"Drift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she so gladly have believed in the doctrine of immortality as now, yet with characteristic honesty and resoluteness she set herself into an attitude of rigid defense, lest through strong desire or mere bodily weariness she should drift into the acceptance of what might be, what indeed she considered to be error. But to her surprise, half to her disappointment, Brian did not even mention the evidences. She had braced herself up to withstand ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... emerged from a long line of snowdrifts and stepped at this little country tavern, supped and am now roasting over a hot stove. Oh, oh, what an experience! No trains running and we have had a thirty-six mile ride in a sleigh. Once we seemed lost in a drift full fifteen feet deep. The driver went on ahead to a house, and there we sat shivering. When he returned we found he had gone over a fence into a field, so we had to dismount and plough through the snow after the sleigh; then we reseated ourselves, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... what power the reiteration of an essentially poetical thought has upon one's feelings. When we take up the LEDGER and read the poetry about little Clara, we feel an unaccountable depression of the spirits. When we drift further down the column and read the poetry about little Johnnie, the depression and spirits acquires and added emphasis, and we experience tangible suffering. When we saunter along down the column further still and read the poetry about little Ferguson, the word torture but vaguely ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this second phrase illustrates a striking feature in Franck's style, namely the fact that his resolutions seldom come out as expected but, instead, drift imperceptibly into other channels. In measure 13 there begins a long series of modulatory developments of the main theme—of a preludial nature—but not a mere prelude in the ordinary sense. That this entire opening portion is the main body of the work ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... of the county was not very intricate; the details were innumerable, but the general drift was easy to acquire. Much more complicated to see through were all the little personal likings, dislikings, petty spites, foibles, hobbies, secret understandings, family jars, and so forth, which really decide a man's vote, or the scale into which he throws his influence. There were scores ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... important business in hand. I didn't come to quarrel with you, Pearl. I came to talk to you like you were a sensible girl." He had been rolling a cigarette between his fingers, and now he lighted it, and for a moment watched the smoke wreaths drift upward. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... office, one with a policy of drift, everything may become possible; but, so long as foresight and vigilance are shown, the Republic remains impregnable. If military malcontents become obstreperous it is only necessary to treat them as ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... crossing without mishap, Stallings observing the performance to note how far down the stream the pony would drift. Tad landed some five rods lower down. On the return, the drift was not ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... Politician." The four parts were afterwards arranged into two, as they are here reprinted, and published together as "The History of John Bull," with a few notes by the author which sufficiently explain its drift. ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... like a Florida swamp; the air seemed to thicken, thicken, as I looked. A quick instinct warned me to look for George in the shadow: it seemed to me that he stood there, in ... glue ... like a caught fly. To let go—to drift in a warm, relaxing current ... I had to shake my shoulders, actually, as if there had been a net ... I felt for ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... to explain the presence of boulders, moraines, drift, and the like phenomena, by the action of water. But even if we could believe that rivers had brought along with them such masses of rock, and deposited them where they are now found, the regularity in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Nigel reached a crisis of restlessness and uncertainty, which warned him that he must drift and delay no longer, but make up his mind quite definitely what course he was going to take. He was not a man who could live comfortably in indecision. He hated it, indeed, as an ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... her brother with a wild expression, as he pointed to a part of the rocky shore where a vessel was dimly seen through the drift. ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... by some careful mothers, is now exploded. Young men are no longer led to look upon every girl that they meet as furtively, to use a vulgarism, "setting her cap for him," and only too ready to fling herself at his feet. So far so good. But have we not suffered our girls to drift into the opposite extreme? In the heyday of their bright young life, with so many new interests and amusements open to them, in the pride of their freedom and independence, they are no longer so inclined to marry, and are even apt to look down upon the married ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... brought on the ruin of the monasteries. Henry's need of money; the refusal of the monks to sign the acts of supremacy and succession; the general drift of reform, and the iniquity of the monks. They fell from natural causes and through the operation of laws which God alone controls. As Hill neatly puts it, "Monasticism was healthy, active and vigorous; it became idle, listless and extravagant; it engendered ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... wait on war on de street to watch foh de parade en wid de bands er playing en de wild varmits en things dis woman give birth ter dat girl chile on de corner of Webber and Seventh St. Dat gal sho got er funny name 'Es-pe-cu-liar'. (I did not get the drift of the story so I asked her what was so funny about the name. Of course it is a name I have never heard before so the following is what the girls Mother said about it to Aunt Easter. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... she was eavesdropping, peered about for a means of slipping out. But the only door, portiere-hung, was the one leading into the parlour. And now this concealed poor blundering Missy from the speakers while it allowed their talk to drift through. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Quebec became the scene of a profligacy unparalleled in her history. The Palace, instead of being a hall of justice, was the abode of debauchery and gambling; and the mad revellers, whom a cynical fate had placed at the head of affairs, allowed the ship of state to drift upon the rocks. Even the fine palace within the city gave too little scope for the diversion of the Intendant and his confederates, and, accordingly, a rustic chateau was built near the high hill of Charlesbourg. Here they paused when tired of the chase, and the revels of the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... well-known in the South of England as a lecturer on scientific subjects. He contributed several papers to the Geological Society on Surface Sculpture, Denudation, Drift Deposits, etc. In 1869 he published a work "On the Scenery of England and Wales" (see "Geol. Mag." 1891, page 432. -on boulders of Ashley Heath. -letters to. -on Moel Tryfan. -on sources of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... river-life, with its convoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore for logs which have broken from it, and which the skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands or stamps. Here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the shelving beaches, mixed with the drift of trees and fence-rails, and frames of corn-cribs and hencoops, and even house walls, which the freshets have brought down and left stranded. The tops of the little willows are tufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of foliage. It is only a question of weeks, perhaps days, before some blast of wind will throw this humbled forest-monarch over the steep bank of the river. When the water rises again, the trunk with a few skeleton branches will be carried away with the current to begin a slow but relentless drift to old Father Amazon. Here and there will be a little pause, while the river gods decide, and then it will move on, to be caught somewhere along the course and contribute to the formation of some new island or complete its last long ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' wintry war. Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, Beneath a scaur. Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, That in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee? Whare wilt then cow'r thy chittering wing, And ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... Mother hauled me to church the Sunday after you broke up Fanchon Smith's dance. Doctor Wallace didn't impress me. These old people make me sick anyhow. They don't understand.... But Daren, I think I get your drift. So snow ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Secretary Seddon for a very able ministry, expressed confidence that his gubernatorial colleagues in Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana would, with himself, "act in no sectional or separatist spirit." It was saying a good deal, considering how strong the drift of popular opinion had been and was to be in the contrary direction. However, in August, the four governors appealed collectively to their constituents and to "the Allied Indian Nations," proving, if proof were ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... condition that he would be graciously pleased to accept "the information and advice of parliament in discovering the causes of the great evils, and redress their grievances." The king accepted this "as a satisfactory answer;" but Charles comprehended their drift—"You specially aim at the Duke of Buckingham; what he hath done to change your minds I wot not." The style of the king now first betrays angered feelings; the secret cause of the uncomplying conduct of the Commons was hatred of the favourite—but the king saw that they designed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... on this head because, at the first appearance of my work, its aim and drift were misapprehended by some of the descendants of the Dutch worthies, and because I understand that now and then one may still be found to regard it with a captious eye. The far greater part, however, I have reason ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... mind, the essential unity of all religion, and his attempt to disentangle the central motive from outlying schemes and dogmas. Mrs. Graves heard him attentively, every now and then asking a question, which showed that she was following the drift ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... spoken calmly and with no outward sign of feeling except that, as he got toward the end of his speech and his drift became open and manifest, his voice gained more and more emphasis as he saw the undisguised impatience and growing anger of Charles. The Prince paid no courteous attention to the arguments of his chief military adviser, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the space below being occupied by a great net-work of exposed roots, some of them a foot or two in thickness, and others varying in size all the way down to mere threads. The freshets which had washed the earth away from the roots, had piled a great mass of drift-wood against one side of them. Sam made a careful examination of the place, and then all went to work. The two boys so disposed some of the drift-wood as to make a sort of covered passage from the edge of the bank to the two trees whose roots were interlaced with each other. ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... still more uncompromising. We of the Free Churches must not be astonished if, as a result of definite and positive teaching within other walls and a lack of such teaching within our own, the people drift away from us. To build up the Church we must preach the Church. She needs the sense ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... others who have delved for diamonds on the South African veldt. Some have ridden range on the plains of Texas and others on the plains of Queensland. When, in the recreation huts, the phonograph plays "Home, Sweet Home" the thoughts of some drift to nipa-thatched huts on flaming tropic islands, some think of tin-roofed wooden cottages in the environs of Sydney or Melbourne, others of staid, old-fashioned, red-brick houses in Halifax ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... black-faced herdwicks on Hindscarth, have broke the fences, and the red drift of 'em is down in the barrowmouth of the pass," ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... article compel me to glance hastily over succeeding epochs in a career with the main drift of which the civilised world is already familiar. After saving Marseilles to the Republic, by a series of actions alternating between desperate valour and brilliant strategy, I went to Paris to report on the great event. Calling on the official ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... directly in it, but keeping just a little to one side, wallowing heavily as he went, for a foot and a half of light, fluffy snow had fallen the day before, and the walking was very bad. Presently he caught sight of a little piece of scarlet cloth fastened to a stick that stood upright in a drift. It ought to have been another warning to him, but it only roused his curiosity to a still higher pitch, as the trapper knew it would. He sat down in the snow and considered. The thing didn't really ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... tired of for ever exercising their prerogatives, or, being awakened as it were from sleep, and having not yet assumed them, abandon the helm, even as a mariner might be supposed to do, in a wide sea, and in a time when no disaster could be apprehended, and leave the vessel of the mind to drift, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... In all the drilling that had taken place before the trial, neither the counsel nor witnesses had thought of what questions might come up in the cross-examination, and now, not seeing the drift of the question, the witness seemed a little bewildered, and the counsel for the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... "You might drift around by there if it ain't too much out of your way, and see if he's got a man on the ranch," Lone suggested. "But you better not touch anything in the house, Swan. The coroner'll likely appoint somebody to look around and see if he's got any folks to send his stuff ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... an unfavourable year or two would form the foot of the upper wall. This seems more probable, from the loose constitution of the floor at the point where it joins the stones, as if it were there only made up of drift and debris, while the part of the floor nearer the foot of the wall is solid ice. It has been suggested to me that possibly water accumulates in the time of greatest thaw to a very large extent in the lower parts of the cave, and ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally made minute inquiries as to her sensations, and whether the confinement of the rooms, and the temperature of the atmosphere, agreed with her. These questions had such a particular drift, that Georgiana began to conjecture that she was already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed in with the fragrant air, or taken with her food. She fancied, likewise—but it might be altogether fancy—that there ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... into a steady gallop and the fields began to drift by under us, and a great wind arose full of fresh breath. We left the clay lands where the bracken grows and came to a valley at the edge of the chalk. As we went down into it we saw the fox go up the other side like a shadow that ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... in a dory, if need be, and armed only with a shotgun, to avenge that outrage. To hear Captain Sam orate concerning the neglect of duty of which he considered the United States government guilty was an experience, interesting or shocking, according to the drift of one's ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... queer story,' said Cotgrave, handing back the green book to the recluse, Ambrose. 