"Desert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "ONE CROWDED HOUR." The scene is a lonely telegraph station on the desert and the time is the present. The characters are: ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... doubtfully, like the flame of a lamp flaring once out of dimness before it dies forever. Was it for this that he had devoted the best thought of his youth and his earlier manhood to plans for the betterment of his state? Should he now, at this, the hour of her supremest political and moral peril, desert her as irredeemable, and join the ranks of those who sneered at her, and pointed mocking fingers at her shame ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... Protestants, some alarmed for their personal safety, and others gained over by the offers of the Court, began to desert the cause for which they had so long contended, and to make terms with the sovereign. The Due de la Force sold himself for two hundred thousand crowns and the baton of a marshal; the Duc de Sully, after repeated delays, surrendered his fortress of Cadenac; the veteran De Lesdiguieres abandoned ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... longing to follow them, if God would give me grace to do so, in their path of utter self-sacrifice. I had been with them continuously in their joys and sorrows, and it did not seem to be possible that I could now go and desert them in that bitter fight. When the doctors had finished binding up my wounds, I was carried off immediately to an ambulance in the road, and placed in it with four others, one of whom was dying. It was a long journey of four hours and a half to No. 1 C.C.S. at Agnez-les-Duisans, ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... thighes, and short legs, and yet being equall vnto vs in stature: for that length which is wanting in their legs is supplied in the vpper parts of their bodies. Their countrey in olde time was a land vtterly desert and waste, situated far beyond Chaldea, from whence they haue expelled Lions, Beares, & such like vntamed beasts with their bowes, and other engines. Of the hides of beasts being tanned, they vse to shape for themselues ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... was traversing the Long Island in poverty and danger, a desolate wanderer wanting the common necessaries of life, but still patient and cheerful ever hoping once more to assemble his faithful Highlanders,—living at one time four days in a desert island, then putting to sea pursued by ships,—Flora Macdonald had accidentally quitted her usual residence at Armadale in Skye, for the purpose of visiting her ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... one last joy on earth. I am not all bad. Don't deny me now. Hold me in your arms, beloved. I had no faith in man or God till I met you, and you were good to me—in the coach—have you forgotten? Don't desert me—now." ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... leaning tower, and one of the former proprietors had buttressed the building from that side with a great strut of wood, like the derrick of a crane. Altogether, it had many marks of ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and nothing but its excellent brightness—the window-glass polished and shining, the paint well scoured, the brasses radiant, the very prop all wreathed about with climbing flowers—nothing but its air of a well-tended, smiling veteran, sitting, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dog ranged the grass-grown streets. The silence reigned infinite and profound, and Constans started in alarm as it was suddenly broken by the scream of an eagle out of the blue. Here was the picture of a desolation incomparably more complete than that of the untrodden desert upon which the life-giving spirit has never breathed. For in this place there had existed a very citadel of being, and behold! a night had passed and ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... probably an accident that the messenger had not arrived with the money this week, and in preparation for escape it was quite likely that Lucien might let it be understood that he had left Paris. He would not be likely to confide in Monsieur Legrand. He would certainly not desert her. ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... altar. But the two snakes glide away to the high sanctuary and seek the fierce Tritonian's citadel, [227-261]and take shelter under the goddess' feet beneath the circle of her shield. Then indeed a strange terror thrills in all our amazed breasts; and Laocoon, men say, hath fulfilled his crime's desert, in piercing the consecrated wood and hurling his guilty spear into its body. All cry out that the image must be drawn to its home and supplication made to her deity. . . . We sunder the walls, and lay open the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... like to know! He saved her from an Indian once, A.O., out on the desert. It was dreadfully romantic. And when he was best man at Eugenia Forbes's wedding, and Mary was flower girl, Mary got the shilling that was in the bride's cake. It was an old English shilling, coined in the reign of Bloody Mary, with Philip's and Mary's heads on it. That is a sure sign they ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... exercise of such faculties as God has given her, let her at least have fair play; let it not be avowed, in the same breath that protection is necessary to her, and that it is refused her; and while we send her forth into the desert, and bind the burthen on her back, and put the staff in her hand, let not her steps be beset, her limbs fettered, and her eyes ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... liberating army, undertook a journey into the interior, in the hope that change of air might prove advantageous to our infant child, which was in a precarious state of health. She performed the journey on horseback, under the intense heat of a vertical sun, across a desert, impeded by the precipitous beds of torrents which intersect the country in every direction. On her arrival at Quilca, she was most hospitably received by the Marchioness de la Pracer, who placed her palace and every luxury ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... early part of the day soon dropped lower to afford us a wider view. In its broad, general features the country was, quite simply, the desert of Arizona over