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More "Tedium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... criminals who keep society in a state of siege are as strong as they are clever. If the risk of a few years' penal servitude on conviction gave place to the certainty of final loss of liberty, these professionals would put up with the tedium of an honest life. Lombroso theories have no application to such men. Benson, of the famous "Benson and Kerr frauds," was the son of an English clergyman. He was a man of real ability, of rare charms of manner and address, and an accomplished ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... bushes he stopped again and watched the prison for at least a minute. Two soldiers were on watch in front of it before the single door, two soldiers in Spanish uniform, who were suffering from tedium, and who were quite sure, anyway that unarmed prisoners could not escape from a one-room building of logs with but a single door, secured by a huge, oak shutter, and two windows, each too small to admit the passage of ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Good jokes are few. Surely it might be permitted Lawyer Gooch to mitigate the bore of briefs, the tedium of torts and the prosiness of processes with even so light a levy upon the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the same tone of readiness with which he had responded to Huntington. By keeping his mouth shut, and never taking sides in any of the occasional disagreements and disputes that enlivened the tedium of life in that community, Thompson had established a reputation for neutrality and trustworthiness, and was permitted ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... began, "but I knew his secretary and travelling companion quite well in a happier day in Boston. The recital here will be Saturday evening, which means that they will remain here on Sunday until the evening train East. I shall suggest to my friend that his employer, to while away the tedium of the Sunday, might care to look in upon me in the afternoon and meet a few of our best people. Nothing boring, of course. I've no doubt he will arrange it. I've written him to Portland, where they ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... 'presage', 'suffrage', 'vestige', 'adverb', 'homicide', 'proverb'. The stress in 'div['o]rce' is due to the long vowel and the two consonants. A few of these words have been borrowed bodily from Latin, as 'odium', 'tedium', 'opprobrium'. ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... of April the tedium of winter quarters was relieved by the good news of Grant's successes before Petersburg. It was evident that Lee's army was breaking up, and to guard against the possible escape of any fragment of it by the ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... instruction, and were themselves made to point out and describe that which had just been explained to them. They took home their collections, and as a preparation for the next lesson were often called upon to classify and describe some unusual specimen by their own unaided efforts. There was no tedium in the class. Agassiz's lively, clear, and attractive method of teaching awakened their own powers of observation in his little pupils, and to some at least opened permanent ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... at this period, among us, that the voyage had but now commenced. The labours of a bad summer, and the tedium of a long winter, were forgotten in a moment when we found ourselves upon ground not hitherto explored, and with every apparent prospect before us of making as rapid a progress as the nature of this navigation will permit towards ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... the gate and swelled the great human river; some of them were perhaps already at home and enlivening their families with the day's experiences, and those who had further to go were probably beguiling the tedium of travel by piling one another up in struggling heaps on the floors of various railway carriages, for the entertainment of those privileged to be ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... strangers in the West looked out eagerly for the Missouri, hoping to find the valley of the river rich in scenery which would relieve the tedium of the journey. But when we came out upon the river-bank and looked at the dull shores, and the sandy bed, which the scant stream does not cover, but through which it creeps, treacherous and slimy, in half a dozen channels, there was no pleasure to the eye, no relief for the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... tiresome. To the philosophic mind, Dr. Frampton, there should be no such thing as tedium, boredom, ennui, and I trust that mine is philosophic. You were much in my thoughts, sir, between the attacks of sea-sickness. By frequent perusal I had committed your two epistles to memory, and while silently rehearsing their ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... plot—not too easy to grasp at the first, thanks to the difficulty we found in following the unfamiliar names of the characters. Both these interests were dominated by the attraction of the admirable setting. Fortunately the scenes were numerous and brief, but we still suffered considerable tedium from the affected and drawling delivery of the heroine. The frequent assurances which we received as to the exceptional quality of Mameena's beauty, and the fact that, to our knowledge, she had three husbands in ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... advantage of the tedium of his journey was that Harry had acquired much more fluency by constant practice in speaking the language. The dress he had selected was not one to attract attention; he had modelled it on that of a Greek merchant who was continually trading with the interior. ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... Ephrinell can very well live without me. I have been quite right in not reckoning on his company to charm away the tedium of the journey. The Yankee has completely "left" me—that is the word—for this angular daughter ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... Romanticism, half lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth, and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a display of archaeological lore or for exotic motifs; others gave all their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of execution, the highway of technical tradition having long been abandoned. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of tight-lacing among women. And now it has been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall pity them? The least rigorous will say that they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... government and dynasty. He entered, therefore, without hesitation into the resentful feeling of the relations who had the best title to dictate his conduct, and not perhaps the less willingly when he remembered the tedium of his quarters, and the inferior figure which he had made among the officers of his regiment. If he could have had any doubt upon the subject it would have been decided by the following letter from his commanding officer, which, as it is very ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... freed me even for a moment from tedium," said the pharaoh, laughing. "O gods! what a day! If Thou hadst heard our discussions, if Thou hadst seen the faces of our counselors! And in addition to all, it pleased the worthy queen to honor our assembly with her ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... to Louvain, a journey of many days and nights, prolonged by accident and difficulty, had been spun out to uttermost tedium for those two in the heavily moving old leathern coach. Who and what were they, these wearied travellers, journeying together silently towards a destination which promised but little of pleasure or luxury by way of welcome—a destination ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... Tom, I do not like your look, Your brows are (see the poets) bent; You're biting hard on Tedium's hook, You're jaundiced, crumpled, footled, spent. What's worse, so mischievous your state You have no pluck to try and trick it. Here! Cram this cap upon your pate And come with ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... them. They come and go aimlessly,—they whose every movement has always its precise and useful purpose—they depart and return, sally forth once again to see if the queen be ready, to excite their sisters, to beguile the tedium of waiting. They fly much higher than is their wont, and the leaves of the mighty trees round about all quiver responsive. They have left trouble behind, and care. They no longer are meddling and fierce, aggressive, suspicious, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... watch through a night with something on your mind you are to be forced to speak of in the morning—a compulsion awaiting you as a lion awaiting the debut of a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Did you, so watching, feel—not the tedium—but the maddening speed of the hours, the cruelty of the striking clocks? Were you conscious of a grateful reliance on your bedroom door, still closed between you and your lion, as the gate that the eager eyes of Rome were fixed on was ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... upon this hint that the Minister of War acted, executing a rare piece of drollery that so enlivened the tedium of ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... was tolerant contempt in Zehru's ringing voice. "I will explain some of the things that puzzle you. There is no reason why I should trouble myself to do so, yet it may while away the tedium of the short wait yet remaining before my apparatus becomes charged to the required point. Listen carefully, Earthling, for at best you will find many of my thoughts beyond the feeble limits of the word forms with ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne just arrived from the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... barber, a shrewd intelligent Greek, Mustapha by name. Barbers are privileged persons for many reasons: running from one employer to another to obtain their livelihood, they also obtain matter for conversation, which, impertinent as it may sometimes be, serves to beguile the tedium of an operation which precludes the use of any organ except the ear. Moreover, we are inclined to be on good terms with a man, who has it in his power to cut our throats whenever he pleases—to wind up, the personal liberties arising from his profession, render ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... I received a present of an armadillo, or ant-eater, who is certainly a wonderful animal, and well worth studying, in the tedium of a calm between the tropics. The body proper is but about nine inches, but, when stretched at length, he covers an extent of two and a half feet, from head to tail, and is wholly fortified with an impenetrable armor of bony scales. On any occasion of alarm, it is his ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... collective wisdom of all the wizards we had decreed to be a synonym for the Siege's duration, and the morning of the pronouncement relative to the advance of the Column from Orange River, had had its tedium neutralised by a cheerful vituperation of Gladstone's defective statesmanship in the year of 'eighty-one and his wicked efforts at a later date to "give Ireland away too." The move from Orange River had occasioned ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... just as children who are given their fill of pleasant things. Many of them have come into the state in which you see them from no fault of their own, because their souls are young and ignorant. They have shrunk from all pain and effort and tedium, like a child that does not like his lessons. There is no thought of punishment, of course. No one learns anything of punishment except a cowardly fear. We never advance until we have the will to advance, and there is nothing ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the paper should never thoroughly dry, but must be kept constantly moist. This was the duty of my sister and myself; and the idleness, which would have been otherwise so desirable, was excessively annoying on account of the tedium and impatience, and the watchfulness which allowed of no distraction. The end, however, was attained; and the bookbinder, who fixed each sheet upon thick paper, did his best to match and repair the margins, which had been here and there torn by our inadvertence. All the sheets together ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... plodding among musty law books and threading legal intricacies, with occasional interruptions, caused by fits of impatience and disgust at the detail and tedium of study, until he had at length fought his way through and placed himself in the front rank of his profession. His brilliant achievement in the famous Jenkins case, in the outset of his career, had at once won for him a position at the ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... had been trying to beguile the tedium of the stormy days by interesting the girls in the lessons they would even now have been studying at Miss Tolliver's school if their houseboat had not sailed away from her anchorage. All the old school books had been brought up from the "Merry Maid." At first the girls were much pleased with ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... jealous and voluptuous Asiatic, women are but the sensual instruments of his secret pleasures.... Does the European, in spite of the apparent deference which he affects towards women, really treat them with more respect? While we refuse them a sensible education, while we feed their minds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselves only with playthings and fashions and adornments, while we seek to inspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do we not show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... the "Rebel yell," leaping a hedge and alighting in a ten-foot ditch among Federal troopers who surrendered to him and his comrades. Yet this is history. We could perhaps more easily have recognized him even though in a military prison-pen, on finding him dispelling the tedium by teaching his fellow prisoners Latin and Greek, or perusing a precious ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and the conic sections will be acquired, which will give a life and reality to the geometrical studies which will occupy them in their school career. Dancing and singing will relieve the tedium of sitting, shake off the surplus energy, give rest to the body, and power, time, and tune to the voice. Models of houses, stores, workshops, kitchens, farms, and factories, which later on they will assist in making, will be a source ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... The monotonous tedium of routine slave-labor was very often broken by some scene of cruelty to one or another of the poor blacks, either by the master or his overseer; and woe unto the luckless one if the master should ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... but that part of it which it has fallen to my lot to describe is very different from those portions about which poets have sung with rapture. Here, none of the many wonders of the tropical latitudes beguile the tedium of the voyage; no glittering dolphins force the winged inhabitants of the deep to seek shelter on the vessel's deck; no ravenous sharks follow in our wake to eat us if we chance to fall overboard, or amuse ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... the unwilling beasts along. On a curve I counted the wagons ahead and behind. I knew that there were forty of them, including our own; for often I had counted them before. And as I counted them now, as a child will to while away tedium, they were all there, forty of them, all canvas-topped, big and massive, crudely fashioned, pitching and lurching, grinding and jarring over sand and sage- brush ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... and, as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... water-lilies; nor was his happiness entirely and solely the essence of his material ease. This was his third morning out of doors, and on each of the two mornings that were gone Hortensia had borne him company, coming with the charitable intent of lightening his tedium by reading to him, but ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... pottage was weaker, the boiled beef less relieved by other diet, the dresses finer, the evening engagements constant. I did not find these visits pleasant. We might not knit, which would have relieved the tedium a little; but we sat in a circle, talking together, only interrupted occasionally by a gentleman, who, breaking out of the knot of men who stood near the door, talking eagerly together, stole across the room on tiptoe, his hat under his arm, and, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... sands, blizzards and typhoons, it was not enough to go out every Sunday to pop at a cap, and the rest of the time to ladle out casting-votes at the gunmaker's. Poor dear great man! If this existence were only prolonged, there would be sufficient tedium in it to kill him ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Rovero spoke of Gaetano Brignoli, to whom she paid the greatest compliments. Aminta returned with an expression altogether changed. Her face was lit up with joy, as expressive and animated as the tedium and thoughtfulness which marked it had been profound. Maulear did not sympathize with her gayety, and she became every moment more moody and sombre. Under the pretext of a headache, he retired to his room. New thoughts assailed him. He ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... government a hundred times more than they did, and with better reason. He had been a lifelong heretic; was a heretic to-day, upon sincerer conviction than them all. What a queer comedy he had been playing of late years—simply from tedium and disgust. He to believe in God? What sort of a God was it who was gracious only to the young, and left the old in the lurch? A God who, when the fancy took him, became a devil; who transformed wealth into poverty, fortune into misfortune, happiness into despair. "You play ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... their boots newly oiled, and not laced up (a particularly Sunday sign), walking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots they had cut during the week, and kicking them critically as if their use were unknown, was a fearful heaviness to her. To relieve the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather's old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while. But on Saturday nights she would frequently sing a psalm, and it was always on a week-day ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... table had discovered a new amusement with which to enlighten the tedium of waiting while Maggie was in the kitchen foraging for food. The game was called "local color," in honor of Patty Wyatt's famous definition in English class, "Local color is that which makes a lie seem truthful." The object of the game was to see who could tell the biggest lie without being ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... New Guinea, while the younger fashioned the islands and the sea. When the natives first saw a steamer on the horizon they thought it was Nemunemu's ship, and the smoke at the funnel they took to be the tobacco-smoke which he puffed to beguile the tedium of the voyage.[397] They are also great believers in magic and witchcraft, and cases of sickness and death, which are not attributed to the malignity of ghosts and spirits, are almost invariably set down to the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... the punchers relieved the tedium of the march, each after his own manner. In an hour the bunch of loose horses lost its early-morning good spirits and settled down to a steady plodding, that needed no supervision. Tom Rich led them, now, in silence, his time fully occupied in rolling ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... or two, and we want to work off all the men, who haven't had any leave at all, before moving up mudwards, when all leave will be stopped. We are engaged at present in practically rebuilding and making sanitary an entire French village, and in "training," which means all the old dismal tedium of manoeuvres plus spit ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... the young Virginian lay bound in a wigwam, guarded by a brace of old warriors, who occasionally varied the tedium of watching by stalking to the door, where, like yelping curs paying their respects to passers-by, they up-lifted their voices and vented a yell or two in testimony of their approbation of what was going on without. Now and then, also, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the chase. The Knight had assured him of the absence of all danger from the Indians, but even without such assurance, Arundel would have preferred to encounter some peril rather than submit to the tedium he must otherwise ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... got gloves on; his long white hands were bare, he could not touch a toad. It was true that the beast had amused him, and that he had chatted to it; but, after all, this was a piece of childish folly—an unmanly way, to say the least, of relieving the tedium of captivity. What was Monsieur Crapaud but a very ugly (and most people said a venomous) reptile? To what a folly he had been condescending! With these thoughts, Monsieur the Viscount steeled himself against the ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Macaulay. But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... at him sharply, but passed downstairs with no more than a "Good night." So Archelaus, too, was feeling life to be empty?... Archelaus had bewailed the past before now, and the vanished glories of the garrison, but never the tedium of his present lot. ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... because they were philosophers and seekers after the beauty that underlies the form of things, they made the picture express its own significance, and every song find echo in the souls of those that heard. You will find no tedium of repetition in all their poetry, no thin vein of thought beaten out over endless pages. The following extract from an ancient treatise on the art of poetry called 'Ming-Chung' sets forth most clearly ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why all this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... pride in the ancestry which now implied such diverse occupations as interstellar steel construction and animal husbandry and llano-planet colonization. "If it were adventure, as the only girl on this ship I'd have to be in the landing party, lest the tedium of orbital waiting make the"—her smile widened to a grin—"the pent-up restlessness of ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... wearily on. Noon came. Nothing and nobody interested Zoe. She went to be measured for a gown and could not support the tedium ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... in this way he owed Carry Brattle fifteen pounds, and comforted himself by reflecting that these fifteen pounds would carry the girl on a good deal beyond the fortnight; if only she would submit herself to the tedium of such a life as would be hers if she remained at Mrs. Stiggs's house. He named a fortnight both to Carry and to Mrs. Stiggs, saying that he himself would either come or send before the end of that time. Then he returned home, and told the whole story ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... at ten, ante-meridian, was banked with eager faces. Band music, muffled and mellow, away off somewhere where the parade was forming! Small boys whiling away the tedium of waiting with snap-crackers. Country teams loaded to the edges, and with little Johnny scooched on a cricket in front, hustling down the line of parade to find a nook. Anxious parents scuttling from side to ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... side," he said; and I smoked the Jacobite. But to shorten the story, which amuses my tedium but may beget it in you, I asked him if ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... "All's right," &c. &c. &c. with nearly a verse of "The night before Larry was stretched," tune and all, and the air of "Polly put the kettle on," which the guard was practising on his bugle, to relieve the tedium of the journey. Like all nervous animals, I am extremely susceptible to external impressions; and the fresh air, movement, and company, had all their usual exhilarating effects on my spirits. Our lady of Sourcraut Hall, Lady C——, received myself and my protector with a ceremonious and freezing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... but half an hour's candle-light and no fire-light. The streets, the shops remain, but old friends are gone." "I assure you" (he goes on) "no work is worse than overwork. The mind preys on itself— the most unwholesome food. I have ceased to care almost for anybody." To remedy this tedium, he tries visiting; for the houses of his old friends were always open to him, and he had a welcome everywhere. But this visiting will not revive him. His spirits descended to zero—below it. He is convinced that happiness is not ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... employment must be full of life and joy, bearing us upward like the wings of a skylark, as he bathes in the sunlight of the upper ether, and carols forth his joy. There will undoubtedly be a variety, too, in heavenly employment, corresponding with our varying states, and making tedium impossible. This may be illustrated by imagining what would be a perfect mode of spending a day in this world. We wake in the morning refreshed by repose, and as we look forth at the sun our spirits rejoice in the ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... Euphues' Golden Legacie (1590). His poems include Glaucus and Scilia (1589), Phillis honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies, and Amorous Delights (1593). Rosalynde, his best known work, and the source from which Shakespeare is said to have drawn As you like It, was written to beguile the tedium of a voyage to the Canaries. Robin the Divell and William Longbeard are historical romances. L. was also a voluminous translator. He was one of the founders of the regular English drama, but his own plays are heavy and tedious. His romances, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... main current of routine was a hopeless monotony of official correspondence, investigations, statistics, reading and reporting on the interminable and flatulent maunderings of the Legislature,—duties heart-breaking in their desperate tedium and maddening inutility. ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... practice, when he lunched alone, to relieve the tedium of the meal with the assistance of reading matter in the shape of one or more of the evening papers. Today, sitting down to a solitary repast at the Piccadilly grill-room, he had brought with him an early edition of the Evening News. And one of the first items which met his eye was ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... with looks bold and shy. They had not many objects of thought in common, therefore not many subjects for conversation. There was no poetry in Gordon, and but the flimsiest sentiment in Phemy. Her mind was feebly active, his full of tedium. Hers was open to any temptation from him, and his to the temptation of usurping the government of her world, of constituting himself the benefactor of this innocent creature, and enriching her life with the bliss of loving a noble object. ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... is easily pleased, for the simple reason that anything is a relief from the tedium of life on ship-board; consequently the coming of the cow was like a half-holiday to them at the wrong end of the day, and they stood about nudging each other, as Dirty Dick trotted up with his bucket, Archy looking on as much amused ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... its diffuse extracts from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,—St. Adalbert and his mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... constantly compelled to turn and wind about in every direction—sometimes standing on for several hours at a stretch to the southward and eastward. These perpetual embarrassments became at length very wearying, and in order to relieve the tedium of our progress I requested the Doctor to remove one of my teeth. This he did with the greatest ability—a wrench to starboard,—another to port, and up it flew through the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... glass and bric-a-brac, if she is very ill, and you need space for necessary glasses or other articles. It will be a pleasant way of beguiling the tedium of some long day in her convalescence to bring forth and arrange them in their accustomed places. Be careful of books, table-covers, and all the articles of luxury and beauty you will find in many of our city houses. Remember that these things ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's faggot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... good spirit came into the empty house, sweeping and garnishing would only entice the seven to take the place of the one. So he tried to interest his pupil once again in his old studies; and by frequent changes did ere long succeed in holding tedium at bay. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... in the logs, where the daubing had dropped out, Smith watched the lights in the ranch-house. He relieved the tedium of the hours by trying to imagine what was going on inside, and in each picture Dora was the central figure. Now, he told himself, she was wiping the dishes for Ling, and teaching him English, as she often did; and when she had finished she would bring her portfolio into the dining-room ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... form was powerless to retain Cameron's attention for very many consecutive minutes at a time; he grew restless, fussed about with portfolios for a little while longer, enlivening the tedium with characteristic observations. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... there are those who know what fed the root, What long, dull tedium as of wintry hours, What rapture as of spring-light after showers, Went to the ripening of this strange, frail fruit. Defeat and hope, disaster, joy and pain, Grief, pleasure and despair—the same old train That follows every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... the ignorant mob, that though much of my mental substance has been wasted, I have enough left to appear respectably in the world, and that I have at least preserved that taste for literary pursuits which I cling to as the greatest of blessings and the best security against the tedium and vacuity which are the indispensable concomitants of an idle youth ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,' called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? To have the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... burned with shame. She felt humiliated. Evidently he had regarded her merely as some one with whom it might he agreeable to idle away the tedium of a journey—but that was all. It was obviously his intention that that should be the beginning and the end ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... many seafaring forefathers murmured in his heart. But he did not so much care for the soft, yielding, brown sands on which the sea-waves broke. The coasts to which he had been used in his youth were either rocky or firm as a macadamized road. Nor was he beguiled into forgetting the tedium of walking over them, as his companion was, by the fascination of the shells and sea curiosities to be picked up on them. Many a mile have I trotted along beside him or behind him, gathering these treasures, while he strode ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... a great deal of valuable professional information is conveyed, at the same time that the tedium of much study is relieved by the harmony. If poetry is yet to be found in our hospitals—a queer place certainly for her to dwell, unless in her present feeble state the frequenters of Parnassus have subscribed to give her an in-patient's ticket—we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. We have seen, too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... side of Gozzoli's art is most fascinating. He has travelled a long way from his master Fra Angelico here: the heaven is of the visible rather than the invisible eye; sense is present as well as the rapturous spirit. The little Medici who endured the tedium of the services here are to be felicitated with upon such an adorable presentment of glory. With plenty of altar candles the sight of these gardens of the blest must have beguiled many a mass. Thinking here in England ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... contrary, while she was still ill in bed, and almost absolutely dependent on what he might choose to do for her, she gibed and flouted him past bearing, mainly, no doubt, for the sake of breaking the tedium of her confinement a little. And when she was about again, and he was defending her weakness from Aunt Hannah, it seemed to him that she viewed his proceedings rather with a malicious than a grateful eye. It amused and excited her to see him ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... kind silence reminds me, in the gentlest, the most considerate way possible, that I am not here to relieve the tedium of a life made lonely by a bereavement equal to your own, in conversation however beguiling, or in quest of a sympathy of which, I dare to say, I feel assured. For, in a sense, it is as to a public assembly, ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... but in the intuition and clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity inasmuch as they know that they ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the intricacies and subserviences, with the tedium and pomposities of Court life! Cora, you do not know what you are talking about, or what you are ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... top of the high pole he would cling protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job, he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... all these evils, Major Smith proposes to add to the College a Manual Labor Department, in which the elder boys shall acquire the rudiments of the arts and trades to which they are destined. This will alleviate the tedium of the College routine, assist the physical development of the boys, and send them forth prepared to render more desirable help to their employers. The present Board of Directors favor ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... from tedium sought recreation in night attacks. Even Petronius took part in these amusements. Their main object was to seize women and toss each on a soldier's mantle till she fainted. Even Nero himself on occasions called these expeditions "pearl hunts," for it happened that in the depth of districts ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... plans, forgot the tedium of the trail. No person is so happy as when doing something to make some other person happy. And Bob was happy because he believed he was to be the means of bringing happiness to many. Making a comfortable living ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... impel us to travel, to change our sky, as Horace calls it—good motives and bad, selfish and unselfish, noble and ignoble. With some people it is pure restlessness; the tedium of ordinary life weighs on them, and travel, they think, will distract them; people travel for the sake of health, or for business reasons, or to accompany some one else, or because other people travel. And these motives are neither good nor bad, they are simply ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... following the example of Clive and of Rumbold. He committed the one fault which the House of Commons never forgives, he wearied it. Such dramatic effect as he might have got out of his position as a proconsul arraigned before a senate he spoiled by the length and tedium of his harangue. He took two days to read a long and wordy defence, two days which he considered all too short, and which the House of Commons found all too long. It yawned while Hastings prosed. Accustomed to an average of eloquence of which the art has long been lost, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... in those times—its humor, its tedium, its dangers, its hardships—was never before so vividly portrayed. The tyranny and cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of that little world of the ship's deck, stand out in strong relief. Dana had a memory like a phonographic record. Unless he took copious notes on this journey, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... pseudonym, "stanes." To every man two stanes. You can either get your "stanes" in England and travel out with them, or hire them in the locality. They make the most pleasant travelling companions and at times are the cause of many amusing incidents which beguile the tedium of the journey. Also they often lead to your picking up chance acquaintances. I have known one stone placed in a dimly lighted corridor of a train productive of much merriment and harmless banter. Being of considerable weight they do not readily respond to a playful kick, but having ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... relieved the tedium of her trial by using her eyes a little more; if, for example, she had condescended to look twice at the handful of mere spectators beyond the reporters on her right, she could scarcely have failed to recognize the good-looking, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... little impromptu call of mine that's disturbing you. After all, life has its unusual moments, and this, I think, is one of them." He sniffed the bouquet of his wine and drank. "It is rare moments like this—bizarre, incredible, what you like—that compensate for the tedium ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... rare powers—fruit of nature and of our interchange of thought—treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are born. They ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... D. box nailed to a pine trunk, these indicated that civilization still existed, but they were only melancholy blurs. She was in a cold enchantment. All of her was dead save the ability to keep on driving, forever, with no hope of the tedium ending. She was bewildered. She passed six times what seemed to be precisely the same forest clearing, always with the road on a tiny ridge to the left of the clearing, always with a darkness-stilled house at one end and always, in the pasture ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... and the one idea uppermost in my mind was how well the linnets must be seasoned to tobacco smoke if they could sing at all in the atmosphere which those Corydons were so carefully polluting. Corydon, besides his pipe, had adopted nuts and beer to solace the tedium of the quarter of an hour that yet intervened before the Bermondsey bird and its Walworth antagonist were to be "on the nail;" and ever and anon fresh Corydons kept dropping in, until some fifty or sixty had assembled. They were all of one type. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... activity and confronted by the sole prospect of having to drag out a humdrum existence, men began to reflect with a sort of sullen exultation upon the possibility of departing this life at will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. This disposition was so general that "Werther" itself exerted a powerful influence, because it everywhere struck a responsive chord and publicly and tangibly exhibited the true inwardness of a morbid ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at another encounter ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... the tedium of beholding the hideousness of all the guests was curiously diminished by the pleasure of seeing Prudence's ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli
... to stand on the bank and watch you doing it. I know what girls in the chorus have to go through. Hanging about for hours in draughts, doing nothing, while the principals go through their scenes, and yelled at if they try to relieve the tedium of captivity with a little light conversation . ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... employment of capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the greatest battles ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... in his early cup of tea that Easter Saturday afternoon, Louis had no project whatever in his head, and he was excessively, exasperatingly bored. A quarter of an hour earlier he had finished reading the novel which had been mitigating the worst tedium of his shamed convalescence, and the state of his mind was not improved by the fact that in his opinion the author of the novel had failed to fulfil clear promises—had, in fact, abused his trust. On the other hand, he felt very appreciably stronger, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... easy journey he had thus rashly undertaken on the faith of a dream,—for dream he still believed it to be. Many weary days and nights were consumed in the comfortless tedium of travel, . . and though he constantly told himself what unheard-of folly it was to pursue an illusive chimera of his own imagination,—a mere phantasm which had somehow or other taken possession of his brain at a time when that brain must have been acted upon (so he continued to think) by strong ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... farce, of course, but underneath the fantastic affectation there was a very real sentiment, that of the intolerable tedium of captivity. Raleigh had been living a life of exaggerated activity, never a month at rest, now at sea, now in Devonshire, now at Court, hurrying hither and thither, his horse and he one veritable centaur. Among the Euphuistic 'tears of fancy' which ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... with a young fellow who had certainly some reason to be satisfied with his own success thus far in life, and who could relieve the tedium of ship's duty in such society. I cannot say I was in love, though I often thought of Emily when she was not before my eyes, and actually dreamt of her three times, in the first fortnight after the re-capture ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... There had been no tedium in the morning's waiting. Like all imaginative people, she had the gift of dramatizing herself. She was seeing herself in white from head to foot, like this efficient young woman who came now and then to the waiting-room door; she was healing the sick and closing tired eyes; she was ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... No tedium vitae round him lowers, The charms of contrast wing his hours, And every scene embellish:— From prison, City, care set free, He tastes his present liberty With keener zest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... not forget Richard Crashaw, of Peterhouse. Willingly would I relieve the intolerable tedium of this dry inquiry by transcribing the few lines of his now beneath my eye. But I forbear, and ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... girls and boys. Alceo shows less resourcefulness than his prototype in that he twice tries to commit suicide by throwing himself into the sea. The last act is spun out to three scenes in accordance with the demand for greater regularity of dramatic construction, but gains nothing but tedium thereby. The other play to be considered connects itself in plot rather with the Pastor fido. It is the Filli di Sciro, the work of Guidubaldo Bonarelli della Rovere. The poet's father enjoyed the protection of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... way, the wild untenanted stretch was unbroken by any incident; yet I remember no tedium by the way; and I believe that a trip taken with Grandma and Grandpa Keeler through the most trackless desert would inevitably have been made to teem with diversion. Those blessed souls! I smile, looking back, but through tears, and with ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... seamanship, and make him well acquainted with the dangers of the coast, he thought that, as Newton was fully equal to the charge of the vessel, he might as well indulge himself with an occasional glass or two, to while away the tedium of embarkation. A stone pitcher of liquor was now his constant attendant when he pulled on board to weigh his anchor; which said pitcher, for fear of accidents, he carried down into the cabin himself. As soon as sail was on the vessel, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... she said, "I have not yet had enough of your second kindness. I was on the point of death from sheer tedium; then you came, just in time; and if you want to carry out your work of mercy you must tell me something about the battle where you were wounded, and who took care of you afterwards, and whether the women of Pannonia ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... indiscretion; for when he ascertained that he was to be kept a prisoner in the cottage until the return of the Wasp, he at once made up his mind to submit with a good grace to what could not be avoided. In order to prove that he was by no means cast down, as well as to lighten the tedium of his confinement, Jo entertained himself by singing snatches of sea songs; such as, "My tight little craft,"—"A life on the stormy sea,"—"Oh for a draught of the howling blast!" etc.; all of which he delivered in a bass voice so powerful that it caused the rafters of the ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... for a month that he was going South next day and delaying from week to week out of inability to make up his mind to the bother of packing and the tedium of a journey, had at last been driven off just before Christmas by the preparations for that festival. He could not support the thought of a Teutonic merry-making. It gave him goose-flesh to think of the season's aggressive cheerfulness, and in his desire to avoid ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... hands.... When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the man after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae. This is a pause, as you may see from the writing. What happened to the old pedestrian emigrants; what was the tedium suffered by the Indians and trappers of our youth, the imagination trembles to conceive. This is now Saturday, 23rd, and I have been steadily travelling since I parted from you at St. Pancras. It is ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... this poor Prince once to burst loose from his Court-moorings, to what regions, with what phenomena, might he not sail and drift! Happily as yet he 'affects to hunt daily;' sits there, since he must sit, presiding that Bureau of his, with dull moon-visage, dull glassy eyes, as if it were a mere tedium ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Kaintuck as could be picked out in a day's ride; and that to a good looking young fellow like himself, with nothing to do but to make love to them, THAT ought to be no mean consideration, enabling him, as it would, to while away the tedium of captivity." At other times he would launch forth into some wild rhapsody, the invention of the moment, or seek to entertain his companion with startling anecdotes connected with his encounters with the Indians on the Wabash, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... wall, a remembrance of Le Maistre's delightful little book, "Voyage autour de ma Chambre," occurred to me. I resolved to imitate the French author, and find occupation and amusement enough to relieve the tedium of my wakefulness, by making a mental inventory of every article of furniture I could see, and by following up to their sources the multitude of associations which even a chair, a table, or a wash-hand stand may ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... of people. It happened that the midnight train from Cornwall was overdue, and fluttered women waiting for friends were importuning bored officials about the delay. Sleepy children stared with wondering eyes at pictorial efforts to beguile the tedium of waiting for trains. There were geographical posters comparing Cornwall favourably to Italy; posters of girls in bathing costume beckoning to "the Cornish Riviera;" posters of frolicsome puppies in baskets ticketed "Lucky Dogs, They're ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... Helen when her vigilant chaperon was momentarily absorbed in a suggestion that private theatricals and the rehearsal of a minuet would relieve the general tedium ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... At present he was expiating some heavy debts by a forced residence with his parents, and unwilling attention to the office, a most distasteful position, which he never attempted to improve, and which permitted him both the tedium of idleness and complaints against all the employment to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the middle watch, when we had nearly run out the south-east trades, I went forward, looking for someone to talk to, or anything to relieve the tedium of my two hours on the lee side of the poop. I found Welsh John sitting on the main-hatch and disposed to yarn. He had been the most intimate with Duncan, harkening to his queer tales of the fairies in Knoidart when we others ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... envy them. They will be sea-sick on the way. The southern winds will blow all the water out of the rivers, and, desolately stranded upon mud, they will relieve the tedium of the interval by tying with large ropes a young gentleman raving with delirium tremens. They will hurry along, appalled by forests blazing in the windy night; and, housed in a bad inn, they will ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... asleep," without the tremor of an eyelid, if I may so style a weather leach, or of any inch of the canvas, from the royals down to the courses. Every condition was as if arranged for a special occasion, or to recompense us for the tedium of the horse latitudes. The moon was big, and there was a clear sky, save for the narrow band of tiny clouds, massed like a flock of sheep, which ever fringes the horizon of the trades; always on the horizon, as you progress, yet never visible above when the horizon of this ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... I was! How unutterably proud of my handsome tender husband! I do not know whether even then he truly loved me, or if he merely intended me as a pretty toy to amuse him during the tedium of college sessions; I only remember my delirious delight, my boundless exultation. We returned home, and Cuthbert resumed his college studies, but through the co-operation of his room-mate, he spent much of his time in our cottage. Peleg became troublesome, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... her, certainly; nevertheless during the heat and tedium of the days that followed, certain cadences of that dulcet voice returned to him like a haunting melody, suggesting visions of a garden, fresh with splashing fountains, where Bianca wandered in company with other fair women playing on the viol and singing as in ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... occupations as interstellar steel construction and animal husbandry and llano-planet colonization. "If it were adventure, as the only girl on this ship I'd have to be in the landing party, lest the tedium of orbital waiting make the"—her smile widened to a grin—"the pent-up restlessness of trouble-makers ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... relieved from this tedium by another summons to the office. Fortified with a glass of good wine, he returned to the encounter, inwardly calling upon his gods to direct him how to meet it. He found poor old Father Pennycuick aged ten years in the hour since he had seen ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... period of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Adamses, we find no humor in the next generation. The only relief from the tedium of argument and exhaustless logic is found in the savage sarcasm of John Randolph, which ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... supplies the public with recreative reading. To the masses of the people—hard-worked and living humdrum lives—the novel comes as an open door to an ideal life, in the enjoyment of which one may forget, for a time, the hardships or the tedium of the real. One of the best functions of the public library is to raise this recreative reading of the community to higher and higher levels; to replace trash with literature of ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... foreseen, tongues did wag—those tongues of the countryside, avid of anything that might spice the tedium of dull lives and brains. And, though no breath of gossip came to Winton's ears, no women visited at Mildenham. Save for the friendly casual acquaintanceships of churchyard, hunting-field, and local race-meetings, Gyp grew up knowing hardly any of her own sex. This ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... chinks in the logs, where the daubing had dropped out, Smith watched the lights in the ranch-house. He relieved the tedium of the hours by trying to imagine what was going on inside, and in each picture Dora was the central figure. Now, he told himself, she was wiping the dishes for Ling, and teaching him English, as she often did; and when she had finished she ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... pleasantly enough, with a young fellow who had certainly some reason to be satisfied with his own success thus far in life, and who could relieve the tedium of ship's duty in such society. I cannot say I was in love, though I often thought of Emily when she was not before my eyes, and actually dreamt of her three times, in the first fortnight after the re-capture of the ship. What was a little remarkable, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... regarded as vaunting over your comrades, who, I've no doubt, relax the tedium of war in temperate indulgence of some of these vices. 'Put up thy sword; states may be saved without it,' would sound out of keeping for a warrior whose States drew the sword when the olive-branch was offered them. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... be practicable. Such an impression is inevitably produced by every verbal description of a complicated process. Compare the time occupied in describing a movement in fencing with that required to execute it; compare the tedium of the grammar and dictionary with the rapidity of reading. Like every practical art, criticism consists in the habit of performing certain acts. In the period of apprenticeship, before the habit is acquired, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... contented. Her character lent itself to gratitude. She did not feel the tedium of wealth; on the contrary, she often took an almost childish pleasure in it. But no one could guess that, for her bearing was always full of dignity and repose. People suspected that there was something questionable about her origin, but as no one could ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... Archibald Roylance did not altogether believe Dickson's tale; it may be that he considered him an agreeable romancer, or a little mad, or no more than a relief to the tedium of a wet Sunday morning. But his incredulity did not survive one glance at Saskia as she stood in that bleak drawing-room among Victorian water-colours and faded chintzes. The young man's boyishness deserted him. He stopped short in his tracks, and made a profound ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... perspective whatever, they cannot represent transparent bodies, they cannot represent luminous bodies, nor reflected lights, nor lustrous bodies—as mirrors and the like polished surfaces, nor mists, nor dark skies, nor an infinite number of things which need not be told for fear of tedium. As regards the power of resisting time, though they have this resistance [Footnote 19: From what is here said as to painting on copper it is very evident that Leonardo was not acquainted with the method of painting in oil on thin copper plates, introduced by the Flemish ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... his eyes and shrugged his shoulders. "Human beings," he said, with a curious smile on his heavy face. "Our social ideas," he said, "have a certain increased liberality, perhaps, in comparison with your times. If a man wishes to relieve such a tedium as this—by feminine society, for instance. We think it no scandal. We have cleared our minds of formulae. There is in our city a class, a ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... when this story begins. The stream of boys with shiny black bags had poured out through the gate and swelled the great human river; some of them were perhaps already at home and enlivening their families with the day's experiences, and those who had further to go were probably beguiling the tedium of travel by piling one another up in struggling heaps on the floors of various railway carriages, for the entertainment of those privileged to be ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... go on! If you only knew," her lifted eyebrows confessed the tedium of Calcutta small-talk. "But why do you say you are lightly esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone—and you hold the public in the hollow ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the door, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid to think of what must follow, racked by confinement and borne to the ground with tedium. This particular phase, he felt with gratitude, could not last for ever; whatever impended (even the gallows, he bitterly and perhaps erroneously reflected) could not fail to be a relief. To calculate cubes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trumpets, a roll of drums, a stirring march of warlike melody, startled them out of the lethargic tedium of exhausted hopes and fears. "It is Santa Anna!" said Antonia; and though they durst not stand up, they drew closer to the balustrade and watched for the approaching army. Is there any woman who can resist that nameless emotion ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... travel together, the kine first, the man after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae. This is a pause, as you may see from the writing. What happened to the old pedestrian emigrants; what was the tedium suffered by the Indians and trappers of our youth, the imagination trembles to conceive. This is now Saturday, 23rd, and I have been steadily travelling since I parted from you at St. Pancras. It is a strange ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... and had become fixed in the habit of illustrating great truths by grotesque and familiar similes. His jokes, the circulating medium of Congress, were as helpful to the cause, as Jay's conscience or Adams' fire; they restored good humor, and relieved the tedium of delay, but were out of place in formal, exact and authoritative papers."—Parton's ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... tedious? There was tedium, rather, in the possession of bodies as durable as metal, as renewable as wax, as insensitive as water. In the fiercest onset of the passions, prolonged to satiety, there was always an element of the unreal. What is pleasure, ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... former alternative is dismissed by most responsible statesmen. They declare that they do not wish to destroy the German people or the German nationality or the civilized life of Germany. I will not enlarge here upon the tedium and difficulties such an undertaking would present. I will dismiss it as being not only impossible, but also as an insanely wicked project. The second alternative, therefore, remains as our War Aim. I do not see how the sloppiest reasoner ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... was to abolish the tedium due to the elaborate aiming of the guns, by fixing a time limit for every move. We made this an outside limit at first, ten minutes, but afterwards we discovered that it made the game much more warlike to cut the time down to a length that would barely permit a slow-moving player ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... been written of the dances by which Washington and his officers and their ladies helped to while away the tedium of long winters during the Revolution, but the story of these has been often told and besides lies outside the limits of this book, as does the dancing at New York and Philadelphia during ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... not tiresome. To the philosophic mind, Dr. Frampton, there should be no such thing as tedium, boredom, ennui, and I trust that mine is philosophic. You were much in my thoughts, sir, between the attacks of sea-sickness. By frequent perusal I had committed your two epistles to memory, and while silently rehearsing their well-turned sentences, in ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless. ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... the death of her daughter, to a dreary solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the absence of her son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keeping, as she had done ere his return from foreign parts, a humble school. It was attended by two little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend, the wife of a tradesman of the place,—a ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... feverish expectation naturally produced by our present circumstances, prevents any thing like regular occupation. We do nothing all the day but wander restlessly about among the old haunts which were our favourites in the peaceful time of our early sojourn here. Max has endeavoured to relieve the tedium, and get up an interest of some sort, by renewing his attempts against the great eel. But the patriarch is as wary, and his stronghold beneath the roots of the buttress tree as impregnable as ever, and all efforts to his prejudice, whether by force or stratagem, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... King's return to Hoghton Tower, orders were given by Sir Richard for the immediate service of the banquet; it being the hospitable baronet's desire that festivities should succeed each other so rapidly as to allow of no tedium. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... is long and the sun hot, pack and saddle animals come together, keeping a level pace of some five miles an hour, and Salam or the Maalem beguiles the tedium of the way with song or legend. The Maalem has a song that was taught him by one of his grandfather's slaves, in the far-off days when Mulai Mohammed reigned in Red Marrakesh. In this chant, with its weird monotonous refrain, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... with flying scud; and, as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder. It ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so accustomed to think of tedium as something modern, that it seems strange to find in the oldest tales [Page 16] in the world how the first king of whom we know anything was bored by his pleasures. A reward for discovering a new pleasure is the very basis of the tale of Sneferu; ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... the long tedium of existence in the settlement began to be broken in earnest. Before they could digest the flavour of one event, something else happened. In the afternoon word came down to Stiffy and Mahooley that the bishop had arrived at the French Mission, bringing the sister of the company ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... youth; in every corner of Italy the tender verses of the Edmenegarda were read with love, and sometimes frenzied passion; the political prisoners of Rome, of Naples, and Palermo found them a grateful solace amid the privations and heavy tedium of incarceration; many sundered lovers were reconjoined indissolubly in the kiss of peace; more than one desperate girl was restrained from the folly of suicide; and even the students in the ecclesiastical seminaries at Milan revolted, as it were, against their rector, and petitioned the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... he smoked on the poop. In her heart of hearts, she was beginning to acknowledge that a voyage through summer seas on a cargo vessel, with no other society than that of unimaginative sailormen, savored of tedium, indeed, almost of deadly monotony. Her rare meetings with Hozier marked bright spots in a dull round of hours. During their small intercourse she had discovered that he was well informed. They had hit upon a few kindred tastes in books and music; they even ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... even by the King's sagacity, he was reprieved, and remanded to the Tower, where the next twelve years of his life were spent in confinement. Fortunately, he had never ceased to cultivate literature with a zeal not often found in the soldier and politician, and he now beguiled the tedium of his lot by an entire devotion to those studies which before had only served to diversify his more active and engrossing pursuits. Of his poetical talents we have already made short mention; to the end of life he continued ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... yourself if you fell into a muddy pond. But I shouldn't like to stand on the bank and watch you doing it. I know what girls in the chorus have to go through. Hanging about for hours in draughts, doing nothing, while the principals go through their scenes, and yelled at if they try to relieve the tedium of captivity with a little light conversation ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... tired you, my friend, with a long letter. But your tedium will end in a few lines more. Mine has yet two years to endure. I am tired of an office where I can do no more good than many others, who would be glad to be employed in it. To myself, personally, it brings nothing but unceasing ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... grasp at the first, thanks to the difficulty we found in following the unfamiliar names of the characters. Both these interests were dominated by the attraction of the admirable setting. Fortunately the scenes were numerous and brief, but we still suffered considerable tedium from the affected and drawling delivery of the heroine. The frequent assurances which we received as to the exceptional quality of Mameena's beauty, and the fact that, to our knowledge, she had three husbands in the course of the play, never quite ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... understand. As for Mr. Fairchild, the fatigue was intolerable; and he would have rebelled at once, if he had not paid for his places for the season, and so chose to have his money's worth, if it was only in tedium. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... accidents. The chief point was, that the paper should never thoroughly dry, but must be kept constantly moist. This was the duty of my sister and myself; and the idleness, which would have been otherwise so desirable, was excessively annoying on account of the tedium and impatience, and the watchfulness which allowed of no distraction. The end, however, was attained; and the bookbinder, who fixed each sheet upon thick paper, did his best to match and repair the margins, which had been here and there torn by our inadvertence. All the sheets ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... not here to describe more fully this journey whose tedium was unnoticed by reason of good-fellowship. Nor of the meal they ate at the "Chequers" Inn at Tonbridge, and how they drank (at the Bo'sun's somewhat diffident suggestion) a health "to his Honor the Cap'n, and the poor ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... of Bessie's present life threatened to be the tedium of nothing to do. She could not read, practise her songs, and learn poetry by heart all the hours of the day: less than three sufficed her often. If she had been bred in a country-house, she would have possessed numerous interests that she inevitably lacked. She was a stranger ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Nero from tedium sought recreation in night attacks. Even Petronius took part in these amusements. Their main object was to seize women and toss each on a soldier's mantle till she fainted. Even Nero himself on occasions called these expeditions "pearl hunts," for it happened ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... spring and kisses and a perfect spiritual companionship.... As I have said, he gets into a terrible muddle. Anyhow, between the two conflicting ideals, he does not fall to the ground of vulgar amours. At the risk of tedium I feel bound to insist on this aspect of his life. For in the errant cosmopolitan world in which he, irresponsible and now well salaried bachelor had his being, he was thrown into the free and easy comradeship of hundreds ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... companions of Lionel worked a young Spanish sailor named Jean de Morales, and, glad of any relief from the toil and tedium of their sad life, he listened eagerly to the often-repeated story of the lovely and beautiful island. Of this unknown land he dreamed and thought continually, longing for freedom that he might discover and ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... and myself as to the best way of dealing with these proceedings as to Legislative Councils. I will enumerate the points very shortly, and though I am afraid it may be tedious, I hope your Lordships will not find the tedium unbearable, because, after all, what you are beginning to consider to-day, is the turning over of a fresh leaf in the history of British responsibility to India. There are only a handful of distinguished members of this House who understand the details of Indian Administration, but I will ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... king exclaimed. "You're in a sweat to be gone, you unmannerly churl! You, a raw, untried boy, are invited to dine with the king, and your one itch is to escape the tedium!" ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... The tedium of the voyage is beguiled by watching the graceful movements of the wandering albatross, the fateful bird of nautical romance, which is sure to be seen in considerable numbers below the thirtieth parallel of south latitude. The peculiarities of this sea-bird's ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... stanes. You can either get your "stanes" in England and travel out with them, or hire them in the locality. They make the most pleasant travelling companions and at times are the cause of many amusing incidents which beguile the tedium of the journey. Also they often lead to your picking up chance acquaintances. I have known one stone placed in a dimly lighted corridor of a train productive of much merriment and harmless banter. Being of considerable weight they do not readily respond to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... is in them. They come and go aimlessly,—they whose every movement has always its precise and useful purpose—they depart and return, sally forth once again to see if the queen be ready, to excite their sisters, to beguile the tedium of waiting. They fly much higher than is their wont, and the leaves of the mighty trees round about all quiver responsive. They have left trouble behind, and care. They no longer are meddling and fierce, aggressive, suspicious, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a cluster of houses and stores, a shack for a station, a freight house and corral with cattle-chutes, and a long platform on which the uneasy passengers might stroll to relieve the tedium ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... were three steps each way, did not allow much play for individuality. Erratic pedestrianism was clearly dangerous, so we rushed round in Indian file, like braves on the warpath; and, by way of relieving the tedium, we speculated on the number of laps in a mile. Our proceedings seemed to strike the wild beasts in the opposite den as unaccountable imbecility. They grinned at us through the bars with as much delight as children might evince in the Zoological Gardens at a performance of insane ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Almo proved himself the greatest genius for desert fighting that the Republic has produced in a hundred years. And I'll follow my own intuition that a swashbuckler whose own thoughts prompted him to challenge the King of the Grove as a cure for tedium, who had the nerve to carry out the idea and the skill to win a hundred and six fights in ten months must be a good all-round man and a real man clear through. I take it that being put in supreme command of a great expedition will brush the cobwebs from Almo's brain and ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... in the dreary little station; or rather it would have been, had not the tedium of it been relieved by the presence of a newly married couple, whose honeymoon was just then at the full. Their delight in each other was exuberant, effervescent, beatific,—what shall I say?—quite beyond veiling or restraint. At first I bestowed upon them sidewise and cornerwise ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... was weaving sweet fancies to beguile the tedium of her uneventful life, a very different scene was being enacted, a few miles away, in the humble home of John Watson, C. P. R. section-man, in the little town of Millford, where he and his wife and family of nine were working out their ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... well pleased at having made such a good stroke of business, and spun round on one foot like a teetotum, hallooing so loud that the wood re-echoed. Then he started off on the road with his new servant, and enlivened the tedium of the way by a variety of jokes, without observing that his companion dropped a pea from his bag at every ten or fifteen paces. The travellers halted for the night in the forest under a large fir-tree, and continued their journey next morning. The sun was already high ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... his sins (or other people's), was confined in an underground dungeon containing sixty-four cells, all communicating with open doorways, as shown in our illustration. In order to reduce the tedium of his restricted life, he set himself various puzzles, and this is one of them. Starting from the cell in which he is shown, how could he visit every cell once, and only once, and make as many turnings as possible? His first attempt is shown by the dotted track. ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... seems to cease to be possible in a company who fancy they have struck every string, sounded every secret, exhausted the possibilities, in each other. A long subjection of the same persons to the same circumstances produces a general spirit of sameness, a flagging tedium, a want of varied attraction and stimulation. Let a stranger, a foreign friend, any honored guest, come in, and how his presence quickens every thing! Life shines with novel lustre, and throbs with new energy. Every one puts his best foot forward, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... and many other stories of the fish world the Pilot beguiled the tedium of the journey. He told about the famous Sucking-Fish, or Remora, which has a wonderful flat apparatus on its head by which it sticks to any object, fish, rock, or ship to which it attaches itself, and once fixed it is impossible to make it loose its hold. The natives in ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... powers—fruit of nature and of our interchange of thought—treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... seated at table. "I should say to every man and woman who came to me on such errands, 'My dear friend, my business is with your spiritual welfare, and with that alone. The doctor and solicitor must take care of your worldly concerns. It is my duty to insure your eternal felicity when the tedium of delirium tremens and the divorce court is all over, and that is really all one ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... wonder you are not bored, droning on in the same key from morning till night. [Despairingly] I am dying of this tedium. What shall ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... he began to weary of the tedium of Luckenough, varied only by the restraint of the academy during term. And at sixteen he rebelled against the rule of his indolent lymphatic mamma, broke through the reins of domestic government, escaped to Baltimore and shipped as cabin boy ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... after this he entered with his friend Correa the office of the Direccion de Bienes Nacionales as copyist, at the munificent salary of some $150 a year. The employment was decidedly contrary to his taste, and to amuse his tedium he used often to sketch or read from his favorite poets. One day, as he was busy sketching, the Director entered, and, seeing a group about Gustavo's chair,—for the young artist's sketches were eagerly awaited and claimed by his admiring associates,—stole up from behind ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... a quiet and secluded fortress, away from the world, in which he might pursue an undisturbed and ordered life of solemnity and delicate impressions of a sacred sort of beauty. His desire for community life was caused by his decided dislike of the world, of fuss and tedium and conventional occupations. He was never in the least degree a typical person. He had no wish to be distinguished, or to influence other minds or lives, or to gain honour or consideration. These things simply appeared to him as not worth striving ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and dreary level. But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have a certain charm of their own even in their dulness and monotony; and amongst the rushes ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... the present edition, for instance, almost all the geography is new. The age has been peculiarly an age of exploration—a locomotive age: commerce, curiosity, the spirit of adventure, the desire of escaping from the tedium of inactive life,—these, and other motives besides, have scattered travellers by hundreds, during the period of our long European peace, over almost every country of the world. And hence so mighty an increase of knowledge in this department, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... picture which a crowd presents at a public execution;—much like a crowd, we may be sure, at any other public spectacle. Whatever the object which gathers together a mob of the lowest class, they will soon begin to relieve the tedium of expectation by coarse jests, drunkenness, and brawling. Yet these descriptive logicians are never weary of painting to us the grotesque and disgusting scenes which the mass of spectators exhibit on these occasions, as if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... travel it mattered little which hotel I stayed at, but to-morrow and the next day, the long week we were to spend together passed before my eyes, the tedium of the afternoons, the irritation and emptiness of Platonic evenings—"Heavens! what have I let myself in for," I thought, and my mind went back over the long journey and the prospect of returning bredouille, as the sportsmen say. But to argue ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... now, when we see by the painful history of mankind at what point we began, by what slow toil, what favourable circumstances, what accumulated achievements, civilised man has become at all worthy in any degree so to call himself—when we realise the tedium of history and the painfulness of results—our perceptions are sharpened as to the relative steps of our long and gradual progress. We have in a great community like England crowds of people scarcely more civilised than the majority of two thousand ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... news spread through St. Ignace. Father Rielle was seen to drive away, and Dr. Renaud was already at the Manor House, but Ringfield, shut up in his own room, reading and pondering, heard nothing of the matter for several hours. However, Poussette and Miss Cordova, to relieve tedium, went into the kitchen, where, secure from both Stanbury and Schenk, the ex-actress took a lesson in cooking, by tea-time producing pancakes so excellent that they rivalled if not excelled those of her instructor. Indeed, with this happily met couple, time ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... One alleviation of the tedium of hotel-life in the city is the almost daily visit of the young man from the dry-goods' shop, who brings samples of lawns, misses' linen dresses, pina handkerchiefs, and fans of all prices, from two to seventy-five dollars. The ladies cluster like bees around these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... "I must write some letters at once." She sighed, as if in tedium. The fact that her fortune was vaguely threatened did not cause her anxiety: she scarcely realized it. What she saw was an opportunity to evade the immediate meeting with Edwin—the meeting which, a few minutes earlier, she had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Court dispersed, and the lady who was its charm and head disappeared also under the tragic waves which had been rising to engulf her, there should fall a sudden blank into the record, a chill of dulness and tedium, the charm departed and the story done. In fact, it was not at all so, and the metropolis of Scotland continued to seethe with contending elements, and to witness a continued struggle, emphasised by many a martyrdom and deed of blood, and many a desperate ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... youths of the period to seek preferment abroad, he closed his books for a while, and became a corsair, visiting the Canary Isles, Brazil, and Patagonia. He brought back, as booty from his expeditions, romances written at sea to beguile the tedium of the passage and the anxieties of the tempest. One was called "The Margarite of America"; another "Rosalynde." The latter fell into Shakespeare's hands and pleased him; he drew from it the plot of "As you like it."[155] Coming before the literary public, Lodge does not altogether forget ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... times our feelings and language on any subject may be different without being insincere. The truth seems to be that Petrarch looked forward to the friendship of the Colonnas for promotion, which he either received scantily, or not at all; so it is little marvellous if he should have at last felt the tedium ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... fitted, both by his previous labors and knowledge of the soil, and by his practiced dexterity in the use of the necessary implements. He has accordingly produced a volume which may either be read consecutively or dipped into at random with the certainty of entertainment and without risk of tedium. Among the sources from which his material is drawn he assigns the first place to the Memoirs of Tate Wilkinson and its sequel, The Wandering Patentee, and the summary which he gives, as far as possible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... on board ship in those times—its humor, its tedium, its dangers, its hardships—was never before so vividly portrayed. The tyranny and cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of that little world of the ship's deck, stand out in strong relief. Dana had a memory ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... ballad, if one apt To move his fancy offers. Crispin's sons Have, from uncounted time, with ale and buns, Cherish'd the gift of Song, which sorrow quells; And, working single in their low-rooft cells, Oft cheat the tedium of a winter's night With anthems warbled in the Muses' spight.— Who now hath caught the alarm? the Servant Maid, Hath heard a buzz at distance; and, afraid To miss a note, with elbows red comes out. Leaving his ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of Nauvoo, Illinois, where vacant houses offered immediate shelter and where they enjoyed an interval of prosperity. The French genius for music, for theatricals, and for literature relieved them from the tedium that characterized most co-operative colonies. Soon their numbers increased to five hundred by accessions which, with few ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... exquisite Psyche of Naples. It showed us that Virgil who was called "The Maiden" as Milton was named "The Lady of Christ's." I don't know the archeology of it, perhaps it was a mere work of modern fancy, but the charm of this image, beheld daily, overcame even the tedium of short scraps of the "AEneid" daily parsed, not without stripes and anguish. So I retain a sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceive the many ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... "spirit," entire high priest, entire perfection, promenades in his garden: he only wants pastime. Against tedium even Gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He contrives man—man is entertaining.... But behold, man also wants pastime. The pity of God for the only distress which belongs to all paradises has no bounds: he ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas, beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... rice-fields, and plunged into dense forests of the long-leafed pine, where for miles not a house, or any other evidence of human occupation, is to be seen. Nothing could well be more dreary than a ride through such a region, and to while away the tedium of the journey I opened a conversation with the driver, who up to that time had maintained ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... more miserable over her want of power to control it, because of the terror that hung over her lest repinings might bring on them all the judicial punishment of a terrible break-up of the home she loved, even while the tedium of the daily round oppressed her. Alternate plaintiveness and weary sharpness of course aggravated both Alda and Bernard, and they knew nothing of the repentant wretchedness that rather ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... joyous citizen of the world at large was Mr. Phelan Harrihan, as, with a soul wholly in tune with the finite, he half sat and half reclined on a baggage-truck at Lebanon Junction. He wag relieving the tedium of his waiting moments by entertaining a critical if ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... Kenko, who became a recluse in 1324, is counted among the "four kings" of Japanese poetry—Ton-a, Joben, Keiun, and Kenko. He has been called the "Horace of Japan." In his celebrated prose work, Weeds of Tedium (Tsure-zure-gusa), he seems to reveal a lurking love for the vices he satirizes. These three authors were all pessimistic. They reflected the tendency ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all these modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and acquiescence. They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was to admire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu quo. They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the strong. They did not realize ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... that Howard Talbot had mended it. But mended it was and her eyes had never sparkled so gaily, nor her laugh rung so lightly since her first winter among them. Mrs. McLane suggested charitably that her tedium vitae had run its course and ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... how the "Boomskys" fell upon Ryder's champagne like wolves upon a wounded buck, how they drank it from "enameled-ware" coffee-cups, from tin dippers, from the bottles themselves; how at last they even dispensed with the tedium of removing the corks and knocked off the heads against the table-ledge and drank from the splintered bottoms; how they quarreled over the lees and dregs, how ever and always fresh supplies were forthcoming, and how at last Hardenberg, Ally Bazan and Slick ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... etiquet by giving him away. It is the nurse who gives the doctor away in private, because every nurse has some particular doctor whom she likes; and she usually assures her patients that all the others are disastrous noodles, and soothes the tedium of the sick-bed by gossip about their blunders. She will even give a doctor away for the sake of making the patient believe that she knows more than the doctor. But she dare not, for her livelihood, give the doctor away in public. And ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... pains to instruct him in seamanship, and make him well acquainted with the dangers of the coast, he thought that, as Newton was fully equal to the charge of the vessel, he might as well indulge himself with an occasional glass or two, to while away the tedium of embarkation. A stone pitcher of liquor was now his constant attendant when he pulled on board to weigh his anchor; which said pitcher, for fear of accidents, he carried down into the cabin himself. As soon as sail was on the vessel, and her course ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... lagging days were spent not only in novel-reading, as the Emperor in after years confessed to Mme. de Remusat, but in attempts at novel-writing, to relieve the tedium of idle hours. It is said that first and last Buonaparte read "Werther" five times through. Enough remains among his boyish scribblings to show how fantastic were the dreams both of love and of glory in which he indulged. Many entertain a suspicion that amid the gaieties ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and its holidays. No where better than in arctic climates are these celebrated by persons of every age and sex. There are innumerable games and pastimes around the fire, where the wildest merriment drives away the tedium of the long wintry night. Stories are told, songs are sung, tricks are played. There is dancing in the lighted hall; there is love making in the dark corners; and to crown the festival there is a sleigh-ride under the cold moon, when the music ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... Astrorum Judiciis, the writing of which beguiled the tedium of his voyage down the Loire on his journey to Paris in 1552, is a book upon which he spent great care, and is certainly worthy of notice. Cardan's gratitude to Archbishop Hamilton for the liberal treatment and gracious reception he ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Pontiff. His conduct towards him in every respect was beyond all praise. As a fellow-man, he consoled him in his sorrows; as a prince, he entertained him with truly royal magnificence, sparing nothing that was calculated to lessen, even to do away with the pain and tedium of exile, whilst, as a faithful Christian, he fulfilled every filial duty towards the Vicar of Christ, expiating, as far as was possible, the crimes committed against him ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... received her sentence so easily, that it was suspected that she did not realize the tedium of confinement, and was relieved by being allowed to be inactive. Until she should go home, she might do whatever did not fatigue her; but most sights, and even the motion of the carriage, were so fatiguing, that ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... should have loved to be a troubadour, or a trouvere, Frank; that was my true metier, to travel from castle to castle singing love songs and telling romantic stories to while away the tedium of the lives of the great. Fancy the reception they would have given me for bringing a new joy into their castled isolation, new ideas, new passions—a breath of gossip and scandal from the outside world to relieve ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... this arrangement, Ben went home to dinner, which he made very lively by recounting Billy Barton's ingenious devices to beguile the tedium of sermon-time. He said nothing of his conversation with Miss Celia, because he had not quite made up his mind whether he liked it or not; it was so new and serious, he felt as if he would better lay it by, to think over a good deal before he could understand ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... what Atheist calls the "tediousness" of the journey has undoubtedly a great hand in making some half-in-earnest men sceptics, if not scoffers. Many of us here to-night who can never now take this miserable man's way out of the tedium of the Christian life, yet most bitterly feel it. Whether that tedium is inherent in that life, and inevitable to such men as we are who are attempting that life; how far that feature belongs to the very essence of the pilgrim life, and how far we import ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... the entire absence of a certain kind of jocoseness which is so naturally associated with spirituous liquors; no talk could have been less offensive. From many a bar-parlour in English country towns I have gone away heavy with tedium and disgust; the cafe at Catanzaro seemed, in comparison, a place of assembly for wits ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... door he had pointed out, like one to whom minutes were hours. All this time he seemed to forget George who certainly had as much reason as himself for finding the time long. But when, after some half hour of this tedium and suspense, there rose from below the faint clatter of ascending footsteps, he remembered his meek companion and beckoning him to one side, began a studied conversation with him, showing him a note-book in which he had written such phrases ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... He has done no harm, and given as much amusement as he has been paid for. Indeed, I consider him more an ornamental and useful character than otherwise. He has brightened many a traveler's recollections, relieved the tedium of many a weary hour in a foreign city, and, with all his deception, has never severed himself from the popular faith, nor sold out the popular cause. I dare say his death, when it occurs, will cause more sensation and evoke more tears, than that of any better ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... pleasant time of day, and when the moon was up both officers and men enjoyed themselves; but on dark nights neither walking nor riding could be indulged in, so broken was the ground, and there was nothing to do but to talk, sing, and vary the tedium by a game ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... invalids, Walter and Eden, recovered but slowly. But for the kindness of every one about them their hours would have passed very wearily in the sickroom. Their tedium was enlivened by constant visits from Henderson and Power, who never failed to interest Walter by their school news, and especially by telling of those numerous little incidents which tended to show that although after the late excitements there ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Caper, 'are those of us who don't win the prize, going to do with paintings of such a size, left on our hands? Nobody, unless a steamboat captain, who wants to ornament his berths, just that size, and relieve the tedium of his passengers, would ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... termed layers, setters, tilers, and so forth. Masters and Fellows wore a distinctive costume, which remained almost unchanged in its fashion for no less than three centuries.[86] Withal, it was a serious company, but in nowise solemn, and the tedium of the journey was no doubt beguiled by song, story, and the humor ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... score—after Tannhauser in the court of the castle and by beckoning to him. By neglecting this and merely standing in front, waiting for the conclusion of the music, she naturally produces an unbearable feeling of tedium. Every bar of dramatic music is justified only by the fact that it explains something in the action or in the character of the actor. That reminiscence of the clarinet theme is not there for its own sake as a purely musical effect, which Elizabeth might have to accompany by her action, but the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... attached; which circumstance, as well as the shape of his head-dress, and his own half-crazed, half-cunning expression of countenance, sufficiently pointed him out as belonging to the race of domestic clowns or jesters, maintained in the houses of the wealthy, to help away the tedium of those lingering hours which they were obliged to spend within doors. He bore, like his companion, a scrip, attached to his belt, but had neither horn nor knife, being probably considered as belonging to a class whom it is esteemed dangerous to intrust with edge-tools. In place ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... refreshments and French and Spanish wines. Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe, who refused to wet her beautiful lips even with a bubble of champagne, had sunk back into a large damask chair, apparently overwearied either with the excitement of the scene or its tedium; and while, for an instant, she was unconscious of voices, laughter and music, a young man stole forward and knelt down at her feet. He bore a salver in his hand on which was a chased silver goblet filled to the brim with wine, which he offered as ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... speak more than a necessary word." Venturing ashore several times on hunting excursions, he at last came near being captured by the enemy, and held after that, that "cabin'd confinement was preferable to a rebel prison," and so kept on board. Once during that weary nine months, the tedium was broken by the capture of a fat prize—a schooner loaded with cotton. Let us hope that the prize-court and its attendant officials did not absorb too big a ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... ancient times, when youth and health made happiness out of everything. I forget for a while the hoary winter of age, when we can think of nothing but how to keep ourselves warm, and how to get rid of our heavy hours until the friendly hand of death shall rid us of all at once. Against this tedium vitae, however, I am fortunately mounted on a hobby, which, indeed, I should have better managed some thirty or forty years ago; but whose easy amble is still sufficient to give exercise and amusement to an octogenary rider. This is the establishment ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... is thrust upon your unwilling notice. In the few cities which you approach the frame-houses and plank-walks preserve the memory of the backwoods. In vain you look for the village church, which in Europe is never far away. In vain you look for the incidents which in our land lighten the tedium of a day's journey. All is barren and bleak monotony. The thin line of railway seems a hundred miles from the life of man. At one station I caught sight of an "Exposition Car," which bore the legend, "Cuba on ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... after that fashion. We novelists are constantly twitted with being long; and to the gentlemen who condescend to review us, and who take up our volumes with a view to business rather than pleasure, we must be infinite in length and tedium. But the story must be made intelligible from the beginning, or the real novel readers will not like it. The plan of jumping at once into the middle has been often tried, and sometimes seductively enough for a chapter ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... or easy journey he had thus rashly undertaken on the faith of a dream,—for dream he still believed it to be. Many weary days and nights were consumed in the comfortless tedium of travel, . . and though he constantly told himself what unheard-of folly it was to pursue an illusive chimera of his own imagination,—a mere phantasm which had somehow or other taken possession of his brain ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... case were these. It was the custom of the mathematical set to which J. S. M. Babington belonged, 4B to wit, to relieve the tedium of the daily lesson with a species of round game which was played as follows. As soon as the master had taken his seat, one of the players would execute a manoeuvre calculated to draw attention on himself, such as dropping a book or upsetting the blackboard. Called up to the desk to ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... book without recording my opinion that it is the finest flower of the Philippine literature. Zuniga did for the island of Luzon what Arthur Young did for France a few years earlier, or to take an apter parallel, what President Dwight did for New England. His careful observations, relieved of tedium by a rare charm of style, his sweetness of temper, quiet humor, his love of nature and of man all combine to make his "Travels" a work that would be accorded a conspicuous place in the literature of any country. An English ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... is well to keep such reflections steadily in mind as regards religious instruction for the young, and, especially, as regards religious services for them. Go back to your own youth, and recollect how little command of attention you had yourself, how volatile you were, how anxious to escape all tedium, how weary of words, how apt to dislike routine. Then see whether you make sufficient allowance for these feelings in dealing with the young; and whether it might not be possible to give them the same holy precepts, to communicate ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth, and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a display of archaeological lore or for exotic motifs; others gave all their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of execution, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to stop at home and devote himself to Vera. Mr. Herbert Pryme, however, had no such excuse, real or imaginary, and yet he stands idly by the corridor window, idly, yet perfectly patiently—relieving the tedium of his position by the unexciting entertainment of softly whistling the popular airs from the "Cloches ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... the whispered jest and stealthy game, and all the noise and drawl of school; and in the midst of the din, sat the poor schoolmaster, vainly attempting to fix his mind upon the duties of the day, and to forget his little sick friend. But the tedium of his office reminded him more strongly of the willing scholar, and his thoughts were rambling from his ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... me, but I have no time and I have no money to buy books or to take a master'. When Augustine Caminade wants his Homer back which he had lent to him, Erasmus complains: 'You deprive me of my sole consolation in my tedium. For I so burn with love for this author, though I cannot understand him, that I feast my eyes and re-create my mind by looking at him.' Was Erasmus aware that in saying this he almost literally reproduced feelings which Petrarch had expressed a hundred ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... which was very hot, nor the tedium of the session, which had been very great, nor the anxiety of Ministers, which was very pressing, had any effect in impairing the energy of Mr. Turnbull. He was as instant, as oratorical, as hostile, as indignant about redistribution as he had been about the franchise. He had ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... has generated a sense of injury and an instinct of antagonism. Others less fortunate still have found Landor a continent of dulness and futility—have come to consider the Seven Volumes as so many aggregations of tedium. Such experiences are one-sided and partial no doubt; and considered from a certain point of view they seem worthless enough. But they exist, and they are in some sort justified. Landor, when all is said, remains a writers' writer; and for my part I find ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... it was land; and although there were still dangers to be passed, in those days it was the broad stretch of the ocean which tried the seamen's nerves. They hailed with joy the first glimpse of the New World after the terrible tedium of ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... at the lens, he dutifully replaced the chest and palm clamps and settled down to the tedium of patrol. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... prison. Some were moved by his supplications, interceded for him, unbarred the door, took off his chains, and left him. He arose, walked out, and sat down with one of them and conversed. He then begged the patriarch to give him some books to copy, to rid himself of the tedium of his idleness. But he refused, nor would he suffer any to hold conversation ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... the commissary's conduct toward her, Janice entered eagerly into the gaiety with which the army beguiled the tedium of winter quarters. Dislike of Clowes precluded Andre and Mobray from coming to the house, but they saw much of the maiden elsewhere. She and Peggy Chew had been made known to each other by Andre early in the British occupation, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... reluctant extensions to successive greater distances, defining the scope of the knowledge proper for a man of his condition? It is a bad thing, is it, that he has a multiplicity of ideas to relieve the tedium incident to the sameness of his course of life; that, with many things which had else been but mere insignificant facts, or plain dry notions and principles, he has a variety of interesting associations; like woodbines and ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... his tedium at the camp of Compiegne, the dauphin, it is said, overtaxed his strength, and died at the age of thirty-six on the 20th of December, 1765, profoundly regretted by the bulk of the nation, who knew his virtues without troubling themselves, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... darkness; what was seen of them seemed an encouragement to shout louder. And I give you my word that it was in no wise needed. All those Southerners, whose enthusiasm had been kept at fever heat since morning, excited still more by the tedium of the long wait and by the storm, gave all that they had of voice, of breath, of noisy energy, blending with the national hymn of Provence that oft-repeated cry, which broke in upon it like a refrain: "Vive le Bey!" The ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... their souls out under the burden of Duty; they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up by commandments to do and to abstain from doing. Hence, we have in Emerson the teaching of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma and the deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter, of which only Shakespeare among the immortals has a copious and unfailing spring, there is at least gaiety in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men to find joy in their existence ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... day was passed in the same dreadful tedium and suspense. I laid the table for dinner, while Northmour and Clara prepared the meal together in the kitchen. I could hear their talk as I went to and fro, and was surprised to find it ran all the time upon myself. Northmour again bracketed us ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... and sat back watching the anchored vessel and relieving the tedium of the long row by scratching the monkey's head and pulling its ears, the animal complacently accepting both operations, and turning its head about so that every portion should receive its share of the scratching, ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... nearly six hours, driving round and round and round the pylons, hour on hour, safe and steady as a train, never taking the risk of sensational banking, nor spiraling like Johnstone, but amusing himself and breaking the tedium by keeping an eye out on each circuit for a fat woman in a bright lavender top-coat, who stood out in the dark line of people that flowed beneath. When he had descended—acclaimed the winner—thousands of heads turned his way as though ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... visitors, and so lively the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an amateurish hand. Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers, Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at home. On Mrs. Warwick's Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group. Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... determination, and in spite of one of Monsieur Lenotre's fascinating monographs on the French Revolution, on which I had counted to beguile the tedium of the journey, I could not get Anastasius Papadopoulos out of my head. He stayed with me the whole of a storm-tossed night, and all the next morning. He has haunted my brain ever since. I see him tossing his arms about in fury, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... You pointed me to the fact that you had observed that rule in the case of the Louisiana and Carolina troops, and you will not fail to perceive that others find in the fact a reason for the like disposal of them. In the hour of sickness, and the tedium of waiting for spring, men from the same region will best console and relieve each other. The maintenance of our cause rests on the sentiments of the people. Letters from the camp, complaining of inequality and harshness in the treatment of the men, have already dulled the enthusiasm ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... not suggested in her erect bearing and serene face as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... my father since then," replied Charles, "and I fear his illness is much more serious than I had any idea of. That being the case, I feel it would be wrong to press any one, even Middleton, to stay and share the tedium of ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... must entrust himself for the long ride up to West Eighty-fifth Street was a most shabby-appearing vehicle, the driver of which, moreover, as Mr. Leary could divine even as he crossed the sidewalk, had wiled away the tedium of waiting by indulgence in draughts of something more potent than the chill air of latish November. Mr. Leary peered doubtfully into the illuminated countenance but dulled eyes of the driver and caught a whiff of a breath alcoholically fragrant, and he understood that ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... a present of an armadillo, or ant-eater, who is certainly a wonderful animal, and well worth studying, in the tedium of a calm between the tropics. The body proper is but about nine inches, but, when stretched at length, he covers an extent of two and a half feet, from head to tail, and is wholly fortified with an impenetrable armor of bony ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... were as unsubstantial as stage scenery; the besiegers were the villains of the piece who would meet with their deserts before the curtain fell; there was comic by-play in his ways of beguiling the tedium and the lassitude of the siege, in the bantering messages he sent out to the besiegers, and now and then even in his garrison orders. The little garrison was permeated by the exosmose action of his cheery optimism and humour during seven weary months of ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... 'did I not find solace in my studies, and a balm for my spirit in the memory of my observations of former years, I should feel little desire for longer life. But so it has been, that this life of obscurity, this vacation from public business, which causes tedium and disgust to so many, has proved ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... these grey years the lonely country and stagnant provincial towns of Russia buried a peasantry which was enslaved by want and toil, and an educated upper class which was enslaved by idleness and tedium. Most of the "Intellectuals," with no outlet for their energies, were content to forget their ennui in vodka and card-playing; only the more idealistic gasped for air in the stifling atmosphere, crying out in despair against life as they saw it, and looking forward with a pathetic hope ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
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