'I see the drift of a good deal, but there are many things that I do not grasp at all. On the last page, for example, what ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... doing lately, seeing next to nothing of one another because the house has been converted into a surplus club for half the fellows in the station; and if you are going to spend your time 'getting inside' other men with a view to painting their portraits, we shall simply drift apart as the Nortons did. Conditions of life out here make that sort of thing fatally easy to fall into. But I tell you plainly that if there is to be no attempt at amalgamation, if we are each to go our own way, then—we must lead separate lives. I would not even ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... wall on that side of us, low but thick and well defined. The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field, with the heads of the distant tors as rocks borne upon its surface. Holmes's face was turned towards it, and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift. ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... as I lay on the prairie, And looked at the stars in the sky, I wondered if ever a cowboy Would drift to that sweet ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... spears, emerged from the wood, and threw themselves upon it to take possession of it. They would have succeeded with ease, had not the crew of the boat out at sea perceived them, and cried out to the lads to let it drift with the current. They were pursued so closely by the enemy, that the master of the pinnace discharged his gun over ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... no remarks. We next came to a cask of salt provisions, washed high and dry at least twenty feet above the usual high-water mark: the sea had evidently not been near this for a long period as it was half covered with drift sand which must have taken some time to accumulate. This Coles easily accounted for, it was merely the cask which had been lost from the wreck of the Paul Pry. I still thought ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... battalions nearest the flanks kept edging outwards, the ones on the right towards their own right and the ones on the left towards their own left, to prevent themselves from being overlapped by the long red line of fire and steel when the two fronts closed. But this drift outwards, while not enough to reach Wolfe's flanks, was quite enough to make a fatal gap in Montcalm's centre. Thus the British, at the final moment, took the French on both the outer and both the inner flanks as ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... a foreign service, and does not understand an English mariner! The worst that can come, after all, of too much top-hamper, is to cut away, and let it drift with the scud. May I make bold to ask, judge, if the courts have done any thing, of late, concerning ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... one poem as typical of the best that is in Whitman— and what a splendid best!—it shall be "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," from the book called Sea-drift. I declare that I can never read this poem without profound emotion; it is here that he fully justifies his claim to atmosphere and suggestiveness; the nesting birds, the sea's edge, with its "liquid rims and wet sands"—what a magical phrase!—the ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rocky forehead in the rear, among a waste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture. The village was picturesque, in the variety of its edifices, though all were rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, of drift-wood, there a row of boat- houses, and beyond them a two-story dwelling, of dark and weather- beaten aspect, the whole intermixed with one or two snug cottages, painted white, a sufficiency of pigsties, and a shoemaker's shop. Two grocery-stores stand opposite each other, in the centre ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the others had gone, and very soon covered my hut two feet deep. I melted the blubber of the whale in the boat's baler, for we had towed the fish ashore. The first potful or two I boiled over a few bits of drift-wood. After that it was easy enough, as I unravelled some of the boat's rope, dipped it in the hot blubber, and made a store of big candles. There was a lot of meat left on the sea-cows, so I cut that ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... as his head emerged from the drift, looking like an animated snow-ball, "and I would have reached there, too, if I ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... had not finished the story. We are creatures of OUTSIDE INFLUENCES—we originate NOTHING within. Whenever we take a new line of thought and drift into a new line of belief and action, the impulse is ALWAYS suggested from the OUTSIDE. Remorse so preyed upon the Infidel that it dissolved his harshness toward the boy's religion and made him come to regard it with tolerance, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... branch of the profession into which I have chanced to fall is a very low one,—and I do not know whether, if the world were before me again, I would allow myself to drift into an ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... suggested to him a new and wholly different life from that which he had led hitherto, and he felt within himself no power or inclination to go on with his old ways. These thoughts he also brooded over in silence, and let himself drift in a ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... rock which lay in the water. He believed the rock would prevent their floating backward with the current, and so it did. They clung to this anchorage until the water resumed its proper direction, when they allowed the raft to drift on. ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... eddies under the low bank, and close up again, and others open, and spin, and disappear. Great circles of muddy surface would boil up from hundreds of feet below, and gloss over, and seem to float away,—sink, come back again under water, and with only a soft hiss surge up again, and again drift off, and vanish. Every few minutes the loamy bank would tip down a great load of earth upon its besieger, and fall back a foot,—sometimes a yard,—and the writhing river would press after, until at ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... cream-white. About it a number of ring-doves and snow-white pigeons were perched or flying; and beyond the lawn he could see the dark veranda of a low house, covered by wistaria just going out of flower. A drift of scent from late lilacs, and new-mown grass, was borne out to him, together with the sound of a mowing-machine, and the humming of many bees. It was beautiful here, and seemed, for all its restfulness, to have something of that flying quality he so loved about her face, about the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... become Roman Catholic or infidel. They cannot drift away from the safe moorings of evangelical truth, unless the churches to which they are tied up give way. The churches control these missions forever. Local management in this work often means mismanagement, on account of the peculiar surroundings in which these ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... after him. And so it was, when summer days were dull and tedious, these two could muse and doze the hours away together; and when the nights were long, and dark, and deep, and beautiful, they could drift out in the noon-light of the stars, and with "the soft complaining flute" and "warbling lute," "lay the pipes," as John would say, for their enduring popularity with the girls! And it was immediately subsequent ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... displacement. They were, so to speak, crowded out. All day long he was for ever forcing his attention upon some matter or other to the exclusion of the lady. A thousand times she came tripping—always he fobbed her off. Considering how much of late he had been content to drift with the stream, the way in which his mind bent to the oars was amazing. His output of mental energy was extraordinary. Will rode Brain with a bloody spur. When night came, the man ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... In the old glacial drift of Scotland the relics of man are found along with those of the fossil elephant. This carries us back to that time above referred to, when a large portion of Europe was covered with ice, which had edged down from the polar regions to southerly latitudes, and, as glaciers, descended from ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... didn't go back over the Pacific, perhaps because of the prevailing westerlies. After the Seattle incident she climbed to a great altitude above the Rockies, apparently using an updraft with very little wing-motion. There was no means of calculating her weight, or mass, or buoyancy. Dead or injured, drift might have carried her anywhere within one or two hundred miles. Then she seemed to be following the line of the Platte and the Missouri. By the end of the day she was circling interminably over the huge complex of St. Louis, ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... bodies of water is similar to navigation on the seas themselves, except that the indispensable sextant of the mariner is of little use in the air, owing to the high speed of travel and the fact that allowances have to be made for the drift of the machine when side-winds are blowing—an extremely difficult ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... white With flannelled oarsmen oft delight To drift upon thy streams, and float In Salter's most luxurious boat; In buff and boots the cheery knight Returns ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... Winnipeg tomorrow there would be an end to all that delightful comradeship with Jane which during the years of his long and broken college course had formed so large a part of his life, and which during the past winter had been closer and dearer than ever. Their lives would necessarily drift apart. Other friends would come in and preoccupy her mind and heart. Jane had the art of making friends and of "binding her friends to her with hooks of steel." He had been indulging the opinion that of all her friends he stood first with her. Even if he were right, he could not ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the thing. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapour streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, half-way up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... evening instead, my first tolerably quiet evening in this new life, this new system of ours for a summer sojourn. The waves of my nomadic life drift me on strange shores, and sometimes, as I mount them, I dream of a home, quiet and beautiful, that home which allures all young minds and gradually fades into the sad features of such households as we see. In all my experience I think of three happy homes where the impression ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... amount of sail carried will depend entirely upon the weather conditions. A yacht should never be overloaded with sail. If she has more than she can comfortably carry she will heel over and drag her sails in the water. Not only this, but she will also drift to leeward when beating to windward. When sailing a new boat, her best trim for various points of sailing and force of wind must be found by painstaking experiments. The boat should always be sailed with her sails as slack as she will ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... them, and on cutting them down, large quantities were easily obtained. Mr. Peale shot several birds, among which was a Nicobar pigeon; some interesting plants and corals were also added. On the island a large quantity of drift-wood was found, which with that which is growing affords ample supplies of fuel for ships. No fresh water is to be had, except by digging, the island being but a ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... and some from Natal were received. On February 7, I left Wynberg, following Lord Roberts up to my old quarters at Modder River, where I saw a few wounded men brought in from the engagements at Koodoosberg Drift. On Lord Roberts's departure for Bloemfontein he requested me to return to Wynberg to await the wounded who might be sent down from the fighting which might occur during his advance. I therefore had the disappointment of seeing the ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... the practice would not please his fastidious inclinations. Law had its objections. In fact, Mr. Lawrence had dropped into that dilettante state into which extreme cultivation, without genius or ambition, is apt to drift its possessor. He was nearing twenty-four now,—handsome, aristocratic, the pride of his family, and the distraction of young women in general. Invitations were showered upon him, and the delicate flattery society loves to use, ministered to ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... am quite happy, Sylvestre, and I owe my happiness to you, to her, and to others. I have done nothing myself to deserve happiness beyond letting myself drift on the current of life. Whenever I tried to row a stroke the boat nearly upset. Everything that others tried to do for me succeeded. I can't get over it. Just think of it yourself. I owed my introduction to Jeanne to Monsieur Flamaran, who drove me to call on her father; his friend; you ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "with infinite satisfaction he tries to justify his view of the case by urging that there is no other way of accounting for it; after the fashion of the philosophers of our own day, who conclude that certain flints found in the drift are the work of men, because the geologist does not see what else they can be." After this twist of meaning, the reviewer proceeds to say, and A. B. would certainly join him, "There is no need to combat any such mode of reasoning as this, because it would apply ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... devotions fluctuated between "that Pete-horse" and the latest female to cross his orbit. At the thought of George Drazk Zen laughed outright. She had played with him. She had made a monkey of him, and he deserved all he had got. It was not the first occasion upon which Zen had let herself drift with the tide, always sure of justifying herself and discomfiting someone by the swift, strong strokes with which, at the right moment, she reached the shore. Zen liked to think of herself as careering through life ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... nature that followed, the captive became the leader. The craft of the plains, the inherent instinct, the feeling which was more than eyesight became the only hope. One whole day to cover ten miles—an endless path of agony, in which Jim went down again and again, but came up blinded by snow and drift, and cut as with lashes by the angry wind. At the end of the ten miles was a Hudson's Bay Company's post and safety; and through ten hours had the two struggled towards it, going off at tangents, circling on their own tracks; but the Indian, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... experience, letters, fancy, art, And scored with runes of human joy and pain. Till six-and-sixty years he used his gift, His gift unparalleled, of laughter and tears, And left the world a high-piled, golden drift Of verse: to grow more golden with the years, Till the Great Silence fallen upon his ways Break into song, and he that ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... you open the wrong valve. We drift, as you say, towards—nay, over the open sea. As master of this balloon, I suggest that we descend within reasonable distance of the brig yonder; which, as I make out, is backing her sails; which, again, can only mean that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be wiser on all counts." And thereupon he asked her suddenly a question of which she did not see the drift. "It was Mrs. Adair, I imagine, who proposed this plan that I should come home to Guessens and that you should stay with her here across ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... his servants, until the impudence of Morris had made him lose his temper. Then he goes out into the garden to see if he can find some explanation to give Morris. The Duke, Smith, the Doctor, and the Secretary drift into the room, which is now tenanted by something impalpable but horrible. The Conjuror returns and clears the air with an exorcism. He has invented an explanation, which he goes out to give to Morris. Patricia ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... at the riverside passed by like so many dedicated lotus blossoms floating down the sacred stream. Some rainy afternoons I spent in a veritable frenzy, singing away old Vaishnava songs to my own tunes, accompanying myself on a harmonium. On other afternoons, we would drift along in a boat, my brother Jyotirindra accompanying my singing with his violin. And as, beginning with the Puravi,[50] we went on varying the mode of our music with the declining day, we saw, ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... secondary plays—at Troilus and Cressida, for instance, or Timon of Athens—to see at once how inveterate and malignant were the diseases to which the dramatic methods of the Elizabethans were a prey. Wisdom and poetry are intertwined with flatness and folly; splendid situations drift purposeless to impotent conclusions; brilliant psychology alternates with the grossest indecency and the feeblest puns. 'O matter and impertinency mixed!' one is inclined to exclaim at such a spectacle. And then one is blinded once more by the glamour of Lear ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... mental excitement by the criticisms on his Vienna performances that appeared in German papers. He does not weary of telling his friend about them, transcribing portions of them, and complaining of Polish papers which had misrepresented the drift and mistranslated the words of them. I do not wonder at the incorrectness of the Polish reports, for some of these criticisms are written in as uncouth, confused, and vague German as I ever had the misfortune to turn into English. One cannot ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Pierce's answers became more hesitating as she saw the drift of Mr. Monroe's questions. Clearly, she was trying to shield Florence, if necessary, at the expense of ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... circular lake, seemingly altogether shut in by the elsewhere dense forest, made its appearance. There were remains of a log shelter near the shore on the left, and, between it and the somewhat muddy beach, Toner lit a fire of drift wood to drive away the flies which followed the party out of the bush. The punt was soon discovered moored to a stake, a punt with three seats flush with the gunwales, one each fore and aft, and one in ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... together at Mainz to investigate the students' societies at the universities. The commission was empowered to arrest any subject in any German State. Special police commissioners were appointed at the universities, whose duty it was to keep a strict eye on the drift of the professor's teachings. Any professor or student expelled from a university was not to be employed by any other German government. The students' societies were suppressed, at least to all outward appearance. The poet Binzer ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... black units usually provided for separate assignment and segregated facilities. As late as February 1949, the commandant made clear he had no intention of allowing the corps to drift into a de facto integration policy. When, for example, it came to his attention that some commanders were restricting appointment of qualified black marines to specialist schools on the grounds that their commands lacked ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... running before the wind Jack had never seen before. The sea stood up round about them like a deep snow-drift, although it was almost calm. But they hadn't gone very far before a nasty piping began in the air. The birds shrieked and made for land, and the sea rose like a black ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... cigarette at the fire. "I was settin' on a crazy bronc', holdin' his head up so he couldn't go to buckin'—outside a little old adobe down in Yuma, Arizona, then," he explained, glancing at the girl. "Did you ever drift away complete, like that, jest from some little old trick to make ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... like a sheet of dazzling silver, dotted with boats; every skylight, every point of glass or metal on the roofs, flashes in the sun, and, gazing down from that corner in the sky, one sees the visible morning hymn of the city—a drift from thousands of house chimneys of delicate unraveling skeins of white-blue smoke lifting from those human dwellings like aerial spirits. It is the song of humanity rising, the song of the ritual ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Harry the gift of Heaven, that a whole pack of clouds should drift above them at that moment, deepening the obscurity and making the pursuing boat, although it was so near, a shapeless form in the mist. He could not see the features of the man, but he was able to discern his large and powerful figure, and he noticed the rhythmic manner in which ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... colony room of the Empire Club in London. The colony room is on the second floor and looks out over Piccadilly Circus. It was at an hour when nobody is in an English club. There was a drift of dirty fog outside. Such nights ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... habit-forming drugs. If, after the fast is over, the individual lives moderately and simply, and is fully determined not to return to the use of these drugs, a permanent cure will be the reward. However, it is very easy to drift back into the old habits. A permanent cure requires that there be no compromise, no saying, "I shall do it this time, but never again." Once the old habit is resumed, it is almost certain to ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... realizing it, her school-fellows were influenced by her pleasant, sunny, unselfish ways. She had set a fashion of doing little kind, considerate, helpful things, which many of the rest began unconsciously to follow. There are always a large number of girls in a school who drift along without any special aim, yet are ready enough to respond to anyone who draws out the best that is in them. If one companion succeeds in avoiding little evils and inconsistencies, keeping her temper, and showing forbearance and self-restraint in all the small daily ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... as to where the miserable object was to be found. All we could do was to carry the glass to No. 9, to train it there on the meridian of No. 9, and take turns every night in watching the field, in the hope that this child of sorrow might drift across it in its path of ruin. But, though everything else seemed to drift by, from east to west, nothing came from south to north, as we expected. For a whole month of spring, another of autumn, another of summer, and another of winter, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... kitchen with Wanda, who daily tries to pretend there hadn't been any pudding left over, and then treads heavily back again to her bedroom, and shuts herself in till four o'clock for her Mittagsruhe; and the other boarders drift away one by one, and I run out for a walk to get unstiffened after having practised all the morning, and as I walk I think over what they've been saying, and try to see things from their ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... perfectly fresh, brand-new, great men, and in view of the fact, in a world like this that geniuses in it are almost invariably, and, as a matter of course, lost or mislaid until they are dead, much the best and safest thing that Trustees of Idealism could do was to watch the drift of public opinion in the different nations, to adopt the course of noting carefully what the world thought were really its great men, and then (at a discreet and dignified distance, of course) tagging the public, and wherever they saw a crowd, a rather nice crowd, round ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 16th we proceeded eighteen miles up the Saskatchewan. Its banks are low, covered with willows, and lined with drift timber. The surrounding country is swampy and intersected by the numerous arms of the river. After passing for twenty or thirty yards through the willow thicket on the banks of the stream we entered an extensive marsh, varied only by a distant line of willows which ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... to see the drift of Grim's purpose. He had established the fact that the French secret agent was already on the track of the letter, and that in turn explained why he had not seized Yussuf Dakmar and put him in jail. It was better to use the man, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... She stands, alone and weak, while more and more The unknown forces grow and cast their blight, Till all the past is lost in one dark night; Unto the woman's lot her life is cast, And like a dream the girlish days drift past. ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... is sweet; For the white drift shalt thou meet, Kind and cold-cheeked and mine own, Wrapped about with deep-furred gown In the broad-wheeled chariot: Then the north shall spare us not; The wide-reaching waste of snow Wilder, lonelier yet shall grow As the reddened sun falls ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... who had exhibited the scalp of his ill-fated servant. For a moment the officer fixed his eyes firmly and unshrinkingly on those of the savage, seeking to reconcile the contradiction that existed between his dress and features and the purity of the English he had just spoken. The other saw his drift, and, impatient of the scrutiny, again repeated, as he fiercely pulled the strong leathern thong by which the prisoner now found himself secured to ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... and embosomed the world's destiny. It was the most original as well as the most godlike of human thoughts. The ship may have been copied from the nautilus, or from the embarked squirrel trimming his tail to the breeze; or it may have been blundered upon by the savage mounted on a drift-log, accidentally making a sail of his sheepskin cloak while extending his arms to keep his balance. But the cart cannot be regarded either as a plagiarism from Nature, or the fruit of accident. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... turnip soup. It would have been so nice with a few peppers. The navigation of the river was dangerous during high water. One night, while we were up in the second canal, the river rose several feet and was booming as we came out into it, and the strong current carried our boat against a drift on a small overflowed island, and came near sinking or capsizing it. Then the only way we could get off was down over a rough, shoaly slough, where she went like a bucking broncho. The next boat after us was manned by Alabamians, and they went ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... well as I knew it; difficult to reflect that his dreams at night were not of the varying results of some late scheme, nor of white shoulders at the opera, nor the mood of the Ninth Ward, nor of the drift of business, but of some farm-house's front yard in mid-summer with a boy aiming a long shot-gun at a red-winged poacher in a cherry tree, or that he saw, in sleep, the worn jambs beside the old-fashioned fireplace where, winter mornings, he kicked on his frozen boots, and the living-room ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... he continued, "so that we might be private if we wished to have a little preliminary chat; not that beef-steak pudding is a great help to conversation. But when people have a certain business in view, their talk is sure to drift towards ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Machiavelli reveal a mind based on the same deeps as Khoeleth, brooding on the same world-wide things. Like him, he looks out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms; like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its circles, sov[)a]v sov[e]v, and returneth to the place whence ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... The Drift.—In Hertfordshire, as elsewhere, the strata whose names are so familiar to geologists do not form the existing surface of the ground. For the origin of this we go back to a comparatively recent period, when disintegration was busily ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... half-decayed tree-trunks; there heaps of rocks lifted their mossy tops in the path. And ever, as they went, the roar of the rapids followed, while through the foliage could be seen the hurrying waters, pouring over rocks, stealing amid drift-logs, eddying in chasms, and shooting in white lines of ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... custom; for what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so superstitiously pursued of some, as though no error could be acquainted with custom." And in his Preface he thus states his motives: "God that knoweth my heart is witness, and you that read my book shall see, that my drift and purpose in this enterprise tendeth only to these respects. First, that the glory and power of God be not so abridged and abased as to be thrust into the hand or lip of a lewd old woman, whereby the work of the Creator should be attributed to the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... just started out to learn what had become of you when we met Mr. Smithson, and he advised us to return to our camp, as he rather expected the gentleman he was looking for would drift that way. Awful glad you got through that terrible storm safe, old ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... six weeks all but a day since we left London. We might have reached Hopedale three days ago, for we were within eighty miles. But a dense fog made it impossible to venture among the islands, where drift ice might be added to the dangers of rocks. So we have been driving to and fro for the last three days and nights over a high sea, studded with icebergs hidden from us by a thick white mist, which made ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... Priscilla's presence the evening of the day when he drove her before him while Richard Travers implored her to hold to her ideal. Fortunately, youth spared Priscilla from a full understanding of her father's words, but she caught the drift of his thought. She was convinced that he feared greatly for her here on earth, and had grave doubts as to her soul's ultimate salvation. There was that within her, so he explained, which, unless curbed and corrected, would cast her into eternal damnation! ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... grew, for a new and terrible source of danger had revealed itself. The chains by which the old ship was moored were beginning to give way. If that happened, she might drift, a mass of flame, against any one of the warships lying ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... the weather today?" I immediately saw the drift of the cunning old Katchiba; he wanted professional advice. I replied, that he must know all about it, as he was a regular rainmaker. "Of course I do," he answered, "but I want to know what YOU think of it." "Well," I ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... will tell you: "He that walketh in the footsteps of that faith of Abraham." By footsteps are meant the works the actions, the holy endeavors of Abraham; and where those footsteps are there is the faith of Abraham. So that the point of instruction hence is thus much (which indeed is the main drift of the apostle). ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... or stay jest as we wish. All of my family stay on the place and he pay us half as shares on all we make. Pretty soon the whitefolks begin to cut down on the shares, and the renters git only a third and some less, and the Negroes begin to drift out to other places, but old Master stick to the halves a year or so after that. Then he come ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... debates or the moot courts, for he was so shabbily dressed he felt he would not be welcome. It was undoubtedly these humiliating experiences, combined with certain of his studies and reading, that caused him to drift into an atheistic train of thought. Working hard, living poor, desiring so much, yet on all sides he saw boys with all the opportunities he longed for, utterly indifferent to them. He saw boys spending in riotous dissipation the money that would have meant so much to him. He saw them recklessly ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... reason and justice insist that, whatever the delays which the storms or accidents may cause, the head of the vessel shall be consistently pointed towards the distant port, and that come what will she shall not be allowed to drift aimlessly hither and thither on the chance of fetching up somewhere ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... hunt and fish. Many have learned to till the ground, and we gather berries and wood for the winter. The other side of the inlet, the tree-trunks drift from the Yukon and are stranded on the islands, so there is plenty for firewood. But upon our island the women gather a vine and dry it. They collect seaweed for food in the early spring, and dry it ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet
... her life had she imagined that she could drift so far as she had drifted in those few seconds. She was still trembling as she led the way back to the church. She could hear him treading after her, and as she thought of him her heart smote her. She felt as if she had hurt him—oh, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... azaleas are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue, and the drifted clouds in it are washed clean of their London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these beautiful women begin to appear about the time when you may have bidden yourself abandon the hope of them for that day. Some drift from the carriages that draw up on the drive beside the sacred close where they are to sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others glide on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles left afar, perhaps that they may give themselves the effect of coming informally. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... navigate much and long, and meet many storms, because he had not the written experience of other travelers to guide him. He had only a few bits of drift-wood not common to his home growth, to cause him to move as he did. But there was a fact, a bit of wood that did not grow ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... minutes and the water was not above their knees. They could see the low shore now at a distance of but a few hundred yards ahead, and untying the ropes under their arms they let the spar drift on, and waded forward until they reached the land. There was a long mud bank yet to cross, and exhausted as they were it took them a long time to do this; but at last they came to a sandy bank rising sharply some ten feet above the flat. They threw themselves down ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... language, the works of their forefathers, which were commonly known in poems in the mother tongue. In the footsteps of these poems, being as it were classic books of antiquity, I have trod; and keeping true step with them as I translated, in the endeavour to preserve their drift, I have taken care to render verses by verses; so that the chronicle of what I shall have to write, being founded upon these, may thus be known, not for a modern fabrication, but for the utterance of antiquity; since this present work promises not a trumpery dazzle of language, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the flames and listening to the crackle of the wood: and then suddenly they heard a tiny sound and looking at the place where Snegourka had been standing, they saw nothing but a little snow-drift fast melting. And they called and called, "Snegourka! Snegourka!" thinking she had run into the forest. But there was no answer. Snegourka had disappeared from this life as mysteriously as she had come into it. Adapted by ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... only for cooking, became their forge and oven all in one. For here, close to a window where the smoke could drift out, Stern built a ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... now. Thoughts of an almond tree flowering in a white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting a thin shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the sting of white dust in an east wind; a drift of ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... would equally resist each other, and the stone would therefore keep place. A couple of wedges were also, in like manner, pitched at the top of each groove; the dormant wedge, or that with the point upward, being held in the hand, while the drift-wedge, or that with its point downward, was driven with a hammer. The whole of what remained above the upper surface of the stone was then cut off with a saw or chisel: and generally, a couple of thin wedges were driven very moderately ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... stood near the inner door of the hall. In a minute or two he saw her come, slowly with the crowd, her hand on Arthur's arm, her eyes anxiously searching for Richard. The moment they found him, her course took a drift toward him, and her face grew white as his, for she saw more plainly that he was ill. They edged nearer and nearer; their hands met through the crowd; their letters were exchanged, and without a word they parted. As Barbara reached the door, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... by me as teacher, went toward the purchase of the home now owned and occupied by us. My good friend, who labors to-day in Beaufort, N.C., having helped me through college and seen me launch upon life's tide, seemed to say, "My boy, do not drift, but steer straight for heaven's port, and do unto others as I have done unto you." For me, her prayers still ascend, unto me, her wise counsel still comes, and upon me, her benedictions ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... In drift-mining the rich gravel is covered by hard lava rock thrown up by some old volcanic outburst. Tunnels are driven by blasting with dynamite, or by drilling under the rock to reach the gravel which usually ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... Great Swamp was led by a wrinkled old cow, wise beyond belief. Scrag we called her. She would take the herd in to the bedding-ground by the river, to a landing-point on the opposite side, never twice the same, and drift noiselessly through the canebrake, choosing blowy hours when the swish of cane over woolly backs was like the run of the wind. Days when the marsh would be full of tapirs wallowing and wild pig rootling and fighting, there might be hundreds feeding within sound of you and not a hint ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... come into the world with different perceptions; but do not let us drift into argument, not ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... be reinforced by Ricketts, and was then ordered to fall back on Front Royal. Reinforcements were ordered to Romney, to Harper's Ferry, and to Winchester; and McDowell, who kept his head throughout, struggled in vain to reunite his scattered divisions. Divining the true drift of the Confederate strategy, he realised that to protect Washington, and to rescue McClellan, the surest method was for his own army corps to march as rapidly as possible to the Chickahominy. But his pleadings were disregarded. Lincoln and Stanton had not yet discovered that the best defence ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... building. The place was desolate with the desolation of autumn. Through the funereal arch he saw the sunset barred by a network of naked branches, while about him the darkening lawn was veiled with the melancholy drift of the leaves. The only sound of life came from a brood of turkeys settling to roost ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... problem that our conversation had suggested: the choice of a vocation. The proposition of the misguided Flynn had made me aware of the fact that I was already letting my charge drift toward the maws of the great unknown which began just beyond the Wall without a plan of life save that he should be a "gentleman." It occurred to me with alarming suddenness that the term "gentleman" was that ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... vegetable matter in the marshes, through which we poked the boat-staves without finding bottom: they were for the most part formed of decomposed grass roots, with occasionally leaves, but no quantity of moss or woody plants. Along the courses of the greater streams drift timber and various organic fragments are no doubt imbedded, but as there is no current over the greater part of the flooded surface, there can be little or no accumulation, except perhaps of old canoes, or of such vegetables as grow on the spot. The waters are dark-coloured, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... inn, with its curiously painted signboard, has its own story to tell, of the old coaching days, and of the great people who used to travel along the main roads, and were sometimes snowed up in a drift just below "The Magpie," which had always good accommodation for travellers, and stabling for fifty horses. All was activity in the stable yard when the coach came in; the villagers crowded round the inn doors to see the great folks from London who were regaling themselves with ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... some of the most beautiful, though not the largest, specimens of calcareous spar known to exist. The lime in these localities being in most instances perfectly pure, the stalactites, to the length of three feet sometimes, are as free from coloring as icicles. Sometimes the miners' drift (which compared with the Mammoth Cave is as a rabbit's burrow to a railway tunnel) is opened into small, low-roofed caves; and in these, in addition to the translucent stalactites, there are little hollows in the floor covered with thin sheets of protocarbonate of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... campaign has reopened with a violent speech from Hunt denouncing the whole thing as a delusion; that the people begin to find out how they are humbugged, and that as it will make nothing cheaper they don't care about it. The man's drift is not very clear whether the Bill is really unpalatable at Preston or whether he wants to go further directly. At the same time John Russell announced some alterations in the Bill, not, as he asserted, trenching upon its principle, but, as the Opposition declares, altering it altogether. On ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... couple of shrill, feminine shrieks. Lavretzky and Liza caught fewer than the others; this, probably, resulted from the fact that they paid less attention than the rest to their fishing, and allowed their floats to drift close inshore. The tall, reddish reeds rustled softly around them, in front of them the motionless water gleamed softly, and their conversation was soft also. Liza stood on a small raft; Lavretzky sat on the inclined trunk of a willow; Liza ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... come into Amaryllis' brain; she felt how limited had been all her thoughts and standpoints in life. She had been willing to drift on without speculation as to the goal to be reached. Indeed, even now, had she any definite goal? She looked at the Russian's strong, rugged face, his inscrutable eyes narrowed and gazing ahead—of what was he thinking? Not ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... smothering, twisting, laughing, stumbling, staggering, yet saved alive by that man of the moment Mandeville, until half-way down the shed and the long box-car train they brought up on a pile of ordnance stores and clung like drift in a flood. And at every twist and stagger Anna said in her heart a speech she had been saying over and over ever since the start from Callender House; a poor commonplace speech that must be spoken though she perished for shame of it; that must be darted out just at the right last instant ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... of pure cold white, again rose up before them, and a few moments brought them close beside it. A venerable building—grey, even in the midst of the hoary landscape. An ancient sun-dial on the belfry wall was nearly hidden by the snow-drift, and scarcely to be known for what it was. Time itself seemed to have grown dull and old, as if no day were ever to displace ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... on my hunting-shirt, I picked up my rifle and drew a bead on the distant figure. The man was an Indian and was allowing the canoe to drift. But why should the turkey-buzzards follow him? As I pondered over this problem and waited to learn whether he be friendly or hostile, there came the spang of a rifle from my side of the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... were come far out into the main, once more the sea waxed wondrous troubled, and a storm arose with so great drift of snow, that none might see the stem from the stern; and they shipped seas, so that they must be ever a-baling. ...
— The Story Of Frithiof The Bold - 1875 • Anonymous
... her head, like one imprisoned in a sand drift, not to be crossed in any direction, but closing in and weighing down. She was in a pitfall, overpowered like Gratian had been, subjugated, soon to be put to the yoke and compelled to draw steadily the harrow of transcendental politics. Her caprices, faults, fancies, duplicities, wiles, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... were so far from Corinna's thoughts that they seemed to drift to her from some distant point in space, out of the world beyond the garden and the black brows of the cedars. They were as meaningless as the wind that brought them, or the whirring of the white moth at the window. Beneath her vacant ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... some shady thorn-trees. I resolved to give him battle, and rode forth with my double-barrelled Westly Richards rifle, followed by men leading the dogs. Present, who was one of the party, carried his roer, no doubt to perform wonders. The wind blew up the river; I accordingly held up to seek a drift, and crossed a short distance above where the buffalo lay. As we drew near the spot, I observed the lion sitting on the top of the bank, exactly where he had been ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... succeeded another in changeless iteration. The lake was a solid floor of gray ice as far as one could see. Along the shore between the breakwaters the ice lay piled in high waves, with circles of clear, shining glass beyond. A persistent drift from the north and east, day after day, lifted the sheets of surface ice and slid them over the inner ledges. At night the lake cracked and boomed like a battery of powerful guns, one report starting another ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... shouldn't have let their words drift thus far and she knew it. Also at this point she should have diverted the conversation. But she remained silent, aware of an indefinite pleasure in the vague excitement which had ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... strained and saw that he had come away a little. He tried again and again. There was a little more distance gained. He tried to build the picture of the operating-room in his mind and while he was doing this a flash of Vivian exploded his mind. With that quick image, he felt himself free to drift downward. ...
— The Alternate Plan • Gerry Maddren
... or to your sisters more. Should you fail to win the prince's love, so that he leaves father and mother for your sake, and lays his hand in yours before the priest, an immortal soul will never be granted you. On the same day that he marries another your heart will break, and you will drift as sea-foam on the water.' 'So let it be,' said the little mermaid, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... answers with a paradox of conscious power, which commands a seeming impossibility, and therein prophesies endowment that will make it possible. Has not the Church ever since been but too often faithless enough to let the multitudes drift away to 'the cities and villages round about,' and there, amid human remedies for their sore needs, 'buy themselves,' with much expenditure, a scanty provision? Are we not all tempted to shuffle off responsibility ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... at Nantes, they became aware of the Lady Sybilla riding towards them on her palfrey of white. She would have passed them without speech, with her head downcast and her eyes fixed upon the dank ground with its covering drift ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... it was the malady which was fraught with danger; but it was not! it was the convalescence, for the stronger Jehan grew, the weaker Bertha became, and so weak that she allowed herself to drift into that Paradise the gates of which Jehan had opened for her. To be brief, she loved him more and more. But in the midst of her happiness, always mingled with apprehension at the menacing words of Fallotte, and tormented by ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... silent reproach to the step-mother, I fancy, for she left no stone unturned to rid herself of the troublesome grown up daughter. She tried every means, threw out hints, until at last Lizzie perceived her drift. Even her father seemed restrained and annoyed by her presence; and when she proposed to him that she should do something now for herself, in the way of support, he made no opposition; on the contrary, seemed relieved, saying the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the hollows were full of the tree-fern; the grass had little white and purple flowers in it. At the valley-bottom a little stream, that would be a river after the first rains, wimpled over sandstone boulders, the barbel rose at flies. There was a drift lower down. It was all the goaded, worn-out oxen could do to stay the huge creaking waggons down the steep bank, and drag them over the river-bed of sand and boulders, through the muddied, churned-up water that they were dying ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Quixote" a sad book, preaching a pessimist view of life, argues a total misconception of its drift. It would be so if its moral were that, in this world, true enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule and discomfiture. But it preaches nothing of the sort; its moral, so far as it can be said to have one, is that the spurious enthusiasm that is born of vanity ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