again. There were the same high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the same occasional strips of green marking ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... your native land, instead of being a lazar-house of slavery, will soon be the garden of freedom. Stand by the cause! Be not dismayed by obstacles you meet; you must surmount them, and you will. Let cowardice and ignorance desert and denounce you—what of that? The true men are still with us, and the struggle must not be abandoned, even though our soldiers should be compelled through the over-zeal of United States officers to abandon the present campaign. There is no turning ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... were the yellow-roofed tombs, which gave back the sun in a thousand points of golden light. After the monotonous brown of the bare north China hills, the vivid green of the trees was as refreshing as finding an unknown oasis in a sandy desert. To the right was the picturesque village of Ma-lin-yu, the residence of ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... the beauty, and the keen salt air of this charmed spot, poor Sally Little lifted up her head, and began to live again, like a flower taken from desert sands and set by a spring. The baby also bloomed like a rose. In an incredibly short time, both mother and child had so altered that one would hardly have known them. The days went by, to them all, as ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... But this last idea melted of itself. How could the famous publisher resemble the poor, unobtrusive Snarle? He, Mr. Hardwill, who received notes from the great Hiawatha, and hob-nobbed with Knickerbocker Irving; he, who owned a phial of yellow sand, which had been taken from a scorching desert with an unpronounceable name, and presented to him by the Oriental Bayard; he, who chatted with genial Mr. Sparrow-grass—God bless him!—(Sparrow-grass,) and joked with Orpheus Stoddard,—he like simple ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... may trace it in many of the poems to which we have already alluded. But it appears with all its lonely gloom of power in "The Haunted House." This poem is surely the work of a fancy that must have often gone into the desert of the soul to meditate, and that must have made itself acquainted with all that is dismal in imagery and feeling. Pictures, in succession or combination, it would be impossible to conceive, which more dolefully impress the mind with a sense of doom, dread, and mystery; yet every picture is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... of lumbago; Newt Spratt loudly demanded the flaxseed his wife had asked him to bring home so that she could make a poultice for a terrible toothache she was enjoying that evening; Alf Reesling refused to desert poor little Elfie; and two other gentlemen succeeded in sneaking out the back way while the Marshal's view was obstructed by the aforesaid slackers. Storekeeper Lamson had a perfectly sound excuse. He was a pacifist. However, he was willing to lend his revolver to ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... shall get somewhere if I keep walking; and I can't starve, though I hate the sight of this horrid stuff," she said to herself, as she hurried over the mountains of Gibraltar Rock that divided the city of Saccharissa from the great desert of brown ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... this lone dwelling-place Of desert-storm, of cold, and desolation, There was prepared for me a consolation: Three of ye here, O friends! did I embrace. Thou enteredst first the poet's house of sorrow, O Pustchin! thanks be with thee, thanks, and praise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... fatal security, Egmont not only forgot his fears, but unfortunately succeeded in inspiring Count Horn with a portion of his confidence. That gentleman had still remained in his solitary mansion at Weert, notwithstanding the artful means which had been used to lure him from that "desert." It is singular that the very same person who, according to a well-informed Catholic contemporary, had been most eager to warn Egmont of his danger, had also been the foremost instrument for effecting the capture of the Admiral. The Seigneur de Billy, on the day after his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... as to the extended boundary between the Argentine Republic and Chile, stretching along the Andean crests from the southern border of the Atacama Desert to Magellan Straits, nearly a third of the length of the South American continent, assumed an acute stage in the early part of the year, and afforded to this Government occasion to express the hope that the resort to arbitration, already contemplated by existing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... energy and daring which we associate peculiarly with the Hellenic name, than the islanders of Hydra and Spetza, who had crossed from the Albanian parts of the Morea and taken possession of these desert rocks not a hundred years before. The same phenomenon of an assimilation of Greeks and Albanians was seen in southern Epirus, the border-ground between the two races. The Suliotes, Albanian mountaineers, whose military exploits form one ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... cotton-spinners and calico-printers? Absurd! It became, in fact, daily more obvious to even the most unreflecting, that these worthies were not likely to be engaged in their "labours of love;" were not exactly the kind of persons to desert their own businesses, to attend out of pure benevolence that of others—to let succumb their own interest to promote those of others; to subscribe out of the gains which they had wrung from their unhappy factory slaves, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... laborious day I encamped on the right bank, leaving still on the other side however a small party in charge of the horses and carts. The day was extremely hot and the full and flowing river gave an unusual appearance of life and motion to the desert whose wearisome stillness was so unvarying elsewhere. Serpents were numerous and some were seen of a species apparently peculiar to this river. Here they invariably took to it, and one beautiful reptile in particular, being of a golden ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the certainty that his best judgment would govern all his actions. Now, he felt himself clutching, almost frantically, at the hard sense of proportion that never before had so much as threatened to desert him. He went about his chores in a grave, automatic way, absorbed in anything but agriculture. Hardly ever did he pass through his barn without paying homage to his own progressiveness and oozing approval of the mechanical milker, driven by his own electrical dynamo, the James Way stanchions ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... self-complacency. There is no reason why they should do so. That many of us have gone from them and found God is no concern of theirs. It is not that we who went out into the wilderness which we thought to be a desert, away from their creeds and dogmas, have turned back and are returning. It is that we have gone on still further, and are beyond that desolation. Never more shall we return to those who gather under the cross. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the future will not be a desert, tree-less country. However, immediate measures to save our remaining trees must be developed. The greater part of our virgin timber has already been felled. The aftermath forests, which succeed the virgin stand, generally are inferior. Our supplies ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... said Sally reprovingly. "Can't you realize that we're practically castaways on a desert island? There's nothing to do till to-morrow but talk about ourselves. I want to hear all about you, and then I'll tell you all about myself. If you feel diffident about starting the revelations, I'll begin. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... sort of men—men in whom desperate greediness takes the place of a heart, and whose conscience has been replaced by an empty purse, to fill which is their one object in life. Their general is their god, and they follow him or desert him just according as he leads them to victory and plunder, or to defeat. They march from country to country, selling their services to whichever side they think will give them the richest booty. Swedes! I can assure you, there is not a Swede left ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... to hinder the finis of my mad plunge. I waved my limbs violently, kicking out and shrieking in the agonies of fear. I cursed and prayed, wept and laughed alternately, did everything, yet nothing, that could save me from contact with the lone desert so horribly close. Nearer and nearer I approached, until at last my feet rested on the hard caked soil. For the first few minutes after my arrival I was too overwhelmed with fear to do other than remain stationary. The ground beneath my feet swarmed ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... name is Tolpec, says Jacinto is a fraud," exclaimed Professor Bumper. "He made all the Indians leave us in the night, though many of them were willing to stay and fill the contract they had made. But Jacinto would not let them, making them desert. Tolpec went away with the others, but because of what Tom had done he planned to come back at the first chance and be our guide. Accordingly he jumped ashore from one of the canoes, and made his way to our camp. He got there, found it deserted ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... hiding every sign of her own secret, that Ivan's reticence appeared to her only the reflection of her own. It was as natural, then, as it was unfortunate, that these visits, looked forward to by each of them as bright oases in an otherwise treeless desert, should also have brought with them their quota of discomfort and vain regret. Throughout each week, woman and boy alike hungered for each other. Yet on Sunday night both usually parted with hearts overflowing with secret remorse at ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... pounds a week for acting. I knew that the tour was not a financial success, and I ventured to suggest that it would be good economy to get some one else for Susan Merton. For answer I got a fiery "Madam, you are a rat! You desert a sinking ship!" My dear old companion, Boo, who was with me, resented this very much: "How can you say such things to ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... young giraffe like him, dropped this spring in the Sarah desert under a cocoanut shy. Four hundred and forties I thought you was goin' to say. 'Ark to him!" He appealed to the delighted crowd. "Offers me forties against my pantomime colt, and ain't ashamed of himself. I'd ha' left him at home in the ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... me, in my charge to the Grand Jury, the following observations: 'I am extremely sorry to be unable to congratulate you or the country on a light calendar, the matters to be brought before you embracing no less than three cases of larceny, and one of enticing soldiers to desert, besides several arising from that ever prolific source, assaults, etc. I cannot, however, pass the former by altogether without once more emphatically remarking, that it is as much to the disgrace of the free ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his brochure, printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass," "Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"—pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Arthur Young described the stretch of country between Frjus and Cannes as a desert, "not one mile in twenty cultivated." Will Europe and America, with the entire civilized world, furnish valetudinarians in sufficient numbers to fill the hotels, villas, and boarding houses now rising ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... however, runs some risk of being engulfed by his hobby and swept away by the flood of books. There is but one remedy, or rather alleviation, for book-collecting is quite incurable and follows a man to his grave (unless, of course, he be cast upon a desert island), and ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... philosophy by seeing the world; and now with a brain full of learning, fingers full of touches, eyes full of tints, and a person full of grace, your father is taking you back to America, to 'waste your sweetness on the desert air.'" ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... ascend the Nevadas, I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its base, I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river, I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines, Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows, Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines, Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... ostrich, the camel, the gazelle, the hippopotamus, the gorilla, the lion and the tiger, and the negro. I had seen the Arab galloping like the wind, and passing like a floating standard, and I had slept under those brown tents, the moving habitation of those white birds of the desert, and I felt, as it were, intoxicated with light, with fancy, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: Lo you there, That hillock burning with a brazen glare; Those myriad dusky flames with points aglow Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro; A Sabbath ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... are not replanted after each harvest (citrus, coffee, rubber); meadows and pastures—land permanently used for herbaceous forage crops; forest and woodland—land under dense or open stands of trees; and other—any land type not specifically mentioned above (urban areas, roads, desert). The percentage figure for irrigated refers to the portion of the entire amount of land area that is artificially ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... hilly land that we are now cultivating to its great detriment, visibly reducing the earth's resources by bringing about rapidly that condition which has led to the saying in the Old World: "After man, the desert." The Roman Empire, where men have had possession for two thousand years, proves, "After man, the desert." It is equally proven in much of China, but it can be prevented if these hill lands are put to trees. But we cannot afford to put those lands into trees ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... drawing near Commem., It is Ver and it is Venus that shall judge the case between us, And I think for all your maxims that you won't compete with them! Then despite their boasted virtue shall your athletes all desert you (Come to me for information if you don't know where they are): For it's ina scholaxomen [2] that's the proper end of Woman And of Man—at least in summer," said the ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... charge of the wrong person. I always feel that my being in the vein for society depends a good deal upon what the society consists of. Every now and then I get somebody to take down to dinner that makes me sigh for the Desert of Sahara. Now, I wonder what's ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... Yuma it is called five hundred and fifty miles and the greater part of the way it is over a desert country. From Los Angeles we struck across the Mojave desert, crossing the extreme south end of Death Valley to avoid the sand desert, and made our way to the Colorado river without any mishap, but sometimes having to ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... establishing a trading-post, and had an excellent equipment for that purpose. The English officers maintain friendly intercourse with the natives, which enables them to see much of Malay life and customs. Some of the English sailors desert here, some are poisoned by the natives, and most of the crew become drunken and disaffected. The captain neglects to discipline them, and finally the crew sail away with their ship and leave him (January 14, 1687), with thirty-six of his ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... bridge and with the second heavy year of snow railroad men looked for new trouble. June is not a month for despair, because the mountain men have never yet scheduled despair as a West End liability. But it is a month that puts wrinkles in the right of way clear across the desert and sows gray hairs in the roadmasters' records from McCloud to Bear Dance. That June the mountain streams roared, the foothills floated, the plains puffed into sponge, and in the thick of it all the Spider Water took a ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... they aren't always hot. It was awful how stupid he was and helpless and disagreeable. He couldn't even crank properly and the engine back-fired on him and hurt his hand. Finally I got so desperate that I sat down and cried, while he nursed his hand and said we ought to desert the machine and go home, and that papa would be anxious if we didn't turn up to lunch. I knew all the time he was talking about his lunch. You don't know what an Englishman is if he isn't fed regularly, and it was now after one and we were eighteen ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... which was one of the pleasantest and gayest of the many entertainments we were present at during our homeward journey. When at the close of it we parted from our hosts they lighted up the way by which we rowed forward over the tranquil waves of the Bay of Aden with blue lights, and the desert mountain sides of the Arabian coast resounded with the hurrahs which were exchanged in the clear, calm night between the representatives of the south and ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Hils.} Now, as touching the making of your hils, you shall vnderstand that although generally they are not made the first yeere, yet it is not amisse if you omit that scruple, and beginne to make your hils as soone as you haue placed your poales, for if your industry be answerable to the desert of the labour, you shall reape as good profit the first yeere, as either the second or the third. To beginne therefore to make your hils, you shall make you an instrument like a stubbing Hoe, which is a toole wherewith labourers stubbe rootes out of decayed ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... the forest had issued from a side-street, a cul de sac, as the frivolous sons of Paris, the Queen of Vice, call it. It was moving with me, stopping when I stopped, galloping when I galloped, turning somersaults when I turned them. And then it spoke to me—spoke, yes, spoke, this thing of the desert—this wild phantasm of a brain distraught by over-indulgence in marrons glaces, the curse of ma patrie, and its speech was as the scent of scarlet poppies, plucked from the grave of a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... with his works by him—a treatise commenced, probably, in the last year of Vespasian's reign, and completed only in that of Domitian—Cicero as a poet is spoken of with a severity of censure which the writer presumes to have been his recognized desert. "For Caesar," he says, "and Brutus made verses, and sent them to the public libraries; not better, indeed, than Cicero, but with less of general misfortune, because only a few people knew that they had done so." This must be taken for what it is worth. The treatise, let it have been ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... themselves voluntarily to the protectorate of larger towns, whose chief arbitrates as sovereign without appeal in all disputes among towns under his wardship; yet, as his judgments are not always pleasing, the dissatisfied desert their huts, and, emigrating to another jurisdiction, build their village anew ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... vast power to live apart and without danger. Let us therefore obey Fortune and not repel her, seeing that she voluntarily and self-invited belonged to our fathers and now abides with us. This result will not be reached if we cast away our arms and desert the ranks and sit idly at home or wander among our allies. It will be reached if we keep our arms constantly in hand—this is the only way to preserve peace—and practice warlike deeds in the midst of dangers—this is the only way ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... cruel and heartless as she. I'll never forgive her for the way she treated Connie. Let's not talk of her, Irma. It makes me feel cross and horrid, and, of all days, I'd like to be happy to-day. There's so much to be happy over, and I'm so glad to see all of you. Life would be a desert waste ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... existence "bounty-jumping," a new crime analogous to that of "repeating" at elections. A man would enlist and receive the bounty, frequently several hundred dollars, but varying somewhat in different places and periods. He would take an early opportunity to desert, as he had intended to do from the first. Changing his name, he would go to some new locality and enlist again, repeating the fraud as often as he could escape detection. The urgency to get recruits and forward them at once to the field, and the wide country which was open to recruiting, made ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... "'Traverse the desert, and then ye can tell What treasures exist in the cold, deep well; Sink in despair on the red, parched earth, And then ye may reckon what water ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... or been influenced by any but the most unselfish motives, he would have accepted the call as the highest honor in the gift of the nation. But to do so he would have been obliged to surrender his private principles and desert his native state, and it is impossible to imagine that a man of his character would, even for an instant, consider such a course. Gravely and sadly he declined the mighty office, and two days later he tendered his resignation from the service ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... a waste of white rises against the day With shelter now, and with blandishment, since the winds have had their way And laid the desert horrific of silence and snow on the world of mankind, School now is the rock in this weary land the ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... if he would see me through. At length he relaxed his features, and softened his manner. "You are a foolish, headstrong boy," said he, "and I shall have an eye upon you. I shall never place in you the confidence I have done. But—I will not desert you. At present, the balance between approbation and dislike is in your favour. How long it will last, I cannot tell; I engage for nothing. But it is my rule to act as I feel. I will for this time do as you require;—and, pray God, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... had been conquered to rear! Where, through the whole earth, could I find so meet a symbol for the character and the name which that sovereign would leave to posterity as this palace itself afforded? A gorgeous monument of regal state raised from a desert; crowded alike with empty pageantries and illustrious names; a prodigy of elaborate artifice, grand in its whole effect, petty in its small details; a solitary oblation to a splendid selfishness, and most remarkable for the revenues which it exhausted and the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... after the excursion just narrated, I accompanied Cardozo in many wanderings on the Solimoens, during which he visited the praias (sand-islands), the turtle pools in the forests, and the by-streams and lakes of the great desert river. His object was mainly to superintend the business of digging up turtle eggs on the sandbanks, having been elected commandante for the year by the municipal council of Ega, of the "praia real" (royal sand-island) of Shimuni, the one lying nearest to Ega. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... anxious lookout for the Maine hills that push so boldly down into the sea. At length we saw them,—faint, dusky shadows in the horizon, looming up in an ashy color and with a most poetical light. We made out clearly Mt. Desert, and felt repaid for our journey by the sight of this famous island, even at such a distance. I pointed out the hills to the man at the wheel, and asked if we should go ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... you suppose I will consent to desert you after that confession?" I questioned, almost indignant. "I would be a brute to do so. You saved me from arrest just now; for me to have been taken to the station house and searched would have put me in a bad ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... to go round to Froken Elisabeth's address; there was still a glimmer of hope. I heard the door bell ring inside the house as I pressed, and stood listening as in a whirling desert. ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... the islands of Maluco. There are many others on the other side of the line, in the tropic of Capricorn, which extend for twelve degrees in south latitude. [40] The ancients affirmed that each and all of them were desert and uninhabitable, [41] but now experience has demonstrated that they deceived themselves; for good climates, many people, and food and other things necessary for human life are found there, besides many mines of rich metals, with precious gems and pearls, and animals and plants, which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... imagination, and are happy in the utility of your calling. But if we seek for poetry, we must, like Byron, quit civilized countries to find it on the sea or in the desert." ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... "cannot live alone," and his cousin Hebe assures him she will never give up the ship; or rather that she never will desert him, unless of course she should discover that he, too, was changed in the cradle. This comforts everybody but the changed Captain. Ralph has, in the twinkling of an eye, become the Captain of the good ship Pinafore, while the Captain has become Ralph, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... told me that I was to go, that was my comfort. I think I have taught myself to think nothing of myself, to bear it all as a necessity, to put up with it, whatever it may be, as men bear thirst in the desert. Thank God, Arthur, I have no baby to suffer with me. Here,—here, it is still very bad. When I think of papa creeping in and out of his house, I sometimes feel that I must kill myself. But our going will put an end to all that. It is much better that we should go. I wish ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... city[10] had long been inured to the allegiance 5 of the Caesars, and it was more by the pressure of intrigue than of their own inclination that they came to desert Nero. They soon realized that the donation promised in Galba's name was not to be paid to them, and that peace would not, like war, offer opportunity for great services and rich rewards. Since they also saw that the new emperor's favour ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... rage had spent itself. He was conscious now of a certain limpness, both of mind and body; his fit of passion over, he felt dulled, almost indifferent to what had happened. Now, too, another feeling was taking possession of him, opening up vistas of a desert emptiness that ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... and I flung it aside. Even my love for the sea had vanished, and I had begun to hate it. During the first few years of my ministry I spent hours by the cliffs and shores, or out on the heaving waters. Then the loneliness of the desert and barren wastes repelled me, and I had begun to loathe it. Altogether I was soured and discontented, and I had a dread consciousness that my life was a failure. All its possibilities had passed ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... tree, and that the wild honey was the luscious juice of the Carob fruit. Having got so far it was easy to go farther, and so the Carob soon got the names of St. John's Bread and St. John's Beans, and the monks of the desert showed the very trees by which St. John's life was supported. But though the Carob tree did not produce the locusts on which St. John fed, there is little or no doubt that "the husks which the swine did eat," and which the Prodigal Son longed for, were the produce ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... hard words, but generally more counsel than comfort—always, however, the best she had, which was of Polonius' kind, an essence of wise selfishness, so far as selfishness can be wise, with a strong dash of self-respect, nowise the more sparing that it was independent of desert. The good man would find it rather difficult to respect himself were he to try; his gaze is upward to the one good; but had it been possible for such a distinction to enter Miss Vavasor's house, it would have been only to be straightway dismissed. She was devoted ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... dismissed, the charter abolished, and Don Miguel proclaimed king. All the dungeons in the realm were filled with victims, and thousands perished in them, or on the scaffold; whilst thousands more were banished to the desert coasts of Africa, or voluntarily abandoned their country, to endure the sorrows of unmerited exile. It was these circumstances that gave rise to the withdrawal of his majesty's representatives from Lisbon, as intimated in the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... mosses decorated the chimney-piece; the little wainscoted parlor was lighted by a skylight, like a cabin, The shop itself seemed almost to become a sea-going ship-shape concern, wanting only good sea room, in the event of an unexpected launch, to work its way securely to any desert island ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... wakes, And the towers of Hunaudaye Gleam like three phantom forms In the morning's sunlight ray; When night her darksome wing Folds round this desert waste, Shun all this cursed ground— Traveller ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... the sky, and I knew he desired to talk of Pipiri Ma. The other Tahitians were already under the roof on their backs, upon the soft bed of dried leaves gathered by them for all of us, but the long, lean physician listened with unabated interest. He had run away for a change from the desert-like interior of his vast island, where he treated the ills of a large territory of sheep-herders, and to be on this mountain under such a benignant canopy, and to hear the folk-lore of the most fascinating race on earth, was to him worth foregoing ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... much-beloved wife of Secretary Bayard. Can it be necessary that society should sacrifice its brightest ornaments, and literally do itself to death, in order to maintain its existence? "Come ye yourselves into a desert place, and rest a while," reveals a law of health and happiness as inexorable and exacting in its demands, and as universal in its sway and scope, as any at work in the frame of material nature. Let us learn the truth and value of ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... registering nine thousand feet, save when they dipped and lifted to the uneven currents over the mountains. The Thunder Bird seemed alive, glorying in her native element. The earth slid away like a map unrolled endlessly beneath them. Desert and little towns on the railroad like broken beads strung loosely on a taut wire. Salton Sea was cool and tempting, though the air shimmered all around it with heat. They flew the full length of it and on up the valley. Then they climbed higher ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... effort at settling down, at arranging things in what was to be her home. There was nothing to arrange, no odds and ends wherewith almost any woman can conjure up a homelike effect in the barest sort of place. She beheld the noon return of the crew much as a shipwrecked castaway on a desert shore might behold a rescuing sail, and she told Charlie that she intended to go into the woods that ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... over, but privately railed at the barbarian, "What evil genius, O thou worst of men, brought thee to our camp, and with what charms and potions hast thou bewitched Crassus, that he should march his army through a vast and deep desert, through ways which are rather fit for a captain of Arabian robbers, than for the general of a Roman army?" But the barbarian being a wily fellow, very submissively exhorted them, and encouraged them to sustain it a little further, and ran about the camp, and, professing to cheer up the soldiers, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... The Desert Smells like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country. San Francisco: North Point ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... his wit." Again, the same idea is expanded into "When he makes his jokes, you applaud the accuracy of his memory, and 'tis only when he states his facts that you admire the flights of his imagination." But the thought was too good to be thus wasted on the desert air of a common-place book. So, forth it came, at the expense of Kelly, who, having been a composer of music, became a wine-merchant. "You will," said the ready wit, "import your music and compose your ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... failed to narrate what he and the colony at Jamestown owed to Pocahontas. He besought the queen's kindly consideration for the stranger just landed upon her shores, as due to Pocahontas's "great spirit, her desert, birth, want, and simplicity." His one call upon the wife of John Rolfe, Gentleman, was marked by profound respect on his part to one whom he accosted as "Lady Rebecca;" ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... impossible to know how far Stephen envisaged the visit as a duty—the priestly horizon is perhaps not wholly free from mirage—or to what extent he confessed it an indulgence. He was certainly aware of a stronger desire than he could altogether account for that Captain Filbert should not desert her post. The idea had an element of imitation oddly personal; he could not bear to reflect upon it. It may be wondered whether in any flight of venial imagination Arnold saw himself in a parallel situation with a lady. I am sure he did not. ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... now, and for past kindnesses from you and your son. I cannot accept your offer. I would like to, did my pride permit, and were it not for the fact that such happiness as is left to my father can only be found by the Bight of Tyee. So, while he lives I shall not desert him. As for your apprehensions"—she smiled tolerantly and whimsically—"though flattering to me, they are quite unnecessary, and I beg you rid your mind of them. I am—that which I am; yet I ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... prince as Edward III., very strong temptations. Nor did opportunities for attack, and chances of success, fail him any more than temptations. He found in France, amongst the grandees of the kingdom, and even at the king's court, men disposed to desert the cause of the king and of France to serve a prince who had more capacity, and who pretended to claim the crown of France as his lawful right. The feudal system lent itself to ambiguous questions and doubts of conscience: a lord who had two suzerains, and who, rightly or wrongly, believed ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... house—we conversed for five minutes—we parted—she went out—her last words being that she would return at half-past one o'clock; and not long after that time, if ever mimic bells—bells of rejoicing, or bells of mourning, are heard in desert spaces of the air, and (as some have said), in unreal worlds, that mock our own, and repeat, for ridicule, the vain and unprofitable motions of man, then too surely, about this hour, began to toll the funeral knell of my earthly happiness—its final ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... answer. She is chattering downstairs with the concierge, for sure. So that is the way you observe your old master's birthday? You desert me even on the eve of Saint-Sylvestre! Alas! if I am to hear any kind wishes to-day, they must come up from the ground; for all who love me have long been buried. I really don't know what I am still ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... wouldn't. It was just a few shacks and a Mexican gambling-house when I saw it. Maybe it isn't there any more, at all. You know—those places! People build them and then go away, and in a year there isn't a thing, just desert again and shifting sand and maybe the little original old ranch by the one spring." He swept the table-cloth with his hand, as if sweeping something into oblivion, and his eyes sought again the spoon. "It's queer, that business. Men and women go out to lonely ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... you know what men do with their mistresses when they begin to feel that they are through with them and there is no legal bond to hold them. They desert them. They cast them off. And then they turn to some honest woman and marry her. That is the way with men. But he was not like that. I can tell what you are about to say. It is on your lips to say that he deserted an honest woman. Well, so he did. And therein lies the secret ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... is composed of its slopes. Its height is nearly three miles, its base is 180 miles in circumference, so that Wales might be packed away within it, leaving room to spare. Yet its whole huge bulk, above a height of about 8000 feet, is one frightful desert, at once the creation and the prey of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... would be a much less consequential discovery, did it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a corresponding rate ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... claim for assistance we wish to combat a prejudice which we know to be general