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More "Stumble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own, and the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open; but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we should stumble on such a ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... round from all sides, and the darkness soon became so great that we could scarcely see a few steps before us. The foremost man continually struck fire, so as to light up the path somewhat by the sparks. But this did not help us much, the animals began to slip and stumble. We were compelled to halt, and stood quiet and motionless, one behind the other, as if suddenly changed to stone by magic. Life returned again with daybreak, and we ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... were Christians, denied the possibility of their being so, as they were ignorant of Christ and His commandments, and placed their hope of salvation on outward forms and superstitious observances, which were the invention of Satan, who wished to keep them in darkness that at last they might stumble into the pit which he had dug for them. I said repeatedly that the Pope, whom they revered, was an arch deceiver, and the head minister of Satan here on earth, and that the monks and friars, whose absence they ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... for many days, it was all mother. Even after his eyes had opened wide and he had found his legs so that he could stumble about a little in the darkness, nothing existed for Baree but his mother. When he was old enough to be playing with sticks and moss out in the sunlight, he still did not know what she looked like. But to him she was big and soft and warm, and she licked his face with her tongue, and talked ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... pink and silver as I ran along the paths, And he would stumble after, Bewildered by my laughter. I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes. I would choose To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths, A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover, Till he caught me in the shade, And the ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... is stretched out still. 26. And He will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly: 17. None shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken: 28. Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses' hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind: 29. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... august title which is laid here as the vindication of our faith on the one hand, and as the ground of the possibility of the benefits of His death being world-wide on the other—viz. the Son of God—then we shall not stumble at the thought that He died for all, because He died for each. I know that if you only regard Jesus Christ as human I am talking utter nonsense; but I know, too, that if we believe in the divinity of our Lord, there need be nothing to stumble us, but the contrary, in the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... via Calcutta, and she sat without movement, hating herself and the world, even the man who, having taken her at her word, had left her alone to stumble as best she could along the crooked, lonely road which would end, as far as she could ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... the Archbishop beheld him swoon, Rollant, Never before such bitter grief he'd had; Stretching his hand, he took that olifant. Through Rencesvals a little river ran; He would go there, fetch water for Rollant. Went step by step, to stumble soon began, So feeble he is, no further fare he can, For too much blood he's lost, and no strength has; Ere he has crossed an acre of the land, His heart grows faint, he falls down forwards and Death comes to him with ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... towards God they pretend to direct their thoughts in all these different ways. What right have I to curse them, I who stumble in my own path? When they have disappeared, I shall, perhaps, learn more. This one rushed away too quickly; I had not time to reply to him. Just now it is as if I had in my intellect more space and more light. I am tranquil. I feel myself ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... can 'scape a stumble, Thus hath said The Prophet-King; But your fall will be a light ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... for those we have, still the load is all such poor weak fellows ought to bear. Old Crump was not thus favored by a gradually lightened load. He bore the same four children every day, faithfully, carefully, with never a stumble nor fall, as though fully aware of the precious nature ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Policeman with a bull's-eye prevents my driver's energetic endeavours to drive through the Palace wall. I stumble into the large hall known as the Library. "Here," said I to myself, "is taking place the historic trial of the Bishop of LINCOLN." The weird scene strongly resembles the Dream Trial in The Bells, where the judges, counsel, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... resorting on the fatal night to the protection of male attire,—a good enough Shaksperian device,—but how remarkable that a woman wandering crazily in the dark, and already sufficiently disguised, should borrow a tell-tale cloak and a worse than useless sword from a corpse that she happens to stumble upon! No wonder that Schiller in revising for the stage decided to let Leonora live rather than provide for her death by such a stagy tour de force. In the stage version, however, she does not reappear ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... capture. There was just time enough for a man to breathe twice, when the order came to fire. The Hussars were at less than a hundred yards' range. As the shrapnel burst, the front squadrons seemed to stumble and fall. The ranks were so near that the change from living human beings into mangled pieces of flesh and rags could clearly be seen. More than one veteran gunner felt squeamish at the sight. But the rear squadrons, though their horses' ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... friend Pickwick, your face radiant with as broad a grin as a staid professor may indulge in, and your very coat, waistcoat, and shoulders expressive of what we should take together when the performance was over! I would give something (not so much, but still a good round sum) if you could only stumble into that very dark and dusty theatre in the daytime (at any minute between twelve and three), and see me with my coat off, the stage manager and universal director, urging impracticable ladies and impossible gentlemen on to the very confines of insanity, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... my father lives, on their way up into the forest.—You cannot help seeing—although you see nothing—how the ponies are ill-used, hounded and flogged. The last of the drove are lame and utterly worn out. They stumble along anyhow and one falls. Oh! it is cruel, wicked. And it is—was, really true, cousin Tom. It must have happened scores of times before old Mr. Verity, your namesake, put a stop to the iniquity by buying The Hard—I have ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... leather and fur. They were dirty in the extreme, and not over good looking; but they had honest countenances, and I had no fear of their not treating me fairly. One of them went before me to clear the way, the other followed at my heels to pick me up should I stumble, and the squaws brought up the rear, all in single file. The squaws had to build the wigwams—or, rather, lean-tos—when we camped, to collect sticks for the fire, to cook the food, and to bring water from the nearest stream or pond; their masters condescended ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... following a slight depression in the ground reached a point within 150 yards of where the savages rested in fancied security. To prevent the possibility of arousing them by any accidental noise, we had dismounted some distance back, and carefully led our horses by the head, lest a stumble or neigh might discover us to the enemy. It was yet dark when we reached a spot opposite the camp, and standing at our horses' heads, impatiently awaited the dawn. Streaks of light soon began shooting through the eastern sky, but it seemed an eternity before we could see well enough ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... had said to him; for the wind rendered it almost impossible for the most powerful voice to make itself heard, unless at a very short distance and dead to windward, as was the barque when her skipper hailed us. We made several attempts to find the brigantine that night, but somehow failed to stumble across either her or the disabled ship upon which we suspected her ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... in Riley Sinclair had come true. The schoolteacher drew his horse as far away as the trail allowed and rode on in silence. Finally there was a stumble, and it seemed as if the words were jarred out from his lips, hitherto closely compressed: ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... did fall back upon Mrs. Scott, but the next day was surprised to stumble upon Jean, who had taken to placing himself very regularly in Mrs. Scott's particular circle, for like Bettina she had also her little court. But what Jean sought there was a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... exclusively to the obscure history of those who suffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, men and women "come to live but called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his poetic function. "Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance of his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compare ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... medium (particularly the young medium) may become panic-stricken by the thought that "perhaps this is merely the result of my own imagination or fancy, instead of spirit power," and the result will be that he will begin to halt and stumble, stammer and stutter, instead of allowing the message to flow through him uninterrupted. This is particularly true when the message is of the nature of a test of identity, and where the vocal organs of the medium are being employed in the manifestation. It occurs ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... began to stumble more and to be weary, so the riders had to dismount and go on foot. All at once an Asiatic grew purple, and fell on the sand. The prince commanded to cover him with ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... at the happier expression which he saw in his friend's face. "I think your steed will not stumble with you to-day. Each of these old dames looks as much like Horace's Atra Cura as can well be conceived; but, though there are seven of them, they will make your burden on ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wished he might put a curb round the well out there, because in the dark sometimes a body might stumble into it; and the Parson said ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... it's about right," replied Godfrey. "I had this fur a hidin' place while the Yanks was a scoutin' about through the country, an' I come here now kase nobody won't think of lookin' fur me so nigh the settlement. An' they won't stumble onto me afore I know it, nuther. They can't git to me if they come afoot kase the bayou'll stop 'em; an' I never heard of nobody coming up here in a boat. Nothing bothers me 'ceptin' a bar. He comes over every night to feed on the beech-nuts an' acorns, an' some night he'll ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... Mr. Lind, in nowise disconcerted, "we stumble on the secrets of others. Our association has innumerable feelers: and we make it our business to know what we can of everything that is going on. For example, I could tell you of an odd little incident that occurred last year in ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... for those who would set out thereon for far or nearer goals. It was all he aspired to do. He knew it was not his to show them the goal, or to direct them thereto; that was for themselves and others; but it was his to make the way possible, that they need not stumble on unbroken ground, or toil in blinding dust of ages, or wade in clogging mud of tradition, these children of the world who tramped with patient feet to ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... in company with others, is a sign that you will participate in some festivity, and you will find that your affairs are growing towards fortune. If you stumble or fall, you will lose property ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... tried again; but again he fell. When he came back to the village he told the old men what had happened to him. They remembered then that a long time before there had been buried there a medicine woman or conjurer. Doubtless it was her medicine that made him stumble. ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... speak of the want of propriety In forming our city so crooked and long; Our ancestors, bless them, were fond of variety— 'Tis naughty to say that they ever were wrong! Tho' strangers may grumble, and thro' the streets and stumble, Take care they don't tumble through crevices small, For trap-doors we've plenty, on sidewalk and entry, And no one stands sentry ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... dissolved.(1084) And Huzzab shall be led away captive; she shall be brought up, and her maids shall lead her as with the voice of doves tabring upon their breasts. I see a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is no end of their corpses; they stumble upon their corpses.(1085) Where is the dwelling of the lions, and the feeding places of the young lions, where the lion, even the old lion, walked, and the lion's whelp, and none made them afraid: where the lion did tear in pieces enough ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... travelling dress, strikingly simple but bearing the unmistakable mark of distinction, was appealing; as were her exquisite, smooth baby skin and the downward drooping, almost childlike, curves of her lips. The inequalities of the ribbed gangplank were sufficient to cause her to stumble. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... Blagwin was still alive. So that plan was abandoned. Then he wondered if he might not convey the tip to some one who had access to his bedroom; his valet or a chambermaid who, as though by accident, might stumble upon the will. But, as every one would know the anonymous tipster could be only Blagwin himself, that plan also was rejected. He saw himself in a blind alley. Without an accomplice he could not act; with an accomplice ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... his early experience for little vital facts to lend a colour to the fainter pictures of age. In "The Winter's Tale," a shepherd finds the child Perdita, who has been exposed; one would expect him to stumble on the child by chance and express surprise; but this shepherd of Shakespeare begins to talk ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... guides, they had been gone for ten days at a time, but never found a trace of the lost man. There was the faint possibility that he had been found and cared for by wandering Indians, but what was far more likely was that French might stumble upon the spot where he died. Even in that land of beasts and birds of prey something would be ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which had its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine's ass, who pats his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, "Moi, aussie, je joue de la ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... all over the country, that her lips were observed to be always in motion, and that there was not a switch about her house which her neighbours did not believe had carried her several hundreds of miles. If she chanced to stumble, they always found sticks or straws that lay in the figure of a cross before her. If she made any mistake at church, and cried Amen in a wrong place, they never failed to conclude that she was saying her prayers backwards. There was not ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... Many times we'd stumble across the fact that after the first report of a UFO being tracked on radar the same identical type of target would be tracked again, many times. But by this time the operator would have learned that they were caused by weather and it ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... there is an overwhelming probability that such an expedition would be successful. Many people, however, will certainly urge: 'In all currents there are eddies and backwaters; suppose, then, you get into one of these, or perhaps stumble on an unknown land up by the Pole and remain lying fast there, how will you extricate yourselves?' To this I would merely reply, as concerns the backwater, that we must get out of it just as surely as we got into it, and that we shall have provisions for five years. And as regards the other ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... really want to know how the Swiss Confederation came to be, you can not do better than take the train to the top of the Rigi. You might stumble through many a volume, and not learn so thoroughly the essential ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... had been misled touching Le Merquier. Surely it was an impudent slander, such as Paris is so ready to spread; or perhaps they were laying another one of those wicked traps for him, against which he had done nothing but stumble for six months past. No, that timid conscience renowned at the Palais de Justice and the Chamber, that cold, austere man could not be dealt with like those coarse, pot-bellied pashas, with their loose belts and floating sleeves ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... constantly passing and repassing between these two islands; and as the 'Daylight' had a particularly heavy cargo this trip, and would not be clear for the next two days, we made up our minds to search the islands, and drive the blacks on to Hinchinbrook, so that one of our parties must stumble across them when we swept it. This may seem to the reader unnecessary trouble, but most of our party were conversant with the habits of the blacks and their limited method of reasoning; and we judged it probable that the Herbert River gins would have at once acquainted the Hinchinbrook ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... said Malcourt, with careless good-humour, "but one has to be so careful in dealing the top card, Herby. You stumble over your own fingers; they're too long; or perhaps ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... shade, Mine eye endured not with unclosed lids; Which marking, near me drew the faithful guide, Offering me his shoulder for a stay. As the blind man behind his leader walks, Lest he should err, or stumble unawares On what might harm him, or perhaps destroy, I journey'd through that bitter air and foul, Still list'ning to my escort's warning voice, "Look that from me thou part not." Straight I heard Voices, and each one seem'd to pray for peace, And ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... is but little accustomed to move at this rate with any one on its back. Be ready to check it should it stumble," answered the lieutenant; "but with your light weight there is very little chance of that. We have, I believe, but two miles to go, and we shall soon cover that ground. Don't spare the whip, Miss Ferris; you ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... brewing, we waited to see the last inning. Then things began to happen with a rapidity that was bewildering. Back through the hedges, across the ditches, over the roadway came the Belgian infantry, crouching, stooping, running for their lives, Every now and then a soldier would stumble, as though he had stubbed his toe, and throw out his arms and fall headlong. A bullet had hit him. The road was sprinkled with silent forms in blue and green. The fields were sprinkled with them too. One man was hit as he was struggling to get through a hedge and died standing, held upright by ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... of robbery had been carried on by one and the same person—evidently a member of the Luttrell household. The spoil was concealed with great care in a locked box on a shelf, and but for an accidental stumble by which Luttrell had brought down the whole shelf and broken the box itself, it would probably have remained there undisturbed. No one would ever have dreamt of seeking for Luttrell's pocket-book in a box in ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... It was a cloudy night with a sprinkling of rain, which was in our favour, as there was the less chance of our presence being discovered. My vedettes I placed two hundred yards in every direction, to guard against a surprise, and also to prevent any peasant who might stumble upon us from carrying the news to the Abbey. Oudin and Papilette were to take turns of duty, while the others with their horses had snug quarters in a great wooden granary. Having walked round and seen that all was as it should be, ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... windows glitter on the distant hill; Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold Stumble on sudden music and are still; The forlorn pinewoods droop ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... narrow gap he drove. In it his horses did not jam or fall or stumble or jostle. The yoke-mates held on like skimming swallows, the trace-mates seemed to rise into the air. I seemed to see the two wheels of his chariot interlock with the two wheels of the upright, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... more than he cared to acknowledge, but until he was better informed of Mr. Hayden's opinions, he thought "discretion the better part of valor." Someway we often stumble upon such characters in life. Good-natured souls they are, and so anxious to ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... circumspectly." Eph. 5:15. To walk circumspectly is to walk cautiously; to look where one is stepping; to be vigilant, watchful, diligent, attentive. Be our pathway ever so light, if we do not look where we are stepping, we may stumble. Conybeare and Howson render the above text in these words: "See then that ye walk without stumbling." We are to walk not as foolish people but as wise. We would say that the man acts foolishly who does not look at all in the way he is walking. Those who are wise in business walk carefully; ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... still as he came towards her, limping a little. She felt that if she moved she must surely stumble and fall. The beating of her heart thundered in her ears and for a moment the river, and the steep sides of the coombe, and the figure of Peter Mallory himself all seemed to grow dim and vague as though ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... its fire upon the devoted axemen. Even here, Fate, or Destiny, or whatever power it be that wills the nature of the end of man, turned aside the death with which he already seemed to grapple. At the very moment when the flash rose from the havoc-dealing gun, he chanced to stumble over the dead body of a soldier, and fell flat upon his face. Scarcely had he touched the ground when he was again upon his feet; but even in that short space of time he alone, of those who had entered the ditch, had been left unscathed. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... good climbers go slowly. Harriet also faithfully followed another good mountain rule,—"Look before you step." She did not fall, slip, or stumble while making the climb. Of course we occasionally rested, and whenever we stopped near a flat rock or a level place, we made use of it by lying down on our backs, straightening out arms and legs, relaxing every muscle, and for a time resting ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... shrewdness. "He probably told her that she would marry you—only he wouldn't put it that way. He would say that in reaching for a star she would stumble ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... of space and labour. In any case, to find it there in the dim, rich interior of that ancient village church, to view it in a religious or reverent mood, and then by-and-by in the dusty belfry to stumble on other far older memorials of the same family, and finally, coming out into the sunny churchyard, to come upon the same name once more in an inscription which tells you that he died in 1890, aged 88. And you think it a good record after nine generations, and that the men who lie under these wide ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... do not stumble, Though thy path be dark as night; There's a star to guide the humble— Trust in God and do the right. Though the road be long and dreary, And the end be out of sight; Foot it bravely, strong or weary— Trust in ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... it was . . ." answered Fritz, hemming and hawing. And he reflected a moment, as though trying to remember his lesson, that he might not stumble in its recital. "Ah!" resumed he, "it was simply his Excellency the Count, and I cannot conceive what you ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... the death-house, and the whetted steel they bear; They are pale before King Hogni; as winter-wolves they glare Whom the ravening hunger driveth, when the chapmen journey slow, And their horses faint in the moon-dusk, and stumble through the snow. ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... could wish I had been postponed to that era, so much have I suffered through speaking French to Frenchmen in the presence of Englishmen. Left alone with a Frenchman, I can stumble along, slowly indeed, but still along, and without acute sense of ignominy. Especially is this so if I am in France. There is in the atmosphere something that braces one for the language. I don't say I am not sorry, even so, for my Frenchman. But I am sorrier for him ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... have asked you to meet me to-day even if I had had to storm your father's house to see you. I am going away, dear, and he could scarcely say much if he came along and found us talking here. You see, it was not likely that I should stumble across a fortune in the streets of London. I have talked the matter over with Barnett—you know our trustee, you have met him once or twice—and we came to the conclusion that the only possible chance of my being able to satisfy your father as to ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... a man, evidently exhausted, who could no more than stumble along and who blocked the trail. This, and one other, were the only played-out men they encountered, for they were very near to the head of the stampede. Nor did they learn till afterwards the horrors ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... enter into life—'pluck it out and cast it from thee; for it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell-fire.' Does your eye offend you, my brethren? Does your eye cause you to stumble and fall, as it is in the etymology? The right use of the eye is to keep you from stumbling and falling; but so perverted are the eye and the heart of every sinner that the city watchman has become a partaker with thieves, and our ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... of times, mourning pitifully over him, and ready to receive him patiently, impenitent as he was. She went up stairs to make his bed quite ready for him; and to put out of his way everything that could by any chance hurt him, if he should stumble and fall in his drunken weakness. When she returned to the kitchen, she lighted a candle, and opened the old family Bible, with its large type, which seemed to her a more sacred book than the little one she used daily. But she could not read; the words passed vaguely and without ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... begin our investigation in Aristotle's way, and look at the [Greek: phainomena] of the subject, we shall immediately stumble over a maxim which is in everybody's mouth, and which, as it is understood in practice, is true and useful, as it is usually applied in argument, false and misleading. "General truths are more important than particular ones." Often, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... ever, she hobbled slowly over to the stove and laid the shoes on the big shelf above it, spreading them out to the rising heat. She had barely arranged them when there was again the sound of approaching footsteps. These feet, however, did not stumble. They were heavy and certain. Mrs. Brenner snatched at the shoes, gathered them up, and turned to run. But one of the lacings caught on a nail on the shelf. She jerked desperately at the nail, and the jerking loosened her hold of both the shoes. With a clatter ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ingenious. Sleekit, sleek, crafty. Slidd'ry, slippery. Sloken, to slake. Slypet, slipped. Sma', small. Smeddum, a powder. Smeek, smoke. Smiddy, smithy. Smoor'd, smothered. Smoutie, smutty. Smytrie, a small collection; a litter. Snakin, sneering. Snap smart. Snapper, to stumble. Snash, abuse. Snaw, snow. Snaw-broo, snow-brew (melted snow). Sned, to lop, to prune. Sneeshin mill, a snuff-box. Snell, bitter, biting. Snick, a latch; snick-drawing scheming; he weel a snick can draw he is good at cheating. Snirtle, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... ago a choice Italian marble table which the famous knight commander, Don Priamo Febrer, had brought back from one of his privateering expeditions had still stood here. Neither was there anything for him to stumble against farther on; the enormous hammered silver brazier resting on a support of the same metal, upheld by a circular row of cupids, Febrer had also converted into cash, selling it by weight! The brazier reminded him of a gold chain presented ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... amongst the cultivators of any branch of science must necessarily precede the period of unanimity.—TORRENS, Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, p. xiii. Even the spread of an error is part of the wide-world process by which we stumble into mere approximations to truth.—L. STEPHEN, Apology of an Agnostic, 81. Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.—S. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... and may thy rest be sweet after war," replied Petronius, extending his hand from between the folds of soft karbas stuff in which he was wrapped. "What's to be heard in Armenia; or since thou wert in Asia, didst thou not stumble into Bithynia?" ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... here," the lawyer's son decided at last. "Whew! I wouldn't dare even to stumble over a tramp taking a nap here. This is ticklish business, or it would be if I were caught here. Now, ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... often happens that, in affairs of importance, the minor events which lead to the ultimate result seem to occur rapidly, and almost to stumble over each other in their haste, it came to pass that on the very evening after I had got Nino's letter I was sent ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... Hume, "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... understood his words, nor because he was naked and unashamed, but only because his need of her was very great, and, therefore, she loved him, and stayed his feet in the way, and was concerned lest he should stumble. ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... I am learning that every step leads to the next—if you don't stumble. If you do—you have to pick yourself up and go back. If John learned from me, I, too, have learned from him. I'm going to ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... stumble into her cabin, and with angry defiance she had acted with the intention of doing to him what she had done to Prebol—but she had missed deliberately when she shot. When she recalled the matter, she saw that ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... with the canteens to fill, chanced upon a small pool where there was a spread of smooth yellow sand. Knowing well the many weird booby traps one might stumble into on a strange world, the Terran prospected carefully, stirring up the stand with a stick. Sighting not so much as a water insect or a curious fish, he pulled off his boots, rolled up his breeches and waded in. The water was cool and refreshing, though ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... Yet here again we stumble on difficulties. Religion is personal. Yet is not religion also eminently social? What is more vital to the social order than its beliefs? If we send a man to gaol for stealing trash, what shall we do to him whom, in our conscience and on our honour, we believe to be corrupting the hearts ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... shelter adapted to our purses and tastes. Every one, of course, emerged from seclusion only at the ultimate moment; and, far from holding any lengthy conversation with Miss Falconer, I was lucky to stumble upon her in the vestibule, help her descend, find a taxi for her at the exit, and see her smile back at me where I stood hatless as ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... glistening Pacific, with the blue outlines of Catalina and more distant islands etched upon the western sky. This picture is sometimes so distinct that you find yourself trying to recognize acquaintances on the streets of Pasadena. Again everything is dreamy with haze. Another morning you may stumble out trying to rub yesterday's sunburn from your eyes, and find everything below curtained by a bank of snowy fog. As for myself, I enjoy the prospect most when I cannot see it ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... to her and walking with her. You don't know how happy it makes me to be here where I first knew you, to live over every event of those days. Your movable shack is almost as it used to be, though there is no absurd steel boat outside for me to stumble into. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... whispered; "make no noise! It was my pistol. Go gently, my dear young lady. It is a farmyard, and you may stumble." ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Thus I begin: "All is not gold that glitters, "Pleasure seems sweet, but proves a glass of bitters. "When Ignorance enters, Folly is at hand: "Learning is better far than house and land. "Let not your virtue trip; who trips may stumble, "And virtue is not virtue, ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... father came they would be married. If he delayed—well, she would stumble on alone. The baby was her cross. She must ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get a fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical. I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was Jeanette! Why, of course! How absurdly simple the whole thing was! Why, this was the very scene of M. Charloix's amazing story. But that she, Lucile, should stumble into the very midst of all ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... not stumble against each other around corners, but see largely and tranquilly from a long way off what they desire, or wish to avoid, and they shape their path accordingly across the waves, and troughs, and tongues, and dips ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... struck our tree and swept past us with a force impossible to realise. No living thing was spared. Snakes, lizards—ay, even the biggest kangaroos—succumbed after an ineffectual struggle. The rats actually ate those of their fellows who seemed to hesitate or stumble. The curious thing was that the great army never seemed to stand still. It appeared to me that each rat simply took a bite at whatever prey came his way, and then passed on with ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... thought and movement, but it worked. Before Joe could swear, even, Crothers was off like the wind, with Joe after him, using the string of oaths he had meant for Crothers on the sand that gave under him and made him stumble ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... and at length deposited it on the top of a little flat weed, where it was left, while for five minutes more she pursued the same zigzag, apparently senseless meandering over the entire field of earth. Now she seems again to stumble upon her neglected prey, and taking it once more in her formidable jaws, she lugs it again for a long helter-skelter jaunt, this time depositing it in the neighborhood of a hole, which at first ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... mighty strange what those men said about him," went on Joe. "To think that we would stumble on the wreckers right at work. We can lead the police to the very place where they have set up their ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... said the Fairy, 'a man does not often stumble and break his shins in the highway, but rather ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... we find here and there; but it is not the flutter of weakness, it is the fury of power: from the very stumble of the rushing steed, sparks are kindled. And, even as Baretti, when he read the Rambler, in Italy, thought within himself, If such are the lighter productions of the English mind, what must be the grander and sterner efforts of its genius? and formed, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... tender conscience,) he calls them fools and blockheads, and by no means will employ them in much, or speak to their commendations before others. For my part, I am of opinion, that he has, by his wicked life, caused many to stumble and fall; and will be, if God prevent not, the ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... and of the first Caesar, to whose characters, while history gives the key, we are apt to fancy, as we stare at them, that to Lavater we owe the discovery. Those ubiquitous emperors Hadrian, Trajan, Antoninus Pius, and Gordianus ditto, on whom as on other boring acquaintance you are sure to stumble in every gallery at Rome till you almost yawn in their faces, are here of course. Besides these, by way of novelty, we fall in with the grave, much-bearded, long-faced bust, Epicurus underwritten on the pedestal. If ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... again; but as she went the fog grew thicker and thicker, and Terry soon became aware that it was freezing hard. The pony began to stumble, and several times he nearly fell, for Terry found it hard to hold him up with her little frost-bitten fingers. She worked bravely, but felt that the road was indeed downhill, and all the more difficult in its ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... He did but stumble over the dead. See, Woodson fights them back from him. For God's sake, ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... the free exercise and interplay of will with will. We may well imagine God's mode of action to {105} resemble that of a human parent who entrusts a growing child with a growing measure of liberty and responsibility, well knowing that in the use of it he will have many a slip and stumble, and occasionally hurt himself; such a parent will carefully refrain from interference, preferring that the child should learn his own lessons from his own mistakes, well knowing that we profit only by the experience for which we ourselves have paid. No one will, of course, pretend that ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... my pains, I did not succeed in killing Jacob, therefore be thou mindful of avenging me upon his descendants." "But how, alas!" said Amalek, "Shall I be able to compete with Israel?" Esau made answer: "Look well, and as soon as thou seest Israel stumble, leap upon them." Amalek looked upon this legacy as the guiding star of his actions. When Israel trespassed, saying with little faith, "Is the Lord among us, or not?" Amalek instantly appeared. Hardly had Israel been tempted by its spies wickedly to exclaim, "Let us make a captain, and let us ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... doubts were answered, for he found himself face to face with a small woman who wore upon her shoulder a large red bow, and was followed by another woman, a buxom person dressed in a peasant's cap. The lady with the red bow, making pretence to stumble, precipitated herself with an affected scream right into his arms, and as he caught her, whispered, "Are you from Leyden, sweetheart?" "Yes." "Then treat me as I treat you, and follow always where I lead. First make pretence to be ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... party was carefully descending the side of the canyon, with now and then a partial stumble, until they reached the bottom of the broad valley where the grass grew luxuriantly nearly the whole year. It was nutritious and succulent and afforded the best of pasturage for the few horses and mules ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... each other, and may be separately considered, and may exist separately, and have no Deed of tiny thing to support their existence. After what manner, therefore, do they belong to self; and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... ever get through alive. It was almost pitch dark now, and the snow grew deeper every moment. We were chilled to the heart. I thought how nice it would be to lie down and rest; but I remembered hearing that that was fatal, and I endeavoured to stumble on with the others. It was wonderful how the girls kept up, even Cecily. It occurred to me to be thankful that Sara Ray ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... ordering matters. As himself was for a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, so will he have the way of the carrying on of his work prove, in his holy and spotless justice, a stumbling-stone to many that shall stumble thereat, and fall, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... Believe me, Hinnissy, readin' is not thinkin'. It seems like it, an' whin it comes out in talk sometimes, it sounds like it. It's a kind iv nearthought that looks ginooine to th' thoughtless, but ye can't get annything on it. Manny a man I've knowed has so doped himsilf with books that he'd stumble ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... God's mouth for that; nor is grace or strength ministered to mankind by the covenant that thou art under. So that still thou standest bound to thy good behaviour; and in the day that thou dost give the first, though ever so little a trip, or stumble in thy obedience, thou forfeitest thine interest in paradise (and in justice), as ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... king in Pheroe and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes' smile the grey nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro, across and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust, the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the flooded waters, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs, had taken ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... others are men of wrath and battle, according to theirs, I will not take it upon me to censure them,—nay, not even if they should feel themselves called upon by hard necessity to shed the blood of their Injun fellow-creatures,—who, it must be confessed, if we should stumble on the same, will do their best to make that necessity as strong as possible. But now let us away, and see what help there is for us; though whither to go, and what to do, there being Injuns before, and Injuns behind, and Injuns ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... things—we dare not speak out—but a tutelar being watches over, and giveth vitality to his arena—his ring is, he may rely upon it, a fairy one—while that mysterious being dances and prances in it, all will go well; his horses will not stumble, never will his clowns forget a syllable of their antiquated jokes. O! let him then, while seriously reflecting upon Simpson and the fate of Vauxhall, give good heed unto the Methuselah, who hath already passed his second centenary in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... made a resolution to avoid the kitchen in future: I might at any moment stumble upon Mr. Hamilton. I had forgotten that he gave Nathaniel lessons sometimes in the evening. What a ubiquitous mortal this man appeared, here, there, and everywhere! It had given me rather a shock to see him so comfortably ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... into that past, I would stumble into American nights—nights with old friends, established there or passing through and run across by chance—nights of joy in being with my own people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having life readjusted to the American ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... soft element: how I joyed in the country where there is no harshness: in the element which upholds and gives way; which caresses and lets go, and will not let you fall. For man may stumble in a furrow; the stag tumble from a cliff; the hawk, wing-weary and beaten, with darkness around him and the storm behind, may dash his brains against a tree. But the home of the salmon is his delight, and the ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... consciousness, and abolished into black non-entity by the first question which recalled me to actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over some poor but honest shop-boy's head, just taken off by its sudden and unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come down "by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... independent, fellow, Gilbert, but I can't say as I blame you for it. Yes, I'll look round in a few days, and maybe I'll stumble on the right man by the ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... entry. Just think of those two chaps dancing around their find, beside a giant dead squid! I wager that was the supreme moment of their greasy lives. I wager that old spouter seethed with excitement and gossip that night. No wonder the Old Man danced! How would you like to stumble on a windfall like that, Blake? But let us ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... dark aspect, stood in the window. Flea saw Screechy hold out her arms toward him with an appealing gesture. He lifted his hand suddenly and drew down the shade, and his broad shoulders were silhouetted against it in sharp, black lines. After that the breathless girl saw the woman turn and stumble past her ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... actual need of guiding your horse, Esmeralda, because long habit has taught him what to do at a music-ride, but you do right to continue to endeavor to make him obey you. Should he stumble; should that man riding before you and struggling to make his horse change his leading foot fail in the attempt, and cause the poor creature to fall; should the rider behind you lose control of her horse, your firm hold of the reins would be of priceless ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... girl, I'm sorry for her, then. She is going to stumble over me every time she turns around. She is going to see me till she cries ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... have to take stuff from a spoon, 'Tis better than having to climb to the moon. You might make a stumble or else have a tumble, And then you would ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... deal scattered; and if we could find a quiet spot, where a few mounted men have taken up their station, we would join them. But before we did that, it would be necessary to find out whether they came from Kordofan, or from some of the villages on the White Nile. It would never do to stumble into ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... the embarrassment of the moment. I broke the silence and spoke out my thoughts: "Men become accustomed to live from youth up as it were in a cage, and when they are once in the open air they dare not venture to use their wings, fearing, if they fly, that they may stumble ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... accomplished. Hell is being gilded. The vulture is being metamorphosed into a bluebird. Horror ends in the pastoral. You think you are at Vouglans's and Parent-Duchatelet's; you are at Longus's. Another step and you will stumble into Berquin's. Strange indeed is it to encounter Daphnis and Chloe ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... they come to pass through the gate, and again when they try to enter the bridegroom's yard, an imaginary obstacle bars the passage. The bearers of the barrow stumble, utter loud exclamations, step back, go forward again, and, as if they were driven back by an invisible force, seem to succumb under the burden. Meanwhile, the rest of the party laugh heartily and urge on and soothe the human team. "Softly! softly, boy! Come, courage! Look out! Patience! ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... are incomplete, Standing in these walls of Time, Broken stairways, where the feet Stumble as they ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... or Intra-capsular Fracture.—This fracture is most frequently met with in elderly persons, especially women, and is usually produced by comparatively slight forms of indirect violence—such, for example, as result from the foot catching on the edge of a carpet, a stumble in walking, or missing a step ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... lips set until the blood was forced from them, and they made a thin purplish line in the pale flesh, she walked the floor back and forth, ever back and forth, until a half-stumble, as she was turning in a dreary round, revealed to her that she ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... head. "Not so," he said. "I do not follow the path, and your feet would stumble. I shall find a way without sinking in the snow. I must go alone. But there is a better way for you. I leave my dove with you: she will keep you warm until help comes. Farewell, friend of the Lord's friends." Stooping the Child kissed Pierre once more, ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... no longer doubts the care and protection of God, yet he feels that his own strength is not sufficient; that he may err and stumble in the path he has chosen. He does not ask that all should be clear, nor that he should see the long course of his life, but is content ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... somewhere. I wish there was a matinee, only it might not be right to go"; and he secretly anathematizes his own ignorance of polite and well-bred circles. But he learns the whereabouts of two galleries, and they stumble over some bric-a-brac that is quite enchanting. Violet has been trained on correct principles. She knows the names and eras of china, and has discrimination. Her little bit of French is well pronounced. She is not so well posted in modern painters, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... that should the weather clear, he was ready to mount the little cob which had been appropriated for his use, which was so steady, that occasionally the Earl had gone out shooting on its back, and so sure-footed, it had never been known to stumble. ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over Duval's head, she tried to ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... poor man of the common folk that had seen Tristan's fall, and had seen him stumble and rise after, and he crept to Tintagel and to Iseult where she ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... for an office like this, to make the way of the Lord clear through all the generations, reason is that we should see everything, and learn all that man is and can be. These things are too deep for us; we stumble on, and know not till after. But now to ...
— A Little Pilgrim • Mrs. Oliphant
... the stranger. "For instance, this 'notion,' as you call it, will never do. It isn't the thing at all; but see here, Judge, examine this hub. There's a 'notion' in that worth something. I tell you what it is, any boy who can stumble on such an idea, even by accident, has got good ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... believed; of those who trust though they are slain; of those who wait the Lord's leisure; and of those who cannot understand his dealings, but rest in what they know of his heart. This is the beatitude of the unoffended, of those who do not stumble over the mystery of God's dealings ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... hour only was the latter able to keep out of range of the Tartars, but he well knew that his horse was becoming weaker, and dreaded every instant that he would stumble never to rise again. ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... will not believe without seeing; who say, I must have proof. What I hear in church is too much for me to believe without many more reasons than are given for it all. Many people, for instance, stumble at the stumbling-block of the cross, and cannot bring themselves to believe that God would condescend to suffer and to die for men. Others cannot make up their minds about the resurrection. It seems to them a strange and ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... tied together. The men who can not swim are then mounted upon the best swimming horses and tied on, otherwise they are liable to become frightened, lose their balance, and be carried away in a rapid current; or a horse may stumble and throw his rider. After the horses have been strung out in a single line by their riders, and every thing is in readiness, the first horse is led carefully into the water, while the men on the opposite bank, pulling upon the rope, thus direct him across, and, if necessary, ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... when thy death was planned by an enemy, and I was hired to do the deed. That was why I would take no wages, for I was already well paid; besides, it was thought that thou wouldst then certainly engage my services. I was to accidentally shoot thee while hunting. What more easy than to stumble and for my gun to explode? But when I knew thee, then I could not kill thee thus. I tried to provoke thee that night, knowing thee to be a violent-tempered man; I provoked thee into insulting me. I hoped thou ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... have had an adequate working-out of so noble a beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals, and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong proportion—as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them—he, Parsifal, this thin-blooded inheritor of ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... imagination. When he left the Doll's House, he took nothing with him, and he never afterward took anything "from strangers." It was his poet's imagination that enabled him to write "News from Nowhere," the only Utopia in whose communal halls the unwary reader does not stumble over dolls' furniture. Morris is the perfect type of the ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... was addressed to a man, evidently exhausted, who could no more than stumble along and who blocked the trail. This, and one other, were the only played-out men they encountered, for they were very near to the head of the stampede. Nor did they learn till afterwards the horrors of that night. Exhausted men ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... might rest in the shade till most of the men were on the other side. A good deal of care was required, for the river, by no means a large one in ordinary times, spread its waters in all directions, so that a false step, or a stumble in any unseen hole, would have drenched the invalid and the bed also on ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... I made a resolution to avoid the kitchen in future: I might at any moment stumble upon Mr. Hamilton. I had forgotten that he gave Nathaniel lessons sometimes in the evening. What a ubiquitous mortal this man appeared, here, there, and everywhere! It had given me rather a shock to see him ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... now you're here I've got to make up my mind what I'll do with you," he went on, as he motioned for Flossie and her brother to walk back in front of him. He held the lantern so they could see where to step, but the earthen floor of the cave was smooth, and the children did not stumble. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island • Laura Lee Hope
... of an approaching horse could be made out. It was approaching slowly, seeming to stumble now and then. There was an uneasy movement among the cattle, and the boys peered eagerly forward, their hands on the butts of ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... called, by unfeeling people, ugliness. They were also deaf, as I have said, and they were scrofulous; one of them was disfigured by the small pox; they had glimmering eyes, red, like the eyes of ferrets, and scarcely half open; and they did not walk so much as stumble along. There, you have the worst of them. Now, hear something on the other side. What first won my pity was, their affection for each other, united to their constant sadness; secondly, a notion which had crept into my head, probably derived ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... She felt that he was talking merely to keep her from worrying, and she was fairly sick with anxiety and did not hear half of what he was saying. She was nervously careful about choosing her steps so that she would not stumble and jolt her father. She did not believe that he was wholly unconscious, for she had seen his eyelids tighten and his lips twitch several times, when she waiting for Swan. He had seemed to be in pain and to ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... islands; and as the 'Daylight' had a particularly heavy cargo this trip, and would not be clear for the next two days, we made up our minds to search the islands, and drive the blacks on to Hinchinbrook, so that one of our parties must stumble across them when we swept it. This may seem to the reader unnecessary trouble, but most of our party were conversant with the habits of the blacks and their limited method of reasoning; and we judged it probable that the Herbert River gins would have at once acquainted ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... Why all his behauiours doe make their retire, To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire. His hart like an Agot with your print impressed, Proud with his forme, in his eie pride expressed. His tongue all impatient to speake and not see, Did stumble with haste in his eie-sight to be, All sences to that sence did make their repaire, To feele onely looking on fairest of faire: Me thought all his sences were lockt in his eye, As Iewels in Christall for some ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... infirmities of age as you do. The day will come in which you will be old yourselves, and every day is bringing you forward to that period. You will then be sensible of the impropriety of your present conduct." Having thus spoken, he endeavoured to hobble on again, and made a second stumble, when, in struggling to save himself from falling, he dropped his cane, and down he fell. On this, the wicked boys renewed their laugh, and highly ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... source in his own infernal regions. I had risen as high in the church as before in the state. I was, forsooth, the wise, the self-sufficient, the impeccable!—I was the counsellor of councils—I was the director of prelates. How should I stumble?—wherefore should I fear temptation? Alas! I became confessor to a sisterhood, and amongst that sisterhood I found the long-loved—the long-lost. Spare me further confession!—A fallen nun, whose guilt was avenged by self-murder, sleeps soundly in the vaults of Engaddi; while, above her very ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... ignorant of Christ and His commandments, and placed their hope of salvation on outward forms and superstitious observances, which were the invention of Satan, who wished to keep them in darkness that at last they might stumble into the pit which he had dug for them. I said repeatedly that the Pope, whom they revered, was an arch deceiver, and the head minister of Satan here on earth, and that the monks and friars, whose absence they so deplored, and to whom they had been accustomed to confess themselves, were ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... nodding. "I called at the police station before I came here, on leaving the train. The detective is Al Howard, and he's a nice fellow but rather stupid. You mustn't expect any results from that source. To be sure, the department might stumble on a clew, but the chances are they wouldn't recognize ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... dedicated, and who was born at Ens, in the neighbourhood) cuts a most distinguished figure in this collection. There is a good, and I think genuine, head of an old woman by Rubens, which I seemed to stumble upon as if by accident, and which was viewed by my guides with a sort of apathy. Mr. Lewis was half lost in extacies before a pretty little sketch by Paolo Veronese; when, on my observing to him that the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... end came. A stumble of Sydenham's horse as he mounted a rise near 'Alwington' threw him to the ground and broke his right leg. His constitution, never strong, had been weakened by disease, unsparing work, and ceaseless ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... nine miles away—just to get square. It was a nasty piece of work, as we were within a few miles of the Boer laager, three hundred strong. There was moonlight, too—it was like a dream, that strange, silent ride, with only the stumble of a horse breaking the regular thud of the hoofs. We surrounded the farm in absolute silence, dismounting some thousand yards away, and fixing bayonets. I told the men I wanted no shots—that would have brought down the commando—but ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... get water and put out a blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant need of being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one side purely physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will stumble upon it, intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not—more likely, if I do not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... lame at that, after the stumble and fall I had, Hugh," said "Just" Smith eagerly; "perhaps the referee would let me throw up my job if he saw how badly my shin ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get a fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical. I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Never more active in his businesses, than when they are mixed with some harm to others; and it is his best play in this game to strike off and lie in the place: Successful commonly in these undertakings, because he passes smoothly those rubs which others stumble at, as conscience and the like; and gratulates himself much in this advantage. Oaths and falshood he counts the nearest way, and loves not by any means to go about. He has many fine quips at this folly of plain dealing, but his "tush!" is greatest at religion; yet he uses this too, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... waked up, the guide has the horses ready, and I must come down. So here I descend my hill Difficulty into the valley of Humiliation. We stumble along, for the roads here are no turnpikes, and we come to a place called the Black Forest; not the Black Forest, but truly a black one. I always love pines, to all generations. I welcome this solemn old brotherhood, which stand gray-bearded, like monks, old, dark, solemn, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... almost exclusively to the obscure history of those who suffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, men and women "come to live but called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his poetic function. "Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance of his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compare it with such ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Yappy run me right to that thicket where the Fox family lives. But if I did, Brushtail or Mrs. Brushtail would surely be right there to lead Yappy away off into the woods. No, if Farmer Roe or his boy doesn't stumble onto their den, I'll have to think up some way myself to get rid of that Fox family. I'll bring my imagination into play," said Doctor Rabbit smilingly, and somewhat ...
— Doctor Rabbit and Brushtail the Fox • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... Romans.(658) His disciple Beza relied mainly on 1 Pet. II, 7 sq.: "But to them that believe not, the stone which the builders rejected, the same is made the head of the corner: and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of scandal, to them who stumble at the word, neither do believe, whereunto also they are set,"(659) i.e., according to Beza, predestined not to believe.(660) But this interpretation is obviously wrong. For we know from Is. VIII, 14(661) and Matth. XXI, 44,(662) that those who fall on this stone are ground ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... seize me, and, as may be supposed, I did not stop to look whether he was about to follow me. My first aim was to get hold of my rifle. With that in my hand I did not fear him. On I ran. I happily did not stumble this time. I daresay I was as pale as death—I am sure I felt so. Gasping for breath, I at length reached the fire. I hurriedly threw some branches on it to make it blaze up, that I might see if my enemy was approaching, and how to aim at ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... latter is essential to the healthful condition of the soul. It is important that we seek earnestly to be "cleansed from secret faults." Without this, our progress in excellence will at best be slow. While "the way of the wicked is as darkness, and they stumble at they know not what," it is nevertheless true that "the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... ascent. In a few days his agony became alarmingly acute. He grew stupid, and had frequent convulsions, his only conscious act being to get up often from his bed (which was in my wife's room, as he was usually under her care) and stumble as far as my writing-table, where he sank down again in exhaustion. The veterinary surgeon said he could do no more, and as the convulsions gradually became terribly acute, I was advised to shorten the poor animal's cruel agony and free him from his pain by a little prussic acid. We ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... means, (Faces are blocks in sentimental scenes) Thus I begin: "All is not gold that glitters, "Pleasure seems sweet, but proves a glass of bitters. "When Ignorance enters, Folly is at hand: "Learning is better far than house and land. "Let not your virtue trip; who trips may stumble, "And virtue is not ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... still in the lock. She had evidently forgotten it. Here was a chance to mischievously banter that habitually careful little woman! He slipped it into his pocket and quietly entered the dark but perfectly familiar hall. He reached the staircase without a stumble and began to ascend softly. Halfway up he heard the sound of his wife's hurried voice and another that startled him. He ascended hastily two steps, which brought him to the level of the half-opened transom of the kitchen. A candle was burning ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... the Children of Signs to guard, And they have no pity at all— You must not stumble, you must not speak, When you come to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... or sounds that might warn him of the neighborhood of strangers. The path grew each moment wilder and more impassable for equestrians. The low branches of the trees more than once whipped their faces. Three times did Trusia's horse stumble over some projecting root directly in their route. After the eternity it takes to cover five miles on an unknown road in chaotic darkness, the charcoal burner ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... felt of her chest and she was pretty much het up. When she cooled off, I started her easy—sort of grazin' along pretendin' we wasn't goin' to lope again. When she got her second wind I give her her head, and she let out and loped clean into the desert town, without makin' a stumble or castin' a shoe. Paid three thousand for her in Los. She is guaranteed to do eighty miles on the level, and she does a whole lot of other things that ain't jest on the level. She'd climb a back fence if you spoke ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... JAMES PAYN'S latest novel, A Stumble on the Threshold, to Cambridge men or Camford men (for in this story the names are synonymous), will be the small-beer chronicle of small College life in their University some thirty years ago. The slang phrases ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... "Not so," he said. "I do not follow the path, and your feet would stumble. I shall find a way without sinking in the snow. I must go alone. But there is a better way for you. I leave my dove with you: she will keep you warm until help comes. Farewell, friend of the Lord's friends." Stooping the Child kissed Pierre ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... bacteriologist, is very characteristic of Russian civilisation, which is a strange conglomeration of products belonging to very different periods. The enquirer who undertakes the study of it will sometimes be scarcely less surprised than would be the naturalist who should unexpectedly stumble upon antediluvian megatheria grazing tranquilly in the same field with prize Southdowns. He will discover the most primitive institutions side by side with the latest products of French doctrinairism, and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... catching stumble of the true forefeet, the man on his back had shot out of the saddle and far ahead. He landed twenty feet away and squarely on his head and shoulders. Like Bolt, Courtrey's body turned a complete somersault—and lay ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... His hands are in his trouser pockets, and he turns from me to howl into the cavernous hold some directions to the cargo-men below. In the gathering gloom of a short January afternoon, with the rush and roar of the winches in my ears, I stumble aft to my quarters, thinking pleasantly ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... that haunted him was not failure,—for oddly enough he never seriously distrusted his power, it was disaster. Would God give him the strength to fight his demon? If he were to gain the heights, only to stumble in the sight of all ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... experience with the young woman had not been successful enough to lead me to believe that I could conquer where Harley had been vanquished. Physical force I had found to be unavailing. She was too cunning to stumble into any of the pitfalls that with all my imagination I could conjure up to embarrass her; but something had to be done, and I now resolved upon a course of moral suasion, and wholly for Harley's sake. The man was actually suffering because she had so persistently defied him, ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... in a life and death struggle, with bloodshot eyes, with foaming, gnashing mouths. They attack and kill one another and try to mangle each other. I leap to my feet. I race out into the night and tread on quaking flesh, step on hard heads, and stumble over weapons and helmets. Something is clutching at my feet like hands, so that I race away like a hunted deer with the hounds at his heels—and ever over more bodies—breathless... out of one field into another. Horror is crooning ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... He used spurs on the horse and it leaped ahead. For all he knew any one of the posse might take a shot at him, so he rode low in the saddle. He heard startled cries, saw Bartolome Rivas stumble as he got out of the path of the wild horse. There were rocks, sand, a body which the horse avoided in a leap, then there was free ground and Drew settled down ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... his brave stallion put forth his utmost efforts to carry his rider safely away from the turmoil of battle. The wounded animal was still able to travel a considerable distance at full gallop. But suddenly he began to slacken his pace and to stumble, and Heideck perceived that his strength was exhausted. He dismounted in order to examine the injuries the horse had sustained, and at once perceived that he could not expect further exertion from the poor brute. In addition to a bayonet-thrust ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... woods have! How you long to explore every nook and corner of them! You would even find consolation in being lost in them. You could then hear the night birds and the owls, and, in your wanderings, might stumble upon ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... maples, and ferny groups—it would crush them by and by, poor trusting things—then it would stumble against a rock or pile of loose stones, wake up and repeat the strain it had learned at its mother's breast, far up in the ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... separately, and have no Deed of tiny thing to support their existence. After what manner, therefore, do they belong to self; and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Will. Of course if the canes are here they were not put where we'd be likely to stumble over them. We've just got to ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... nights pass, and at last in the distance in the murky fog the city comes into sight. The journey is over. The train comes to a standstill before reaching the town, near a goods' station. The bullocks, released from the van, stagger and stumble as though they were walking ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... waves, and its unfortunate passengers immersed. The fatal machine was drifted by currents far behind the wreck of the Frigate; without cable, anchor, mast, sail, oars; in a word, without the smallest means of enabling them to save themselves. Each wave that struck it, made them stumble in heaps on one another. Their feet getting entangled among the cordage, and between the planks, bereaved them of the faculty of moving. Maddened by these misfortunes, suspended, and adrift upon a merciless ocean, they were soon tortured between the pieces of wood ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... eat, lay down, and slept again. When I woke it was past noon. I stumble in to the telephone again and ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... all parenthetical in the present section, and so I say nothing more about it; and ask you, rather, just to look at the loving reasons which Christ here suggests for His present speech— 'that ye should not be offended,' or stumble. He warns them of the storm before it bursts, lest, when it bursts, it should sweep them away from their moorings. Of course, there could be nothing more productive of intellectual bewilderment, and more ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... reached a point within 150 yards of where the savages rested in fancied security. To prevent the possibility of arousing them by any accidental noise, we had dismounted some distance back, and carefully led our horses by the head, lest a stumble or neigh might discover us to the enemy. It was yet dark when we reached a spot opposite the camp, and standing at our horses' heads, impatiently awaited the dawn. Streaks of light soon began shooting through the eastern sky, but it seemed an eternity before we could see well enough ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... Fortunately, she was a first-rate fencer, and knew her work capitally, as she proved in the present instance, by rising to the leap, clearing the fence in beautiful style, and dropping lightly into the lane beyond, without so much as a stumble, just as Clara and her attendant turned the corner of the road and came in sight. My sudden appearance frightened Clara's pony to a degree which justified me in riding up and assisting her to reduce it to order. Having accomplished this not very difficult task, I waited for a ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... experience never gets into our blood and bones. It always remains outside of us. That's why we look with wonder at the past. And this persists even when from practice and through growing callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in that rapid blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine—which our life is—nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more. Not at the time, I mean. If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such exclamation: 'Well! ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... see the two men coming toward him. They were outlined against the radiance from the motor-cars. Cautiously he stepped toward the south, hoping that they would pass him in the darkness, but he dared not move rapidly, lest a stumble or the breaking of a twig ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... way, extended over the middle of hell, which is sharper than a sword and finer than a hair, over which all must pass. In this passage of it, while the feet of the infidels, by the decree of God, shall slip, so as they shall fall into hell-fire, the feet of the faithful shall never stumble, but they shall arrive safely into the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... believes to be the real origin of this singular race is not even hinted at in the more celebrated treatises. Conscious of the diffidence with which any one should approach a matter which so many learned men have labored over, he advances the plea of the proverb, that they who study the stars will stumble at stones,—a plea, that much learning and genius may fail, where less would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... surest of them and has most need of them. In refusing to see what is right, he loses the power of seeing what is prudent and safe. He who persists in such a course will inevitably be drawn into signal lapses of judgment, however richly nature may have endowed him with that faculty: he will stumble over his own self-love; his very assurance will be tripping him when he least expects it. And so Falstaff's conceit and egotism, working together, as they do, with his greed and lust, have the effect of stuffing him with the most childish gullibility, at once laying him open to the arts ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... no knowledge whatever of his own house. The attics at Heston were large and rambling. He believed the servants were all in the other wing, but was not sure; he could only hope that he might not stumble on some ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this book anywhere and not find richness. To prove that this is true, I will open it at random and copy the page I happen to stumble upon. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... turned his face to the cliff. A light was shining half-way up it—that must come from the window of Rufus's cottage. He took it as a beacon, and began to stumble through the howling darkness towards it. He knew the cliff-path. He had come down it only that night to make sure that there was no one spying upon them. The cottage had been shut and dark then, the little garden empty. He had concluded that Rufus had gone early ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... his chair, after a couple of hours, he has only enough strength left to stumble across the room. He sinks down on his bed and lies there as if Death held him in his clutches. It is not invigorating sleep which has closed his eyes, but a stupor, a long fainting fit during which he remains conscious, tortured by the horrible thought that his strength ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... out of the caves, so that it would have been practically impossible for two men to have passed through the entire twenty-seven chambers without encountering an apt in nearly every one of them. Once a month they sleep for a full day, and it was our good fortune to stumble by accident upon one of ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... my neck at least a dozen times. He pushed me along, made me stumble down the ten steps of the basin, and I next found myself on the back of the whale. They assured me that it still breathed, but I should not like to affirm that it really did; but the splashing of the water breaking its eddy against the poor creature caused it to oscillate slightly. Then, ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... 'Ah, to be sure. That's the question. How do they look now? On the very first morning of my going out, what do I do? Stumble on a family I know, who are constantly assisting of us in all sorts of ways, from that time to this! That won't do, you know; that ain't what I'd a right to expect. If I had stumbled on a serpent and got bit; or stumbled on a first-rate ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... background of streaming furs and glistening feathers. The only time they are forbidden to enter the kasgi is when the shaman is performing certain secret rites. They also have secret meetings of their own when all men are banished.[3] I happened to stumble on to one of these one time when they were performing certain rites over a pregnant woman, but being a white man, and therefore unaccountable, I was greeted with a good-natured laugh and sent about ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... for a man who overestimates himself is commonly punished by disregard even of his real merits. These may not meet with recognition until later times. The writings of James I wore the pedantic dress of the age; but in the midst of scholastic argumentation we yet stumble upon apt thoughts and allusions. The images which he frequently employs have not that delicacy of literary feeling which avoids what is ungraceful, but they are original and sometimes striking in their simplicity. Naturally thorough and acute, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... scarcely a minute below, and respectfully wishing the occupants of the cabin a good evening, they took their leave. The elder went first, and as the second followed, he appeared to stumble at the door. As he did so, he let a folded paper fall from his hand, and, at the same instant, he gave a hurried glance at Ada over his shoulder. Before she had time to tell him of his loss, he had sprung up the companion-ladder. The strangers were quickly in their boat, which, with rapid ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon the stage I thought I never could be more frightened in my life, I find that with each new part my fear has augmented in proportion as previous success would have rendered it more damaging to fail. A stumble at starting would have been bad enough, and might have bruised me; but a fall from the height to which I have been raised might break my neck, or at any rate cripple me for life. I do not believe that to fail in a part would make me individually unhappy for a moment; ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... though it ain't quite come in the lowlands, an' as it's rained a lot in the last week, I reckon you'll find it bad. Mebbe our hosses will go down in the road to thar knees, but I guess they won't sink up to thar bodies. They may stumble an' throw us, but as we'll hit in soft mud it ain't likely to hurt us. It may rain hard, 'cause I see clouds heapin' up thar in the west. An' if it rains the cold may then freeze a skim of ice over the road, on which we could slip an' break our ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... surely the fates would one day confront him with his wife's lover! And one day, as he rode through the village of Gudesburg, these revengeful thoughts were uppermost in his mind. They engrossed him wholly, and he took little heed of the passers-by; but an unexpected stumble on the part of his horse caused him to look up, and of a sudden his eyes blazed like live coals. Here, walking only a few yards away from him, was a youth who bore an unmistakable resemblance to the unfaithful Elise; and dismounting instantly, the Herzog strode up to the stranger, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... staircase. They reached it, and began to descend the winding steps. Unorna, holding her leader by one hand, steadied herself with the other against the smooth, curved wall, fearing at every moment lest she should stumble and fall in the total darkness. But Beatrice never faltered. To her the way was as bright as though the noonday ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... and not first; All cannot be the first of all: Is not this, too, but vanity? I stumble ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... said he, "an obstacle against which all stupid people stumble; it is the act of reasoning under ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... said, as though he had not thought of it, "I don't know. If I were really sure that I was needed. You know it's mighty hard telling these days when you stumble upon a damsel in distress whether a stranger's aid is welcome or not. If there's one thing I won't do it's shove myself forward when ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... suddenly, and Mathew Mizzle is almost knocked down. Throw out a bucket of water at night, and Mathew Mizzle is there to receive its contents. Pass a stick through the key-hole, and it's Mizzle's eye that suffers the detriment. You stumble over him in dark entries—you find him lying perdu in the closet. Go where you will, there is Mizzle, if it be in the wrong place ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... down the steep rock another piercing shriek broke forth immediately below me, and glancing down I saw one of our black companions who had dropped from one ledge to the next lose his footing, stumble, and fall headlong into the great chasm. Cries of horror escaped us as we saw him strike a rugged ledge of rock far below, rebound, and then fall head foremost to the rock's base, his skull already battered ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... time this evening," went on the city editor. "You might stumble on some news. You wrote a very good story to-day. Try again to-morrow. We've beat the other papers on it as ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... figures swung down High School Street together, talking and laughing in low voices. The smallest of the six appeared to stumble over her feet, and once tumbled in the road. Her friends gayly helped her up, when it was disclosed that she wore a pair of boy's shoes much too ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... was a delightful place, especially of an evening, when its drowsy alcoves were kindled with the brightness of lamps shining on the rows of volumes. Many a passer-by would stumble down the steps from the street in sheer curiosity; others, familiar visitors, dropped in with the same comfortable emotion that a man feels on entering his club. Roger's custom was to sit at his desk in the rear, puffing his pipe and reading; ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Washington, at the close of the first session as presiding officer of the Senate, and I loved him more and more. Many did not realise his brilliancy, because he had such poise of character, such even methods. The trouble has been, with so many men of great talent in Washington, that they stumble in a mire of dissipation. Mr. Hendricks never got aboard that railroad train so popular with political aspirants. The Dead River Grand Trunk Railroad is said to have for its stations Tippleton, Quarrelville, Guzzler's Junction, Debauch Siding, Dismal Swamp, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... swelled by visitors from twenty miles round, shouts, romps, eats and drinks and dances. After which the visitors are packed like sardines into railway trains. They pin their tickets to their coats and promptly go to sleep. At every station the railway officials stumble up and down the trains with lanterns. The last feeble effort of the more wakeful reveller, before he adds himself to the heap of snoring humanity on the floor of the railway carriage, is to change the tickets of a couple of his unconscious companions. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... his arrival by an opportune stumble and a noisy effort to recover himself, at the same instant aiming a stealthy kick at the topmost round of the ladder, and scrambling ostentatiously over the edge of the trap. The ladder went down thirty or forty feet with a racket, clattering ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... his face was familiar can easily imagine what it must have been when it still had the light of youth. I had never seen a man of genius look so passive, a man of experience so off his guard. At the period I made his acquaintance this freshness was all un-brushed. His foot had begun to stumble, but he was full of big intentions and of sweet Maud Stannace. Black-haired and pale, deceptively languid, he had the eyes of a clever child and the voice of a bronze bell. He saw more even than I had done in the girl he was ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... to tread in the dark. Building blocks and trains of cars and fire engines and a rocking horse were everywhere, to trip the feet of the unwary. Mother scolded about it, at times; and I fear I myself have muttered harsh things when, late at night, I have entered the house only to stumble against the tin sides of an ...
— Making the House a Home • Edgar A. Guest
... ever want me, Christine——" She seemed not to be listening, and he broke off, only to stumble on again: "Try and forgive me—try not to think too hardly of me." She looked at him then; her beautiful eyes were ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... guess we ride!" And they swept out after Shorty. They saw the diminutive cowboy tear through the band of herders, his gun going; saw his horse stumble and fall and a figure pitch from the saddle and roll to one side. "And if I'm goin'—I want to go out that way," shouted Bull Cassidy. "Shorty ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... arrived at the little village of Hilton, within a mile of the Hall. I knew a respectable second-rate inn on the side next the Hall, to which the gardener and other servants had been in the habit of repairing of an evening; and I thought I might there stumble upon some information, especially as the old-fashioned place had a large kitchen in which all sorts of guests met. When I reflected on the utter change which time, weather, and a great scar must have made upon me, I feared ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... so often to make a literal and material interpretation of his statements, said one to another: "This is a hard saying; who can hear him?" Or according to our idiom—who can understand him? Jesus asked them squarely if what he had just said caused them to stumble, and in order to be sure that they might not miss his real meaning and therefore teaching, said: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... blossoms which they surround. The infinite shades and depths of colour with which nature is filled render it impossible for anyone to attempt to imitate it beyond a certain point of general harmony. This is now more generally understood than it used to be; but still we often stumble across some glaring instance in which a gaudy eye and taste have been allowed to run riot, and the result has been the reproduction of something not very ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... May a good Genius guide you; for you are alone, alone; and have a steep pilgrimage to make,— leading high, if you do not slip or stumble! ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... more water then the shipp drewe A man must tell yow tales and find yow ears Haruest ears (of a busy man). When thrift is in the feeld he is in the Towne That he wynnes in y'e hundreth he louseth in the Shyre To stumble at a strawe and leap over a bloc To stoppe two gappes with one bush To doe more than the preest spake of on Sunday To throwe the hatchet after the helve Yow would be ouer the stile before yow come at it. Asinus avis (a foolish conjecture). Herculis Cothurnos aptare ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... degradations, has never ceased to grasp the central fact of Eternity. The impalpable air teems with Divinity. Watchful eyes and clutching hands surround the pilgrim's path, and unseen spirits dog faltering footsteps as they stumble through the snares and pitfalls of earthly life. In the rude tribes of the Tengger, hereditary faith reflects the uncompromising features of local environment. The lotus-eating races of the tropical lowlands, with their feeble grasp on the sterner aspects of creed and character, have nothing ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... kings and Lord of lords; and because He who is our Life 'is exalted high above all principalities and powers'; and because from His throne He has quickened us from the death of sin, and has drawn us so near to Himself that if we are His we truly live beside Him, even whilst we stumble here in the darkness, we may know the exceeding greatness of His power, according to the working of the strength of the might which He wrought in Christ when He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... absolutely necessary or not it would be hard to say, for just as the boys discharged their various weapons the huge bear was seen to stumble and fall. He gave several convulsive shudders, and ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... enough and deviously enough, he may chance upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself. On the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander, the possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a deserted cabin, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... that it was said, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery:' but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell. And if thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong
... so quickly that the other members of the gang, awakened from deep slumber, had only time to stumble to their feet before it was over. The Sky Pilot, ignoring the screaming Charlie, thought only of the loot which had ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... which to pierce the peculiar racial vesture in which the German soul is shrouded, nor are we endowed with the gift of patient observation which might enable us to extract those rays from facts. And so we stumble along, dealing with an imaginary people whom we ourselves have created after our own image and likeness, falling into fatal ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... direct Divine revelation. This may be plausible in cases of the Strathmore, where the intelligence was communicated of the loss of an English ship, but no one can seriously hold it when the only information to be communicated was a stumble on the stairs. ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... do people stumble at certain invaluable words in the Church Catechism, which teach children to thank God for having brought them into that state of salvation. Even very good people, and people who really wish to believe and honour the Church Catechism, ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... because of such 'offense' or refrain from speaking freely about faith? Gracious, St. Paul and I want to offend like this for we preach so strongly against works, insisting on faith alone for no other reason than to offend people that they might stumble and fall and learn that they are not saved by good works but only by Christ's death and resurrection. Knowing that they cannot be saved by their good works of the law, how much more will they realize that they shall not be ...
— An Open Letter on Translating • Gary Mann
... would light the print-shop lamp, make out the papers, take the money, and stumble back to bed. A sign, "CLOSED," or "NEVER CLOSED," would have been equally ineffective in stopping the night movement on the Strip. Homesteaders living miles away came after the long day's work to put in their proving-up notices. They must be in the paper the following day ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... morning of the fifth day, seeing the old man stumble on the level flagstones of the garden, Hilary finished dressing hastily, and followed. He overtook him walking forward feebly beneath the candelabra of flowering chestnut-trees, with a hail-shower striking white on his high shoulders; and, placing himself alongside, without greeting—for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wood buried in the bogs of Wolmer Forest is not yet all exhausted, for the peat-cutters now and then stumble upon a log. I have just seen a piece which was sent by a labourer of Oak Hanger to a carpenter of this village; this was the butt-end of a small oak, about five feet long, and about five inches in diameter. It had apparently ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... precepts of God and true obedience, this axiom should be reversed. Then we should observe not so much that which is said, but the person of him who speaks. In respect to divine precepts, if you observe that which is said and not him who speaks, you will easily stumble. This is illustrated by the example of Eve, whose mind did not dwell upon the person who issued the command. She regarded only the command and concluded it to be a matter of small moment to taste the apple. But what injury was thereby wrought ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... and fro, they clink together harmoniously in song, and even seem to take part in the fiesta as they flash back and break up the rays of light, reflecting them on the white walls in all the colors of the rainbow. The children play about amusing themselves by chasing the colors, they stumble and break the globes, but this does not interfere with the general merriment, although at other times in the year the tears in their round eyes would be taken account ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... you will, there is a total misapprehension of the conditions in which they were placed, of the atmosphere in which they lived. Certain details, which seem to us inexplicable in some of these buildings, were, no doubt, imperatively required by the position and needs of the surroundings. In fact, we stumble, we feel our ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... consciousness of her legs and feet whatever unless she saw them, although she could move them still and even get in and out of bed, or in and out of her bath-chair, without much assistance, so long as she could see her lower limbs. Often she would stumble and fall down, even on a grassy lawn. In the dark she could not control ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... to play scales. She took the C scale—it was so easy that she could think. She was so happy that she played it in a very prancy way, up and down, up and down. Then it commenced to stumble and go ve-ry, v-e-r-y slowly. Rosanna had had an awful thought. The same thought had really been there all the time, but her heart was making such a happy noise that she wouldn't let herself hear it. Now, however, it made such a racket she just had to listen. Over and over with the ...
— The Girl Scouts at Home - or Rosanna's Beautiful Day • Katherine Keene Galt
... the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over Duval's head, she tried to see ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.—Colton. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... go forward, the more is everything turned terribly inside out, full of putrefaction, cataclysmic. We walk on a surface of shell fragments, and the foot trips on them at every step. We go among them as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of broken weapons or bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles, fire-buckets, sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical wiring, the French and German accouterments all mutilated and encrusted in dried mud, and among the sinister piles ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... this, to be able to instruct a half-civilized brood of children, of both sexes, in the rudiments of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic and geography, with enough of grammar to enable them to stammer and stumble through a simple sentence, and arrive safely at the end without any material ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... about the town like a dog with your tongue hanging out, running and running and cursing life. From the clothier's to the chemist's, from the chemist's to the modiste's, from the modiste's to the pork butcher's, and then back again to the chemist's. In one place you stumble, in a second you lose your money, in a third you forget to pay and they raise a hue and cry after you, in a fourth you tread on the train of a lady's dress.... Tfoo! You get so shaken up from all this that your bones ache all night and you dream of crocodiles. Well, you've ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope about, and then strike a match; and in another instant the door opened, and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped bourgeois pulling on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our English ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... but he came anyway, and lay down beside the fire with his nose on his paws, just where people would be most likely to stumble ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... Those of Central America are still an unsolved riddle. Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able thought. Yet they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had the luck to stumble on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ancient writing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... tone. Julian began to look doubtful. Could it be that all was changed, that there was only danger in this act, that to grope thus in the darkness for lost hope, lost safety, a lost Valentine, with love, trust, beauty, still clinging about him, was to stumble further into a deepening night? It might be so. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... into my former state of blurred consciousness, but the very attempt itself frustrated the effort. I was full of growing resentment against my partner. My dormant anger was aroused, it had found an object and, against all reason and fairness, demanded vengeance. I pretended to stumble and jerked the sleeper so as ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the Great Lakes. The boys run across some Canadian smugglers and stumble on the secret of ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... the proud. Not only the Lord's word, but also the Lord himself, partakes of this twofold character, and produces these diverse effects; the same rock on which a meek disciple surely builds his hope, is also the stone over which scoffers stumble in their final fall. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... hand of God is upon thee, and upon what thou hast; to wit, that it is for thy sinning against him, and that thou mightest be turned to him? If so, thy summer is not quite ended; thy harvest is not yet quite over and gone. Take heed, stand out no longer, lest he cause darkness, and lest thy feet stumble upon the dark mountains; and lest, while you look for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... merits as well as the moral qualities of his illustrious friends. "When they happened to be together," says he, in his tale of Psyche, "and had talked to their heart's content of their diversions, if they chanced to stumble upon any point of science or literature, they profited by the occasion, without, however, lingering too long over one and the same subject, but flitting from one topic to another like bees that meet as they go with different sorts of flowers. Envy, malignity, or cabal had no voice amongst ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the middle of the second week, he came home tired after a long day's work. The lamp that usually stood all night in the hall had burned itself out, and he had to stumble upstairs in the dark. He made considerable noise in doing so, but nobody seemed to be disturbed. The whole house was utterly quiet, and probably everybody was asleep. There were no lights under any of the doors. All was in darkness. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... jockey term for a horse that does not lift up his legs sufficiently, or goes too near the ground, and is therefore apt to stumble. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... must be," and "It's a poor heart that never rejoices," were the popular expressions of the London public at that moment, and the men who had to cater for that public were thankful when they were able to stumble across anything that fitted in with the prevailing mood. For the first time in his life Tony Luton discovered that agents and managers were a leisured class, and ...
— When William Came • Saki
... fog made the lamps of the town look! Did they disturb the pony? What a stumble! Ha! there's a shoe off. Be it known that it was Harold's own fault; he had not looked at the shoes for many a morning, as he knew it was his ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... house, for my own reasons, but told her that it were safer for herself to wait for some stirrup cup chance, as it were. That day I saw that it had come, and I cut a thorn from the nearest bush and was ready. I could not reach the girl to stumble ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... will be ruled by me, I'll tell you what you shall do. Mark what I say; for I'll teach you the way to come to heaven, if you stumble not—give all you have to the poor but one single penny, and with that penny buy you a good strong halter; and when you ha' done so, come to me, and I'll tell you what you shall ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... she would," said she, impatiently. "And that is why I don't propose any such idiotic performance. You will merely stumble in the dark and manage your elbow so awkwardly that Mrs. Rockerbilt's coiffure will be entirely disarranged by it. She will scream, of course, and I will instantly restore the light, after which I will attend to the substitution. Now don't fail me ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... given him to ride carefully in the middle of the track, as, treading in the deep snow, the horse might "ball,"—an expression applied to taking up snow in the hollow of the hoof, which causes the animal to stumble. An unusually long time elapsed before the messenger made his appearance from his mission, and then he was seen making his way painfully through the snow, leading the horse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... But where was the famous lamassery that lay at its foot? Threading our way through a wilderness of rock, heaped up in sharp confusion, we came out on a little ridge, and there before us lay Tuerin,—not a house but a village, built in and out among the rocks. It was an extraordinary sight to stumble upon, here on the edge of the uninhabited desert. A little apart from the rest were four large temples crowned with gilt balls and fluttering banners, and leading off from them were neat rows of small white plastered cottages with red ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... that in the courtyard of the Kasbah he should stumble upon Ayoub, who indeed had by his mistress's commands been set to watch for the wazeer. The fat fellow rolled forward, his hands supporting his paunch, his little ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... which he regards the inspired record; and even finds "the spectacle of able, and we doubt not conscientious writers engaging in attempting the impossible,—painful and humiliating." He says, "they evidently do not breathe freely over their work; but shuffle and stumble over their difficulties in a piteous manner." (p. 250.) He asserts dogmatically that "the interpretation proposed by Buckland to be given to the Mosaic description, will not bear a moment's serious ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... baby's father came they would be married. If he delayed—well, she would stumble on alone. The baby was her cross. She must carry it ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... torrent's arch; He fails alone who feebly creeps; He wins who dares the hero's march. Be thou a hero! let thy might Tramp on eternal snows its way, And, through the ebon wails of night Hew down a passage unto day. Press on! if once and twice thy feet Slip back and stumble, harder try; From him who never dreads to meet Danger and death, they're sure to fly. To coward ranks the bullet speeds, While on their breasts, who never quail, Gleams, guardian of chivalric deeds, Bright courage, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the time spring again descended into the valley, was an attachment close almost as that between mother and offspring. When in his playful moments, rare indeed now for one of his age, he would inadvertently plunge into her, or stumble over a water-pail, she would nicker grave disapproval, or else chide him more generously by licking his neck and withers a long ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... can subscribe to these points, you are one of those who really want a country home and will eventually find one. Those who only think they do will stumble over some detail and then settle back with a plaintive, "We would love to move to the country if we could only find a place like yours." Castles in the air have everything, for imagination builds them; but those ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... influence do I know! Within me all is wintry. Frost and snow I should prefer my dismal path to bound. How sadly, yonder, with belated glow Rises the ruddy moon's imperfect round, Shedding so faint a light, at every tread One's sure to stumble 'gainst a rock or tree! An Ignis Fatuus I must call instead. Yonder one burning merrily, I see. Holla! my friend! may I request your light? Why should you flare away so uselessly? Be kind enough to show ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... his mother would be in from market; there would be a blazing fire at home, and supper, and a warm corner. Should he venture back? But then, morning would come again, and the hard work, and he would have to stumble along the sticky furrows all day, and there would be blows and threatenings to end with. No, he could not go back; it would be better even, he said to himself, to beg for his bread like the tramps he had seen sometimes ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... she wished he might put a curb round the well out there, because in the dark, sometimes, a body might stumble into it; and the parson, he told ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fusion of the two which exactly simulates the form of a complete percept. Thus, for example, in the case just supposed, if another person, bearing some resemblance to our expected friend, chances to come into view, we may probably stumble into the error of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... of the reins is felt on the bit, and the directions are indicated by a turn of the wrist rather than by a pull; the horses are guided and encouraged, and only pulled up when they exceed their intended pace, or in the event of a stumble; for there is a strong though gentle hand on ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... their names, to step down and look upon the sick person. While she was delivering her message to me, they conveyed the sick person to the stair-head, and then disappeared. I went down, without staying for my servant to light a candle, and in the dark happened to stumble upon the sick person, and kicked him down stairs. In fine, I saw he was dead, and that it was the crooked Mussulman, whose death you are now about to avenge. So my wife and I took the corpse, and, after conveying it up to the leads of our house, moved it to the roof of the purveyor's house, our ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... forth thy hand; stretch forth thy hand to God; Nor falter thou, nor stumble at His word. And if in service thou shalt faithful be, His promise of salvation thou ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the short outline is soon given. Promptly at 4 p.m. the creeping barrage started. In a dazed way or lighting cigarettes the men, who had lost during the long wait all sense of their whereabouts, began to stumble forward up the hill. Our shrapnel barrage was not good. One of the earliest shells burst just behind the hole from which I stepped. It wounded Rowbotham and Baxter (my two signallers) and destroyed the basket of carrier pigeons. Of other English shells I saw ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... away from him, a few hundred yards off. At that sight, death entered his heart. He ran after her, calling out.... She did not look around. When he had lessened the distance between them by a half, he saw her suddenly stumble and fall. She did not get up again, but lay ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... credit to us all yet. The sorra one of him but's as manly as anything, and as longheaded as a four-footed baste, so he is! nothing daunts or dashes him, or puts him to an amplush: but he'll look you in the face so stout an' cute, an' never redden or stumble, whether he's right or wrong, that it does one's heart good to see him. Then he has such a laning to it, you see, that the crathur 'ud ground an argument on anything, thin draw it out to a norration an' make it as clear as rock-water, besides incensing you ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... were following his movements, for now he had succeeded in the more difficult part of his errand he was conscious of strain. Indeed, he feared he was getting shaky and the danger was not yet over. They were not clear of the village and a noisy stumble would bring the Indians out. Unless they reached camp in the next few days he thought Blake would die, and the journey was a long and arduous one. Still, he was determined that if disaster overtook him, the plotter who had betrayed them should not escape. Harding was a respecter of law and social ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... very little load for those we have, still the load is all such poor weak fellows ought to bear. Old Crump was not thus favored by a gradually lightened load. He bore the same four children every day, faithfully, carefully, with never a stumble nor fall, as though fully aware of the precious ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... these said trifling points of conduct, which, perhaps, in any single instance, seem so slightly and so remotely connected with it. But remember it is not always over great impediments that men are liable to stumble most fatally. ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... about A.D. 545, happened to stumble upon an anonymous Harmony or Digest of the Gospels [286:1], and began in consequence to investigate the authorship. He found two notices in Eusebius of such Harmonies; one in the Epistle to Carpianus prefixed to the ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... "we stumble upon still another of the multiple tribulations of the clockmaker. If a big clock is expected to do any very fine work the latitude of the place in which it is to be put must be taken into consideration. For example, experiment has proved that the length of a pendulum vibrating ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... it will be observed, to ridicule absurdity. It is easy to pull down what has been ill built; but if we leave the ruins for others to stumble over, we do little good to society. Parents may reasonably say, if you take away from our children the books they have, give them better. They are not yet to be had, but if a demand for them be once excited, they will soon appear. ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... differed in Octavius. That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper after another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of "Thurston's," as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought. Each had his special ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... of fear that I might stumble and kill him. It was all I could do to insist on his being carried down in an arm-chair by ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... life with more circumspection, and make no step till they think themselves secure from the hazard of a precipice, when neither pleasure nor profit can tempt them from the beaten path; who refuse to climb lest they should fall, or to run lest they should stumble, and move slowly forward without any compliance with those passions by which the heady and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... horseman chooses his horse's ground and his pace for him. "To avoid a falling leaf a horse will put his foot over a precipice. When a horse has made a stumble, or is in difficulties at a fence, you cannot leave him too much at liberty, or be too quiet with him." Don't believe the nonsense people talk about holding a horse ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... hired to do the deed. That was why I would take no wages, for I was already well paid; besides, it was thought that thou wouldst then certainly engage my services. I was to accidentally shoot thee while hunting. What more easy than to stumble and for my gun to explode? But when I knew thee, then I could not kill thee thus. I tried to provoke thee that night, knowing thee to be a violent-tempered man; I provoked thee into insulting me. I hoped thou wouldst have struck ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... he said, "little do the innocent lambs of the flock know of the dangers and conflicts through which the shepherds must pass who keep the Lord's fold. We have the labors of angels laid upon us, and we are but men. Often we stumble, often we faint, and Satan takes advantage of our weakness. I cannot confer with you now as I would; but, my child, listen to my directions. Shun this young man; let nothing ever lead you to listen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... in, and your very coat, waistcoat, and shoulders expressive of what we should take together when the performance was over! I would give something (not so much, but still a good round sum) if you could only stumble into that very dark and dusty theatre in the daytime (at any minute between twelve and three), and see me with my coat off, the stage manager and universal director, urging impracticable ladies and impossible gentlemen on to the very confines of insanity, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... encouraging my daughter to kill herself," the older woman charged Farrel. "Kay, you tomboy, do not jump that gate again! Suppose that horse should stumble and throw you." ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the old gentleman in surprise; "come in, my dear sir; did you stumble against the door? I hope ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... smiling; "and which is my present? You had better point it out, lest I should stumble upon it and learn the ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... with me, and I'll take care of you," she said. "There is the step. Don't stumble. Here, steady yourself with the umbrella. We are almost there now." Her voice was cold and hard; but the words were those she might have used to Archibald had she been leading him in ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... worrying about Westy, because something is always delaying that fellow, and I even hoped that he wouldn't stumble over any more good turns, until this day's work was over. If Westy fell out of a ten-story building, he'd do a good turn on the way down—that's the ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... were out of hearing before he crept into the open. Across the face of the slope he cut obliquely, working always toward higher ground. His lips were drawn back so that the tobacco-stained teeth showed in a snarl of savage rage. It would go ill with any of the posse if they should stumble on him. He would have no more mercy than ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... that they might blunder into destroying the delicate fabric of the romance altogether. Hence Jane kept her own council, speculating with amusement as to how long it would be before his two solicitous but blinded relatives should stumble ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... in the dense darkness of the forest with no gleam of light to guide him on his way, and his feet were constantly snared in the knotted roots of the trees intersecting the path. So must he stumble along a dark and rugged track through the rest of his years. There was no cheering gleam beckoning him to a happy future. But though it was thorny and obscure it was not an ignoble path, and it might ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... young maples, and ferny groups—it would crush them by and by, poor trusting things—then it would stumble against a rock or pile of loose stones, wake up and repeat the strain it had learned at its mother's breast, far up ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... truly affirm, has, in some shape or other, animated all forms of religion! that these brightest specimens of 'spiritual religion' in the ancient world somehow missed what many of the lowest savages have managed to stumble upon!" ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. 28 Besides those things that are without, there is that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches. 29 Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is caused to stumble, and I burn not? 30 If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things that concern my weakness. 31 The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed for evermore knoweth that I lie not. 32 In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king guarded the city of the Damascenes in order to take ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... to ask again, with Marie Antoinette, why the people who are starving for bread do not eat cake. The fact is that to keep within one's income to-day, either financially or vitally, is an aristocratic luxury that is absolutely denied to the many. Most men—the rich as well as the poor—stumble through life three parts dead. The ruling class, if it had the will and the skill, might awaken itself to fullness of life. But only a comparatively few of the others could, because the world is conducted on a principle ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... so, as they were ignorant of Christ and His commandments, and placed their hope of salvation on outward forms and superstitious observances, which were the invention of Satan, who wished to keep them in darkness that at last they might stumble into the pit which he had dug for them. I said repeatedly that the Pope, whom they revered, was an arch deceiver, and the head minister of Satan here on earth, and that the monks and friars, whose absence they so deplored, and to whom they had been accustomed to confess themselves, were his subordinate ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... laugh as soft and sure as her own Hugh took Clara into his arms. A few minutes later they went up stairs and twice Hugh stumbled on the stairway. It did not matter. His long awkward body was a thing outside himself. It might stumble and fall many times but the new thing he had found, the thing inside himself that responded to the thing inside the shell that was Clara his wife, did not stumble. It flew like a bird out of darkness into the light. At the moment he thought the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... being about to report the woonders of Island doe presently stumble, as it were, vpon the thresholde, to the great inconuenience of them both. For that which they heere affirme of mount Hecla, although it hath some shew of trueth: notwithstanding concerning the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... staring me in the face I doubted, and my heart was cast down. Now the light is given me by which I see the way through the labyrinth! It is our Father's beautiful garden in which we are. I have learned that all is intended for order and beauty, but as children we cannot yet walk so as not to stumble. Natural science has explained a thousand mysteries. Social science—understand the word; not schemes, plans or guessing, but genuine science, as far from guess or scheme as astronomy or chemistry is—will reveal to us as many ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... saunter uncertainly around the room, pausing finally at the desk and staring down at its blotter, his back turned to his companion. A more neutral observer than the other, he thought he could see a question arising that had not yet occurred to the less-unprejudiced detective. But Creighton would stumble upon it eventually—far better ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... guttural tones. What they were saying she could not distinguish, but somehow she understood that Peter had come even sooner than Lolla had feared, and the gypsy girl, at the risk of angering him, was trying to warn her, so that she might not descend the trail and so stumble right ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Long Lake - Bessie King in Summer Camp • Jane L. Stewart
... no, Wren! What for?" returned the post commander, obviously nettled. "I fancy he'll not thank you for even searching his quarters. You may stumble over his big museum in the dark and smash things. No, let him alone. If he isn't here for dinner, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... reins on his neck. I then set myself to observe; and I aver, that in riding above 100,000 miles I scarce ever remember my horse (except two, that would fall head over heels anyway) to fall, or make a considerable stumble, while I rode with a slack rein. To fancy, therefore, that a tight rein prevents stumbling, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... me, and saw that each was as disturbed as myself. A full quarter of an hour had passed since the time set for the attack, and still there was no signal from Garcia. The strain was becoming intolerable. At any moment some servant, rising earlier than his fellows, might stumble upon us, and in his surprise sound the alarm. Already in the trail behind us a number of natives, on their way to market, had been halted by our men, who were silently waving them back into the forest. The town was beginning to stir, ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... almost without exception, and yet some of the pictures were done cleverly enough. There is very little talent in this world, and what there is, it seems to me, is pretty well known and acknowledged. We don't often stumble upon geniuses ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... larger trees or stones, and wound around them, where a road would have led to their removal. The path also became rougher, from stones which protruded in many places, or from long roots stretching across, which in the darkness made the horses stumble incessantly. These it was impossible to avoid. In addition to these, there were miry places, where the horses sank deep, and could only extricate themselves ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... bidding. So hard did she work, that in a few days she was able to make the horse-shoes. Early one morning she set out for the hill of poison. On her hands and feet she went, but even with the horse-shoes on she had to be very careful not to stumble, lest some poisoned thorns should enter into her flesh, and she should die. But when at last she was over, it was only to hear that her husband was to be married that day to the daughter ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... the face with an eye that was single and therefore at once forgiving and fearless. The man who has no mote in his own eye cannot be knocked down by the beam in his neighbour's; while he who is busy with the mote in his neighbour's may stumble to destruction over the ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... point, he admitted that Anjou had gained little honor by his recent course; and that it would be a mistake on their part to stumble a second time over the same stone. He foresaw, nevertheless, that the Duke—irritated as he was by the loss of so many of his nobles, and by the downfall of all his hopes in the Netherlands—would be likely to inflict great injuries upon their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... point of almost telescopic calamity: a stingy, transient vista of village lights; a brief, narrow, hill-bordered road that looked for all the world like the aisle of a toy-shop, flanked on either side by high-reaching shelves where miniature house-lights twinkled cunningly; a sudden stumble of hoofs into a less-traveled snow-path, and then, absolutely unavoidable, absolutely unescapable, an old, white colonial house with its great solemn elm trees stretching out their long arms protectingly all around and about it after the ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... struggle, with bloodshot eyes, with foaming, gnashing mouths. They attack and kill one another and try to mangle each other. I leap to my feet. I race out into the night and tread on quaking flesh, step on hard heads, and stumble over weapons and helmets. Something is clutching at my feet like hands, so that I race away like a hunted deer with the hounds at his heels—and ever over more bodies—breathless... out of one field into another. Horror is crooning over my head. Horror is crooning ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... the other side of the way, where he seemed on the point of fleeing, leaving his master to his fate. I thought it would be a shame if the badgered deputy had to stumble home in the dark, so I growled out ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... right enough, if the horses don't happen to stumble. That off-leader isn't over sure-footed—did you see that? (Culch. shudders.) But what's the joke ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... assistance," he said, "that I'm telling you this, first, because I know you will be interested, but, secondly, because I want to put you on the lookout. You have shown yourselves such sensible, clever fellows that, if you keep your ears open, who knows but what you will stumble on something of importance. I believe the man or men behind the plot may live in the 'Millionaire ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... then, did they stumble in order that they should fall? Far be it! But by their fall salvation is come to the Gentiles, to provoke them to jealousy. (12)But if their fall is the riches of the world, and their diminution the riches of the Gentiles, how much ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... of all moments is gone! It is gone, and you can not find it! Those words that came as a trumpet-clash, burning your very flesh—that melody that melted your whole being to tears—they are gone—you can not find them! You search and you search—but you can not find them. And so you stumble on, in despair and agony; and still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this until the thing is done—done and over—until you have nailed it fast. So you go back again, though perhaps you are so tired ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... grey fog made the lamps of the town look! Did they disturb the pony? What a stumble! Ha! there's a shoe off. Be it known that it was Harold's own fault; he had not looked at the shoes for many a morning, as he knew it was his ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... acquainted with the road, but towards the close of our journey we could hear the river running near us for miles in the pitch darkness, and although my brother walked bravely on in front, I knew he was afraid of the water, and no doubt in fear that he might stumble into it in the dark. We were walking in Indian file, for there was no room to walk abreast in safety, while in places we had absolutely to grope ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... open the window, for fear I'd waken the crathurs. It was very dark and throublesome to find the door; but at last I did get it, and I groped my way out, and went down as asy as I could. I felt quite sober, and I counted the steps one after another, as I was going down, that I might not stumble at ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... to a man, evidently exhausted, who could no more than stumble along and who blocked the trail. This, and one other, were the only played-out men they encountered, for they were very near to the head of the stampede. Nor did they learn till afterwards the horrors of that night. Exhausted ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... be not proud, For the Lord hath spoken! Give glory to the Lord your God Before it grows dark, And before your feet stumble— On the mountains of dusk. While ye look for light, He turns it to gloom And sets ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... fuddling-cap. You must not tell publicly, how you sweated with carrying those verses, which may detain the eyes and ears of Caesar. Solicited with much entreaty, do your best. Finally, get you gone, farewell: take care you do not stumble, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... dearest friends. Consider the amorous and lascivious, in the height of their fury they dare violate a Vestal. For custom is very powerful to draw the temper of the body to anything that is suitable to it; and he that is apt to fall will stumble at everything that lies in his way. So it is no wonder that those that have raised in themselves an envious and bewitching habit, if according to the peculiarity of their passion they are carried on to suitable effects; for when ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... pleasantly said the priest, recognizing her nationality; and taking her to a little door he conducted her up a stone staircase, at the top of which he showed her the long blind story over the aisle arches which led round to where the light was. Cautioning her not to stumble over the uneven floor, he left her and descended. His words had signified that ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... prudency itself, what more kind and amiable than it, when thou shalt truly consider with thyself, what it is through all the proper objects of thy rational intellectual faculty currently to go on without any fall or stumble? As for the things of the world, their true nature is in a manner so involved with obscurity, that unto many philosophers, and those no mean ones, they seemed altogether incomprehensible, and the Stoics themselves, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... negroes call to each other, laugh with spontaneous, childlike humor. The wharf officers, the brokers, pass with intense faces. It is hot. Sweat drips from black faces and from white. Whips crack. Mules trot and stumble over the loose and resounding boards. Heavy wheels rumble. And the life of gambling, drinking, pleasure, crawls about the French quarter, along Canal Street, on Royal Street. The bell in the Cathedral rings. I catch the whiff of flowers. Gulls ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... sleepless—my drawing sitting gibbering on my chest. I knew how fearfully I should stumble—that is why I wanted to do more drawings earlier. I have been working on the thing this morning, and I believe I improved it slightly. What I want now is a cloak—the simplest you have (perhaps the green one?), which I think would ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... A stumble of the horse threw him, and as he lay on the ground, unable to move, one of the servants of the company came up and broke the lance across Don Quixote's ribs. It was not until a countryman came by that the Don was extricated, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... groaned through his gritted teeth, some malignant god made him misstep, stumble. He fell between the hard furrows, bruising his face and hands. After a moment he rose, but rose to sink back again with keen pain shooting through an ankle. He had turned it. For an instant he sat motionless, taking breath, then ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... him betides, He mett an Ant, which he bestrides, And post thereon away he rides, Which with his haste doth stumble; And came full ouer on her snowte, Her heels so threw the dirt about, For she by no meanes could get out, But ouer ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... from friendship, or pity from philanthropy, or sympathy both in joy and grief from genuine goodwill. And if those err who wish to banish love because of erotic madness, neither are they right who blame all desire because of love of money, but they act like people who refuse to run because they might stumble, or to throw because they might throw wide of the mark, or object to sing altogether because they might make a false note. For as in sounds music does not create melody by the banishment of sharps and flats, and as in bodies the art of the physician procures ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over Duval's head, she tried ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... the three men had, on the previous day, complained of a peculiar smarting of the eyes, but little did they think at the time of what it portended. As they proceeded the smarting sensation increased, till at length David Saunders began to stumble, and exclaimed that all was dark. His words struck dismay into the hearts of his companions, for both Andrew and Foubister had for some time found a difficulty in seeing objects before them, and in a short time the latter cried out that he too was blind. ...
— Archibald Hughson - An Arctic Story • W.H.G. Kingston
... dealing the cards about the table in the reverse direction, pausing until each man had shown his card. Nearly every one hesitated; and sometimes you would see a player's fingers stumble more than once before he could turn over the momentous slip of pasteboard. As the Prince's turn drew nearer, he was conscious of a growing and almost suffocating excitement; but he had somewhat of the gambler's nature, and recognised almost with astonishment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way of sinners is as darkness, they know not at what they stumble," and "Dodd" was destined to "take a header" forthwith. The jerks on the reins drew the spigot from its place, and the first he knew it was dangling in the air over the end of the barrel. He leaned over, fully to observe this fact, and saw the cider shooting out in an amber stream and flooding ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... threshold force her in. The custom of lifting the bride over the threshold, probably to avert an ill-omened stumble, has prevailed among the most diverse races. For the anointing of the doorposts Brand quotes Langley's translation of Polydore Vergil: "The bryde anoynted the poostes of the doores with swynes' grease, because she thought by that ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... will freely wade, by their writings, in the deepest mysteries of monarchy and politick government. Whereupon it cannot otherwise fall out but that when men go out of their element and meddle with things above their capacity, themselves shall not only go astray and stumble in darkness, but will mislead also divers others with themselves into many mistakings and errors; the proof whereof we have lately had by a book written by Dr. Cowel, called ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... which is worth the time she spends. Still, I think singing is of more practical use than instrumental music, and the power to play simple things well which is so rare is in most cases more to the purpose than to stumble through Beethoven ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... his regalia, being marched down the hill between two business-like-looking persons, who were unmistakably officers of police. He walked dejectedly and had lost all his bravado. There was no blinking the fact that in my absence he had managed somehow to stumble into the hands of the guardians of the law and was now in process of being transported ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... little meaning as a duel between two rival gamebirds in a cockpit. We know, and it will some day dawn on the Germans, that this War has a deeper meaning than that. We are not nationalist; we are too deeply experienced in politics to stumble into that trap. We have had a better and longer political education than has come to Germany in her short and feverish national life. It is often said that the Germans are better educated than we are, and in a sense ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... multiply, at once the pleasure, the reverence, and the intelligence with which you read: and, believe me, it is wiser and holier, by the fire of your own faith to kindle the ashes of expired religions, than to let your soul shiver and stumble among their graves, through the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... hair and bathed her face; then, yielding to her impatience, she again softly opened the door of her chamber and ventured to cross the vast workroom, noiselessly and on tiptoe. The shutters were still closed, but she could see clearly enough not to stumble against the furniture. When she was at the other end before the door of the doctor's room, she bent forward, holding her breath. Was he already up? What could he be doing? She heard him plainly, walking about with short steps, dressing himself, no doubt. She never entered this chamber in ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... hast; to wit, that it is for thy sinning against him, and that thou mightest be turned to him? If so, thy summer is not quite ended; thy harvest is not yet quite over and gone. Take heed, stand out no longer, lest he cause darkness, and lest thy feet stumble upon the dark mountains; and lest, while you look for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... over the calm serene mockery of Hermes' smile the grey nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro, across and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust, the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the flooded waters, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs, had taken and eaten, in hunger or ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... pretend to direct their thoughts in all these different ways. What right have I to curse them, I who stumble in my own path? When they have disappeared, I shall, perhaps, learn more. This one rushed away too quickly; I had not time to reply to him. Just now it is as if I had in my intellect more space and more ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... these points, you are one of those who really want a country home and will eventually find one. Those who only think they do will stumble over some detail and then settle back with a plaintive, "We would love to move to the country if we could only find a place like yours." Castles in the air have everything, for imagination builds them; but those planted four square ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... benefit of you two," he added, addressing the brothers, "I will say that when you are riding a trail, and especially a mountain trail, always let your pony have plenty of rein. It's easier for him. He won't be so likely to stumble and fall, and a pony can generally keep a ...
— Comrades of the Saddle - The Young Rough Riders of the Plains • Frank V. Webster
... unsuccessful, would lay the fault on ourselves, and remember that there is no cause of perturbation and inconstancy but wrong principles, I pledge myself to you that we should make some proficiency. But we set out in a very different way from the very beginning. In infancy, for example, if we happen to stumble, our nurse does not chide us, but beats the stone. Why, what harm has the stone done? Was it to move out of its place for the folly of your child? Again, if we do not find something to eat when we come out ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... upward very steady, save that I did stumble oft, and did go through six great hours. And truly it did seem that I went in an utter dark, because that I had been awhile ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... woman had the reputation of a witch all over the country, that her lips were observed to be always in motion, and that there was not a switch about her house which her neighbours did not believe had carried her several hundreds of miles. If she chanced to stumble, they always found sticks or straws that lay in the figure of a cross before her. If she made any mistake at church, and cried Amen in a wrong place, they never failed to conclude that she was saying her prayers backwards. There was not a maid in the parish that ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... stepped at a walking pace, it was like being lulled to sleep in a nurse's arms; when he trotted, it was like rocking at sea; when he galloped, he outstripped the wind! Never out of breath, perfectly sound in his wind. Sinews of steel: for him to stumble was a thing never recorded! To take a ditch or a fence was nothing to him—and what a clever beast! At his master's voice he would run with his head in the air; if you told him to stand still and walked away from him, he would not stir; directly you turned back, a faint neigh to ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... one great danger was that one of the men might stumble and fall, and then the yellow devil would be upon him in a moment and the joy of the kill would be too ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... courage into Tilda, she scarcely knew why, and henceforth she followed more confidently. With a stumble or two, but no serious mishap, they groped their way down the coombe, and coming to the ledge, saw the beach spread at their feet in the moonlight and out on the water the dark boat heaving gently, a little beyond the edge of the waves' ripple. The tide had receded since their last ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it, love, since thou and I By all the seeming pride are drawn more nigh? Lo, love, our toil-girthed garden of desire, How of its changeless sweetness may we tire, While round about the storm is in the boughs And careless change amid the turmoil ploughs The rugged fields we needs must stumble o'er, Till the grain ripens that ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... creatures still crawled on, shivering, till the snow, gathering like balls under their feet, or the fragment of some broken article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their comrades, caused them to stumble and fall. There they groaned in vain; the snow soon covered them; slight hillocks marked the spot where they lay: such was their only grave! The road was studded with these undulations, like a cemetery: ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... easily obtained than the ratifications. Execution was surrounded with insurmountable difficulties which in negotiation had been lightly skipped over at the stroke of a pen. At the very first step, that of military evacuation, there was a stumble. Maurice and Spinola were expected to withdraw their forces, and to undertake to bring in no troops in the future, and to make no invasion ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... perilous alternatives; either to shut the door altogether and set his portmanteau out upon the wayside, a wonder to all beholders; or to leave the door ajar, so that any thievish tramp or holiday schoolboy might stray in and stumble on the grisly secret. To the last, as the least desperate, his mind inclined; but he must first insure himself that he was unobserved. He peered out, and down the long road; it lay dead empty. He went to the corner of the by-road that comes by way of Dean; there ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his strong hand and I try to shake myself, and I stumble curiously, although lying down. A clamor booms in my temples and then thunders like the guns in my ears; it overflows me,—I ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... down some way farther off from the fire than usual, and Fenton, pretending to stumble as he passed, threw himself down by his side. Their guards, taking no notice of this, allowed them to remain where they were, while they set themselves to cooking part of a deer they had shot during the day. The Indians, ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... And this our slave!— Up, work, look sharp about it!" Bounding a foot and fast retiring from her, I stoop for stones strewn thick about the sand, Aim them, fling them, And, as my idle arm resumes the knack, Score a hit and laugh To see her stumble hurt, behind the pine trunks. "Unless you work, I throw again, To it and steady at it. Mark me, drab, we Camilli Mean what we say." Stone after stone still flies, But aimed to knock chips from the pine-boles now; For she is busy gathering sticks, increasing Her distance as she may. ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... startled you and your friends," began the man. "I had no idea of sneaking into your workshop, but I had just arrived here, and seeing the doors open I went in. I heard no one about, and I wandered to the back of the place. There I happened to stumble over ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... the beds, allow the little girl to hand you the pillows; and, even should you stumble over her and them, sometimes, you will do well to maintain the pious pretence that she lightens your work by assisting in tucking in the covers, and in gathering up soiled articles of clothing and putting them in the clothes-bag or hamper. She ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... of objectivity which enable me to write. But even they threaten to betray me. For as I write doubts dance like macabre figures among my words. The very sentences seem to stretch themselves into ridiculous postures. And I must almost close my eyes and stumble blindly ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... my boy, his eyes aglow, and his arms raised, rushes toward the bed. His curls, escaping from the nightcap covering his head, float on his forehead. His long, loose night-shirt, catching his little feet, increases his impatience, and causes him to stumble ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... are mostly frame, unplastered, but "papered" inside with flour-sacks sewed together, and the handsomer the "brand" upon the sacks is, the neater the house looks. Occasionally, you stumble on a stone house. On account of the dryness of the country, the shingles on the houses warp till they look like short joints of stove pipe ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to do, then? Stand by and look on? Not exactly. Yet we may look on other people doing their work while we do ours. They are already beginning, as I have said, to stumble about with attempts at State Socialism. Let them make their experiments and blunders, and prepare the way for us by so doing. And our own business? Well, we- -sect or party, or group of self-seekers, madmen, and poets, which you will—are at least the only set of people ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... etc., or, as it runs in English: "Good morning, my darling wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... day-time, when a settled rain drives them within doors, are worse horrors than it is worth while (without a practical object in view) to admit into one's imagination. No wonder that they creep forth from the foul mystery of their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, or scramble up out of their cellars, on the upper step of which you may see the grimy housewife, before the shower is ended, letting the rain-drops gutter down her visage; while her children (an impish progeny of cavernous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... this any longer," at length he exclaimed, and shooting out of bed, walked up and down the room, scratching and fuming as if he had just escaped from an ant's nest. Infuriated by the irritation of the flea-bites, he could not do otherwise than stumble over everything that came in his way; and the long nails of his naked toes coming in contact with my ear, soon set me on my ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the very same day that he had received them, Caesar contrived to stumble, and twist his foot as he was returning to his room. When the hour of dinner came he tried to go down, but declared that walking hurt him so much, that he should be obliged to give it up, so the governor paid him a visit instead, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... peculiarities. Entering his house, you find nothing in the place where you expected it. "Don Quixote," with, all its windmills mixed up with "Dr. Dick on the Sacraments," Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog," and "Charnock on the Attributes." Passing across the room, you stumble against the manuscript of his last lecture, or put your foot in a piece of pie that has fallen off the end of the writing table. You mistake his essay on the "Copernican System" for blotting paper. Many of his books ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... hooded figures swung down High School Street together, talking and laughing in low voices. The smallest of the six appeared to stumble over her feet, and once tumbled in the road. Her friends gayly helped her up, when it was disclosed that she wore a pair of boy's shoes much ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... on. He suddenly found himself moving with greater caution, and he knew he was dreading the moment when some foolish stumble of his should bring her back to that life which he feared yet longed to behold. He longed for the delight of watching the play of emotions upon her lovely features, to hear her speak and laugh, and to watch her smile. He feared, for he knew that with her ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the echo. The concussion of the air starts a loose part of the roof overhead and a portion falls in. The little company is shut up in the earth with little chance of ever seeing the light again. They have lights, however, and stumble across some tools, and by dint of many hours' hard labor they are at length able to communicate with their friends outside, who are at last able to rescue them. The author, throughout the story, dwells much upon ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... hundred feet from the embankment his shoes touched grass. Then he came to the edge of a ploughed field. Here he felt that he must proceed with even greater caution, for now most of the train noises had ceased and he feared to slip or stumble, and thus make a noise that might be carried on the still night air to the ears of the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... mountains. Under my footsteps the gravel felt soft, but, once I had got outside the iron gate, I found myself on ground as hard as stone. The mud formed by recent rains and the ruts hollowed by streams of convoys had frozen, and the road was a maze of furrows and inequalities which made me stumble ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... of the Great Lakes. The boys run across some Canadian smugglers and stumble on the secret of a ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... than a weak and contemptible Amusement, wanting Energy of Thought, or Propriety of Expression. Yet we may run into Error, by an injudicious Affectation of attaining Perfection, as Men, who are gazing upward, when they shou'd be looking to their Footsteps, stumble frequently against Posts, while they ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... it was tiger or not, it would neither be safe for him to raise an alarm, nor start to rush back to the bivouac—though this was not twenty yards from the spot. By making an attempt to retreat, he might draw the animal after him, or stumble upon it—not knowing its direction. It was to ascertain its whereabouts that he had stopped and stood listening. That once known, he might keep his place, or lake ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... leads through a thicket. The horses stumble frequently, for the stones are loose, and the footing consequently uncertain. Crouch has a fall, and ere he can remount the lady is gone. It is useless to hurry after her, and he is proceeding slowly, when Grip, who is a little in advance, growls fiercely, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the corner of a sofa, and concealed it with the cover. This was a great relief. I almost began to feel like the injured party—more like a captive than a robber; and I groped my way through the room, with a sort of vague idea that I might perhaps stumble upon some trap-door, or sliding-panel, which would lead into the open air, or, at worst, into a secret chamber, where I should be safe for any given number of years from my persecutors. But there was nothing of the kind in this stern, prosaic ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... the voice, and the tender, trustful feeling that breathed through the prayer awakened in Ranald's heart emotions and longings he had never known before, and he rose from his knees feeling how wicked and how cruel a thing it would be to cause one of these little ones to stumble. ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... did babble about this one thing! The box, the box, and nothing but the box! It seemed as if the box were bewitched, and as if the cottage were not big enough to hold it, without Pandora's continually stumbling over it, and making Epimetheus stumble over it likewise, and bruising ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the care and protection of God, yet he feels that his own strength is not sufficient; that he may err and stumble in the path he has chosen. He does not ask that all should be clear, nor that he should see the long course of his life, but is content ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... problem as he found it, and came north to stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two or three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided Paris, and had wanted no French influence in his education. He disapproved of France ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... time betwixt. So in our lives; allow I entered mine Another way than you: 't is possible I ended just by knocking head against That plaguy low-hung branch yourself began By getting bump from; as at last you too May stumble o'er that stump which first of all Bade me walk circumspectly. Head and feet Are vulnerable both, and I, foot-sure, Forgot that ducking down saves brow from bruise. I, early old, played young man four years since And failed confoundedly: so, hate alike ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... are so binding, its teachings so direct, its discipline so perfect, that one cannot stray away blindly. The obedient child who would be pained not to do the Father's will is kept in the straight and narrow way, the light is held steadily before his eyes; if he stumble or turn aside he is brought back, and if he become restive and the 'fetters,' grateful to the loving child, bind too galling he throws them off, more willing to be lost than bear self-denial for the present. For myself, Hubert, I ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... pleasure must consume a vast amount of nervous force, but it makes her very refreshing to people as blases as Paul and I are. My first feeling about her is very much what yours was. Personally, there seems to be all the stuff in her of which an actress is made; will she some day stumble upon the discovery of how to bring her own individual flame and force to bear upon her art? I should think it not unlikely, and, altogether, I feel as though I should take a more hopeful view of her intellectually than you do. You see, my dear Eustace, you men never realise how clever ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of readers stumble at the threshold. In so vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs and kitchen offices where no one would delight to linger; but it was at least unhappy that the vestibule should be so badly lighted; and until, in the seventeenth chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... night to the protection of male attire,—a good enough Shaksperian device,—but how remarkable that a woman wandering crazily in the dark, and already sufficiently disguised, should borrow a tell-tale cloak and a worse than useless sword from a corpse that she happens to stumble upon! No wonder that Schiller in revising for the stage decided to let Leonora live rather than provide for her death by such a stagy tour de force. In the stage version, however, she does not reappear ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... is in her house and garden, and mistress of the creatures, even of the small butterfly with painted wings, there, sir, I hunt no animal. Nor will my dogs chase any animal there. That is what I meant when I said that if an animal should stumble against their legs, they would lift up their noses and pass on without seeing it. For in that wood there is one law, the law that Rima imposes, and outside of it a ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... blue-warm blue of horizon and sea. The steps by which these ways descend towards the bay are black with age, and slightly mossed close to the wall on either side: they have an alarming steepness,—one might easily stumble from the upper into the lower street. Looking towards the water through these openings from the Grande Rue, you will notice that the sea-line cuts across the blue space just at the level of the upper story of the house ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... you in a spot so vital that you die in a few minutes. You throw up your hands, you stagger against the mantel-shelf, you tear open your collar and then grope at nothing; you press your hands on your wound and take two reeling steps forward; you call feebly for help and stumble against the sofa which you fall upon, and finally, still groping wildly, you roll off on the floor, where you kick out once or twice; your clinched hand comes down with a thud on the ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... of these old Indian signs. He was anxious to find them, and delighted when he did find them. "Here are the signs," he would say, "we are on the right trail." But we were not on the right trail. The right trail—the Nascaupee route—was miles to the northward. We eventually did stumble upon a trail to Michikamau, but it was another one—a very old one—and we found it ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... younger and more active than the aged Solomon. He was weak and rheumatic; he was also timid and easily confused. If the water had overtaken him anywhere, he might easily fall a prey. In his efforts to escape, he would soon become so terrified that his limbs would be paralyzed. He might then stumble over the rocks, and break some of his bones, or he might be intrapped in some recess of the cliffs, from which escape might ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... work subjects: namely, if I stumble on any general remark, and if I find it confirmed in any other very distinct class, then I try to find out whether it is true,—if it has any bearing on my work. The following, perhaps, may be important to me. Dr. Wight remarks ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... but one must have vision as well so that one can look right ahead and not stumble over retained old prejudices; people so often want a thing and yet have not will enough to eliminate qualities in themselves which must obviously prevent their obtaining ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... to find out and bear in mind the experience of other people, we can make use of it, as a warning and a guide, in much the same way as if it had happened to ourselves. If I have seen a boy try to run across the road in front of an automobile and stumble and get killed, it is not necessary for me to get killed in order to appreciate the danger of the experiment. You may never have seen this happen, but if I have and I tell you about it, you can use the information ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... now was to assure the safety of the prisoners in the other camp, and he made his way across the island hurriedly, lest by accident Sam should happen to stumble across his comrades. ...
— Messenger No. 48 • James Otis
... you, friends?" said he; "did you never never see a man stumble before? Come, the passage is free; now at length we will quench our thirst in Saumur," and taking his sword in his left hand, he again attempted to make ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... mare round, set his heels into her sides and, before anyone could move, the horse and its rider sprang for the window, dashed clear through it on to the roadway and away at a gallop, without so much as a stop or a stumble; leaving a shower of broken glass and splintered wood ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... there was an interruption. Godfrey had been listening at the keyhole, but finding that difficult, had opened the door slightly, but in his interest managed to stumble against it. The door flew open, and he fell forward upon his knees on the carpet ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... would defend the Patriarch in this, wantonly reject the consolation which the Holy Ghost considered to be necessary to the Church—the consolation, namely, that even the greatest saints may, at times, stumble and fall."[1] ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... hinted at in the more celebrated treatises. Conscious of the diffidence with which any one should approach a matter which so many learned men have labored over, he advances the plea of the proverb, that they who study the stars will stumble at stones,—a plea, that much learning and genius may fail, where less would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... left the pave road which runs on to Ypres, and after this the roads were much more difficult to travel. Shell holes were frequent and generally full of water, so that in the dark it was only too easy to stumble into them. 'Shell-hole on the right,' 'Shell-hole on the left,' 'Shell-hole in the middle,' 'Keep to your right' were being passed back continually. Progress was slow of course under these conditions and with the heavy loads that we all carried. But it was ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... the right way, it is no wonder that they stumble and fall. And it is evident from the manner in which ye have managed your testimony, that politics, (as a religious body of men) is not your proper Walk; for however well adapted it might appear to you, it is, nevertheless, a jumble of ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... that, even if he were, no danger would reach him: the gun aimed at him would strike some broken branch, the knife drawn against him would break like a splinter before it struck him, the man who rushed on him would stumble and fall before he could touch that haughty head. He was above all danger, above all fear; he knew neither care nor grief; alas! he did not feel like other men. His head was lifted freely, his eyes were clear and bright when ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... be red-hot rivals in business," he said with an agreeable laugh. "But that needn't prevent, eh? Funny I should stumble on you like this! I ride every night after supper—a man needs a bit of exercise after working all day in the store. I saw the ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... can this Alpine apex of faith have to do with the creatures who call themselves Christians, creeping about in the valleys, hardly knowing that there are mountains above them, save that they take offence at and stumble over the pebbles washed across their path by the glacier streams? I will tell you. We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments, instead of up at the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... attention until, suddenly, the report of a pistol was heard, and a short time after I saw a man in mid-air leaping from the President's box to the stage, brandishing in his hand a drawn dagger. His spur caught in the American flag festooned in front of the box, causing him to stumble when he struck the stage, and he fell on his hands and knees. He quickly regained the erect posture and hopped across the stage, flourishing his dagger, clearing the stage before him and dragging the foot of the leg, which was subsequently found to be broken, he disappeared behind the ...
— Lincoln's Last Hours • Charles A. Leale
... reverence, and the intelligence with which you read: and, believe me, it is wiser and holier, by the fire of your own faith to kindle the ashes of expired religions, than to let your soul shiver and stumble among their graves, through the gathering ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Herbert answered drily; 'only mind, whatever you do, for Heaven's sake don't go and stumble and pull ME down on the top of you. It's the clear duty of a good citizen to respect the lives of the other men who are roped together with him on the side of ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... arrangement is, at the best, unsatisfactory, but to abandon the cruise is the only alternative. However, considering I had but a few hours to look about me, I have been more fortunate than might have been expected. I have had the luck to stumble on a young fellow, very highly recommended by the Captain of the Port. He returned just a fortnight ago from a trip to Australia, and having since married a wife, is naturally anxious not to lose this opportunity of going to sea again for a ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... evening, At the tender star of woman; And they heard him murmur softly, "Ah, showain nemeshin, Nosa! Pray, pity me, my father!" '"Listen!" said the elder sister, "He is praying to his father! What a pity that the old man Does not stumble in the pathway, Does not break his neck by falling!" And they laughed till all the forest Rang with their unseemly laughter. 'On their pathway through the woodlands Lay an oak by storms uprooted, Lay the great trunk of an oak-tree Buried half in leaves ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Walters bitterly. "Who that's got anything to lose is master of himself in this country?" With shoulders sagging and a sort of stumble in his gait, he went toward the door. He paused there to say: "I've served too long, Mr. Roebuck. There's no fight in me. I thought there was, but there ain't. Do the best you can for me." And he took himself ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... upon what was to be done, a hackney coachman, driving softly along, and perceiving us standing by the kennel, came up close to us, and calling, "A coach, master!" by a dexterous management of the reins made his horses stumble in the wet, and bedaub us all over with mud. After which exploit he drove on, applauding himself with a hearty laugh, in which several people joined, to my great mortification; but one, more compassionate than the rest, seeing us strangers, advised me to go into ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... of smoke, he saw officers and men trying to hack away and beat out the burning timbers—saw a reckless carbineer—his own tent-mate—dismount and run out across the planking which was already afire, saw him stumble and roll over as a bullet hit him, get to his knees blindly, trip and fall flat in the smoke. Then Fear bellowed in Berkley's ear; but he had already clapped spurs to his horse, cantering out across the burning planking and straight ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... son's friends, but who cannot for the life of him tell which of the score of youthful faces darting sidelong glances in their direction is the particular one he is meant to be saluting. At last in the press they stumble upon one boy at close quarters, whom Cusack the younger ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... charge of the prisoners did not share, or sympathise with, the feelings of the chief who had spared their lives, for they not only forced them to hurry forward as fast as they could go, but gave them occasional pricks with their spear-points when any of them chanced to trip or stumble. One of the warriors in particular—a fiery man—sometimes struck them with the shaft of his spear and otherwise maltreated them. It may be easily understood that men with unbroken spirits and high courage did not submit to this ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... this room," said Hayden triumphantly, after shaking hands with her, "and I haven't fallen once. If I came here often I should bring an ax, notch the furniture and then clear a path. There goes some one!" as a heavy stumble was heard. "I did ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... she saw them, although she could move them still and even get in and out of bed, or in and out of her bath-chair, without much assistance, so long as she could see her lower limbs. Often she would stumble and fall down, even on a grassy lawn. In the dark she could not control her ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... a failing, it is to be found in an inability to hang together in our play, and an incapacity for comprehending the said fact. Set either instrumentalist by himself, and he will manage to stumble through a tune; but put the whole orchestra together, and the result usually falls short of what should be harmony. The hornist is our feeblest musician. He has not yet succeeded in eliciting more than two ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... position, as a sort of animated encyclopedia, to be consulted at will. And all this, to be able to instruct a half-civilized brood of children, of both sexes, in the rudiments of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic and geography, with enough of grammar to enable them to stammer and stumble through a simple sentence, and arrive safely at the end without any material ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... immolation of age on the flowery altars of youth. Like most customs in which we are nurtured, it had seemed natural and pleasant enough until she had watched the hollows deepen in her mother's temples and the tireless knotted hands stumble at their work. Then a pang had seized her and she had pleaded earnestly to be permitted ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... sand made him stumble, and in that instant he became aware of the Sphinx towering over him, its great granite Face solemn in the moonlight. His voice died away in an awed whisper. Long, long he gazed into the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... "Thou needst not stumble at such easy Scripture; behold, the meaning is quite clear! They who travel on the so-called King's Highway are continually exaggerating the merits of the way, thereby making it appear greater and broader than it really is. They ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... shall I say?... In my heart I really care for nothing whatever but that you should not stumble—see? Oh, but really you mustn't skip about like that!" he cried, breaking off to scold her for too agile a movement in stepping over a branch that lay in the path. "But when I think about myself, and compare myself ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of Hermes' smile the grey nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro, across and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust, the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the flooded waters, and the stealing sure inroad of the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... observes the Greek skandalon may be rendered offense, downfall, or a stumbling against something. For when a body, while moving along a path, meets with an obstacle, it may happen to stumble against it, and be disposed to fall down: such an obstacle ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... and her charming person; till coming to a stand of coaches, a coachman plied her; was accepted; alighted; opened the coach-door in a hurry, seeing her hurry; and in it she stumbled for haste; and, as the fellow believed, hurt her shin with the stumble.' ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... literal and material interpretation of his statements, said one to another: "This is a hard saying; who can hear him?" Or according to our idiom—who can understand him? Jesus asked them squarely if what he had just said caused them to stumble, and in order to be sure that they might not miss his real meaning and therefore teaching, said: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... excepte it be tow great; but a fine ship it is. And seeing our neer freinds ther are so streite lased, we hope to assure her without troubling them any further; and if ye ship fale too small, it fitteth well yt such as stumble at strawes already, may rest them ther a while, least worse blocks come in ye way ere 7. years be ended. If you had beaten this bussines so throuly a month agoe, and write to us as now you doe, we could thus have done much more conveniently. But it is as it is; I hope our freinds they, if they ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... mountains, though it ain't quite come in the lowlands, an' as it's rained a lot in the last week, I reckon you'll find it bad. Mebbe our hosses will go down in the road to thar knees, but I guess they won't sink up to thar bodies. They may stumble an' throw us, but as we'll hit in soft mud it ain't likely to hurt us. It may rain hard, 'cause I see clouds heapin' up thar in the west. An' if it rains the cold may then freeze a skim of ice over the road, on which we could slip an' break our necks, hosses an' all. Then thar are some ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... won their forbearance. We listened to her statements more than half disposed to credit them, yet we adhered to our original determination, nevertheless, of joining the first gypsy camp on which, during the course of our tour, we might stumble. ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... we stumble we hear them shouting; every time we blunder against their limits or stretch out to any ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... whatsoever. You may not believe me. But so it is. I know it by experience to be true. I warn you that you will find it true one day; that all spite, passion, prejudice, suspicion, hard judgments, contempt, self-conceit, blind a man's reason, and heart, and soul, and make him stumble and fall into mistakes, even in worldly matters, just as surely as shutting our eyes makes us stumble in broad daylight. He who gives way to such passions is asleep, while he fancies himself broad awake. His life is a dream; and like a dreamer, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... Alicia's head against my knee, a light, swift footstep sounded overhead in the attic, followed by a sort of stumble, as if somebody had slipped on one of those ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Trifles (which are Faults in meaner Capacities) and hurry'd on to his Subject with a Freedom of Spirit peculiar to himself. A Racer at New-market or the Downs, which has been fed and drest, and with the nicest Caution prepared for the Course, will stumble perhaps at a little Hillock; while the Wings of Pegasus bear ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... brother's wife and child, and two more second cousins are to come; not to our house, but to board next door. There is a troop of artists swarming the tavern; all ladies, some of them very congenial, cultivated, excellent persons. They are all delighted with Dorset, and it is pleasant to stumble on little groups of them at their work. A. has been out sketching with them and succeeds very well. I have given up painting landscapes and taken to flowers. I have just had a visit here in my room from three ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... damson), he animadverted upon the astounding negligence of women. There were Nellie (his wife), his mother, the nurse, the cook, the maid—five of them; and in his mind they had all plotted together—a conspiracy of carelessness—to leave the inexcusable tool in his lobby for him to stumble over. What was the use of accidentally procuring ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... stickler for full-blown loveliness. I may find a man who has become inoculated with western heresies and believes that a woman with intellect is desirable, even though under weight. I may find a fool, or an aristocrat who has gambled. I may stumble upon good fortune if I put her out among the young men. Yes, I ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... me there is an overwhelming probability that such an expedition would be successful. Many people, however, will certainly urge: 'In all currents there are eddies and backwaters; suppose, then, you get into one of these, or perhaps stumble on an unknown land up by the Pole and remain lying fast there, how will you extricate yourselves?' To this I would merely reply, as concerns the backwater, that we must get out of it just as surely as we got into it, and that we shall have provisions for five years. And ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... a blind man who sat by the wayside with a lantern near him. When he was asked what he had a lantern for, as he could not see the light, he said it was that people should not stumble ever him. I believe more people stumble over the inconsistencies of professed Christians than from any other cause. What is doing more harm to the cause of Christ than all the scepticism in the world is this cold, dead formalism, this conformity to the world, ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... their assumed characters, or acknowledge their true ones and brave the worst. They could not venture to speak to consult with each other. Paul thought that the best plan would be to keep silent till compelled to speak. He therefore got as near O'Grady as he could, and, pretending to stumble, put his finger against his friend's lips. O'Grady passed on the signal soon afterwards to Reuben. This matter arranged, they quietly followed their captor—O'Grady doing his best to hum a tune which he had ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... more than a great, gaping grave, on the brink of which we walk with wild courage," said the king, softly. "There is no moment that some one does not stumble at our side and fall into the abyss, and we have the courage to continue in the path until our strength fails and we sink, making room for another. Almost all of those who formerly occupied these rooms have vanished. How long will it be ere ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... What for?" returned the post commander, obviously nettled. "I fancy he'll not thank you for even searching his quarters. You may stumble over his big museum in the dark and smash things. No, let him alone. If he isn't here for dinner, I'll ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... same time fully convinced that in our day there are thousands of youths who are falling into the same errors and perils from sheer vanity and affectation; who admire most what they least understand, and adopt all the obscurities and paradoxes they stumble upon, as a cheap path to a reputation for profundity; who awkwardly imitate the manner and retail the phrases of the writers they study; and, as usual, exaggerate to caricature their least agreeable eccentricities. We should think that some of these ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... we are to begin our investigation in Aristotle's way, and look at the [Greek: phainomena] of the subject, we shall immediately stumble over a maxim which is in everybody's mouth, and which, as it is understood in practice, is true and useful, as it is usually applied in argument, false and misleading. "General truths are more important than particular ones." Often, when in conversation, I have been praising ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... always unfortunate to make a stumble on the threshold; and Mr. Mill's opening paragraph makes two. "The name of God," he says, "is veiled under two extremely abstract phrases, 'the Infinite and the Absolute.'... But it is one of the most unquestionable of all logical maxims, that the meaning of the abstract must ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... talked to many of the cottagers, who all treated him with that good-humour and tolerance which they considered due to his age and feebleness. Young men gave him a ready hand if they saw him inclined to falter or to stumble over rough places in the stony street,—little children ran up to him with the flowers they had gathered on the hills, or the shells they had collected from the drift on the shore—women smiled at him from their open doors and windows—girls called to him the "Good morning!" or "Good-night!"—and ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... those who are the most matter of fact people in the world, signs are very common. It is a bad omen with them to stumble over a threshold, or to step over green or red, or to sneeze while making up ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... horror that haunted him was not failure,—for oddly enough he never seriously distrusted his power, it was disaster. Would God give him the strength to fight his demon? If he were to gain the heights, only to stumble in the sight of all ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... you know I am dreadfully troubled now and then with some of my characters, and can't think how to get rid of them. And she'll say, perhaps, Don't shoot your villain this time, you've shot three or four already in the last six weeks; let his mare stumble and throw him and break his neck. Or she'll give me a hint about some new way for my lover to make a declaration. She must have had a good many offers, it's my belief, for she has told me a dozen different ways for me to use in my stories. And whenever I read a story to her, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship's ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... shots were absolutely necessary or not it would be hard to say, for just as the boys discharged their various weapons the huge bear was seen to stumble and fall. He gave several convulsive shudders, ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... "will be a credit to us all yet. The sorra one of him but's as manly as anything, and as longheaded as a four-footed baste, so he is! nothing daunts or dashes him, or puts him to an amplush: but he'll look you in the face so stout an' cute, an' never redden or stumble, whether he's right or wrong, that it does one's heart good to see him. Then he has such a laning to it, you see, that the crathur 'ud ground an argument on anything, thin draw it out to a norration an' make it as clear as rock-water, besides ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... the door. Mrs. Cranceford had sent a negro boy with an umbrella and a lantern. The night was wild, and the slanting rain hit hard. Before he reached the house the wind puffed out his lantern, leaving him to stumble through the dark. ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... ask again, with Marie Antoinette, why the people who are starving for bread do not eat cake. The fact is that to keep within one's income to-day, either financially or vitally, is an aristocratic luxury that is absolutely denied to the many. Most men—the rich as well as the poor—stumble through life three parts dead. The ruling class, if it had the will and the skill, might awaken itself to fullness of life. But only a comparatively few of the others could, because the world is conducted on a principle which makes it even less possible for them ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... it! And what are the ways to which ye walk? Are they not such ways as will not come to the light, and hate the light, because it reproves them? John iii. 19, 20, xi. 9, 10. Are they not such in which men stumble, though they seem to walk easily and plainly in them? Yet O that everlasting stumble that is at the end of them, when you shall fall out of one darkness of sin and delusion into another extreme, eternal darkness of destruction and damnation! O that fearful dungeon ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the ascent. In a few days his agony became alarmingly acute. He grew stupid, and had frequent convulsions, his only conscious act being to get up often from his bed (which was in my wife's room, as he was usually under her care) and stumble as far as my writing-table, where he sank down again in exhaustion. The veterinary surgeon said he could do no more, and as the convulsions gradually became terribly acute, I was advised to shorten the poor animal's cruel agony and ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... cravings of the young spirit with the bread of life, or they will gorge themselves with poison. Telling them that they ought not to be hungry, will not stop their hunger; shutting our eyes to facts, will only make us stumble over them the sooner; hiding our eyes in the sand, like the hunted ostrich, will not hide us from the iron necessity of circumstances, or from the Almighty will of Him, who is saying in these days to society, in language unmistakable: "Educate, or fall to pieces! ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... love to represent it. The path is indeed in several parts only fourteen or fifteen inches broad; and the ridge of the mountain, along which the road runs, is covered with a short slippery turf. The slopes on each side are steep, and the traveller, should he stumble, might slide down to the depth of seven or eight hundred feet. Nevertheless, the flanks of the mountain are steep declivities rather than precipices; and the mules of this country are so sure-footed that they inspire the greatest confidence. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... memory, took the veil here a century and a half ago, this house has ever been above reproach. You will tacitly allow her to slip away; and, once away, I will set matters right for her. But nothing must transpire which could stumble or scandalise the other members of the Community. The peculiar circumstances which the Knight made known to me—always, of course, without making any mention of the name of Seraphine—can hardly have occurred in any other ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... disintegration to the end—the end, the apportionment of its parts (of its subtle flesh, its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments, and all the sensateness that informed it) to the chicken farm, the hide-house, the glue-rendering works, and the bone-meal fertiliser factory. To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horse must abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truth of life and that makes ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... ask my old husband would he vote how she told him if she carried him to the polls. He said yes and she carried him. When he got there they told him no colored was allowed to vote in that election. Poor old man, she didn't offer to get him home, but left him to stumble along ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... was clearly not expected, the sham post was very cautiously moved, and an eye no doubt peeped through the aperture: for there was a howl of dismay, and the man was heard to stumble back and burst into the kitchen, here a Babel of voices rose ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... your acquaintance with your aunt is a very brief one, and she is an extraordinary character; hard to understand. You may easily stumble on a prejudice of ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... unwillingly I turned one morning into Kauffer's; and I can not now imagine why I did it, for emulation of the Assistant Adjutant-General was really not motive enough, unless it was with an instinct prepared to stumble upon matter germane in an absurd ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... practicable precaution against being rebuffed. You want to assure yourself of a welcome. Having gained this chance to start the sale of your capabilities, it is of vital importance not to take the next step in the selling process blindly, lest you stumble. Hence you should size up the other man before you announce your purpose in calling. What you may learn from reading his character correctly will help you to gain admittance into his mind for your ideas. It should assure ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... craving—not for artistic expression, but for food and drink." But I cannot conscientiously advise any man to turn to writing merely as a means of earning his victual unless he should, by some cheerful casualty, stumble upon a trick of the You-know-me-Alfred sort, what one might call the Attabuoyant style. If all you want is a suggestion as to some honest way of growing rich, the doughnut industry is not yet overcrowded; and people will stand in line to pay twenty-two ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... to his work, saying, "The water is rising in the well again!" Though disease had fastened on his lungs, and was spreading there, and though suffering from a distressing cough, he went on lecturing as usual. To add to his troubles, when one day endeavouring to recover himself from a stumble occasioned by his lameness, he overstrained his arm, and broke the bone near the shoulder. But he recovered from his successive accidents and illnesses in the most extraordinary way. The reed ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... blow. It hit harder, as Jerome meant it should, than any verbal rallying. It sent the man back over his own life to the first stumble in it. ...
— Different Girls • Various
... o'clock, I took a stroll by myself through the town of Compiegne. Coming home, when crossing the bridge below the Palace, I met the Emperor arm-in-arm with Walewski. Not ten minutes afterwards, whom should I stumble upon but the ruffian who had seized the Emperor's bridle? The same red comforter was round his neck, the same wild look was in his face. I turned after he had passed, and at the same moment he turned to look ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... seemed that a sort of madness seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out all night, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... severely for allowing the king to expose himself and the country to this unnecessary danger; while the meanness of the locality, the fetid air, the darkness of the night, which was wet and tempestuous, and the uncertainty of the event lowered my spirits, and made every splash in the kennel and stumble on the reeking, slippery pavements—matters over which the king grew merry—seem no light troubles ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... other track, the roses Are backed by sharpest thorns; While berries always nourish, And the violet but adorns;— You will stumble into sluices, And what is worse than all, Your self-respect and conscience ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... when I had the misfortune to stumble against your majesty yesterday, a misfortune which I shall deplore to the last day of my life, especially after the dissatisfaction which you exhibited, I remained, sire, motionless with despair, your majesty being at too great a distance to hear my excuses, when I saw something ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... and fall in pieces and make no recruit"—a broad hint to leave. She "would not help him on with his coat"—a cutting blow. She would not let her servant accompany him home with a lantern, but heartlessly permitted her elderly lover to stumble home alone in the dark. She spoke to him of his luckless courtship of Widow Denison (a most unpleasant topic), thus giving a clue to the whole situation, in showing that Madam Winthrop resented his desertion of her in his ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... almost down to the bridge itself, extended trees and shrubbery that afforded excellent hiding places. The only trouble was that both the outlaws and the officers who were trying to apprehend them were likely to seek the same shelter and might in this way stumble across each other before the trap was ready ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... only guess. I can only stumble and grope in the dark. Think! That woman, lovely, sweet, brilliant, could she accept all that you offer her and give nothing in return if she were heart-free? Wouldn't your love for her appeal to her, touch her, force some tenderness in response? Oh, I have watched her. I have ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... to rock with the fearless certainty of a chamois. Her only stumble was caused, she recollected, by an absurd effort to avoid wetting her dress. She laughed nervously when they reached the place. This time Jenks lifted her across ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... prayer the gray-beard uttered "Ukko's fabric is the bandage, Ukko's science is the surgeon, These have served the wounded hero, Wrapped the wounds of the magician. Look upon us, God of mercy, Come and guard us, kind Creator, And protect us from all evil! Guide our feet lest they may stumble, Guard our lives from every danger, From the wicked wilds of Hisi." Wainamoinen, old and truthful, Felt the mighty aid of magic, Felt the help of gracious Ukko, Straightway stronger grew in body, Straightway were the wounds united, Quick the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... and give ear, be not proud, For the Lord hath spoken! Give glory to the Lord your God Before it grows dark, And before your feet stumble— On the mountains of dusk. While ye look for light, He turns it to gloom And ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... horse could be made out. It was approaching slowly, seeming to stumble now and then. There was an uneasy movement among the cattle, and the boys peered eagerly forward, their hands on the butts of their guns in ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... traditions against public interference in private matters. The unreasoning opposition of medical men to government protection of health, their concentration on cure, and their tardy emphasis on prevention have forced many communities to stumble into the evil practices mentioned in Chapter XVI. Incidentally, the best physicians have learned that the prosperity of their profession increases with every increase in the general standard of living. It is the man in ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... more I renew Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found Long since to be but just one other mound Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew. And once again, and wiser in no wise, I chase your colored phantom on the air, And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise And stumble pitifully on to where, Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes, Once more I ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... her strains of romantic, egotistic ability to which nothing in them corresponded. She could play, she could draw—brilliantly, spontaneously—up to a certain point, when neither Sarah nor Lulu could stumble through a "piece," or produce anything capable of giving the smallest satisfaction to their drawing-master. She could chatter, on occasion, so that a room full of people instinctively listened. And she had read voraciously, especially ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... northward before a hot and oppressive breeze, and the sun was now hidden. The carriage descended at a rapid trot, and once the man got down and silently examined his brakes. The road was a sort of cornice cut on the bare mountain side, and a stumble or the slipping of a brake-block would inevitably send the carriage ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... blessing, though a great trial, Miss, and a great trust; but don't suppose you are destined to exemption from trouble on that account, any more than poor Emmanuel Bryerly. As the sparks fly upwards, Miss Ruthyn! Your cushioned carriage may overturn on the highroad, as I may stumble and fall upon the footpath. There are other troubles than debt and privation. Who can tell how long health may last, or when an accident may happen the brain; what mortifications may await you in ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... expected to stumble over a mine with the men all at work. You expected to find a shaft and mules and men on every side. How ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... men will be drowsy on the march. The women must cook and scatter popcorn on the verandah every morning; so will the men be agile in their movements. The rooms must be kept very tidy, all boxes being placed near the walls; for if any one were to stumble over them, the absent husbands would fall and be at the mercy of the foe. At every meal a little rice must be left in the pot and put aside; so will the men far away always have something to eat and need never go hungry. On no account may the women sit at the loom till their legs ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... two-thirty, I watch; but nothing occurs; and, finally, I stumble off to bed, where I am ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... of them cared much for this man. He was not a man to make close friends. But death had given him a new dignity among them, and the rough hands lifted him, and bore him to the boat as tenderly as though a jar or a stumble might add to ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... said Ioasaph, "But how, after baptism, shall a man keep himself clear from all sin? For even if there be, as thou sayest, repentance for them that stumble, yet it is attended with toil and trouble, with weeping and mourning; things which, methinks, are not easy for the many to accomplish. But I desired rather to find a way to keep strictly the commandments of God, and not swerve from them, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... down under it, and almost thought that I should give up the ghost. After some time, however, I recovered, and getting up tried to find my way out of the anialwch. Sheer good fortune caused me to stumble upon a path, by following which I came to a lone farm-house, where a good-natured woman gave me certain directions by means of which I at last got out of the hot stony wilderness, for such it was, upon ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... them a conclusion concerning him who did them. One aid he offered to the imprisoned prophet,—a word from the Book of Isaiah (xxxv. 5f., lxi. 1f.),—and added a blessing for such as "should find nothing to stumble at in him." Here Jesus emphasized his works, and allowed his message to speak for itself; but he frankly indicated that he expected people to pass from wonder at his ministry to an opinion about himself. At Caesarea Philippi he showed to his disciples that this opinion about himself ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... hard winter in San Francisco; the rains were heavy, and the mud fearful. I have seen mules stumble in the street, and drown in the liquid mud! Montgomery Street had been filled up with brush and clay, and I always dreaded to ride on horseback along it, because the mud was so deep that a horse's legs ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... that a priest was the very person he was looking for, coolly replaced the old man's hat, which had tumbled off, and bade him accompany him at once on an errand of spiritual counsel to one who was even then lying in extremity. "To think," said the stranger, "that I should stumble upon the very man I was seeking! Body of Bacchus! but this is lucky! Follow me quickly, for there ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... he said. "We had made our last charge down on the head of the enemy's column. It was hot work. Desailles was shot through the head, close by my side and, as we rode off, I felt my horse stumble, and knew that it was hit. Almost at the same moment my sword fell from my hand, my right arm being ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... that whether it was tiger or not, it would neither be safe for him to raise an alarm, nor start to rush back to the bivouac—though this was not twenty yards from the spot. By making an attempt to retreat, he might draw the animal after him, or stumble upon it—not knowing its direction. It was to ascertain its whereabouts that he had stopped and stood listening. That once known, he might keep his place, or lake to ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... was leading her unerringly towards the staircase. They reached it, and began to descend the winding steps. Unorna, holding her leader by one hand, steadied herself with the other against the smooth, curved wall, fearing at every moment lest she should stumble and fall in the total darkness. But Beatrice never faltered. To her the way was as bright as though the noonday sun had ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... thought of a mind, an intention, "for God is perfect in goodness." Words so easily come to obscure what they were meant to reveal; and if we think how the notion of perfect goodness rules and sways such a man's mind, we shall not wonder that he did not stumble at the omnipotency which revolts us, cowed as we are by the presence of evil. The old gentleman dressed like a king;—this was not the part of his ideas about God which occupied Duerer's mind. He accepted it, but did not think about it: it filled what would otherwise have been a blank in his mind ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... jump which no one could have imagined a dog of his size capable of doing, he clutched the Arab chief by the throat as he slashed at me, making him stumble back, thus causing the cut that would otherwise have sliced off my head like a carrot to be wasted ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... of tumbled pine-clad ridges and gullies, on which I soon lost my way in a drizzling rain. The single telegraph wire came to my rescue, jumping lightly from moss-grown stick to tall slender tree-trunk across vast chasms down into and out of which I had to slip and slide and stumble pantingly upward in pursuit. Before dark I was delighted to fall upon a trail again, though not with its condition, for it was generally perpendicular and always thick with loose stones. A band of arrieros cooking their scanty supper under a shelter tent asserted there ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed in the body of a chamois chaser. The simple image of the old object has been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... cried the voice by my side. There was positive offence in the tone, and, as I looked my amazement, he continued accusingly, "You always smile. Every time we meet. It must be an annoyance to stumble against me wherever you go. Yet you smile! And to-day you are ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... water then the shipp drewe A man must tell yow tales and find yow ears Haruest ears (of a busy man). When thrift is in the feeld he is in the Towne That he wynnes in y'e hundreth he louseth in the Shyre To stumble at a strawe and leap over a bloc To stoppe two gappes with one bush To doe more than the preest spake of on Sunday To throwe the hatchet after the helve Yow would be ouer the stile before yow come at it. Asinus avis (a foolish conjecture). Herculis Cothurnos aptare infantj ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... "They quite forgot.... They stumble upon jewels worth a month of strike pay—baubles whose loss has stupefied the County, and forget to mention it. And I spent two hours this afternoon in a gas-mask studying the plan of the drains and ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... nature and a wound in patience, the death of hope and the entrance into despair. It is children's awe and fools' amazement, a worm in conscience and a curse to wickedness. In brief, it makes the coward stagger, the liar stammer, the thief stumble, and the traitor start. It is a blot in arms, a blur in honour, the shame of a soldier, and the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... already mounted on one of the coach horses, where she sat demurely and at ease awaiting him. Geoffrey seized the bridle and walked slowly down the bank, taking great care of his own steps lest he should by slipping cause the horse to stumble, and in a few seconds they were slowly picking their way over the rough ice. The horse's hoofs crunched into the snow, and Betty held her breath, and a little thrill went over her as she fancied she heard the ice ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... I hesitated, fearful that if I followed I should stumble or dislodge some of the lava blocks of ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... to be falling, yet to rise again and stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven—this was the best which would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the intention for the deed—who, when there is a sincere ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... pray that I may not through indifference wander without a purpose, or through discouragement stumble through the darkness. May I be drawn to the light by the vision of hopeful and ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... historians of the crusades slide and stumble over this humiliating step. Yet, since the heroes knelt to salute the emperor, as he sat motionless on his throne, it is clear that they must have kissed either his feet or knees. It is only singular, that Anna should not have amply supplied the silence or ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... let her snapper and stoyte on her way, [stumble, stagger] Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jad gae: Come ease or come travail, come pleasure or pain, My warst ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... roof. Now again she flies aloof, Coasting mountain clouds, and kissed By the evening's amethyst. In wet wood and miry lane Still we pound and pant in vain; Still with earthy foot we chase Waning pinion, fainting face; Still, with grey hair, we stumble on Till - behold! - the vision gone! Where has fleeting beauty led? To the doorway of the dead! qy. omit? [Life is gone, but life was gay: We have come ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... idle. It is all movement, noise, and glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him; the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long and wonderful ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... leave him alone, Gibbons; as long as he is forward he can do no harm; but if you see him working his way aft, after it gets dark, it will do him no harm if you manage to stumble against him and give him a clout on ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... square. It was a nasty piece of work, as we were within a few miles of the Boer laager, three hundred strong. There was moonlight, too—it was like a dream, that strange, silent ride, with only the stumble of a horse breaking the regular thud of the hoofs. We surrounded the farm in absolute silence, dismounting some thousand yards away, and fixing bayonets. I told the men I wanted no shots—that would have brought down the commando—but ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... "So I am to get in front of it, and lead it in the right direction? Fine ... as long as I don't stumble over something. If I do, it'll go over me like ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... and elevated beatitude; a simper sat upon his lips, which parted ineffectually with the speech that he endeavored to make. A still lingering consciousness of something to be done, prompted him to rise, however, and stumble toward the landlord, who, while scuffling with the jailer, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Cook's firm friend till the day of his death. Cook had been a short time at school under the instruction of Smothers and Prout, but when he entered the Land Office his education was at most only the ability to stumble along a little in a primary reading-book. He, however, now gave himself in all his leisure moments, early and late, to study. Mr. Wilson remembers his indefatigable application, and affirms that it was ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history of those who suffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, men and women "come to live but called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his poetic function. "Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance of his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compare it with such poems ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... denied the possibility of their being so, as they were ignorant of Christ and His commandments, and placed their hope of salvation on outward forms and superstitious observances, which were the invention of Satan, who wished to keep them in darkness that at last they might stumble into the pit which he had dug for them. I said repeatedly that the Pope, whom they revered, was an arch deceiver, and the head minister of Satan here on earth, and that the monks and friars, whose absence ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... to drop her, and let her get through the torrent by herself; but Cheiron's words were in his mind, and he said only, 'Patience, mother; the best horse may stumble ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... in the line the machine-gunners were always split up into small sections over the front, their guns of course being very carefully concealed. In consequence, just when I thought I had reached an area which was quite uninhabited, I would stumble on some queer little hole, and, on calling down it to see if there were any men there, the answer would be, "The machine-gun battalion," and I would find myself among friends. At Averdoignt they had one of the best rest billets they ever ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... captain had carried her half the distance between the tent and the boat, in the last of which, a minute more would have deposited his victim, when a severe blow on the back of his head caused Spike to stumble, and he permitted Rose to escape from his grasp, in the effort to save himself from a fall. Turning fiercely toward his assailant, whom he suspected to be one of his boat's crew, he saw Tier standing within a few yards, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... footing and fell over the precipice, and it is the general opinion that they were killed long before they reached the golden palace of the Plumerian Thetis. I was a little alarmed at first, for fear my horse would stumble, in which case I should have shared the fate of the unhappy beeves, but soon forgot all fear in the enchanting display of flowers which each opening in the shrubs displayed to me. Earth's firmament was starred ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... as he found it, and came north to stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two or three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided Paris, and had wanted no French influence in his education. He disapproved of France in the lump. A certain knowledge of the language one must ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... I began to see why he had gone away so meekly, though he knew that a stranger had found him out and was likely to stumble on his treasure: so long as I was in hiding, I had had him at a disadvantage; but now, having gone away quietly without resistance, he was able to await me under cover at the Forbidden River's mouth, and I would be the one who would run most risk when ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... especially in boy-life. We must have our powers of mental vision quickened and cleared by the magic dew of sad experience—experience which alone can give sympathy worth having, ere we can understand the queer bits of pathos we constantly stumble upon in life, ere we can begin to judge our fellows with the large-hearted charity that alone can illumine the glass through which for so long we see ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... Obed. "Those fellows want scalps and they don't care whether we're Texans or Mexicans. Besides, they may have better horses than the Mexican ponies. But it's a long chase that has no turning, and if our horses don't stumble we'll beat them. Look out for potholes ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is our lucky morning," remarked Garry. "Here we might have been days and days before we ever found the slightest bit of evidence on which to base our search for the band of smugglers, but in less than an hour after the starting of our mission, we stumble upon this very ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... is safety. Misfortune seems to have dogged my steps; but in this pause of my life—in this state of calmness—I can see that misfortune is my good; for, not until my feet were turning into ways that lead to death, did I stumble and fall." ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... strong hand and I try to shake myself, and I stumble curiously, although lying down. A clamor booms in my temples and then thunders like the guns in my ears; it overflows ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... upon the owner of the voice that was at once so fresh and young, so coolly determined and vaguely defiant. And as he looked at her there was much speculation in his grave eyes. Odd that he should stumble upon her the first thing. ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... remained scarcely a minute below, and respectfully wishing the occupants of the cabin a good evening, they took their leave. The elder went first, and as the second followed, he appeared to stumble at the door. As he did so, he let a folded paper fall from his hand, and, at the same instant, he gave a hurried glance at Ada over his shoulder. Before she had time to tell him of his loss, he had sprung up the companion-ladder. The strangers were quickly ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... he came towards her, limping a little. She felt that if she moved she must surely stumble and fall. The beating of her heart thundered in her ears and for a moment the river, and the steep sides of the coombe, and the figure of Peter Mallory himself all seemed to grow dim and vague as though ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... main lode above?' And she answered yes. That every gravel bar made a better showing; the last trip had taken him above the tree line, and this time he expected to prospect along the glacier at the source of the stream. Sometimes erosions laid veins open, and any hour 'he might stumble on riches.' She smiled again, though her lip trembled, then said it was his limited outfit that troubled her most. He had taken only a light blanket and a small allowance of ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... was the yell or not, the horse recovered from the slight stumble: and no harm befel ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... now leads through a thicket. The horses stumble frequently, for the stones are loose, and the footing consequently uncertain. Crouch has a fall, and ere he can remount the lady is gone. It is useless to hurry after her, and he is proceeding slowly, when Grip, who is a little in advance, growls fiercely, and looks back at his master, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hands with delight, and wafted the Moon with its frosty gauze covering up through the smoke-hole of the room and it became fixed as the Stars, to give light through the hours of darkness, that the earth need not stumble and fall upon ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... on, favorable odds. contingency, dependence (uncertainty) 475; situation (circumstance) 8. statistics, theory of Probabilities, theory of Chances; bookmaking; assurance; speculation, gaming &c 621. V. chance, hap, turn up; fall to one's lot; be one's fate &c 601; stumble on light upon; take one's chance &c 621. Adj. casual, fortuitous, accidental, adventitious, causeless, incidental, contingent, uncaused, undetermined, indeterminate; random, statistical; possible &c 470; unintentional ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... which is my present? You had better point it out, lest I should stumble upon it and learn the ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... "You'll stumble." He did not wait for her assent, and for that and for the strength of his hold she liked him, and, as she ran, and her blood quickened, she liked him better. She did not understand herself, for she ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... and there he saw Master Phoby Geen come slamming out of the empty Folly and post down the slope at a swinging pace towards Cawse Ogo. "And a pretty rage he's carrying with him I'll wager," said the doctor to himself. "The Lord send he doesn't stumble upon Dan'l, or I may have to hurt him, which I don't want, and lose the fun of this. I wouldn't miss it ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... talking when Miss Salisbury brought back Lily by the hand, red-eyed and still sniffling, to stumble over her pleas for pardon. And then, the storm having abated, there were instant preparations for departure set in motion. And Mr. Kimball and his associates helped them into their vehicles, Miss Clemcy's beautiful old lace showing ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... Nellie (his wife), his mother, the nurse, the cook, the maid—five of them; and in his mind they had all plotted together—a conspiracy of carelessness—to leave the inexcusable tool in his lobby for him to stumble over. What was the use of accidentally procuring three hundred ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... cloysters or colleges, will freely wade, by their writings, in the deepest mysteries of monarchy and politick government. Whereupon it cannot otherwise fall out but that when men go out of their element and meddle with things above their capacity, themselves shall not only go astray and stumble in darkness, but will mislead also divers others with themselves into many mistakings and errors; the proof whereof we have lately had by a book written by Dr. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... men we were helping out of the train were seriously hurt. I had to choose between my one badly wounded man, whom we hadn't found, and about a dozen who could stumble somehow into safety. But my two stretcher-bearers were wavering badly, and it was all I could do to keep them ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... tired and hungry. They drag and stumble along in a most tiresome manner. There is moonlight, that ought to add poetry to the scenery—but in Persia there is no poetry about anything. There are a great many caravans on the road—they all travel at night to save the animals from the great heat of ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to me, and if you stumble, the naiads will rise out of their depths, and "hold up their pearled wrists" to save ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... in the present section, and so I say nothing more about it; and ask you, rather, just to look at the loving reasons which Christ here suggests for His present speech— 'that ye should not be offended,' or stumble. He warns them of the storm before it bursts, lest, when it bursts, it should sweep them away from their moorings. Of course, there could be nothing more productive of intellectual bewilderment, and more likely to lead to doubt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... at the man who reared the logs. Still, if one wanders from the trail far enough and deviously enough, he may chance upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself. On the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander, the possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a deserted cabin, but upon ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... always addressed in that manner. She will answer the hungry customer with, 'Yah ochen sojalaylu, shto unaus nyet yestnik prepasov siechas' (a simple home cure for lockjaw), meaning, "I am very sorry, but we are right out of food today.' He will try several other places, and if he is lucky he is apt to stumble across a place where he can get something to eat, but when he looks at the bill of fare and learns that it cost him about $7.50 for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, he beats it ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... token. The Doctor liked to discuss Kenyon with his wife from the standpoint of ancestry. He took a sort of fiendish delight—if one may imagine a fiend with a seraphic face and dancing blue eyes and a mouth that loved to pucker in a pensive whistle—in Mrs. Nesbit's never failing stumble over the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... pity on him, and gave him the coffin. The prince had it borne away by his servants. They happened to stumble over a bush, and the shock forced the bit of poisoned apple which Snowdrop had tasted out of her throat. Immediately she opened her eyes, raised the coffin-lid, and sat up alive once more. "Oh, heaven!" cried she, ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... only dread, and He shall be to you for a sanctuary, but for a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and many among them shall stumble against that stone, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and perish. Hide my words, and cover my law ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... walking stealthily, like the stealthiest of the wild kindred themselves. The trail being well-worn, though long deserted by man, his feet kept it without difficulty; but he held the paddle out before him lest he should stumble over a windfall. Presently he took note of the fact that the trail was marvellously smooth for one that had been so long deserted, and with a little creeping of the skin, which was not in any sense fear but rather ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... arguments side by side: on this side lay success; the greatest office ever held by a Negro in America—greater than Douglass or Bruce or Lynch had held—a landmark, a living example and inspiration. A man owed the world success; there were plenty who could fail and stumble and give multiple excuses. Should he be one? He viewed the other side. What must he pay for success? Aye, face it boldly—what? Mechanically he searched for his mail and undid the latest number of the Colored American. He was sure ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... journey of life, as we travel along To the mystical goal that is hidden from sight, You may stumble at times into Roadways of Wrong, Not seeing the sign-board that points to the right. Through caverns of sorrow your feet may be led, Where the noon of the day will like midnight appear. But no matter whither you wander or tread, Keep out ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... for me?" asked the young inventor, as he took up his curious weapon, and followed Ned out into the yard. It was so dark that they had fairly to stumble along. ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... I the weary night Are taking a walk for his delight, I drowsily stumble o'er stool and chair And clasp the babe with grim despair, For he's got the colic And paregoric Don't seem to ease my ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... her in. The custom of lifting the bride over the threshold, probably to avert an ill-omened stumble, has prevailed among the most diverse races. For the anointing of the doorposts Brand quotes Langley's translation of Polydore Vergil: "The bryde anoynted the poostes of the doores with swynes' grease, because ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... to you, Guru," she said without a stumble, "a great friend of mine. This is Mr Pillson, Guru; Guru, Mr Pillson. The Guru is coming to tiffin with me, Georgie. Cannot I ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... stacks. The negroes call to each other, laugh with spontaneous, childlike humor. The wharf officers, the brokers, pass with intense faces. It is hot. Sweat drips from black faces and from white. Whips crack. Mules trot and stumble over the loose and resounding boards. Heavy wheels rumble. And the life of gambling, drinking, pleasure, crawls about the French quarter, along Canal Street, on Royal Street. The bell in the Cathedral rings. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... was resolved to convince you that everything which a man DETERMINES to do, may be done. I had some information respecting the rascals, though it was but slight, and on these grounds I proceeded. I happened by mere accident to stumble upon a gondolier, whose appearance excited my curiosity. I fell into discourse with him. I was soon convinced that he was not ignorant of the lurking-place of the bravoes, and by means of some gold and many fair speeches, I at length brought him to confess that though not regularly belonging ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... timorousness, (for so he calls the first appearance of a tender conscience,) he calls them fools and blockheads, and by no means will employ them in much, or speak to their commendations before others. For my part, I am of opinion, that he has, by his wicked life, caused many to stumble and fall; and will be, if God prevent not, ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... of sniffing the lad decided that smoke lay off obliquely to the right of him. Having decided upon this he started in the direction named, but proceeded with much more caution than before as he did not wish to stumble upon strangers until he had first determined whether they ...
— The Pony Rider Boys with the Texas Rangers • Frank Gee Patchin
... hot and close down in the rock-hewn chamber, and we are glad enough to stumble up and out again, though we are blinded by the ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... childish origin, beginning in a casual superstition or local accident. 'These people,' says Captain Palmer of the Fiji,' are very conservative. A chief was one day going over a mountain-path followed by a long string of his people, when he happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of the people immediately did the same except one man, who was set upon by the rest to know whether he considered himself better than the chief.' What can be worse than a life regulated by that sort of obedience, and that sort of imitation? This is, of course, a bad specimen, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... might not have walked over backwards, or got off his mule on either side. One of the bad passes, called las Animas (the souls), I had crossed, and did not find out till a day afterwards, that it was one of the awful dangers. No doubt there are many parts in which, if the mule should stumble, the rider would be hurled down a great precipice; but of this there is little chance. I dare say, in the spring, the "laderas," or roads, which each year are formed anew across the piles of fallen detritus, are very bad; but from what I saw, I suspect the real danger is nothing. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed in the body of a chamois chaser. The simple image of the old object has been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient actions, are in me, and the old ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... had the good fortune to stumble on a trail that was evidently used by Indians or other dwellers in the wilderness, probably by men portaging the length of bad water down the river. It was a rough enough path, yet it made his task immeasurably easier. ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... reality. She liked Susan; in her intelligence and physical charm were the possibilities of getting far up in the world; it seemed a pity that she was thus handicapped. Still, perhaps Susan would stumble upon some worth while man who, attempting to possess her without marriage and failing, would pay the heavy price. There was always that chance—a small chance, smaller even than finding by loose living a worth ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... difficult bar approached. And she felt inclined to cry with thankfulness everytime the child went smoothly past. But then just as surely as her nervous tension released itself, and she began to comfort herself that the concluding page could not fail to go well, a stumble, a slip, a despairing cry from the piano stool, and the whole ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... sheer will, regained his mental balance. "I am tired and nervous, or I would never imagine such foolish things," he said. "Of course it is as you say, produced by natural causes, and I will likely laugh at my fears as soon as we stumble on the key to the mystery. And now I am going to insist upon your going back inside, Charley. It won't do for us to have you down with the fever again. For our sakes, as well as your own, you must ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... on Him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe He is precious, but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense, even to them which stumble at the Word, being disobedient" (1 Pet. 2, 4-8). Here Peter in the plainest and strongest terms declares Christ to be the rock on which the Church is built. The scribes and Pharisees rejected Him, as had been foretold, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... reflected from its surface are pitilessly flashed into the dark places of the earth, which have been wrapped around by the old-time dim religious light, since first the world began. The people in whose eyes these rays beat so mercilessly, reel and stumble blindly on in their march through life, taking wrong turnings at every step, and going woefully astray. Let us hope that succeeding generations will become used to the new conditions, and will fight their way ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... soft of voice: "Not all men stumble when a Nation falls; There are that stand upright. God gives thee this: They that are faithful to thy Faith, that walk Thy way, and keep thy covenant with God, And daily sing thy hymn, when comes the Judge With Sign ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... desperate pass he tried to shout, but found, as the spent runner usually does, that he was almost voiceless. A feeble call was all he could manage, and on the contrary wind and noise of the storm, this was quite inadequate. He could only stumble on, borne up by his indomitable will. He was weakening ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... mad about it," she continued. "He thought Mr. Courtney was an ordinary sort of person, anyway. I didn't. I just thought him dull, and I suppose he couldn't help that. Mommer wanted to go over to England last summer. She thought we might stumble on him over there. But popper wouldn't let her do it. He sent us to Alaska instead." She paused, and gave a smiling bow to an acquaintance. "Doesn't Mrs. Peck look sweet tonight?" She designated the society editress of the ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... know I did what was best for them in advising them as I did. These same girls will be topnotchers in other fields of stage dancing, and I would rather direct their pathway to sure success than to let them wander into byways where their feet might stumble. So first of all, the candidate for ballet dancing must have my approval, she must be qualified according to my high standards, and when I say "Yes," and the student enters faithfully upon the work as I lay it out, she is going ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... The miracle of the transformation of monsters by love is being accomplished. Hell is being gilded. The vulture is being metamorphosed into a bluebird. Horror ends in the pastoral. You think you are at Vouglans's and Parent-Duchatelet's; you are at Longus's. Another step and you will stumble into Berquin's. Strange indeed is it to encounter Daphnis and Chloe in ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... nothing that he could do sat silent beside him smoking tranquilly, while, with the flung-up snow whirling about them, the team went floundering down almost precipitous gully or rutted declivity, where a stumble would have hurled them all into the tops of the pines below. Nor had a cry escaped the girl who sat behind them, gripping the side of the bouncing vehicle, when once a horse went down, and on another occasion the wagon left the trail and drove into a hemlock. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... was sitting with Alicia's head against my knee, a light, swift footstep sounded overhead in the attic, followed by a sort of stumble, as if somebody had slipped on one of those unexpected steps. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... old, low, and irregular level, with a rugged floor full of holes with water in them, and with projections in the roof that rendered frequent stooping necessary. The difficulty of one's progress in such places is that, while you are looking out for your head, you stumble into the holes, and when the holes claim attention you run your head against the roof; but, thanks to the miner's ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... than a great, gaping grave, on the brink of which we walk with wild courage," said the king, softly. "There is no moment that some one does not stumble at our side and fall into the abyss, and we have the courage to continue in the path until our strength fails and we sink, making room for another. Almost all of those who formerly occupied these rooms have vanished. How long will it be ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... man speaketh, every man holdeth his tongue, and, look, what he saith, they extol it to the clouds: but if the poor man speak, they say, What fellow is this? and if he stumble, they will help ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... we retire is swept continually with fire. I climb up to the ridge. Now nothing further matters. Only not to fall alive in the hands of those over there! To die! I stumble over a ridge in the field. A few moments of unconsciousness. Then again the tacktack-tacktack of the machine guns. God, our Lord, Thou art our refuge forever and aye! I pray Thee, I pray Thee, let me die an honest soldier's death. And not suffer long. Now, dear Lord, please; now! If ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... advertisement for a private secretary? How then should he have gained a footing in this house? Well, here he was, and speculation was of no value, save in a congratulatory sense. The fly in the amber was the presence of the young American; Fitzgerald, shrewd and clever, might stumble upon something. Well, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... their descent of the hill. Meyer did not speak again; all his attention seemed to be concentrated upon finding a safe path on which the horses would not stumble. Nor did Benita speak; she was too utterly exhausted—so exhausted, indeed, that she could no longer control her mind and imagination. These seemed to loose themselves from her and to acquire new powers, notably that of entering into the secret thoughts of the man at ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... country, that her lips were observed to be always in motion, and that there was not a switch about her house which her neighbours did not believe had carried her several hundreds of miles. If she chanced to stumble, they always found sticks or straws that lay in the figure of a cross before her. If she made any mistake at church, and cried Amen in a wrong place, they never failed to conclude that she was saying her prayers backwards. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... this luck," he congratulated himself, "it will go hard with me if I do not either stumble on the youngling himself, or someone who can ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... details now: how his arm had hung limp; how he had been to a good deal of awkward trouble to keep his left arm always toward her; how white he had been when he passed her on his way out; how he had seemed to stumble when he stepped into ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... proved. Your whole strength will barely suffice for the defence of the sacred cause you represent; for its defence against the fierce and crafty enemies who at this hour perchance are arching their backs and purring like cats, but who are lurking in the jungle, awaiting the moment when you will stumble if you should ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... inwardly. "By Jove, Elizabeth, think of that boy, coming out of nothing, everything poured into his hands—and now within ten days of his goal! Rather exciting, isn't it? Suppose he should stumble at the very threshold of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... the struggle.... What? ... No, I do not know why; I have told you all I know. There is nothing more, Mr. Carruthers—except that I should advise you to work as quickly as possible, as otherwise some one may stumble on the crime before you ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... rest of the bunch. You come along with me, now, and get your supper. After that you may return if you want to. Big-foot, you and Curley stay here until the Pinto gets back. Better keep busy. You may stumble upon something ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... shoulders of a slave. He was a thin delicate youth with evidences of fatal consumption upon him. He had become faint from over-exertion, and one of the drivers had applied the whip by way of stimulus. The effect on the poor youth was to cause him to stumble, and instead of making him lift better, made him rest his weight on the stone, thus overbalancing it, and bringing it down. In falling the block caught the ankle of the youth, who fell with a piercing shriek to the ground, where he lay ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... forward, the more is everything turned terribly inside out, full of putrefaction, cataclysmic. We walk on a surface of shell fragments, and the foot trips on them at every step. We go among them as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of broken weapons or bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles, fire-buckets, sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical wiring, the French and German accouterments all mutilated and encrusted ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Afraid she might stumble on to a bear and be sadly frightened, I called on her to wait for me. But she discovered a blaze on a sycamore beyond the cane and hurried forward. Half-way through the cane she slipped on a wet root ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... a creature of circumstance, that Norman, Scandinavian, Goth, or Icelander, deserves no sort of credit for it. All history shows that it vanishes before the temptations of any Vinland which the frozen barbarians stumble upon. None the less does it give them vigor of muscle, and power to endure hardship, which, in the end, tells, over the accomplishments of the most warlike Romans, Greeks, Persians, or other Southrons. "Fight us, if you like," said Ariovistus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... saw, when he passed that way three days before, that the road was blocked with wagons, artillery trains and stable-lines, and to these obstructions were now added sleeping men, who would not be over civil to any one who chanced to stumble against them in the dark. So Dick drew his squad off into the woods out of the way and went into camp; that is to say, he ate the little piece of hard tack he found in his haversack, washed it down with a drink of warm water from his canteen, ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... unnaturally, in a life and death struggle, with bloodshot eyes, with foaming, gnashing mouths. They attack and kill one another and try to mangle each other. I leap to my feet. I race out into the night and tread on quaking flesh, step on hard heads, and stumble over weapons and helmets. Something is clutching at my feet like hands, so that I race away like a hunted deer with the hounds at his heels—and ever over more bodies—breathless... out of one field into another. Horror is crooning over my head. Horror is crooning beneath ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Those who stumble at the prodigality and licence of his style, and the unchartered daring of his imagination, will find a most curious and brilliant discussion of the whole subject in his Essay on Shelley, which may be summed up in the injunction that "in poetry, as in the Kingdom of God, we should ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... succeed in killing Jacob, therefore be thou mindful of avenging me upon his descendants." "But how, alas!" said Amalek, "Shall I be able to compete with Israel?" Esau made answer: "Look well, and as soon as thou seest Israel stumble, leap upon them." Amalek looked upon this legacy as the guiding star of his actions. When Israel trespassed, saying with little faith, "Is the Lord among us, or not?" Amalek instantly appeared. Hardly had Israel been tempted ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... James said afterwards, 'like my old mare Betsy, a step and a stumble, a nod and a flop, and home in the Lord's own time—that's ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
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