the wind, and the wild clamour of the news-vendors, he felt as if every one were reeling pell-mell around him like persons on a ship at sea,—men with hats blown off,—women and children running aslant against the gale with hair streaming,—all eager to purchase the first papers which contained ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... waiting and fretted by the galling fire of the foe, would not wait, and, pushing them aside, clambering, boosting, and tumbling went over the obstruction. Not pausing to form in the ditch, they scrambled up the parapet and went surging over the crest, pell-mell, upon ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... and very kind it was of her, for I earned but little. At eleven years of age she sent me to work in one of the factories of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. I don't wish to speak, ill of the masters of these factories; but what do they care, if little boys and girls are mixed up pell-mell with young men and women of eighteen to twenty? Now you see, there, as everywhere, some are no better than they should be; they are not particular in word or deed, and I ask you, what art example for the children, who hear and see more than you think for. Then, what ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... bathing the whole scene in light. In the notch, half-way up the slope, stood a momentarily paralyzed group of nearly a hundred painted warriors. Every rifle in the hands of the white men in the two buildings spoke, and instantly the notch emptied itself pell-mell of its living throng. Only a few prostrate bodies showed the Apaches had ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... retreat; the whole column was nothing but a projectile. The force acquired to crush the English crusht the French. The inexorable ravine could not yield until it was filled; riders and horses rolled in together pell-mell, grinding each other, making common flesh in this dreadful gulf, and when this grave was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of the Dubois' ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... right did not make them beloved by the begetters and sponsors of their victims. When word first went round, on the last day of February, that a lamb had unexpectedly turned upon these two practised and confident wolves, and had torn an ear from each of them, and driven them pell-mell into a "corner," it was received on all sides with ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... the little white feet, over the mossy stones, and over the green turf, and I could not tell whether they looked prettier in the water or out of it. There was a rush for the baskets, and their contents were tumbled out pell-mell on the grass. Forks, spoons, tarts, sandwiches, lemons, followed each other ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... Guise, could have effected more than all the crusaders of two hundred years. The crusaders numbered many heroes, but scarcely a single general. There was no military discipline among them: they knew nothing of tactics or strategy; they fought pell-mell in groups, as in the contests of barons among themselves. Individually they were gallant and brave, and performed prodigies of valor with their swords and battle-axes; but there was no direction given ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... this success the enemy pushed on, supposing they should enter the town pell-mell with the rest; nor did the Royalists hinder them, but let good part of Barkstead's own regiment enter the head-gate; but then sallying from St. Mary's with a choice body of foot on their left, and the horse rallying in the High Street, ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... were all scalped they started over again, and kept up the fun until the big plantation bell sounded, and then the Injuns deserted in a body and ran off pell-mell to the quarters; for that bell was for the Christmas dinner, and they wouldn't miss that for all the scalps that ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... his hat, waved his hand in a friendly way, and darted off across the square. The old gardien came out with the keys and took me off to the Tour de Constance, where Protestants were imprisoned pell-mell after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; thence to the Tour des Bourguignons, where I forget how many hundred Burgundians were massacred and pickled in salt; and, after these cheery exhibitions, invited ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... four times. Carried originally by a mixed force from Savaii and Tuamasanga, the victors, instead of completing fresh defences or pursuing their advantage, fell to eat and smoke and celebrate their victory with impromptu songs. In this humour a rally of the Tamaseses smote them, drove them out pell-mell, and tumbled them into the ravine, where many broke their heads and legs. Again the work was taken, again lost. Ammunition failed the belligerents; and they fought hand to hand in the contested fort with axes, clubs, and clubbed rifles. The sustained ardour of the engagement ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... above his head, he let his pen rush on for hour after hour in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit, where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions; where jests and anger, hopes and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled one another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man had nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the pile of ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... life may in the end be made up of a few well-turned speeches, a few fine books, and a few great plays. As for practicing what is so magisterially set forth, that is the last thing thought of. And if we pass from the world of talent to spheres which the mediocre exploit, there, in a pell-mell of confusion, we see those who think that we are in the world to talk and hear others talk—the great and hopeless rout of babblers, of everything that prates, bawls, and perorates and, after all, finds that there isn't talking enough. They all forget that those who make the least noise ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... time the forward deck was always under water, and the men gathered abaft the trunk to keep as dry as possible. Officers and crew were huddled together pell-mell, and, with our usual loose discipline, every body joined in the conversation and counsel. Before sundown I again advised the laying-to of the schooner; but the task had now become so formidable that the men who dreaded ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... have an ensemble,—to borrow one of the most picturesque terms of the art of painting; all is discord, even the external decoration. The cabajoutis is to Parisian architecture what the capharnaum is to the apartment,—a poke-hole, where the most heterogeneous articles are flung pell-mell. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... where a letter might be hid has been neglected. The table and bureau-drawers had been thrown here and there, but the narrow spaces between the drawers had been examined—I saw proofs of it, for I found the imprints of fingers on the dust which lay in these spaces. The books had been thrown pell-mell upon the floor, but every one of them had been handled, and some of them with such violence that the bindings were torn off. We found the mantel-shelves in their places, but every one had been lifted up. The chairs were ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... village spelled agony to the poor rustic. Still he thought he would get used to the new home which his son had chosen. But the strange journey with locomotive and steamship bewildered him dreadfully; and the clamor of the metropolis, into which he was flung pell-mell, altogether stupefied him. With a vacant air he regarded the Pandemonium, and a petrifaction of his inner being seemed to take place. He became "a barrel with a stave missing." No spark of animation visited his eye. Only one thought survived in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... which loosely fell, Crying: "No! not yet that dire eclipse!" Now loud laughed the dancers, and whirled pell-mell (While the ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... hospital practice: and he was required to keep all the knowledge he could pick up, in this distracting fashion, at examination point, until, at the end of three years, he was set down to a table and questioned pell-mell upon all the different matters with which he had been striving to make acquaintance. A worse system and one more calculated to obstruct the acquisition of sound knowledge and to give full play to the "crammer" and the "grinder" could hardly have been devised ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... we had come from, and as sure as I'm writing this, there was some one running pell-mell right toward us. I saw right away it was a girl. You know how a girl runs, especially when she runs fast. She was holding her head way back and laughing, and her hair was all flying loose. There ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... those pell-mell onslaughts and hand-to-hand struggles. Twice we were within an ace of being driven from our stronghold, when General Harris and his staff leapt recklessly upon the ramparts and hurled the besiegers heels ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... unpardonable herd of liars, knaves, and cheats who traffic in holy things, absolve for money, sell heaven, deceive the simple, and appear as if they "hadden leve to lye al here lyf after."[654] In this nethermost circle of his hell, where he scourges them with incessant raillery, the poet confines pell-mell all these glutted unbelievers. Like hardy parasitical plants, they have disjoined the tiles and stones of the sacred edifice, so that the wind steals in, and the rain penetrates: shameless pardoners they are, friars, pilgrims, hermits, with nothing of the saint about ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... taken from their shelf and shut up in a case of grand marqueterie work, an asylum worthier of them than of me. The wooden table still held its ground, protected by a vast pile of pamphlets and papers heaped pell-mell upon it; they seemed as if they would long protect it from its doom. Yet one day that too was mastered by fate, and in spite of my idleness pamphlets and papers went to arrange themselves in the shelves of a costly bureau.... It was thus that ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... powder on their hands, because their feet were shod with army shoes; there were innocent persons, the victims of private malice, who had been wrongfully denounced, shrieking forth their entreaties and explanations and finding no one to lend an ear to them; and all were driven pell-mell against a wall, facing the muzzles of the muskets, often so many poor wretches in the band at once that the bullets did not suffice for all and it became necessary to finish the wounded with the bayonet. From morning until night ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... name was Captain Truck, played at checkers; and I amused myself for a while by watching the trouble they had in keeping the men in the proper places. Just at the most exciting point of the game, the ship would careen, and down would go the white checkers pell-mell among the black. Then my father laughed, but Captain Truck would grow very angry, and vow that he would have won the game in a move or two more, if the confounded old chicken-coop—that's what he ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... reconnoitering beyond the door. This was promptly followed by a pell-mell dash for the open. In a moment they were crowding the trackside, staring with stupid eyes and mouths agape at the miniature snowfall of sugar, and the wreckage ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... advance, we discover a landscape ever renewing itself in a thousand fashions. We have palaces and ruins; gardens and solitudes: the horizon lengthens in the distance, or suddenly contracts; huts and stables, columns and triumphal arches, all lie pell-mell, and often so close that we might find room for all on the same ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... second the scouts were ready. In another, the little party emerged from the house and started pell-mell down the hill in a mad race to reach the landing before the ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... proceeded to inspect my spoils behind the target, and now stood looking at my portrait-gallery of living celebrities, his great chest heaving with laughter; and before I could satisfy my inquiring friends, the whole crowd had rushed pell-mell to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... length succeeded in producing; for the pretty creatures became more frightened than ever; and instead of swimming, as hitherto, in concert, and parallel to each other as they had been doing, they got huddled into a crowd, and commenced darting, pell-mell, in ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... had to be taken in the open. They did it under fire, on the run, with a dozen riflemen aiming at them from the fringe of blackberry bushes that bordered the mesa. Up the ridge they went pell-mell, Reeves limping the last fifty feet of the way. An almost spent bullet had struck him in the fleshy part ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... respectable wind to go wreaking its vengeance on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves; but this wind happening to come up with a great heap of them just after venting its humor on the insulted Dragon, did so disperse and scatter them that they fled away, pell-mell, some here, some there, rolling over each other, whirling round and round upon their thin edges, taking frantic flights into the air, and playing all manner of gambols in the extremity of their distresses. Nor was this enough for its malicious fury, for not content ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... Church in the pell-mell of Stephen's time Hath climb'd the throne and almost clutch'd the crown; But by the royal customs of our realm The Church should hold her baronies of me, Like other lords amenable to law. I'll have them written ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... boats from the vessels in the harbor, gathering at Long Wharf. Drums were beating, troops marching. Abraham Duncan came with the information that four or five thousand men were to assault the works and drive the provincials pell-mell across the marshes to Roxbury. At any rate, that was the plan. He was sure it would be a bloody battle. Possibly, while General Howe was engaged at Dorchester Heights, Mr. Washington might be ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... confirmed. The part extending to the mountains was so ground up and broken that there was positively not a spot where one could set one's foot. It looked as if a battle had been fought here, and the ammunition had been great blocks of ice. They lay pell-mell, one on the top of another, in all directions, and evoked a picture of violent confusion. Thank God we were not here while this was going on, I thought to myself, as I stood looking out over this battlefield; it must have been a spectacle ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... But pell-mell into camp they went, stampeding the oxen and horses and frightening the men, and Billy began to feel that he must keep on his ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... and already disheartened, imagined that these eager enemies were but forerunners of a large reinforcement. Hastily they disengaged themselves from the outlaws, and, gathering up Master Carfax, rushed pell-mell with him backward to the ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... a beautiful specimen of variegated anthracite, with all the hues of the rainbow beaming from its lacquered angles. The governor thought "a heap" of this specimen of the black rock, but dropping all the documents and State papers pell-mell upon the floor, he seized the piece of anthracite, and placing it carefully upon the blazing cross-sticks of the fire, in the most absorbed manner watched the operation. To his great delight the black rock was soon red hot—he called for his servant ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... San Joaquin Rivers. Then, in 1846, had come the War with Mexico and the Conquest of California by the Americans, swiftly followed by the discovery of gold in 1848 and the great inflow of gold-seekers from all parts of the world of 1849 and later, who, of course, all rushed pell-mell to the gold regions, leaving the rest of California more thinly populated than ever. Indeed, in 1849, all California, except the gold regions, was practically deserted; and, since the gold regions were located in what had been, a ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... for he did not wait for another invitation, but started on his way in a hurry, with Dick riding pell-mell after him. ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... delay, I cried out, as I had received authority to do so, "In the name of the King, open to us!" They obeyed an order thus given; we entered pell-mell, and in the greatest haste, men and mules, into the kitchen, which was on the ground-floor; and we hurried to extinguish the lights, in order not to awaken the suspicions of the bandits who were seeking for us. Indeed, we heard them, passing and repassing near the house, vociferating ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mohammed's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been written-down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton flung pell-mell into a chest; and they published it, without any discoverable order as to time or otherwise;—merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that way, lies almost at the end: for the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... discipline in his own camp by getting his regiments into shape, by establishing hospitals (which were immediately filled), and by protecting the citizens from the depredations of the starving fugitives who had been poured pell-mell ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... man who flinches.' And so they set off, but very slowly, like men whose legs were of very little use to them, and I sent four of them three hundred yards ahead to scout, and the others followed pell-mell, walking at random and without any order. I put the strongest in the rear, with orders to quicken the pace of the sluggards with the points of their bayonets ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... out of a piece of the body of the Creator, or made by some demiurgic potter out of clay. All these legends are told by savages, with no sense of their inconsistency. There is no single orthodoxy on the matter, and we shall see that all these theories coexist pell-mell among the mythological traditions of civilised races. In almost every mythology, too, the whole theory of the origin of man is crossed by the tradition of a Deluge, or some other great destruction, followed by revival ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... the shack. The intruder did not stand forth and show himself. The herder wondered that his approach had not been discovered. In the meantime the ewe, which he had absent-mindedly let go of, had made her escape and was again mingling with the multitude which was now running pell-mell into the corral. It seemed strange that the person behind the shack did not step forth. Being now free of the ewe (who had in no wise thwarted Justice by her act), he proceeded to investigate his home. And when he reached the corner of ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... carnival, a complete confusion of ranks, of manners, and of sentiments: the crowd, the cries, the wit, and the comfits with which they inundate without distinction the carriages as they pass along, confound every mortal together and set the nation pell-mell, as if ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... a great piece of luck that he had found that out. It made everything easy at once, and her words came out pell-mell. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... for Kathlyn that she had made up her mind to leap for the vines at the moment she did. For the elephants had not left the first turn in the street when keepers and soldiers came running pell-mell into the street with ropes and ladders, prepared for the recapture of the treasury leopards, which, of course, were looked upon ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... Castelnau clung on to the heights around Verdun, his centre and left were safely hinged upon a fortress under cover of which he could launch his counter-offensive with all the weight of his now completely mobilised reinforcements. Moreover, the army that had hurried pell-mell from Paris in taxicabs, in carts, in any form of conveyance that the authorities could lay hands upon, was now completely established on the left of the British, and if Von Kluck, lured on by the prize of Paris, pushed on, he would ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... our captain cries, "for her we will lie by, And on the morrow's coming dawn, a palaver we will try; For should we now attempt to make a pell-mell night attack, I fear our fight would heavy fall upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... themselves to the grain, chiefly dhura, that had partly poured out into the street. No one interfered with them. Within half an hour all the women and children in the town apparently, to the number of several thousands, were running pell-mell to loot the granary. Men also joined in plundering the Khalifa's storehouse. They ran against our horses, tripped over each other and fell in their crazy haste to fill sacks, skins, and nondescript vessels of ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... the sisters and to the prescription labels that I wrote for them, I obtained fortunately a cutlet now and then and a pear picked in the hospital orchard. I was, then, on the whole, the least to be pitied of all the soldiers packed together, pell-mell, in the wards, but during the first days I could not succeed even in swallowing the meagre morning dole. It was inspection hour, and the doctor chose that moment to perform his operations. The second day after my arrival he ripped a thigh open from top to bottom; I heard ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... the long rocket, That shot, from its socket, Puts armies, pell-mell, to the rout, sir; At Leipsic, its tail Made Napoleon turn pale, And sent all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... flight so tempting to very young wing-shots; now and then a flock of doves whistle off too far for a certain shot, and clouds of crow-blackbirds rise with hoarse chirps and seek less public feeding-grounds; a rabbit dashes off from a brier-patch and both dogs rush pell-mell at his heels, but a single note from the whistle brings them to a sudden halt and makes them look thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Off they go again, as wild as deer; but suddenly Di's whole action changes: crouching to the ground and beating her sides rapidly with her tail, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... through the fighting, this girl, she had drunk her fill from staved-in wine-casks and slept on the bare ground, pell-mell with the men, out in the public square reddened with the glare of conflagration. They were killing all round her, and nobody had been killed yet for her. She was resolved they should shoot her someone, before the end! Stamping with fury, she ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... I was trying to tell you, laddie, when you ran pell-mell in here to call the police. You ought to have made sure before you ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... streets, along the highways, in the fields. They marked the road by which the vanquished hordes had retreated. I counted almost two hundred in one trench, where a German battery had been placed. They lay pell-mell, mixed in with unexploded shells. Panic had apparently swept the gunners away. They had not had time to carry off their shells, so they had left them behind. But they had had time to empty the bottles. Absinthe, ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... praised. The Petit Moniteur, June, 1899, says: "Mlle. Chauchet, a very young girl, in her picture of a 'Breton Interior' shows a vigor and decision very rare in a woman." Of the "Maree," the Depeche de Brest says: "On a sombre background, in artistic disorder, thrown pell-mell on the ground, are baskets and a shining copper kettle, with a mass of fish of all sorts, of varied forms, and changing colors. All well painted. Such is the picture by ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... fifth, raising a shout of joy at the arrival of their friends, took the offensive, swept before them the mutineers who had made their way into the battery, and, joining the irregulars, drove the mutineers, astounded and panic-stricken at the fierceness of the assault, pell-mell before them down ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... or in a bare place, and seemed to be talking to each other with their heads close together. Suddenly one would jump down, and start for the bushes or the other side of the pasture. They would all follow pell-mell; then in a few minutes they would come rushing back again. It was pretty to see them playing together and having a good time before the sorrowful day of their ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... were shoved along the bottom; but I have seen the dredging instrument employed in the Thames, above and below London Bridge, to deepen the river, and worked by steam power, scoop up gravel and sand from the bottom, and then pour the contents pell-mell into the boat, and still many specimens of Limnaea, Planorbis, Paludina, Cyclas, and other shells might be taken out ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... a small tree to the back of our wagon, locked the wheels, and the Brethren held back by the tree with all their might." Even then the wagon went down so fast that most of the Brethren lost their footing and rolled and tumbled pell-mell. But Faith makes little of such mishaps: "No harm was done and we thanked the Lord that he had so graciously protected us, for it looked dangerous and we thought at times that it could not possibly be done without accident but we got down safely... we were all very tired and ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... and rifled barrel, opposed at Inkermann to the antiquated Russian musket, tore through the dense columns which had forced their way to the brow of the plateau, driving the stolid Muscovites, "incapable of panic," back into the ravine pell-mell—how, at many periods of the siege of Sebastopol, the rifle-pits did more to cripple the defence than did the mortars and battering-guns—we need not recount. These pits, and the rope mantlets wherewith they obliged the Russians to cover their embrasures, were pronounced ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... and showers of rice and confetti. While the guests were still eating and drinking Lester and Letty managed to escape by a side entrance into a closed carriage, and were off. Fifteen minutes later there was pursuit pell-mell on the part of the guests to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific depot; but by that time the happy couple were in their private car, and the arrival of the rice throwers made no difference. More champagne ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... hubbub rose outside my window, and I jumped up to see what was going on. Little Thief had come back, and Big Thief caught him in the act of robbery. Away they went pell-mell, jabbering like a flock of blackbirds, along a linden branch, through two maples, across a driveway, and up a big elm where Little Thief whisked out of sight into ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... the savages were flying pell-mell across the bridge with Gascoyne and Henry close on their heels, and the stout merchant panting after them, with his victorious band, as fast as his less agile limbs could ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... two of Mr. Langlois' most interesting photographs. One of these shows the head of the corpse of a young miner whose face stands out in relief against the side of the gallery (Fig. 2) the other shows a wheel and a lot of debris heaped up pell-mell (Fig. 3). ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... [Moves. The Church in the pell-mell of Stephen's time Hath climb'd the throne and almost clutch'd the crown; But by the royal customs of our realm The Church should hold her baronies of me, Like other lords amenable to law. I'll have them written down and made ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... surviving, even after as many or more have disappeared. I refer to those double words which either contain within themselves a strong rhyming modulation, such for example as 'willy-nilly', 'hocus-pocus', 'helter-skelter', 'tag-rag', 'namby-pamby', 'pell-mell', 'hodge-podge'; or with a slight difference from this, though belonging to the same group, those of which the characteristic feature is not this internal likeness with initial unlikeness, but initial likeness with ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... it was, 25 As I came through the desert: Lo you, there, That hillock burning with a brazen glare; Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro; A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell 30 For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... cried out, as I had received authority to do so, "In the name of the King, open to us!" They obeyed an order thus given; we entered pell-mell, and in the greatest haste, men and mules, into the kitchen, which was on the ground-floor; and we hurried to extinguish the lights, in order not to awaken the suspicions of the bandits who were seeking for us. Indeed, we heard them, passing and repassing near ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... gaining new hope from my courage, helped me with all his strength. It was no light task, for many of them were large and heavy. On we went, working like maniacs, slinging barrels, cheeses, and boxes pell-mell into the middle of the room. At last there only remained one huge barrel of vodka, which stood in the corner. With our united strength we rolled it out, and there was a little low wooden door in the wainscot behind it. The key fitted, and with a cry ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hurrying out pell-mell by the back way. Their horses stood at the gate; they mounted, and rode off, Moore laughing at their abrupt ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... curious town, the streets everywhere steep and narrow, and the houses, pell-mell, rich and poor, large and small huddled together without order. Almost opposite the handsome dwelling, the photograph of which had misled me, stood a little house where I could buy rich, creamy milk. It was sold by a Mademoiselle Rosalie, an old maid, whom I generally ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... that Monsieur de Balzac does not proceed with sureness, and that in his numerous productions, some of which appear to us almost admirable, at any rate touching and delicious or piquant and finely comic in observation, there is a dreadful pell-mell. What a throng of volumes, what a flight of tales, novels of all sorts, droll, philosophic, and theosophic. There is something to be enjoyed in each, no doubt, but what prolixity! In the elaboration of a subject, as in the detail of style, Monsieur ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... grievously not to forget this thing. The craft is hard—then approve the more sweetly him who carols the tune. But this is the way of the world, that when a man or woman sings more tunably than his fellows, those about the fire fall upon him, pell-mell, for reason of their envy. They rehearse diligently the faults of his song, and steal away his praise with evil words. I will brand these folk as they deserve. They, and such as they, are like mad dogs—cowardly ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... sprang Sir Pertinax with gleeful shout, Plucked forth his blade and fiercely laid about. "Ha, rogues! Ha, knaves! Most scurvy dogs!" he cried. While point and edge right lustily he plied And smote to earth the foremost of the crew, Then, laughing, pell-mell leapt on other two. The fourth rogue's thrust, Duke Joc'lyn blithely parried Right featly with the quarter-staff he carried. Then 'neath the fellow's guard did nimbly slip And caught him in a cunning wrestler's grip. Now did they reel and stagger to and fro, And on the ling each ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... places without regard to dignity or station. "Carpenters and shipwrights sit next to the czar; but senators, ministers, generals, priests, sailors, buffoons of all kinds, sit pell-mell, without any distinction." And they were crowded so closely that it was with great difficulty they could lift their hands to their mouths. As for foreigners, if they happened to sit between Russians, they were little likely to have any appetite to eat. All ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the serious little faces under the red and white caps have given me a heavier case of Weltschmerz than I have ever experienced at a performance of "Tristan und Isolde." It was the fact of those little children advancing in unison; that is the word. If they had trudged or scurried along, pell-mell, I should not have minded. But May parties move forward in procession, and the movement of a compact crowd is, to me, always ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... became known in Bristol, and a clamorous mob assembled before the Castle. The Mayor, to his credit, did his best to resist the rabble, and to save his prisoner; but the mob were stronger than authority. They carried the gates, rushed pell-mell into the Castle, and dragged the captive forth into the market-place. And then Bertram saw his master again—a helpless prisoner, in the hands of a furious mob, among whom several priests were active. As he appeared, there ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... terrific; now came triumphant shouts in English, and Roger could picture to himself the bravo fellows rushing the Spaniards pell-mell across their own decks and into the water, or below; and again the tide of battle seemed to turn, and the English to be ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... strikes sparks. There is a deeply rooted feeling in us that the arts have a common matrix, that they are emotionally akin. "Her slow smile" in fiction has had marked success with young people, but a "slow landscape" is still regarded suspiciously. The bravest critic of art was Huysmans. He pitched pell-mell into the hell-broth of his criticism any image that assaulted his fecund brain. He forced one to see his picture—for he was primarily concerned not with ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... their way to the wharf with all possible speed. In the meantime, Colonel Wood had gone out to the transport in a steam-launch and gotten the vessel to come up to the wharf. On board went the Rough Riders pell-mell, and not a ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... his hand to the girl, nodded to his drowsy uncle, waved his cap to the rest - and off they flew pell-mell, as if all the witches in England were in their horses' legs. They were out of sight in ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... my life has made Where I may try to dare in thought. I mind, When I stood in the midst of those bare women, All at once, outburst with a rising buzz, A mob of flying thoughts was wild in me: Things I might do swarmed in my brain pell-mell, Like a heap of flies kickt into humming cloud. I beat them down; and now I cannot tell For certain what they were. I can call up Naught venturesome and darting like their style; Very tame braveries now!—O ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... gate, Sampietro. What do you mean?" said Our Lord. "If Il Santissimo will but step this way, round by these bushes," said Sampietro, "He shall see." And there sure enough He saw; for there was Our Lady drawing us all up helter-skelter, pell-mell, willy-nilly into Heaven in a great bucket, to our great gain and undeserved good. O clemens, O ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... off! But surely no, it can't be? Yes, by jove, there are boats pulling after us with all the might the rowers can command. We lie to, the proas come nearer. Hurrah! the clothes, some wholly washed, some half-washed, and some not washed at all. Piles of fair white linen are bundled up the gangway pell-mell, Malay washerwomen bundled out ditto, and for payment, the revolving screws settle that in a highly ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... trials awaited him, however, somewhat different from those already experienced. The boat had been under way but a short time before it was struck by a sudden squall, tearing the rotten sails to pieces, and driving the craft pell-mell upon Long Island. It was the first squall of that sort Benjamin had ever experienced. Other squalls had struck him, and he was fleeing from one at that time, but this squall of wind and rain was altogether a new experience, and he wilted under ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... flash the ravenous seven went rushing Pell-mell into the house, Nor left, of the fine roast upon the table, Enough ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... thrown into confusion. Everything was pulled up by the roots. Events, destined to destroy ancient Europe and to construct a new Europe, trod upon one another's heels in their ceaseless rush, and drove the nations pell-mell, some into the light, others into darkness. So much uproar ensued that it was impossible that some echoes of it should not reach the hearts of the people. It was more than an echo, it was a reflex blow. Man, withdrawing within himself ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... and if you just make believe that you're standing on a little hill near that old pit and looking south toward Black Lake, you'll see just what we saw—as you might say. We saw the water just pouring through Nick's Valley and coming toward us and going pell-mell into the old creek bed. Now that's the best way I can tell it to you. I guess the little hill we were on acted kind of like a back stop maybe (anyway, that's what Bert said) because the water only beat against it and then ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... preparing to make for Calestano and to cross the first high spur of the Apennines that separated me from it, when I saw, as I left the place, a very old church; and I stayed a moment and looked at carvings which were in no order, but put in pell-mell, evidently chosen from some older building. They were barbaric, but one could see that they stood for the last judgement of man, and there were the good looking foolish, and there were the wicked being boiled by devils in a pot, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the army led by Aetius against that of Attila, who also had in his ranks Goths, Burgundians, Gepidians, Alans, and beyond Rhine Franks, gathered together and enlisted on his road. It was a chaos and a conflict of barbarians, of every name and race, disputing one with another, pell-mell, the remnants of the Roman empire torn asunder and in dissolution. Attila had already arrived before Orleans, and was laying siege to it. The bishop, St. Anianus, sustained a while the courage of the besieged, by promising them aid from Aetius ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the people nor their leaders could learn that, not a new doctrine, but a wise toleration for all Christian doctrines was wanted. Of new doctrines there was no lack. Lutherans, Calvinists, Flaccianists, Majorists, Adiaphorists, Brantianists, Ubiquitists, swarmed and contended pell-mell. In this there would have been small harm, if the Reformers had known what reformation meant. But they could not invent or imagine toleration. All claimed the privilege of persecuting. There were sagacious and honest men among the great ones of the country, but they were but few. Wise ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with considerable vigour and imperativeness. And so the worthy old housekeeper decided that on the whole it would be well to be careful—to mind one's P's and Q's as it were,—to pause before rushing pell-mell into a flood of unpremeditated speech, and to pay the strictest possible attention ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... poet, 'were frightfully distorted: they glared, they grinned, they spat, they railed, and hissed, and roared; they gnashed their teeth, and bit, and butted with their foreheads at each other; his arms, wielding swords and spears, were fighting pell-mell together; his legs, in like manner, were indefatigably at variance, striding contrary ways, and trampling on each other's toes, or kicking each other's shins, as if by mutual consent.' Such would be the true representative of an organ that ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... given to dissection and to hospital practice: and he was required to keep all the knowledge he could pick up, in this distracting fashion, at examination point, until, at the end of three years, he was set down to a table and questioned pell-mell upon all the different matters with which he had been striving to make acquaintance. A worse system and one more calculated to obstruct the acquisition of sound knowledge and to give full play to the "crammer" and the "grinder" could hardly have been devised by human ingenuity. Of late years ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... boy indicted Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted before. The sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the forecastle scuttle and watched and listened. The hunters piled pell-mell out of the steerage, but as Leach's tirade continued I saw that there was no levity in their faces. Even they were frightened, not at the boy's terrible words, but at his terrible audacity. It did ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... bell rang, and away started our train, whizz, bang, like a flash of lightning through a butter-firkin. I endeavoured to catch a glimpse of some familiar places as we passed, but the attempt was altogether useless. Harrow-on-the-Hill, as we shot by it, seemed to be driving pell-mell up to town, followed by Boxmoor, Tring, and Aylesbury—I missed Wolverton and Weedon while taking a pinch of snuff—lost Rugby and Coventry before I had done sneezing, and I had scarcely time to say, "God bless us," till I found we had reached Birmingham. Whereupon I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... latter half of April, we pass through what I call the "robin racket,"—trains of three or four birds rushing pell-mell over the lawn and fetching up in a tree or bush, or occasionally upon the ground, all piping and screaming at the top of their voices, but whether in mirth or anger it is hard to tell. The nucleus of the train is a female. One cannot see that the males ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... week ago, and made our first stage to Derby, where we had to wait an hour or two at a great, bustling, pell-mell, crowded railway station. It was much thronged with second and third class passengers, coming and departing in continual trains; for these were the Whitsuntide holidays, which set all the lower orders ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... question I felt required consideration. I paused. Seeing it he said, "But I will tell you what I think of it. I think it will surprise and confound the enemy. They won't know what I am about. It will bring forward a pell-mell battle, and ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... dogs, harnessed to one of the small sleds, became suddenly terrified. Before any one could interfere they had bolted from Muck Tu's control in a wild break for the farther side of the ice. The sled was overturned; pell-mell the dogs threw themselves into the water; the sled sank, the load-lashing parted, and two medicine chests, the bag of sewing materials—of priceless worth—a coil of wire ropes, and three hundred and fifty pounds of pemmican were lost in ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... the door, and they were out in the crying tempest. The great clouds flew along the sky like an army in retreat. Some, to Winifred, seemed soldiers, others baggage-waggons, horses, gun-carriages, rushing pell-mell for safety. One drooping, tattered cloud she deemed the colours of a regiment streaming under the stars that peeped out here and there—watching sentinel eyes, obdurate, till some ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... of the rifle. Three more. No answer. Pancracio disobeys orders. He fires, smashing the lock. The door opens. Behind, a confusion of skirts and children's bare legs rushing to and fro, pell-mell. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... seven hundred men, under the command of Colonel Daniel E. Hungerford and Jack Hayes, the noted Texas Ranger, was raised. Hungerford was the beau-ideal of a soldier, as he was already the hero of three wars, and one of the best tacticians of his time. This command drove the Indians pell-mell for three miles to Mud Lake, killing and wounding them at every jump. Colonel Hungerford and Jack Hayes received, and were entitled, to great praise, for at the close of the war terms were made which have kept the Indians peaceable ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... little overtaxed brain was in a whirl. She had no definite idea of anything beyond getting away. As a patient domestic beast of burden suddenly resumes his savage state and rushes blindly, pell-mell, he knows not where, so Mlle. Fouchette now plunged into the oblivion ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... those would drive them pell-mell; For safety they'd Hazen, and think they did well To escape from the jury of women turned loose Who have drank to its dregs ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... he meant to keep away from his friend. He stayed at home longer than usual on purpose. Finally he grew afraid of being late and tumbled pell-mell downstairs, intent on turning to his old route by way of East Long Street. But no sooner had he reached the lane than his legs seemed to be moving regardless of his will, and they took the familiar turn toward the Quay. At that moment ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means common in which an author is at all in condition to retrace the steps by which his conclusions have been attained. In general, suggestions having arisen pell-mell, are pursued and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... first man who flinches.' And so they set off, but very slowly, like men whose legs were of very little use to them, and I sent four of them three hundred yards ahead to scout, and the others followed pell-mell, walking at random and without any order. I put the strongest in the rear, with orders to quicken the pace of the sluggards with the points of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... and shouting out, Down with Baal and his worshippers! they charged the malignants so unexpectedly home, that they not only drove them back into their house of garrison, but entered it with them, as the phrase is, pell-mell. I also was there, partly hurried on by the crowd, partly to prevail on our enraged soldiers to give quarter; for it grieved my heart to see Christians and Englishmen hashed down with swords and gunstocks, like curs in ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... in 1810 that Shelley, impressed somehow or other with the belief that Stockdale was the poet's friend, rushed pell-mell into the publisher's Pall Mall shop, and besought him to do the friendly thing by him, and help him out of a scrape he had got into with his printer by ordering him to print fourteen hundred and eighty ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... us. Speech then ceases and we seem to be struck dumb. Stooping or kneeling we bestir ourselves; we buckle on our waist-belts; shadowy arms dart from one side to another; pockets are rummaged. And we issue forth pell-mell, dragging our knapsacks behind us by the straps, our ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... are the laws enforced now against gambling, betting, swearing or any other form of innocent amusement.... Why! two wenches were whipped at the post by the public hangman only last week, because forsooth they were betting on the winner amongst themselves, whilst watching a bout of pell-mell.... And you know that John Howthill stood in the pillory for two hours and had both his hands bored through with a hot iron for allowing gambling inside his coffeehouse. ... And so, mistress, you will perceive that I am speaking but in ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... them. I won't say I wish you could feel what it is, because that would be an unchristian and savage aspiration. It is never inclosed, or warded off. You walk down the main street of a large town; and, slap-dash, headlong, pell-mell, down the middle of the street, with pigs burrowing, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and children crawling, close to the very rails, there comes tearing along a mad locomotive with its train of cars, scattering a red-hot shower ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and the conflict began among friends who should have been united against the enemy. Finally, the two troops, leaving behind them some corpses stifled in the press, or even killed by their companions, passed through the defile pell-mell and were lost sight of in the ravine. But during this struggle Seyton and Arbroath had lost precious time, and the detachment sent by Murray, which had taken the road by Glasgow, had reached the village ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... what had befallen them, I mounted the mule and came hither, in haste, to tell you." When my master's wife and daughters heard this, they shrieked aloud and tore their clothes and buffeted their faces, whilst the neighbours came round them. Then my mistress overturned the furniture of the house, pell-mell, tore down the shelves, broke up the casements and the lattices and smeared the walls with mud and indigo. Presently she said to me, "Out on thee, O Kafour! Come and help me tear down these cupboards and break up these vessels and porcelain!" So I went to her and helped her break ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... Thornburgh, it was soon evident, was giving him but a scatterbrained attention. Her secret was working in her ample breast. Very soon she could contain it no longer, and breaking in upon her husband's parish news, she tumbled it all out pell-mell, with a mixture of discomfiture and defiance infinitely diverting. She could not keep a secret, but she also could not bear to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the morning, when the bell rang for the boys to come in from their recess, Newman and many of the others pushed in at the doorway, pell-mell, as usual. Before they were fairly inside the room the new master, calm and smiling, stood before them. One of his long arms shot out; he collared Newman and, with a trip of the foot, flung him on the floor. Ben Murch, coming next, landed on top of Newman. Alfred Batchelder, Ephraim Darnley, ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... butter's lost!' yelled Peter the Graybeard, as he rushed pell-mell up the steps, with the spigot in his hand. What a spectacle was there! the churn upset, the cream spilt all over the floor, and the huge sow fairly wallowing in ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... charge that they drove back the defenders mile after mile to the very gates of Milan. Then one of the older soldiers, who saw the enemy's plan, shouted, "Turn, men-at-arms, turn!" and the others heard in time, but the Good Knight, thinking only of pursuing his foes, entered pell-mell with them into the city, and followed them to the very palace of the lord Lodovico. As he was wearing the white cross of France, he was soon surrounded on all sides and taken prisoner. Lodovico had heard the cries, and sent for this brave foe, who was disarmed ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare
... the multitudinous government were laid together. Heads of colleges, presidents of chambers, militia-chieftains; magistrates, ward-masters, deans of fishmongers, of tailors, gardeners, butchers, all met together pell-mell; and there was no predominant authority. This was not a convenient working machinery for a city threatened with a siege by the first captain of the age. Moreover there was a deficiency of regular troops: The burgher-militia were well trained and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to rip off the sidearms and ammunition belt of the stricken German and then ran pell-mell across the open space that fronted the old guardhouse to one of the village streets up which the stream of German sailors had vanished. As he got an unbroken view up the street and on to the higher ground that stretched away from the ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... luxurious thing of morocco. Homer, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, have been taken from their shelf and shut up in a case of grand marqueterie work, an asylum worthier of them than of me. The wooden table still held its ground, protected by a vast pile of pamphlets and papers heaped pell-mell upon it; they seemed as if they would long protect it from its doom. Yet one day that too was mastered by fate, and in spite of my idleness pamphlets and papers went to arrange themselves in the shelves of a costly bureau.... It was thus that the edifying retreat of the philosopher ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,—misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:—John Wilkes's—the ugliest man's in England—saying, that ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... only articles of furniture were two high-backed arm-chairs, covered with a plain-colored stuff, of which it was impossible to guess the original color; a large table, half covered with an unbleached linen table-cloth in which a loaf was wrapped, the other half being strewed pell-mell with papers and books; and, lastly, a rickety, worm-eaten four-post bedstead, with its blue serge curtains looped back to admit the rays of the sun, and the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... round, the larboard quarter boat was completely smashed between the ship's side and the rock. Nothing could exceed the alarm that prevailed on board for a few minutes after the sudden crash. The decks were covered with spars and rigging, lying pell-mell upon the bodies of those who had been injured by their fall. The man at the helm had been killed at his post, and the wheel itself was shivered to atoms; whilst the darkness of the night, and the roar of the breakers against the cliff, added to the horrors of ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... remains of his command were cut off and surrendered. As we passed out of range of the enemy's fire we mingled with the masses of troops skurrying towards the landing, all semblance of organization lost. It was a great crowd of beaten troops. Pell-mell we rushed towards the landing. As we approached it we saw a row of siege guns, manned and ready for action, while a dense mass of unorganized infantry were rallied to their support. No doubt they were men from every regiment on the ...
— "Shiloh" as Seen by a Private Soldier - With Some Personal Reminiscences • Warren Olney
... revellers scented with joy the prospect of rain. At the Arch of San Lorenza, in Lucina, in the long narrow street of the Via Corso, where doorways and casements and roofs and footways were agrin with faces, half a dozen Jews or so were assembled pell-mell. They had just been given a hearty meal, but they did not look grateful. Almost naked, save for a white cloak of the meagrest dimensions, comically indecent, covered with tinsel and decorated with laurels, they stood shivering, awaiting ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... repetitions, its catchwords—"That's quite another thing! That's quite another thing!"—its rattling indomitability, its loud indiscreetness. His speeches, made repeatedly at the most inopportune junctures, and filled pell-mell with all the fancies and furies that happened at the moment to be whisking about in his head, were the consternation of Ministers. He was one part blackguard, people said, and three parts buffoon; but those who knew him better could not help liking him—he ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... to turn; to thwart. Thraws, throes. Threap, maintain, argue. Threesome, trio. Thretteen, thirteen. Thretty, thirty. Thrissle, thistle. Thristed, thirsted. Through, mak to through make good. Throu'ther (through other), pell-mell. Thummart, polecat. Thy lane, alone. Tight, girt, prepared. Till, to. Till't, to it. Timmer, timber, material. Tine, to lose; to be lost. Tinkler, tinker. Tint, lost Tippence, twopence. Tip, v. toop. Tirl, to strip. Tirl, to knock for entrance. Tither, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... to the original use to which the building was put. On the first floor (above the ground-floor) was one room and the kitchen; on the floor above that were two bedrooms. The garret was used to put away articles more choice and delicate than those that lay pell-mell about ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... swarming on their prey, the band stormed the door, and thrust and struggled and battled a way down the narrow staircase, and along the narrow passage. "A bas les Huguenots! Mort aux Huguenots!" they shouted; and shrieking, sweating, spurning with vile hands, viler faces, they poured pell-mell into the street, and added their clamour to the boom of the tocsin that, as by magic and in a moment, turned the streets of Paris into a hell of blood and cruelty. For as it was here, so it was in a dozen ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... their master-gunner (a man of no mean skill and mark, you must think,) confronts me with his linstock, ready to give fire; I, spying his intendment, discharged my petronel in his bosom, and with these single arms, my poor rapier, ran violently upon the Moors that guarded the ordnance, and put them pell-mell, to the sword. ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... Officer tumbled pell-mell up the ladder and handed a piece of folded paper to the Captain, saluted, turned on his heel and descended the ladder again. The Captain unfolded the signal and read with knitted brows. Then he turned quickly to ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... feat as it befell; Not a head in white and black On a single fishing-smack, 130 In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack All that France saved from the fight whence England bore the bell. Go to Paris: rank on rank Search the heroes flung pell-mell On the Louvre, face and flank! 135 You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. So, for better and for worse, Herve Riel, accept my verse! In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more Save the squadron, honour France, love thy wife the Belle ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... navigable world. Such were the people whose arrival in the Pacific the Spanish commandantes and viceroys awaited with no small fear and trembling. They knew vaguely that we had just come off victorious from a long, fierce, and bloody struggle with powerful England, and while they consigned us pell-mell to the devil, as "malditos Americanos," they doubted whether we had the additional claim to go there upon the strength of being heretics. The captains of the guarda-costas redoubled their vigilance, and sailed in chase of not ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... horses go through without hitting a gate post? Would they run into a fence or over a pile of stones at one side? My heart was in my mouth. I jerked the reins in a vain attempt to guide them, but on they went, pell-mell, making straight for the open gate. Presently I saw some one rush from the house and then another person come flying from the stables. Just before we reached the gate, it was flung to with a bang. The horses pranced, swung a little to one side and stopped short, and I heard some one say, ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... be difficult to say who was first, for Henri, Adolphe, and nearly a dozen others, galloped across the bridge together, and the whole troop followed them pell-mell into the town. The two cannons were soon taken; the irresolute blues, who, with only half a heart, had attempted to defend themselves, were driven from their positions, and Henri at once found himself ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... and report of the fire-arms, and the fall of their foremost chief, shot through the brain by Arlac, filled them with consternation, and they fled within their defences. Pursuers and pursued entered pell-mell together. The place was pillaged and burned, its inmates captured or killed, and the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Pell-mell down the stairs rushed the youths, one after another. In the meantime Senator Morr was dressing and so were the others ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... until Sommers felt that the place was intolerable. All this office practice got on his nerves. It was too "intensive." He could not keep his head and enter thoroughly into the complications of a dozen cases, when they were shoved at him pell-mell. He realized that he was falling into a routine, was giving conventional directions, relying upon the printed prescriptions and mechanical devices. All these devices were ingenious,—they would do no harm,—and they might do good, ought to do good,—if the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... not too good to keep," shouted Josie Jordan, rushing in pell-mell, and seizing the pair with a lustiness peculiar only to a maiden of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... troops who had retired advanced immediately, and all the French army pursued so hotly the English, that if the cry had not been raised to halt, it is very doubtful if they would not have got into Quebec pell-mell with the fugitives, being near the town-gates when this cry began. Thus Quebec would have been retaken in a most singular manner,[C] unforeseen and unpremeditated. I know nothing worse than ill-disciplined troops; certainly a brave militia, with its simple, ancient way of fighting, ...
— The Campaign of 1760 in Canada - A Narrative Attributed to Chevalier Johnstone • Chevalier Johnstone
... fire of Driscoll's six-shooters and the one howitzer. But it was headlong flight. At the trench they did not stop to grapple, but fought their way through and fled on down the hill, on across the grassy plain, nor paused until they had crowded pell-mell into the main Imperialist army ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... riders; no power to retreat; the whole column was nothing but a projectile. The force acquired to crush the English crusht the French. The inexorable ravine could not yield until it was filled; riders and horses rolled in together pell-mell, grinding each other, making common flesh in this dreadful gulf, and when this grave was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of the Dubois' ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... thought was to rush pell-mell after the Dog. He had often read of the hunt following furiously the baying of the Hounds, but ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... shun!" to the type before him—and the words jumped back into their places, letters separated from their entanglement and stood like soldiers at spruce attention. A relaxing of the effort—and dismiss! helter-skelter, pell-mell went letter, word, and line. It was all a blur again. Once more he made the necessary exercise of his will and was able to read a line or two; but, if the mistiness were not to come before his eyes, the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... are in the day's work; the imagination readily accepts them. It instinctively rejects, on the contrary, whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its lowest terms, as the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling pell-mell and hugger-mugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the caves of old. And yet to be just to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and dens of our cities; I must not forget that I have passed dinnerward through Soho, and seen ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... One foot high, and one foot low, Bearded, cloaked, and cowled, they go, 'Neath Charlie's Wain they twitter and tweet, And away they swarm 'neath the Dragon's feet, With a whoop and a flutter they swing and sway, And surge pell-mell down the Milky Way. Betwixt the legs of the glittering Chair They hover and squeak in the empty air. Then round they swoop past the glimmering Lion To where Sirius barks behind huge Orion; Up, then, and over to wheel amain, Under ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... commander struck spurs into his horse and dashed up the long slope at a run, closely followed by his enemy and aid. What they saw when they overtook the straggling, running, panting, screaming pell-mell ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... failing, determined, at great risk, to charge the whole body. They did so, and the Mantatees gave way, and fled in a westerly direction; but they were intercepted by the Griquas, and another charge being made, the whole was pell-mell and confusion. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... to the narrow fissure, and after a short time the stone moved and was raised. A staircase with high, steep steps, sinking into darkness, awaited the impatient travellers, who rushed down pell-mell. A sloping gallery painted on both walls with figures and hieroglyphs came next, then at the end of the gallery some more steps leading to a short corridor, a sort of vestibule to a hall in the same style as the first one, but larger and ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... anything new in the drama—that it was almost criminal to slight it. Nothing was made of it. It almost escaped attention. Instead, we got a crew of comic opera Scotchmen singing songs, and an absurd picture of Robert Burns, who was injected pell-mell into the "romance." ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... so loud, his manner so imperative, that the startled boy, without stopping to argue, stuffed the clothes pell-mell into the bag again and departed. A farewell glance at the clock made him look almost ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... "Mlle. Chauchet, a very young girl, in her picture of a 'Breton Interior' shows a vigor and decision very rare in a woman." Of the "Maree," the Depeche de Brest says: "On a sombre background, in artistic disorder, thrown pell-mell on the ground, are baskets and a shining copper kettle, with a mass of fish of all sorts, of varied forms, and changing colors. All well painted. Such is the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... the wall; and three-and-twenty of our fellows jumped after me. By the Pope of Rome, friend Tummas, that was a day!—Had you seen how the Mounseers looked when four-and-twenty rampaging he-devils, sword and pistol, cut and thrust, pell-mell came tumbling into the redoubt! Why, sir, we left in three minutes as many artillerymen's heads as there were cannon-balls. It was, "Ah sacre!" "D——- you, take that!" "O mon Dieu!" "Run him through!" "Ventrebleu!" and it WAS ventrebleu with him, I warrant you; for bleu, in the French language, ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The curate had concealed himself behind a post. More shots, more reports were heard from the direction of the convento, followed by cries and the sound of persons running. Capitan Tiago, Aunt Isabel, and Linares rushed in pell-mell, crying, "Tulisan! Tulisan!" Andeng followed, flourishing the gridiron as she ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the State of South Carolina was the enthusiastic pioneer. At the date of the President's message she had already provided by law for the machinery of a convention, though no delegates had been elected. Nevertheless, her Legislature at once plunged pell-mell into the task of making laws for the new condition of independent sovereignty which by common consent the convention was in a few days to declare. Questions of army and navy, postal communication, and foreign diplomacy, for the moment eclipsed the baser topics of estray laws or wolf-scalp ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... the time the captain's boat was due, and the four little Blossoms started pell-mell on a run for the wharf. Meg carried the glasses, remembering even in her hurry that they had promised to ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... great babble of voices, some shrieks, and more confusion, and the guests ran pell-mell down the great stairs and out the castle door. To Peter's dismay, Aunt Jane was not among them. So into the castle he rushed again, calling at the top of his voice, "Aunt Jane! Aunt Jane!" He ran through the brilliantly ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... seizes all classes. A week ago it was a short street indeed which did not boast at least one Red Cross Hospital; now most of them are deserted, for the fashionable women who followed the fashion in joining hospitals have now again followed the fashion and fled, pell-mell. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... and me, to whom communities and nations sometimes seem going pell-mell, and world ruled by some fiend at hap-hazard, and in all directions maladministration! The God who keeps seven worlds in right circuit for six thousand years can certainly keep all the affairs of individuals and nations and continents in ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... about. "'If we've been worsted here in the West, our friends in the East have made up for it by sweeping everything before them. Grant, the Yankee general, has been surprised at Shiloh, his army driven pell-mell through their camp and down under the bank of the river, where their gunboats saved them. Johnston lived long enough to see the Yankees in full flight and then he was killed; but Beauregard, who took his ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... Kollin, with his horse-guards, the cavalry piquets of the head-quarters, and the second and third battalions of guards. We had only four field pieces, and our squadron was stationed in one of the suburbs. Our advance posts, towards evening, were driven back into the town, and the hussars entered pell-mell: the enemy's light troops swarmed over the country, and my commanding officer sent me immediately to receive the King's orders. After much search, I found him at the top of a steeple, with a telescope in his hand. Never ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... the canons. Cautiously he approached and peeped around the corner. At first swift glance it had all the appearance of long disuse. But Jean had no time for another look. A clip-clop of trotting horses on hard ground brought the same pell-mell rush of sensations that had driven him to wild flight scarcely an hour past. His body jerked with its instinctive impulse, then quivered with his restraint. To turn back would be risky, to run ahead would be fatal, to hide was his one hope. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... rush in pell-mell, head-over-heels," added Mickey, after they had stood thus a short time; but they are sneaking along, just as they always do when they're on ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... down the almost perpendicular slope of a neve, with extended arms and clutching hands, seeking the broken rope which held this string of lives, and only served to drag them down to death in the gulf where the mass was to fall pell-mell, with ropes, axes, veils, and all the gay outfit of Alpine ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... and the young voices broke in pell-mell after her like a joyous crowd, seeing a vine-clad procession, and losing no time in joining for fear of losing step. Raven knew perfectly well the great old hymn was no matter for a passionately remorseful, sin-laden meeting of this sort. Nan knew it, too. He was sure she had not ventured it ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... whole column was nothing but a projectile. The force acquired to crush the English crusht the French. The inexorable ravine could not yield until it was filled; riders and horses rolled in together pell-mell, grinding each other, making common flesh in this dreadful gulf, and when this grave was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of the Dubois' brigade ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... miles short of Lexington, ominous sounds of conflict smote his ears: not the rolling volleys and stately tread of victory, but the confused noise of fight and flight, betokening irretrievable disaster. The fresh troops were formed into a hollow square, and pell-mell the hunted fugitives came rushing into their place of refuge. Exhausted by their long march and hot fight, many of them fell prone upon the ground, "their tongues," says a high authority, "hanging out ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... sorted them eagerly, putting them pell-mell into the drawers without the slightest attempt at any sort of order. But if there were very few clothes in the trunks, there were all sorts of other things. There were boxes full of caterpillars in different stages of chrysalis form. There ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... brain was in a whirl. She had no definite idea of anything beyond getting away. As a patient domestic beast of burden suddenly resumes his savage state and rushes blindly, pell-mell, he knows not where, so Mlle. Fouchette now plunged into ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... her arm, which loosely fell, Crying: "No! not yet that dire eclipse!" Now loud laughed the dancers, and whirled pell-mell (While the ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... for she pains herself grievously not to forget this thing. The craft is hard—then approve the more sweetly him who carols the tune. But this is the way of the world, that when a man or woman sings more tunably than his fellows, those about the fire fall upon him, pell-mell, for reason of their envy. They rehearse diligently the faults of his song, and steal away his praise with evil words. I will brand these folk as they deserve. They, and such as they, are like mad dogs—cowardly and felon—who traitorously bring to death men better than themselves. Now ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... she had been the link of connection between them and himself? She knew him, then—his home, his circumstances, his address. (His horse was going now where and how it would; the man's mind was confounded by the questions that came upon it pell-mell, none waiting for an answer.) In that other time when she had lived in the sea, and he had seen her from the desolate bit of coast, who was she? Where had she really lived? In what way could she have gained her information concerning him? What could have tempted her to play the part of a fishy ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... crowd, eager to see what was going forward, pressed closely upon the entrance of the approach; seeing which, the king gave certain orders, and immediately four or five men with long heavy bludgeons rushed at the mob and belaboured them right and left, putting the mass to flight pell-mell through the narrow ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... dust. But little cared Kit for weather. There was a freedom and freshness in the wind, as it came howling by, which, let it cut never so sharp, was welcome. As it swept on with its cloud of frost, bearing down the dry twigs and boughs and withered leaves, and carrying them away pell-mell, it seemed as though some general sympathy had got abroad, and everything was in a hurry, like themselves. The harder the gusts, the better progress they appeared to make. It was a good thing to go ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... formed the army led by Aetius against that of Attila, who also had in his ranks Goths, Burgundians, Gepidians, Alans, and beyond Rhine Franks, gathered together and enlisted on his road. It was a chaos and a conflict of barbarians, of every name and race, disputing one with another, pell-mell, the remnants of the Roman empire torn asunder and in dissolution. Attila had already arrived before Orleans, and was laying siege to it. The bishop, St. Anianus, sustained a while the courage of the besieged, by promising them aid from Aetius and his allies. The aid was slow to come; and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... in his own way. On St. John's Day, which was a time of great festivity, he suddenly reappeared, blew a new and beguiling air on his pipe, and immediately every child in the city felt as if a hand had seized him and ran pell-mell after the musician as he climbed the mountain, in which a door suddenly opened, and through that door all, save a lame boy, passed and were ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... cried a voice, and all eyes were turned to the gaudy swaying globe. Before anyone could speak, Elinor gave another hard tug, tearing out the bottom of the lantern, and down came the shower of gay little gauze bags with their cargoes of bonbons, pell-mell on the ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... revenue, the Amil took a force a few days ago to her twelve villages of Sonowlee, within the Dureeabad district, and seized and carried off some three hundred of her tenants, men, women, and children, as hostages for the payment of the balance due, and confined them pell-mell, in a fort. The clamour of the rest of the population as I passed was terrible, all declaring that they had paid their rents to the Ranee, and that she alone ought to be held responsible. She, however, resided at Soorujpoor, within the jurisdiction, and under the protection ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... trouble and too much child-bearing have done next to their worst with her. Sensible when she grasps a thing, she is often a bit mazed. She has the figure of an old woman—bent, screwed—and the toughness of a young one. Her words, spoken pell-mell in a high strained voice which oscillates between laughter and tears, seem to be tumbling down a hill one after another. Spite of all her household difficulties, she retains the usual table of ornaments just inside the front door. Last summer she reclaimed from the roadway a tiny triangular ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... conflict began among friends who should have been united against the enemy. Finally, the two troops, leaving behind them some corpses stifled in the press, or even killed by their companions, passed through the defile pell-mell and were lost sight of in the ravine. But during this struggle Seyton and Arbroath had lost precious time, and the detachment sent by Murray, which had taken the road by Glasgow, had reached the village ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... at one end, and eight of us took hold of it to try to pull the other end loose. Just as we were going to relinquish the effort in despair, the whistle of an engine in pursuit sounded in our ears! The effect was magical. With one convulsive effort we broke the rail in two, and tumbled pell-mell over the embankment. No one was hurt, and we took up our precious half rail, which insured us time to pass the train ahead, before our ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... of the soldiers, rushing up pell-mell, helped him pull the infuriated Bruce from his victim. The spectacle of their admired dog-hero, so murderously mauling a woman of the Red Cross, dazed ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Mr. Flanagan made another feint with the boot and lamp at the stairs, but stopped again in curious bewilderment, and rubbed his head. Then, with another inspiration, and speaking with such velocity that his words ran into each other, pell-mell, he continued: "Th' small girl's sick, sur. Begorra, I wor just pullin' on th' boots tuh gaw for the docther, in th' nixt streth, an' summons him to her relehf, for it's bad she is. A'id betther be goan." Another start, and a movement to put on the boot instantly, baffled by his getting the lamp ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... sentimentalism and rhetorical flourish, the former especially directed to the negroes in the gallery, when, suddenly, a cry of "Fire! fire!" was raised in the street. The learned Doctor stood as if electrified, and the instant after his hearers rushed pell-mell out of the chapel, amidst the shrieks of the females, and the consternation of the men, caused, without doubt, by a lurking suspicion of impending evil from the negroes which I have before referred to. On ascertaining that the alarm was caused by a house being ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... amenable to his spiritual power, for look, these rats that would come to his call, just as from his castle top he summon the wolves to your going and to that poor mother's cry, though they come to him, they run pell-mell from the so little dogs of my friend Arthur. We have other matters before us, other dangers, other fears, and that monster . . . He has not used his power over the brute world for the only or the last time tonight. So be it that he has gone elsewhere. Good! It has given us opportunity ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... fall was the signal of defeat and victory: the Swedes gave way, the Dutch pressed forward; the former took to their heels, the latter hotly pursued. Some entered with them, pell-mell, through the sally-port; others stormed the bastion, and others scrambled over the curtain. Thus in a little while the fortress of Fort Christina, which, like another Troy, had stood a siege of full ten hours, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... artillery to shield them, that the Germans were for a moment taken aback. Not a shot was fired for a space of time almost long enough to let the Americans reach the trench, and then the rifles broke out and the brown uniforms fell like leaves in autumn. But not all. They rushed on pell-mell, cutting wire, pouring irresistibly into the German trench. And the Guards, such as were not mown down, lost courage at the astounding impetus of the dash, and scrambled and ran from their trench. They took it—our boys took that trench—this old ditch. But then the big German guns opened a fire ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... befell; Not a head in white and black On a single fishing smack, In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack All that France saved from the fight whence England bore the bell. Go to Paris: rank on rank Search the heroes flung pell-mell On the Louvre, face and flank! You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. So, for better and for worse, Herve Riel, accept my verse! In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more Save the squadron, honour France, love thy wife, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... unity of a paragraph most frequently result from including more than belongs there. The theme has been selected; it is narrow and concise. When one begins to write, many things crowd in pell-mell. Impressions, which come and go, we hardly know how or why, are the only products of most minds. Impressions, not shaped and logical thoughts, make up the mixed confusion frequently called a theme. The writer puts down enough of these impressions to make ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... out the objects and places of interest. And thus, through the alleys and by-ways, through the nooks and labyrinths of these underground temple-ruins, we get to the rear, where the ramparts and mounds crumble to a mighty heap, rising pell-mell to the ceiling. Here, one is likely to get a glimpse into such enchanted worlds as the name of a Dickens or a Balzac might suggest. Here, too, is Shakespeare in lamentable state; there is Carlyle ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... order that boats might be floated down by this route, affording him an opportunity to make a bridge. But on learning that it had a much higher elevation than the Tigris, he did not do it, fearing that the water might rush pell-mell down hill and render the Euphrates unnavigable. So he conveyed the boats across by means of hauling engines at the point where the space between the rivers is the least—the whole stream of the Euphrates empties into a swamp and from there somehow ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... over to see them tumble out of the Temple so fast that one boy fell and about six fell on top of him just as American boys do pouring out of school. I even saw one lad whack another one on the back of his little bald head and a scuffle ensued. They laughed, fought, tumbled pell-mell, got up again grinning, winked and laughed back at the good natured Americans for all the world like ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... the stick, pushed in the coat, and began waving the stick about in the opening, saying, 'Come out, come out!' as he did so. He was still waving the stick, when suddenly the door of the garret was flung open; all the crowd flew pell-mell down the stairs instantly, Gavrila first of all. ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... his own men, and one hundred under Inspector Folk, of Brooklyn, who had been early ordered over, and been doing good service in the city, he marched down Broadway, and was just entering the Park, when the frightened crowd came rushing pell-mell across it. Immediately forming "company front," he swept the Park like a storm, clearing everything before him. Order being restored, Folk returned with his force to Brooklyn, where things began to wear a threatening ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, 85 Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 90 Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... no, it can't be? Yes, by jove, there are boats pulling after us with all the might the rowers can command. We lie to, the proas come nearer. Hurrah! the clothes, some wholly washed, some half-washed, and some not washed at all. Piles of fair white linen are bundled up the gangway pell-mell, Malay washerwomen bundled out ditto, and for payment, the revolving screws settle that in a ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... him at home, and the two armies met on the hill called Janiculum, beyond the river from the city. Here came the crash of battle, but the men of Clusium proved the stronger, and after a sharp struggle the Romans gave way and were driven pell-mell down the hill and across the bridge which spanned the Tiber at this point. This was a wooden bridge on which the Romans set great store, as it was their only means of crossing the stream. But it now was likely to ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Street!" called the conductor, and rattled the door. The railroad men tumbled out pell-mell, all but one. Conrad shook him, and he went out mechanically, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... the desert thus it was, 25 As I came through the desert: Lo you, there, That hillock burning with a brazen glare; Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro; A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell 30 For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... seemed simple panic: and like a pack of dogs which rush to mangle a mongrel, they were at him pell-mell. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... distraught to fetch Marian, do tilt pell-mell into Lord Robert, who hath come down to Amhurste for a week or ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... Christmas morning, when the young Van Johnsons rushed pell-mell, helter-skelter, into the room prepared for his call, a new jacket hung on one chair, a new pair of trousers on the other; a doll's head peeped out of Queen Victoria's stocking; a new sled, gayly painted, announced itself in big letters "The Go Ahead"; lots of toys were waiting for Primrose ...
— Harper's Young People, December 30, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... dogs, children sprang into sight from nowhere, and ran pell-mell to the two cannon. Galen Albret, reappearing from the factory, began to issue orders. Two men set about hoisting on the tall flag-staff the blood-red banner of the Company. Speculation, excited and earnest, arose among the ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... mind, the puff'd with wind, Do all come here pell-mell in; And they are sure to work their cure ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... imprecations, heedless of Mrs. Haxton's shrill appeal that they should beat off the few assailants then perilously close at hand, they yielded to the blind instinct of self-preservation, and rushed pell-mell for the camels. At once these men of a martial tribe, men who had cheerfully faced the far greater danger of the Hadendowa general attack, became untrammeled savages, each striving like a maniac to secure ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Calestano and to cross the first high spur of the Apennines that separated me from it, when I saw, as I left the place, a very old church; and I stayed a moment and looked at carvings which were in no order, but put in pell-mell, evidently chosen from some older building. They were barbaric, but one could see that they stood for the last judgement of man, and there were the good looking foolish, and there were the wicked being boiled by devils in a pot, and what was most pleasing was one devil ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... be fit to wear the khaki of scouts if we did, fellows!" cried Tom Chesney. "Come on, and let's give them a taste of their own medicine," and with loud shouts the five comrades started to gather up the snow as they chased pell-mell toward ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... running desperately with leaps and bounds, and panting for breath, came a tall slim man all in tight-fitting white clothes, with a dead white face and a white hairless head; and after him, tumbling on pell-mell, was a perfect riot of little red imps, with little horns on their foreheads, and little tails behind them, all trying to spear the white man with the wicked little pitchforks which they carried, and to seize him with their claws. Freddie thought ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... Adele and I fought for the map.... A sudden lurch to the left flung us into the corner, whence, before we had recovered our equilibrium, a violent swerve to the right returned us pell-mell. At last, in response to our menaces, Berry slowed ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the Coonia force managed to cut off the water from the stream which supplied it, and then an alarm was raised that they were about to make an attack. On this the whole army, horse and foot, tumbled over each other pell-mell, trying who should get the soonest out ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... words still surviving, even after as many or more have disappeared. I refer to those double words which either contain within themselves a strong rhyming modulation, such for example as 'willy-nilly', 'hocus-pocus', 'helter-skelter', 'tag-rag', 'namby-pamby', 'pell-mell', 'hodge-podge'; or with a slight difference from this, though belonging to the same group, those of which the characteristic feature is not this internal likeness with initial unlikeness, but initial likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming, but strongly alliterative, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds of sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-mell around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumble food—yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days when each man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... some flat rock or in a bare place, and seemed to be talking to each other with their heads close together. Suddenly one would jump down, and start for the bushes or the other side of the pasture. They would all follow pell-mell; then in a few minutes they would come rushing back again. It was pretty to see them playing together and having a good time before the sorrowful day of ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... slowly, "it's—it's just as though some cosmic jester, all-powerful, had scooped up the fragments of a ruined city and tossed them pell-mell into the core of the Adirondacks! ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... an ancient and hitherto ineradicable practice, the Pope is assisted in the temporal government of his States by the spiritual chiefs, subalterns, and spiritual employes of his Church; that Cardinals, Bishops, Canons, Priests, forage pell-mell about the country; that one sole and identical caste possesses the right of administering both sacraments and provinces; of confirming little boys and the judgments of the lower courts; of ordaining subdeacons and arrests; of despatching ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... which would tend to diminish popular respect for government servants and to transform... transform, what a wealth of hidden things that word conceals. I cannot so much as pronounce it but a world of ideas and sentiments come thronging pell-mell to invade the secret recesses of my being." "I beg pardon, monsieur?" "What did you say, M. Boscheron?" "Please repeat, monsieur; I didn't quite ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... one of these illuminations, Dunlap saw the foe approaching, Coming 'round to flank the columns Of the bold midnight invaders. Then he ordered forth his platoon, To cut off the brave Militia, To arrest the flanking Cornstalks, When pell-mell fell all together, In the hard-contested battle. But the weak, outnumbered Guardsmen, —Some among the twenty-seven— Soon were caught and held in capture, Soon were dragged within the circle Of the annual encampment. ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... to suggest that some minor point in Mr. Curtis's exposition was not correct, thus calling out a tumult of conflicting statements, the result of which was yet greater confusion, so that we seemed fated to adjourn pell-mell into the street and be summoned a second time into the hall, in order to begin ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... cautious reconnoitering beyond the door. This was promptly followed by a pell-mell dash for the open. In a moment they were crowding the trackside, staring with stupid eyes and mouths agape at the miniature snowfall of sugar, and the ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... to be allowed the luxury of a gallop, set off pell-mell, and Winifred followed at a gait which soon brought her, flushed and out of breath, before the unpainted house where the Davitt family made their abode. It was not characterized by great order or tidiness. Clothes-lines, hung with underwear of various shapes and sizes, ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... midst of all these characteristic types, moving about in a pell-mell fashion, making a constantly changing mosaic of vivid hues, there are the inhabitants of the innumerable valleys around Tarbes itself, each of them with its own peculiarities of costume, manners, speech, which make them easily distinguishable ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... vaults of S. Peter's contain mere fragments of tombs, some precious as historical records, some valuable as works of art, swept together pell-mell from the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... different subjects, in addition to the hours given to dissection and to hospital practice: and he was required to keep all the knowledge he could pick up, in this distracting fashion, at examination point, until, at the end of three years, he was set down to a table and questioned pell-mell upon all the different matters with which he had been striving to make acquaintance. A worse system and one more calculated to obstruct the acquisition of sound knowledge and to give full play to the "crammer" and the "grinder" could ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... yell, flung themselves, sword in hand, upon the whole battery; and the whole battery, bewildered by the suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack, thinking the entire battalion was upon them, gave way, and rushed pell-mell ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... him, however, somewhat different from those already experienced. The boat had been under way but a short time before it was struck by a sudden squall, tearing the rotten sails to pieces, and driving the craft pell-mell upon Long Island. It was the first squall of that sort Benjamin had ever experienced. Other squalls had struck him, and he was fleeing from one at that time, but this squall of wind and rain was altogether a new experience, and he wilted under it. The condition was made more ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... their headwaters. In the regions drained by these streams the run-off water is not absorbed as it should be. It flows unimpeded from the higher levels to the river valleys. It floods the river courses with so much water that they burst their banks and pour pell-mell over the surrounding country. Many floods which occur in the United States occur because we have cut down large areas of trees which formerly protected the sources of ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... one, our men retreated to the last ridge, and General Colley was shot through the head. After this, the retreat became a rout, and the soldiers rushed pell-mell down the precipitous sides of the hill, the Boers knocking them over by the score as they went, till they were out of range. A few were also, I heard, killed by the shells from the guns that were advanced from the camp to cover the retreat, but as this ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... does he find. Hence, while any one superstitious practice may be antique, there is small probability for assuming a contemporaneous origin of the hymns of the two collections. The many verses cited, apparently pell-mell, from the Rig Veda, might, it is true, revert to a version older than that in which they are found in the Rig Veda, but there is nothing to show that they were not taken from the Rig Veda, and re-dressed in a form that rendered them in many cases more ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... curiosities, which seemed to have been brought together from the four quarters of the globe. Stuffed birds from Africa, porcelain monsters from China, silver ornaments and utensils from India and Peru, mosaic work from Italy, and bronzes from France, were all heaped together pell-mell with the coarse deal boxes and dingy leather cases which served to pack them for traveling. The little man apologized, with a cheerful and simpering conceit, for his litter of curiosities, his dressing-gown, and his delicate health; and, waving his hand ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... that have fallen over the eyes. He is full of grace, and his virtues seem to me to be just those which Lucca herself possesses. Hidden away between the mountains, between the plains and the sea, she achieved nothing, or almost nothing. Castracani for a moment forced her into the pell-mell of awakened Italy, but with his death, and certainly with the fall of the House of Guinigi, she returned to herself, to her own quiet heart, which was enough for her. This one sculptor is almost her sole contribution ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... have cracked all at once, their easy-going, timid, incapable guardians having allowed things to take their course. Society, accordingly, disintegrated and a pell-mell, is turned into a turbulent, shouting crowd, each pushing and being pushed, all alike over-excited and congratulating each other on having finally obtained elbow-room, and all demanding the new barriers shall be ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... yelled Peter the Graybeard, as he rushed pell-mell up the steps, with the spigot in his hand. What a spectacle was there! the churn upset, the cream spilt all over the floor, and the huge sow fairly wallowing in the rich ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... companions, but they were already awake, and tumbling pell-mell over each other. They were being rapidly dragged down a steep declivity. Day dawned and revealed a terrible scene. The form of the mountains changed in an instant. Cones were cut off. Tottering peaks ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... cases out of a hundred. But no; those Russians argued that no single regiment would come browsing around there at such a time. It must be the entire English army, and that the sly Russian game was detected and blocked; so they turned tail, and away they went, pell-mell, over the hill and down into the field, in wild confusion, and we after them; they themselves broke the solid Russia centre in the field, and tore through, and in no time there was the most tremendous rout you ever saw, and the defeat of the allies was turned into a sweeping and splendid ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... do but that he should go back and speak to him. He said the boy would be disappointed. The men were visibly uneasy at his going, but that didn't affect him. He ordered them to wait, and back he went, pell-mell, all alone into that horde of fiends. They hadn't got over their funk, luckily, and he saw Blue Arrow and made his party call and got out again all right. He didn't tell that himself, but Sergeant O'Hara made the camp ring with it. He adores Morgan, and claims that he doesn't ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... previously. Some way from Suez we came upon a well of bad, brackish water. Notwithstanding all drawbacks, the supply was eagerly hailed. Our people shouted, scolded, and pushed each other to get the best places; camels, horses, asses, and men rushed pell-mell towards the well, and happy was he who could seize upon a little water. There are barracks near this well, and soldiers are posted here to promote ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,—misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:—John Wilkes's—the ugliest man's in England—saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... Ammidons heard, had been knocked down and injured in the pell-mell of the rush. Gerrit's countenance showed his contempt of what he held to be a characteristically ludicrous farce. After all, his wishes in regard to the Nautilus had been easy of execution, the ship was now his; he was already contracting ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... all she would say. She shut her mouth tight over that. That house was enough to make a strong-minded woman like Caroline dumb, and send a weak one into hysterics. It was dripping with water, and nearly all the furniture out in the yard piled up pell-mell. I could not see how she was going to get supper for the boarders: the kitchen fire was out and the stove drenched, with a panful of biscuits in ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was laid in, the lid put down, and the care of covering them with sand left to the winds. The lid is fastened with the same mortar which is used in the brick masonry surrounding the coffin, where such a receptacle has been made for it; but they more usually lie pell-mell, separated only by thin layers of loose sand. There are mounds which are, as one may say, larded with them: wherever you begin to dig a trench, the narrow ends stick out from both sides. In these coffins also various articles were buried with the dead, sometimes valuable ones. The ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... forward, and then he saw Jack, who had gained the forecastle, waving his cutlass in triumph. The Spaniards, who had hitherto shown a bold front, on hearing the shout, and seeing that their chance of victory was gone, threw themselves pell-mell down the hatchways among their companions, who had by this time regained their legs. What was bad, they had also kept possession of their arms, and began to fire upon the English. The seamen could easily have shot them, but the ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... I, deeply impressed, were looking at the dance with absorbing interest, a sudden hue and cry was raised about half a block off. A commotion was started among those who had been quietly enjoying the sights and all ran pell-mell in every direction. Some one was heard saying "fight!" Then the younger brother of Red Shirt came running forward ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... refuge from the excitement of the month previous to our departure. We landed in a deluge of rain, and the only article in our possession that alarmed the officers of the Custom House was not the sewing-machine, which was hardly vouchsafed a look, but your cake-box. We were thankful to tumble pell-mell into a carriage, and soon to find ourselves in a comfortable room, before a blazing fire. We go round with a phrase-book and talk out of it, so if anybody ever asks you what sort of people the Prentiss family are and what are our conversational powers, you ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... in the sea of human affairs, the greater part are fishers in smooth waters, who catch crabs; and he who thinks to take the most exact measure of the object at which he aims often shoots widest of the mark. The consequence of this is that all are running pell-mell, all toiling in the dark, all thinking crookedly, all acting child's-play, all judging at random, and with a haphazard blow of a foolish resolution bringing upon themselves a bitter repentance; as was ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... charge: Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls; Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe: Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law. March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell; If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.— What shall I say more than I have inferr'd? Remember whom you are to cope withal;— A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways, A scum of Britagnes, and base lackey peasants, Whom their o'er-cloyed country ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... had it not been for the self-possession and coolness of the captain of the steamer, the loss of life would have been appalling. The captain turned his boat and beached it as soon as possible, not, however, before the men began leaping over the sides of the vessel in one grand pell-mell. The dark waves of unknown death were below them, while the shells shrieked and burst through the steamer. There was but little choice for the panic stricken men. Fortunately the waters here were ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... sufficient to fling the whole pack forward, pell-mell, crowded together, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull down the prey. Buck's marvellous quickness and agility stood him in good stead. Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and gashing, he was everywhere at once, presenting ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... laughter. The ice was broken in good earnest. "Three cheers for Ben Hay! Three cheers and a tiger for Jack Darcy!" and amid all this hubbub the men and women, the boys and girls, rushed in pell-mell. A gladder crew one never saw. To decide when others doubt, to go forward boldly when others hesitate, to stand up for the principle of right when others have traduced and blackened it, to take the first step, is to be as heroic as the ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... the lobby. They heard the disturbance and rushed up pell-mell. But not one of these touched her. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... gateway, we chose it in preference to the steep, perpendicular path, which, always taken by the natives, led equally to the drawbridge and main entrance. To our extreme regret, however, we soon found our course impeded by the huge trunks of mighty pine trees lying in a perfect pell-mell above and on both sides of us. A glance up the hillside showed scores more of these slain giants. To proceed was almost hopeless, and we were forced to rest upon some timber and mark our future course between piles oozing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... were waiting. The condemned were loaded into them pell-mell, with hands tied. The woman Rochemaure, whose pregnancy had not been verified by the surgeon, was hoisted into one of the tumbrils. She recovered a little of her old energy to watch the crowd of onlookers, hoping against hope to find rescuers amongst them. The throng was less ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... years ago, was about as symmetrical as a game of spillikins in confusion. In legends it is said that Astaroth travelled over the world, carrying on her back a wallet which contained everything, even good women in their houses. A pell-mell of sheds thrown from her devil's bag would give an idea of that irregular Weymouth—the good women in the sheds included. The Music Hall remains as a specimen of those buildings. A confusion of wooden dens, carved and eaten by worms (which carve ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... pell-mell, at this challenge, but they tried in vain to catch the bright-eyed, laughing creature who, with golden hair streaming in the sunlight, cast back many a sparkling glance of triumph as ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... were, and they tumbled pell-mell into the room, fairly falling upon Norman of Torn in their anxiety to get their swords into him; but once they met that master hand, they went more slowly, and in a moment, two of them went no more at all, and the others, with the Earl, were but circling warily in search of a chance ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Petrarch and his followers had fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the scholars who had been the first to show the way were the first to deplore the pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was the unintended result of the inroad on insularity which had already begun. They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to meet it as it came. Ascham in his Schoolmaster ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Savaii and Tuamasanga, the victors, instead of completing fresh defences or pursuing their advantage, fell to eat and smoke and celebrate their victory with impromptu songs. In this humour a rally of the Tamaseses smote them, drove them out pell-mell, and tumbled them into the ravine, where many broke their heads and legs. Again the work was taken, again lost. Ammunition failed the belligerents; and they fought hand to hand in the contested fort with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before. Poor old Joan thought her last hour had really come, and gave herself up for lost, for when she looked round she saw the fearful great creature she had been riding, disappearing in the distance in flames of fire, and tearing after it, helter-skelter, pell-mell, was a horrible crew of men and dogs and horses. Two or three hundred of them there must have been, and not one of the lot had a head ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... second bidding. Eager to be gone he awkwardly put out his hand, first to Mr. Tolman and then to Steve; and afterward, with a shy smile to the detective and the policeman and a boyish duck of his head, he shot into the hall and they heard him rushing pell-mell down the corridor. Mrs. Nolan, however, was more self-controlled. She curtsied elaborately to each of the men and called down upon their heads every blessing that the sky could rain, and it was only after her breath had become quite ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
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