in Greece against those who desert their allies in time of war. For we wish not only to obtain your countenance and support, but also to preserve your respect. To abandon an ally without just cause in a time of peril is justly regarded as an act of treason. But then the alliance must be a fair and equal relation ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... do find any one, they will be friends. Besides Meyer, there is Dr. Sprenger, the Arabic scholar, as house friend, whose library I have at last secured for us,—a delightful man, who is my guide in the Arabian desert, so that I may be certain of bringing the children of Israel in thirty months to the Jabbok, namely, in the fifth ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Fezzan I followed a caravan. On the margin of the sandy desert, in a salt plain, that shone like a frozen lake, and was only covered in spots with light drifting sand, a halt was made. The eldest of the company—the water gourd hung at his girdle, and on his head was a little bag of unleavened bread—drew a square in the sand with his staff, and wrote ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... "Forsake her—desert? Not me! She's unlucky, sir, and no one can't help it. Bad luck comes to every one sometimes, same as good luck does, sir. We takes it all, sir, just as it comes, just as we did over the landing t'other day—Titely was the unlucky ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet Isaiah saying, "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in the desert" (Isaiah 35:6). ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... seventh century, as St. Boniface went to the Rhine, to evangelise the country, and built himself a cell on the side of the mountain which overlooks the glassworks. Here he did his appointed work, and here, on June 2, 670, he was put to death. The mountain was then known as Mount Ereme or Mount Desert, and it is still heavily wooded throughout almost ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... right, of what it is humane and honorable for them to accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit and a universal human sympathy which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind; and they have refused to compound their ideals or desert others that they ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... grown to loathe Detroit Jim. Every word he murmured, every movement he made, intensified the loathing. He had made up his mind that Jim was planning to desert him the next time he should fall asleep; perhaps would kill him and leave him there—in the dark. The two had practically ceased speaking to each other. In his mental confusion Old Man Anderson kept revolving in his mind, with ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Benjamin not to desert him now, and promised by all that was great and good that he would stop drinking and lead a sober life. In the circumstances, Benjamin could scarcely do otherwise than to pay his bill at the inn and take him along with him, though he very reluctantly decided to do so. Having collected ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... speculations which ruined him. So his love had not been a blessing. The ship which North Wind had sunk was their last venture, and Mr. Evans had gone out with it in the hope of turning its cargo to the best advantage. He was one of the single boat-load which managed to reach a desert island, and he had gone through a great many hardships and sufferings since then. But he was not past being taught, and his troubles had done him no end of good, for they had made him doubt himself, and begin to think, so that he had come ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... one time, but they went hunting after a pig that was destroying the whole country, and making a desert of it. And they followed it till they came to a lake, and there it turned on them, and no hound of them escaped alive, but they were all drowned or maimed. And the pig made for an island then, that got the name of Muc-inis, the Pigs Island afterwards; and the lake got the name of Loch ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... like to refuse, for fear they should all desert, and yet he didn't dare get rid of the captain, in case such a strong and brave man should ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... written in his old age; and that passion causes him thus to open his first book:—"Love was the inventor, and is still the maintainer, of every noble science. It is chiefly that which hath made my flowers and trees to flourish, though planted in a barren desert, and hath brought me to the knowledge I now have in plants and planting; for indeed it is impossible for any man to have any considerable collection of plants to prosper, unless he love them: for neither the ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... fellow-subjects. Thus the discontent which had so greatly facilitated the conquest of the border-provinces soon turned against the conqueror himself, and one uprising after another shook Ibrahim's hold upon Mount Lebanon and the Syrian desert. The Sultan watched each outbreak against his adversary with grim joy, impatient for the moment when the re-organisation of his own forces should enable him to re-enter the field and to strike ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... had much business to transact in London, and I was almost perpetually alone at Finchley. Of our domestic establishment there was only one who did not desert us, and he was a negro!—one of that despised, degraded race, who wear the colour on their features which too often characterises the hearts of their fair and unfeeling oppressors. I have found, during my journey through life, that the two male domestics who were most attached to my ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... the governor's conduct. In raising this siege, after he had been a month in possession of the town, unless he was in immediate want of provisions or ammunition, or his men, having little confidence in his abilities, threatened to desert him: for if the Spanish ships drew more than ten feet water, which it is probable they must have done, they could not come over the bar to injure him: if they landed their men, yet still his force was superior to that of the enemy, and he might ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt |
