"Astonishingly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... astonishingly restored, and have not had a trace of heart trouble for months. But I am quite aware that I am, physically speaking, on good behaviour—and maintain my condition only by taking an amount of care which is very ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the wall, with all her wit and vigour gone, because she loved him more steadfastly than he did her. Whatever happened he must not take it out of Martin. It was astonishing how real she had become now—as V.V. became a dream. Yes, Martin was astonishingly real. And if only he could go now and talk to Martin—and face all the facts of life with her, even as he had done with that ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... a woman wearing a necklace of scarabs taken from a princess's tomb, who felt hands about her throat to strangle her; of little Ka figures, Pasht goddesses, amulets and the rest, that brought curious disaster to those who kept them. They are many and various, astonishingly circumstantial often, and vouched for by persons the reverse of credulous. The modern superstition that haunts the desert gullies with Afreets has nothing in common with them. They rest upon a basis of indubitable experience; and they remain—inexplicable. ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... not quite infinite—but it is astonishingly full. All sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and different ways of action and different goals to which life may be directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards long, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... wished to say,—"if it had been anybody but our Jeannette I should have congratulated myself on the chance to see such a piece of work as that. I've never seen Jefferson Craig operate, though I've been a fascinated follower of his research and have read every word he has written. And he's astonishingly young. I expected to see a man of ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... stolen, and was probably of good parentage; certainly, if elegance and symmetry of person and form, could prove blood, it never was more marked than in this interesting child. Her abode with the gipsies, and their peculiar mode of life and manners, had rendered her astonishingly precocious in intellect; but of education she had none, except what was instilled into her by Melchior, whom she always accompanied when he assumed his character as a juggler. She then danced on the slack wire, at the same time performing several feats in balancing, throwing of oranges, &c. When ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... unenlightened, unpolitical, unpoetical rustics, but remarkably well off, paying only three pounds a year for excellent four-roomed cottages, having abundance of cheap and good food, and various rights of common, and privileges which help to make them comfortable. It is an astonishingly sleepy and quiet sort of community and neighborhood, and this is a pretty place, on the edge of a wild common, with fine clumps of fir-wood about it, and a picturesquely colored district of heath, gorse, broom, and pine growth, extending just far enough round the grounds to ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of the rhyming letters of Burns is astonishingly high. They bear, as such compositions should, the impression of free spontaneity, and indeed often read like sheer improvisations. Yet they are sprinkled with admirable stanzas of natural description, shrewd criticism, delightful humor, and are pervaded by a delicate ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... of decorative work in which many women took great delight and became astonishingly skilful was what was known, or at any rate advertised, by the ambitious title of Papyrotamia. It was simply the cutting out of stiff paper of various decorative and ornamental designs with scissors. At the time of the Revolution it was evidently deemed a very high accomplishment, and the best ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... reading a book about ants. Perhaps you know all the wonderful things about them, but I had neglected that branch of natural history. Their doings are astonishingly like those of an animal called man, and it seems to me that I have discovered one point of resemblance which perhaps has never been noted. Are you aware that at an early stage of their existence ants have wings? ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... refuse to name the source of your astonishingly detailed information concerning this affair—myself included. You wish me to believe you simply assume I am at odds with Captain Monk and his friends. I admit it is true. But how should you know it? Ah, no, my friend! either you will tell me how you learned this secret, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... not pay has become self-evident to any one who will give the question a few minutes' thought. International finance is a peacemaker every time it sends a British pound into a foreign country. But its influence as a peacemaker is astonishingly feeble just for this reason, that its appeal is to an interest which mankind very rightly disregards whenever it feels that more weighty matters are in question. The fact that war does not pay is an argument that is listened to as little by a nation when its blood is up, as ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... between facts and vivid figments of his imagination, his imperturbable good nature overcame even the people whom he bored most, so that they ended by becoming, in a reluctant manner, his friends. In appearance, Mainhall was astonishingly like the conventional stage-Englishman of American drama: tall and thin, with high, hitching shoulders and a small head glistening with closely brushed yellow hair. He spoke with an extreme Oxford accent, and when he was talking well, his face sometimes wore ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... the dynamic widow," he replied, corrugating his serene and sunburnt forehead. "I've come down here to forget her. I'll tell you about her later." Then he grinned, in his silly, familiar way, showing two rows of astonishingly white, strong teeth, between the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... that it is "perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and interested)." Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti's own dictum (works of John Keats, vol. ii., p. 320) that the poem "shows astonishingly real mediaevalism for one not bred ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... said, wiping her eyes on a wet and crumpled handkerchief. In a time astonishingly brief to one hitherto unfamiliar with the lachrymal function, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... from me as I pondered. My Tenant was the name of the thing, and I had thrust it aside only when the idea of Larks in Aspic occurred to me—not in any disgust. And really, now, what I remembered of it seemed to me astonishingly good! ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... standard of his Huguenots, the "Prophet" is {280} not without both striking and powerful passages; it is even said, that motherly love never spoke in accents more touching than in this opera. The text is again historical, but though done by Scribe, it is astonishingly weak ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... idea of the Evil One, and since their erection the schools have been patronized by an astonishingly large number of disappointed church-members who receive instruction more readily from the modern methods here in vogue than from the ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... the training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth, about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that internationalizing ...
— Progress and History • Various
... causes behind their coming, it is certain that an astonishingly large number of our oversea kinsmen were arriving in England each week; and I believe every one of them joined The Citizens. Their presence and the part they played in affairs had a marked effect upon the spirit of the time. All sorts ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... dreadful day," she said, but her face had brightened astonishingly at the sight of ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... hill-tribes) will carry thirty seers (sixty pounds) upon his back, or twenty-five seers upon his head, up the hills for fifty miles, without rest or food, in twenty-four hours; his charge for which is but one rupee—a special instance of the astonishingly cheap labor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her tete-a-tete before Louis Craven arrived, and he was really due at the House. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bed back of the quilt. You'll find a hoe there. You can dig up the dirt under the shuck tick with it—which helps astonishingly. What would the world say if it could know that judge Slocum Price makes his bed with a hoe! There's Spartan hardihood!" but the boy, not knowing what was meant by Spartan hardihood, remained silent. "Nearing threescore ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... to a very small but astonishingly energetic fellow, at her end of the see-saw, who was impressed with the notion that he was doing good service by wriggling his own body up and down, "if you go on so, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... is, as well as such an anomalous, volcanic, torrid character ought to be. At first she puzzled me (and that is an insult I find it hard to forgive), but finally I found the clue. She is indefatigable and astonishingly faithful as a nurse; does all her duty, and more, which is saying a good deal—for I am a hard taskmaster. Aren't you afraid that I will work you more unmercifully than a Yankee factory-child, or a Cornwall miner? See here, Queen; what do you ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... caught up the tray from the piano and glided away on his toe-points; whereupon Mr. Brimberly (being alone) became astonishingly agile and nimble all at once, diving down to straighten a rug here and there, rearranging chairs and tables; he even opened the window and hurled two half-smoked cigars far out into the night; and his eye was as calm, his brow as placid, his ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... little girl present me with a hair chain which she had just completed. Great order and decorum prevailed. Amongst the permanent scholars in the upper part of the institution, there are some who embroider astonishingly well—surplices, altar-hangings, in short, all the church vestments in gold or silk. In the room where these are kept are the confessionals for the pupils. The priests are in a separate room, and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the Boreas frigate of twenty-eight guns, then at Long Reach, under the command of Captain Wells: and, unfortunately, was attacked the very same day, by the ague and fever; which continued, every other day, for above a fortnight, and pulled him down most astonishingly. This, however, was not his sole misfortune. On his recovery, he sailed at daylight, just after high water; but the pilot run the ship aground, where it lay with so little water that the people could walk round, till next flood. That night, and part of ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... by which was meant buying and selling and manufacturing, also financial dealings and commerce, the passion for money-getting was particularly prominent. An astonishingly small percentage of those that went into business, as they said, made a success, if we except the large manufacturers, but in spite of that it was a popular way of earning a livelihood. One thing that made it popular was the fact ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... seated beneath an apple tree, on the bank of the stream in deep conversation with a most remarkable old man, who was fishing industriously with the very rod The Seraph so lately had bewailed. He was an astonishingly old man, with hair and beard as white as wool, wreathing a face as pink as the apple-blossoms that fell about him. Cautiously we drew near, quite unobserved by the two who seemed utterly absorbed in their occupation of watching the line as it dipped into the stream. Now we could see that the ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... her companion. "It really is a very good show. There is a sort of youthful freshness about the acting that is very engaging. And every part is so competently filled. Jaques is astonishingly good, don't you think? I never heard the 'seven ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... "Such astonishingly loquacious people as lived in Paris in the eighteenth century! ineffective, sardonic, verbose, sociable, intellectual, elegant, immoral—grand gentlemen and ladies, with tears for mimic woes and none for actual ones, praise for wit, rewards for cleverness, and ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... festooned with a long perspective of arches stretching right away down the leafy avenue that goes out of the town—to the north in one direction, and to St Germain in the other. The arches were entirely composed without a single exception of large crimson-red Chinese lanterns. The effect was astonishingly good, but despite all the decoration, the townsfolk seemed determined to preserve the quiet of the Sabbath, and although there were crowds everywhere, the only noise that broke the stillness was that of the steam round-about that had been erected on a triangular ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... reluctantly, Peter began to show him. There were two or three oils by now; powerful sketches of country life, with its humor and pathos; heads of children and of negroes; bits of the River Swamp; all astonishingly well done. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... stumbling forward through the sage as best she might, tripping here and there, sweeping her skirts now and again from the ragged branches which caught against them. He took her hand in his to lead her. It lay light and warm in his own—astonishingly light and warm, as suddenly he realized. She had pushed the sunbonnet back from her forehead as she would have done had she been desirous of seeing better. He noted the color of her cheeks, the regularity of her features, ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... on its dusty crown. "Egad, Mr. Vibart! so would you be—so would any man be who has lived on anything he could beg, borrow, or steal, with an occasional meal of turnips—in the digging of which I am become astonishingly expert—and unripe blackberries, which latter I have proved to be a very trying diet in ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... efforts. In the great wild West, way out there, where some of the best easterners by leaving their homes and their comforts therein, and enduring all the hardships of pioneering life they succeeded at last to put a solid foundation of a new and permanent civilization astonishingly wonderful not only in the development of this great land of liberty but revolutionizing the whole commercial and ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... following the valley we had seen yesterday evening, we named it Lucky Valley. After a brief halt, we pushed on, and by eleven, were at our old quarters in Mussel Bend. We heard the voices of natives in all directions, far and near, and as I found the party still astonishingly fresh, and eager to proceed, I thought it best to keep going. We therefore continued our journey, and just before dark reached the spot where we had dined the first day. Here, however, the cheerful excitement of our ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... moreover, was always precarious. At no time could New France pay its own way; every second dispatch from the governor and intendant asked the king for money or for things that cost money. Louis XIV was astonishingly generous in the face of so many of these demands upon his exchequer, but the more he gave the more he was asked to give. When the stress of European wars curtailed the king's bounty the colonial authorities began to issue paper money; the issues were gradually increased; the paper ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... komatik upon its side, with its nose against an ice hummock as an anchorage, and observing this maneuver, the bear resumed all fours and began a retreat with a lumbering, but astonishingly rapid ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... 'Astonishingly. I don't see much of her. She came in the other night to tell me that a Captain Somebody had proposed to her after six minutes of acquaintance, and laughed more gaily over it than I ever saw her. It's part of her ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... serfs, sometimes to death, for the pleasure of seeing them suffer; while the opening pages, describing the trekking of the family out of far-eastern Orenburg into the adjoining province of Ufa, and the building of the mill and the dam, are astonishingly vivid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... the Roman peasant, with such a figure and such grace as any aristocrat might have envied, and that she spoke with the Roman accent which almost all other Italians admire; but though her manners had a certain repose, they were often of an extremely unexpected nature, and she had an astonishingly simple way of calling things by their names which sometimes disconcerted Marcello and sometimes amused him. Settimia civilised her, almost without letting her know it, for she was quick to learn, like all naturally ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... down to the river's edge at the very point where the tapir was about to land, and turned it back. Two or three of the dogs were swimming. We were more than half the breadth of the river away from the tapir, and somewhat down-stream, when it dived. It made an astonishingly long swim beneath the water this time, almost as if it had been a hippopotamus, for it passed completely under our canoe and rose between us and the hither bank. I shot it, the bullet going into its brain, while it was thirty or forty ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Astonishingly different has been the case with the Northern Buddhisms which are those of Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, China, Korea and Japan. As luxuriant as the evolutions of political and dogmatic Christianity and as radical in their departures from the primitive simplicity of the faith, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... privileged beings such as seem as a rule to exist only in poetry and literature; a woman as beautiful as she was astonishingly gifted with the rarest faculties; combining with the most searching intelligence and the most persuasive eloquence so exquisite a sensitiveness that she seemed often to ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... he found them,—two astonishingly small bear-cubs. One whined pitifully and struggled to his feet as though in anticipation of supper, but the other was cold and stiff. It had evidently been ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... excluded from rich and fashionable society, but from the society of the average educated and cultivated people. I'm not saying he is fit for it; but I don't care how intelligent and agreeable he might be—and some of them are astonishingly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind and their original way of looking at things that I like nothing better than to talk with them—all of our invisible fences are ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... slain British soldier in one of the fights in Buenos Ayres in 1807 or 1808; a pair of heavy horse pistols, and a ponderous, formidable-looking old blunderbuss, wide at the mouth as a tea-cup saucer. His, too, were the swords. To our native neighbours this appeared an astonishingly large collection of weapons, for in those days they possessed no fire-arm except, in some rare instances, a carbine, brought home by a runaway soldier and kept concealed lest the authorities should get ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Suddenly, impulsively, she turned toward me, her face almost feverish, her eyes astonishingly large and bright. "I haven't told you much," she acknowledged tremulously; "but you won't think that I don't trust you. It is only that I couldn't talk of it and keep my courage; and I must keep it a little longer—until ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... it—whisk! he sank to the deck; the turban, spread open by the resistance of the air, fluttered down to cover him from head to foot. Apparently he fell asleep at once, for he did not again move nor alter his position. He, as well as an astonishingly large proportion of the other Somalis and Abyssinians we saw, carried a queer, well-defined, triangular wound in his head. It had long since healed, was an inch or so across, and looked as though a piece ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... had suddenly awakened from a pleasant dream. She raised her frightened eyes and paused like one bewitched. Two vigorous ragged men stood before her. They were both handsome young fellows; one of them was astonishingly handsome, swarthy, black-eyed. Both were barely covered by their dirty rags, the openings in which showed their ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... earth, suffered not only from the inclement weather, but groaned with the terrible pangs of sea-sickness. I resolved, therefore, if possible, to refresh the drooping gang by a hot meal; and, beneath the shelter of a tarpaulin, contrived to cook a mess of rice. Warm food comforted us astonishingly; but, alas! the next day was a picture of the past! A slave—cramped and smothered amid the crowd that soaked so long in the salt water at our boat's bottom—died during the darkness. Next morning, the same low, leaden, coffin-lid ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... the eager questioning of a modest, affectionate boy who curbs his natural effervescence of greeting like a well-trained dog. The tone was astonishingly young, a ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... if the Trade set to work to combat The Master. Bell had no information whatever about that still mysterious and still more horrible person himself. But what he knew about The Master's agents he sent to a lady in Porto Rico who has an astonishingly large number of far ranging nephews. And then Bell got himself adequately shaved, bought a hearty breakfast, and, after one or two heartening drinks, was driven grandly to the residence of the Senor Francia, deputy of The Master for the republic ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... was requisite with some acorns, and the splutterings were answered by low thunder. So came a second champion to aid them. This was a pleasant looking young fellow with an astonishingly red beard: he had a basket slung over his shoulder, and he carried a bright hammer. He rode in a chariot ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... France: this is a SECOND circumstance, guessable by nobody; known only to Kaunitz and a select one or two; but which also will greatly complicate Friedrich's position, and render his Enigma indeed astonishingly intricate, as ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... the short crew, who hastened to obey his rapid commands, by assisting the two seamen stationed aft to brail in the spanker, in which labor he was speedily joined by Talbot, who had come on deck. Young Wilton and Bentley lent the same assistance forward, and in an astonishingly brief time, considering her small crew, the Mellish, like the stranger, was going free with the wind on her quarter, her best point of sailing, her course now making a wide obtuse angle with that ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... was the son of Solomon Gambouge; and as all the world knows, both father and son were astonishingly clever fellows at their profession. Solomon painted landscapes, which nobody bought; and Simon took a higher line, and painted portraits to admiration, only nobody ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... manner. Of course, believing himself to be suspected, the man was under a strain. But would the strain on him be so heavy as it plainly was, if he knew himself to be innocent? And then his eagerness to fasten the crime on the mysterious woman. It had been astonishingly intense, almost hysterical. ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... was trying to make beer out of bananas. The stuff, after being bottled, blew up with a great noise and a dissemination of the astonishingly offensive odour of the fermented fruit that seemed to spread for acres about. On the other hand, her attempt at making perfume from the moso'oi flower (said to be the real ylang-ylang) was a distinct success. She had to get permission from the government ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... her here a while," the man explained, as he endeavored to avoid the child's astonishingly skilful and astonishingly painful kicks. "Maybe you can find somebody to go bond for her. There ain't no other ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... of all kinds are there more responsible for the performance of their duties than are their fellows in the older provinces, and property and person are more secure than elsewhere in India. Gang robbery is rare, perjury is unfrequent, and Mr. Campbell informs us that a solemn oath is "astonishingly binding." "The longer we possess a province," he continues, "the more common and general does perjury become;" and we need no better evidence than is thus furnished of the slavish tendency of the system. The hill tribes, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... from another pile of decayed leaves mixed with some earth was examined under a high power, and the number of spores of various shapes and sizes which it contained was astonishingly great; and these crushed in the gizzards of worms may largely aid in supporting them. Whenever castings are thrown up in the greatest number, few or no leaves are drawn into the burrows; for instance the turf along a hedgerow, about 200 yards in length, was daily observed in the autumn during several ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... obliged to set the soup kettles boiling and feed his patients before medicine could be retained. My reply was a draft for two hundred liras (something over eight hundred dollars) with the added dispatch: "Keep the pot boiling; let us know your wants." The further reports show from this time an astonishingly small number of deaths. The utmost care was taken by all our expeditions to prevent the spread of the contagion and there is no record of its ever having been carried out of the cities, where it was found, either at Zeitoun, Marash, or Arabkir. Lacking this precaution, ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... And, astonishingly, that was that. The leading Tel-Aviv newspaper summed up Israeli feeling when it wrote in an editorial: "Certainly there were many heavy hearts in our country when the coin fell against us. But let us show the world that we are true sportsmen. ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... time I had in my employ, and at the head of my establishment, one of the greatest female detectives who ever carried a case to a successful conclusion. She had been in my employ for two years, and had worked up the cases given her in an astonishingly able manner, proving herself a woman of strong, clear discernment. As she takes a prominent part in bringing to light the facts which follow, and in clearing away the mystery that overhung the disappearance of the ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... an astonishingly civil answer that Beauty's courage rose: but it sank again when the beast, addressing the merchant, desired him to leave the palace next morning, and never return to it again. "And so good night, merchant. And good ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... against the pallor of the dawn; then, with a furious, rushing speed, before his companion could move a hand to stop him, he shot with a plunge through the flaps of canvas—and was gone. And as he went—so astonishingly fast that the voice could actually be heard dying in the distance—he called aloud in tones of anguished terror that at the same time held something strangely like the frenzied exultation ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... characteristics of this strange man have something strikingly original and perplexingly contradictory in them. Fat as he is and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women, and more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself. He winced and shuddered yesterday, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... there an actor on any stage to-day who can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of Iago? Making allowance for the different art medium that the singing actor must work in, and despite the larger curves of operatic pose and gesture, Maurel kept astonishingly near to the characters he assumed. He was Shakespearian; his Falstaff was the most wonderful ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... to the whole face. The eyebrows themselves were straight, and not strongly marked, a shade or two perhaps too light,—a fault still more apparent in the lashes; the eyes were large, full, and though bright, astonishingly calm and deep,—at least in ordinary moments; yet withal they wanted the charm of that steadfast and open look which goes at once to the heart and invites its trust,—their expression was rather ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "These are mine," said another; "no one must touch them but me," but the market-women taught them that they could not monopolize, but deal fairly. They are certainly clever traders, and keep each other in countenance, they stand by each other, and will not allow overreaching, and they give food astonishingly cheap: once in the market they ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... from the land of the free and the home of the brave can, and does, "arrive" astonishingly well without ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... the hill, on this day of the pilgrimage, made those older dead-and-gone bands of pilgrims astonishingly real. On the tops of bastions, in the clefts on the rocks, beneath the glorious walls of La Merveille, or perilously lodged on the crumbling cornice of a tourelle, numerous rude altars had been hastily erected. The ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... also fairly often witty, which is too frequently forgotten, was ardent, passionate, a rough and violent fighter more particularly in his tragedies, which are baldly crude satires, illumined with astonishingly beautiful passages fairly frequent in recurrence, against the Catholics and their leaders. Others of very different temperament displayed yet more than the poets of the sixteenth century that liberty, that fantasy, that disorder which ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... corresponding to the organs and parts of the lower animals from which they have been extracted, no longer admits of doubt. In cases of partial and even complete impotency, especially in elderly men, attended with nervous exhaustion, most astonishingly favorable results are obtained by our specialists through the administration of our extracts obtained from the nerve tissue of the spinal cord, associated with the use of the expressed juices from animal testes. We do not, however, prescribe these extracts ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... was the consideration—took so long that it was nearly dark when Elsie announced that she simply MUST go. It was Ralph's duty as a gentleman to help her in putting on her coat, and this took an astonishingly long time. Finally it was done, however, ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... astonishingly evident that she wasn't at all frightened. The arm that levelled the weapon (a round and shapely arm, bare to the shoulder) was admirably steady; the rich colouring of her distinctly handsome face showed not a trace of pallor; and the fire that flickered in her large and ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... come, we shall cover ourselves in the sand, and fire off our matchlocks. They will feel our bullets, and hear our report, and look about and see no person. We shall be covered up in the sand." This, the Souf Arab repeated several times, and the Ghadamsee traders thought it astonishingly clever and courageous. It is reported five hundred Touaricks are soon to pursue the Shânbah into the Algerian territory. It is said also, French Arabs will support the Shânbah bandits against both Touaricks and Souafah. Such is the silly talk of our caravan. Still the French have got far south, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... said: "You've had a hard day of it; won't you refresh yourself?" The Chancellor, without wasting time to answer, raised the bottle to his lips, exclaiming: "Here's to the unification of Germany!" which sentiment the gurgling of an astonishingly long drink seemed to emphasize. The Count then handed the bottle back to his nephew, who, shaking it, ejaculated, "Why, we can't pledge you in return—there is nothing left!" to which came the waggish response, "I beg pardon; it was so dark I couldn't see"; nevertheless there was a little remaining, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... To prove how astonishingly our strength may be diminished by indolence, the Doctor tells us, that meeting a gentleman who had lately returned from India, to his inquiry after his health he replied, "Why, better—better, thank ye—I think I begin to feel some symptoms of the return of a little English energy. Do you know ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... you will as often as not find beauties fading on their stalks, and plain girls marrying on every side of them. And no doubt plain girls do marry very frequently. Nobody, for instance, with half an eye can fail to be familiar with the phenomenon, in his own circle, of astonishingly ugly married women. It does not, however, follow that plain girls are not terribly ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... wonderful punch which Von Gerhard had concocted, Fritz mounted his chair, placed his plump hand over the spot where he supposed his heart to be, fastened his watery blue eyes upon my surprised and blushing countenance, and sang "Weh! Dass Wir Scheiden Mussen!" in an astonishingly beautiful barytone. I dared not look at Von Gerhard, for I knew that he was purple with suppressed mirth, so I stared stonily at the sardine sandwich and dill pickle on my plate, and felt myself growing hot and hysterical, and cold ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... been so astonishingly bold and quick that the main body were unaware of the success; and Colonel Duran, thinking the explosion was caused by the bursting of one of the enemy's guns, continued steadily firing at the fort. The position of the twenty men and three officers ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... Grindstone Knob was a rather neat, small house, white, with green blinds. We were somewhat astonished to learn from a negro boy, who spoke the most astonishingly bad English, that this was the home of Mas' —- —-. Yes, this was the den of the wolf himself, and I had no doubt that he was not far off. There was a small cotton ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... next morning, Dr. Tolbridge drove into the Witton yard. No matter who waited for him, he would not delay this visit. When he asked for Miss Panney, he had a strong idea that the old lady would refuse to see him. But in an astonishingly short space of time, she marched into the parlor, every war-flag flying, and closed the door ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... artist of his day. His name was a household word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and embittered man, and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and misunderstood genius. He was known the world over as the most astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor, and because the artists and critics of France never seriously recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim of the mania of persecution, and his naturally ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... to her credit when the erranding was finished and the time needed for the home run set aside, so to the little cabin, built beside the schoolhouse, she went with heavily loaded arms and an astonishingly light heart. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... are keeping up an astonishingly vigorous campaign. The hardest fighting of late has taken place in the eastern ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 11, March 17, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... a whole, I think that in size and shape they are about intermediate between the eggs of the European Carrion-Crow and Rook. But they vary, as I said, astonishingly in size, from 1.5 to 1.95 in length, and in breadth from 1.12 to 1.22, and I have one perfectly spherical egg, a deformity of course, ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... is too light for that. The fruits brought us from shore were oranges, pine-apples, water-melons, limes, bananas, cocoa-nuts, &c., and some yams, which were a good substitute for potatoes. The fruit was all very good, and astonishingly cheap; our oranges being green, lasted till we reached England. Some of our passengers went on shore, and returned with marvellous accounts of the dirtiness and narrowness of the streets, and the extremely ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... making every piece of furniture for Mary's room and the nursery adjoining. The Doctor was amazed at the mechanical genius he displayed in its construction. He had taken a month's instruction at a cabinet maker's in Asheville and the bed, bureau, tables and chairs which he had turned out were astonishingly beautiful. Their lines were copied from old models and each piece was a work of art. The iron work was even more tastefully and beautifully wrought. He had toiled day and night with an enthusiasm and patience that gave the physician ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... said nothing about it. As I cantered off I began to think that it was only a fancy of mine, and finally I was sure of it, and laughed it off. For, you must know, the lady's face looked astonishingly like a certain face that I don't particularly care to see—certainly not in such close connection with Minnie. But, you see, I thought it might have been my fancy, so that I finally shook off the feeling, and said nothing to you ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... noticing the interruption, "all went smoothly. We met clandestinely and spent many an hour together, unknown to the invalid. We tried to keep him in bed as long as we could, but his constitution, which was that of an ox, was against us, and his recovery was astonishingly rapid. An indiscreet observation on the part of one of the household first led him to suspect, and, watching his wife like a cat does a mouse, he caught her one evening in the act of holding out her ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... equipment was required. The farmer was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs, heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic legends and Provencal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his experiences of literature ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... in the range back of the ranch, taking advantage of draw and canyon whenever possible, even when this demanded a long detour. Sometimes, the canyon bottoms were astonishingly level. At other times boulders and crevices would block them until they had made free use of dynamite. They had all sorts of minor mishaps. Dick was not an expert either in road grading or blasting, although he was far ahead of the Sun Planters in ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... with a want of realisation. When the objectionable specimen of the obnoxious mass lifted a pair of suffering human eyes to her face, the ice thawed in a surprisingly sudden manner from the surface of her flinty heart, and the set lips relaxed into an astonishingly pitying expression. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... while languages differ, men (and above all early men) have the same kind of thoughts, desires, fancies, habits, institutions. It is not that in which all races formally differ—their language—but that in which all early races are astonishingly the same—their ideas, fancies, habits, desires—that causes the amazing similarity ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... mother's heart, as many and many a woman's heart has been melted through all the ages. She soothed the truant child and petted him, until the cramping in his throat relaxed sufficiently to admit of the passage of an astonishingly large slice of bread and butter and sugar. After it was disposed of, Harold busied himself by assorting his old iron scraps on the back porch, and his mother smiled as she fancied she heard the boy trying to whistle ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... pointing to my bed of straw. The honest fellow would not accept it, saying I must have his money. I therefore sold him one of the baskets, and another was also purchased by one of the other men. They seemed astonishingly pleased with their bargains. Just as they had concluded their dealings with me a big man came into the barn, who I found out was the master. The men showed him the baskets and pointed to me, telling the farmer that I was a "dumby and deafy." The big ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... Germans at Lipno and thrown back in the direction of Plock. By November 16, 1914, the Russians had lost in that sector a total of about 5,000 prisoners with a proportionate number of machine guns. In general throughout the entire fighting in this territory the Russian losses by capture were astonishingly high. Of course, the Germans, too, lost men in this manner; but being in the offensive they suffered less, while the Russians, continually forced to fall back, often found it impossible to withdraw advanced formations in time. Further to the north the Russians ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... elaborate foppery of even the first sentence,[186] with its coquetry of arrangement, its tormented structure of phrase, its jingle of sound-repetition, its desperate rejection of simplicity in every shape and form. To describe precisely the means resorted to would take a chapter at least. They are astonishingly modern—the present tense, the use of catchwords like [Greek: holos], the repetitions and jingles above referred to. Excessively elaborate description of word-painting, though modern too, can hardly be said to be a novelty: it had distinguished most of the earlier Greek novelists, especially ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... gather some faint idea of the labours of our Field Post Offices. There are letters, and parcels, and newspapers. Letters we may pass over. They are featureless things, except to their recipient. Parcels have more individuality. Ours are of all shapes and sizes, and most of them are astonishingly badly tied. It is quite heartrending to behold a kilted exile endeavouring to gather up a heterogeneous mess of socks, cigarettes, chocolate, soap, shortbread, and Edinburgh rock, from the ruins of what was once a flabby and unstable parcel, but is now a few skimpy rags of brown ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... all that regal calm from her face and lets the rest loose. I suppose I am a fool to tell you this, but I've been haunted by the idea from the first that if you know this woman, disaster will come of it. I do not mean any old woman's presentiment, but from what I know of her nature and yours. You do astonishingly few erratic things for a genius, but in certain conditions you are unbridled, and my only hope has been that the lightning in you would strike at random without doing much harm—to you, at all events. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... an astonishingly long day's march, and did not meet with the slightest sign of danger. Nor did they come across any better token of civilized life than two deserted "ranches," or farm-houses, made of "abode" or ...
— The Talking Leaves - An Indian Story • William O. Stoddard
... till Mrs Fyne whispered doubtfully "I really think I must go over." Fyne didn't answer for a while (his is a reflective mind, you know), and then as if Mrs Fyne's whispers had an occult power over that door it opened wide again and the white-bearded man issued, astonishingly active in his movements, using his stick almost like a leaping-pole to get down the steps; and hobbled away briskly along the pavement. Naturally the Fynes were too far off to make out the expression of his face. But it would not have helped them very much to a guess at the conditions inside ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... son of So-and-so of blessed memory, should be drawing a monthly salary of Rs. 450 by the discharge of my duties as collector of cotton duties, and driving in my dog-cart to my office every day in a short coat and soia hat, appeared to me to be such an astonishingly ludicrous illusion that I burst into a horse-laugh, as I stood in the gloom of ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... anybody any trouble; she continued to be a 'fraid-cat, and looked under the bed every night for a burglar. With Blair at boarding-school her life was very solitary, for of course there was no intimacy between her and her stepmother. Mrs. Maitland was invariably kind to her, and astonishingly patient with the rather dull little mind—one of those minds that are like softly tangled skeins of single zephyr; if you try to unwind the mild, elusive thoughts, they only knot tightly upon themselves, and the result is a half-frightened and very ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not only above, but far above all the poets of the day. Every word has the stamp of immortality. This canto is in a style (but totally free from indelicacy, and sustained with incredible ease and power) like the end of the second canto: there ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... peculiarly prepossessing. I guessed him to be about five-and-thirty. He had a clear olive complexion, black moustache and short silky vandyke beard, and the most fascinating, the most humorous, the most mocking, the most astonishingly bright eyes I have ever seen in my life. I murmured a few expressions of thanks, while he prolonged the handshake with the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... strengthen the inference, drawn from 'the Pythagorean school,' the man's work itself, that the mysticism and numbers with which he is surrounded are taken from that system of numbers and from that mysticism which are so astonishingly like his own. All subsequent philosophies borrowed from Pythagoreanism, and in so far has India helped to ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... us a really lovely town-hall in the centre, the roof dotted over with rows of windows, while an airy lace-work spire, with a ducal crown as the finish, rises lightly. On to its sides are encrusted other buildings of Renaissance order, while behind is a mansion still more astonishingly embroidered in sculptured stone, with a colonnade of vast extent. Around the place itself stretches a vast number of Spanish mansions, with the usual charmingly 'escalloped' roof, all resting on a prolonged colonnade or piazza, strange, old-fashioned, ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... political ascendancy—in part, at least, to this cause, though the proceedings of Clisthenes indicate a hearty and spontaneous popular sentiment. But such constitutional admission of the people would not have been so astonishingly fruitful in positive results, if the course of public events for the half century after Clisthenes had not been such as to stimulate most powerfully their energy, their self-reliance, their mutual sympathies, and their ambition. I shall recount in a future chapter these historical ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... implements, portions of primaeval costume, combs, and other articles of the toilet, pieces of domestic furniture, old and buried wooden houses, and even, as in the alleged case of Queen Gunhild, and other "bogged" or "pitted" criminals, human bodies astonishingly entire, and covered with the leathern and other dresses in which they died. All this forms a great mine of antiquarian research, in which little or nothing has yet been accomplished in Scotland. It is only by due excavations that we can hope to acquire ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... efforts to aid us in our search as in securing food, and there is always a degree of intelligence displayed in whatever he undertakes that is wholly foreign to the Inuit character. Even the stones that he brought into camp bore marks that were most astonishingly like writing. You could almost read them. If we had not been so straitened for transportation we would have brought some of these remarkable ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... of "the Father of Modern Music," had a twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and manner and mien. They suffered the same disorders and died nearly together. Their wives, it is said—horresco referens!—could not tell them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom he said he had discussed matrimony with and ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... of the garrison was astonishingly small. In killed and wounded it amounted only to fifty-five—so great was the advantage of the cover afforded by their works. After this repulse the Count D'Estaing announced to General Lincoln his determination ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... any glance at the ghastly wound, the stranger astonishingly continued his swift pace. As we jumped in front of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... a singular animal of the Opossum species, having a false belly, was found by the natives, and brought into the town alive, on the 10th of August, 1803. This is a very singular animal; for when it ascends a tree, at which it is astonishingly expert, it will never quit it until it has cleared it of its leaves. It is mostly found in the mountains and deep ravines to the southward and northward of Broken Bay, and the natives instantly discover its concealment by observing the leaves of the Gum-tree eaten off, this being the tree ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... tighter than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them," was her reiterated comment on ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... cemetery of drift boulders. There! that is the hound. Does his voice come across the valley from the spur off against us, or is it on our side down under the mountain? After an interval, just as I am thinking the dog is going away from us along the opposite range, his voice comes up astonishingly near. A mass of snow falls from a branch, and makes one start; but it is not the fox. Then through the white vista below me I catch a glimpse of something red or yellow, yellowish red or reddish yellow; it emerges from the lower ground, and, with an easy, jaunty air, draws ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... the proa descended with a rattle and bang, the man at the oar gave it several vigorous sweeps, and the strange-looking but astonishingly swift craft came to rest almost in the same position that the schooner Coral occupied three ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis |
