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Drift   Listen
verb
Drift  v. t.  
1.
To drive or carry, as currents do a floating body.
2.
To drive into heaps; as, a current of wind drifts snow or sand.
3.
(Mach.) To enlarge or shape, as a hole, with a drift.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Drift" Quotes from Famous Books



... exposure of myself to the just obloquy and derision of the public; while, on the other hand, if I left him alone upon the wide world of ice, and dragged the tobaugan to town myself, the unfortunate brule must inevitably have stepped into some treacherous snow-drift or air-hole, and thus miserably perished. So I made up my mind for a camp on the ice; and, diverging from our course in the direction pointed out by the Indian, we soon arrived at the object indicated by him, which proved to be a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... but a blazed line runs part of the way, and for the rest you follow up the little brook that runs out of the pond. We stuck up our shelter in a hollow on the brook, half a mile below the pond, so that the smoke of our fire would not drift over the hunting-ground, and waited till five o'clock in the afternoon. Then we went up to the pond, and took our position in a clump of birch-trees on the edge of the open meadow that runs round the east shore. Just at dark Billy began to call, and it was beautiful. You know how it goes. Three ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... brief and strenuous. A young man and a young woman would be seen together constantly, would fall in love, would come to know each the other thoroughly. Then, with the mind and character and looks and moods of each fully revealed to the other, they would drift or fly in opposite directions, wholly disillusioned. Occasionally they found that they were really congenial, and either love remained or a cordial friendship sprang up. The modes of thought, inconceivable to Europeans or Europeanized Americans, ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips

... from her rude idyllic life, Are racy as the legends old By Chaucer or Boccaccio told; To her who keeps, through change of place And time, her native strength and grace, Alike where warm Sorrento smiles, Or where, by birchen-shaded isles Whose summer winds have shivered o'er The icy drift of Labrador, She lifts to light the priceless Pearl Of Harpswell's angel-beckoned girl. To her at threescore years and ten Be tributes of the tongue and pen, Be honor, praise, and heart thanks given, The loves of earth, the ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... in the first instance. It finds a true bill usually, and sends the cause down to be tried by judge and jury, who dispose of it. Actually the incompetence of a grand juror or two doesn't count, if the scandal be not too glaring. . . . But I see your drift. It will be a point for the other side, no matter how lunatic the document, that after perpetrating it he was still thought capable by the High ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... From King's Post, whilst visiting the new fortifications and the guns in their new positions all about it, I watched the Boers dragging two field guns hastily southward along the western track, perhaps to Springfield Drift, over the Tugela. Then a large body—500 or 600—galloped hurriedly ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... then 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 the ice-floor is formed ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... of gingerbread, Of nougat and of peppermints, The stall of toys where overhead Balloons of gay translucent tints Float on the breeze and drift and sway; Fruit of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various

... the Island is to a great extent overcome by the inhabitants collecting their fuel from the Gulf Stream, which brings drift wood in large quantities from Mexico, Virginia, the Caroline Islands, and even ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... 1843. The drift of Saunaka's queries seems to be this the religion of Pravritti is opposed to that of Nivritti. How is it that both have been created by the same Narayana. How is it that he has made some with dispositions to follow the one, and others with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... upon remembered glory. We cannot afford to drift. We reject the prospect of failure or mediocrity or an inferior quality of life for any person. Our Government must at the same time be both competent ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... "Even the necklace may drift to the surface in the eruption which is sure to take place in the near future," smiled Ned. "Now about Gaga," he continued. "Suppose you look around and see if you can't find a room in the old house which would not be used to-night, even if ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson

... city and earn my living. What chance have I?" And I felt like posting back an immediate answer and saying: "Stay where you are." I didn't do it, though, for I knew it would be useless. The child is bound to come, and come she will. And she will drift into a third-rate Chicago boarding-house, than which if there is anything meaner—let us pray! And if she is pretty she will have to carry herself like snow on high hills to avoid contamination. ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden

... Willard, as his head emerged from the drift, looking like an animated snow-ball, "and I would have reached there, too, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... had allowed the victorious army of Manassas to drift into a rabble while they wrangled for position, ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... going on doing nothing. Uncle Harry Danforth, his mother's brother, had looked after the Rushbrook estate for years, and had spared Arnold all possible trouble. He had given up all responsibilities, just because he chose to give up and let himself drift. But there are moments when a man wakes up to a sudden CONSCIOUSNESS that he has trifled with himself and his past. Had he come here to meet the touch of the vanished hand? There was a pause, and again the soft white wings ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney

... been covered on the shore by a layer of earth thrown up by the sea, and which was afterwards petrified? And if the deluge before mentioned had carried them to these parts of the sea, you might find these shells at the boundary of one drift but not at the boundary between many drifts. We must also account for the winters of the years during which the sea multiplied the drifts of sand and mud brought down by the neighbouring rivers, by washing down the shores; and if you chose to say that there ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... developing, the minerals of Great Slave Lake, but, above all, the inroad of gold-seekers by way of Edmonton. The latter was viewed with great mistrust by the Indians, the outrages referred to showing, like straws in the wind, the inevitable drift of things had the treaties been delayed. For, as a matter of fact, those now peaceable tribes, soured by lawless aggression, and sheltered by their vast forests, might easily have taken an Indian revenge, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... this brief journey, and had received no other explanation from the Right Bower, who led them, than that afforded by his mute example when he reached the race. Leaping into it without a word, he at once began to clear away the broken timbers and drift-wood. Fired by the spectacle of what appeared to be a new and utterly frivolous game, the men gayly leaped after him, and were soon engaged in a fascinating struggle with the impeded race. The Judge forgot his lameness in springing over a broken sluice-box; Union Mills forgot his whistle ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... whose voyage is on the track of the trade winds nevertheless needs more than dead reckoning for his course; he needs to take the sun at noon, to study the heavens at night, and to con his chart. To follow one's interior drift only is to sail the ocean without chart or compass. The sail that is wafted by the impulses of the divine Spirit in the interior life must have, besides, the guarantee of divine veracity in the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... not a young woman to let things drift. She had kept house for a whimsical, happy-go-lucky father since she was fourteen; mothered her beautiful young sister; and, at her father's death, two years before, had with quiet decision arranged her own life, wholly avoiding the discussion and the friction which ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker

... Rivet Law, 1871.*—As, from the drift of its proceedings, the royalist character of the Assembly began to stand out in unmistakable relief, there arose from republican quarters vigorous opposition to the prolonged existence of the body. Even before the signing of the Peace of Frankfort, May 10, 1871, there occurred ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal conquest, mingled with the hate and contempt for Western ideas, drift impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that there is in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree serve even the lowest interests of mankind—and certainly no ground ready for a revolution. The sin of the old European monarchies was not the absolutism ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... history which it must henceforth occupy. It is astonishing, however, that Mr. Wallace should have quoted the extract from the Origin of Species just given, as he has done on p. 412 of his Darwinism, without betraying any sign that he has caught its driftlessness—for drift, other than a desire to hedge, it assuredly has not got. The battle now turns on the question whether modifications of either structure or instinct due to use or disuse are ever inherited, or whether they are not. Can the effects ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... GERTRUDE agrees, and you tripped and fell down in the snow drift, and oh, grandfather, you ought to have seen him when he got up; he was a sight. ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp

... cried, "Give, give." By these events we had clearly turned the corner and were pacing backwards to pre-Union days, going back, back, and still further backward, to the conditions which prevailed in the old Republics, and (if a check is not applied) we shall steadily drift back to the days of the old Dutch East ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... slain than Sigi's prey; and this thing he much misliked, and he said that great wonder it was that a very thrall should out-do him in the hunting of deer: so he fell on him and slew him, and buried the body of him thereafter in a snow-drift. ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous

... ability acquired by each executive and workman, such as has been attained in our highly specialized manufacturing industries, many of which may be found in our neighboring states. The upbuilding of such organizations is only in its infancy. There is now a natural drift away from congested cities to adjacent states where plants and homes may be spread out ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness

... adventures, in which his stars are chiefly in fault for his liaisons, settles at last into an honourable lawgiver, a moral speaker on divorce bills, and possibly a subscriber to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. The author has not completed his design, but such appears to have been the drift of it, affording ample opportunities to unveil the foibles and follies of all sorts of men—and women too. It is generally supposed to contain much of the author's own experience, but still, with all its riant knowledge ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... I suppose he knows something of the nature of exchange. Dubourg was determined I should have one youngster at least about my hand who understood business. But I see his drift, and he shall find that I do so when he looks at the balance-sheet. Owen, let Clement's salary be paid up to next quarter-day, and let him ship himself back to Bourdeaux in his father's ship, which ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... Master, "requires a pure and clear background." "Then," said the other, "rules of ceremony require to have a background!" "Ah!" exclaimed the Master, "you are the man to catch the drift of my thought. Such as you may well introduce a discussion on ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... idea, either," commented the western lad. "I begin to see your drift, as the wind said to the snowstorm. You mean to build a sort of high platform ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker

... laws and institutions, and general measures of State, by calumniating the principal Authorities of the Kingdom. Hence, instead of gratitude and love, and confidence and hope, are resentment and envy, mistrust and jealousy, and hatred and rancour, inspired:—and the drift of all is, to impress the Body of the People with a belief that neither justice can be expected, nor benevolence hoped for, unless power be transferred to Persons least resembling those who now hold it; that is—to Demagogues ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... forward economic development from a lamentably low base. In December 2003, the World Bank, IMF, and UNDP were forced to step in to provide emergency budgetary support in the amount of $107 million for 2004, representing over 80% of the total national budget. Government drift and indecision, however, have resulted in ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... plumes of rocket smoke, and bringing food and fuel to its crew. And presently one of those panting small ships would refill its fuel tanks to the bursting point from the fuel other ships had brought—and yet the ship would have no weight. So it would drift away from the greater floating thing in space, and suddenly its rockets would spout flame and fumes, and it would head triumphantly out and away from Earth. And it would be the first vessel ever to ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... but to disperse the crowd, and so get rid of responsibility. He 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 for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... her seat in the stern of the boat. I pushed from shore into the current, and paddling rapidly to the middle of the foaming torrent, filled with drift-wood, threw the paddle overboard, and took my ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... my drift," said Anton. "I know, as I before said, that the papers are still extant, and I have reason to believe that you may discover their possessor. You can gain any information you may still want respecting them ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... sight is set for 547 yards and is not adjustable. When the leaf is raised four sights come into view. The extreme range sight for 2,850 yards at the top of the leaf is seldom used. The open sight at the upper edge of the drift slide is adjustable from 1,400 to 2,750 yards. To set it the upper edge of the slide is made to correspond with the range reading on the leaf, and the slide is then clamped with the slide screw. This sight also is seldom used. The open sight at the bottom ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department

... young fellow, a little deficient, perhaps, in strength of will, but very generally liked, and with the making of a fine man about him; and yet he was likely, from sheer easiness of temper and disinclination to settle down to anything, to drift with the stream till he ruined his life. That is how I read his character from what I have heard of him, and that being so, I think this complete break in his life may ultimately be of considerable ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty

... a plan of itself, and even into a guide to itself. This is especially true, as may be suggested in a moment, regarding the direction of the roads leading out of it. But anyhow, a man must decide which way he will leave the city; he cannot merely drift out of the city as he drifts out of the modern cities through a litter of slums. And there is no better way to get a preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gates in the memory. Suppose, for instance, that ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... wild-hissing surges holds debate, Plunging and struggling, till at last we see A spacious haven, sudden and serene And, high aloft, the twinkle of Portree. At once the winds are hushed, the moon is seen To free her face from cloudy drift, and fill With silver light the clefts ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... be knocked to pieces," she cried; for the pony, in the drift and scud, could scarcely be seen but for his helpless struggles. But the young man was half way toward him while she spoke, and she knelt upon the kelp, and clasped ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... diver rarely escaped without injury of some kind. With regard to the ordinary shark, however, our divers actually sought them. Their method of capturing them was almost incredible in its simplicity and daring. Three or four of our divers would go out in a boat and allow themselves to drift into a big school of sharks. Then one man, possessed of more nerve than the rest, would bend over the side and smartly prick the first one he came across with a spear taken out for the purpose. The moment ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... we found ourselves completely hemmed in by the ice, and our prospects looked cheerless indeed. A strong gale blew, during the whole forenoon, from the northeast, and drove large cakes of the drift against the rudder and counter with such violence that we all trembled for the consequences. Toward evening, the gale still blowing with fury, a large field in front separated, and we were enabled, by carrying a press of sail to force a passage through ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... took my fish-line and sat still as a mouse, while he looked up and down the river, and whistled to himself—when he got a good idea, I guess, for after he'd whistled some, he'd let the boat drift and make marks in his sketch-book. He was a nice man, but not used to little boys, I think, for he used awful big words, and didn't answer questions like Aunties and ...
— W. A. G.'s Tale • Margaret Turnbull

... I never had a pleasanter one, for Miss Rivers is, I think, an exceedingly agreeable companion," returned Durward, beginning to see the drift of her remarks. ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes

... country, hill and dale And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift O' the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... with the main body of the fleet about fourteen miles off, to make an attack. Failing in all these, and growing desperate in his zeal, especially as every hour of delay was enabling the French to recover themselves and rendering success less sure, he suffered his single frigate to drift towards the enemy. "I did not venture to make sail," wrote Lord Cochrane, in his very modest account of this daring exploit, "lest the movement might be seen from the flag-ship, and a signal of recall should defeat my purpose of making an attack with the Imperieuse; my object being to compel ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald

... blood in him, and, if he had been able, would have been a desperate poacher and black-fisher. Indeed, it has been reported that when he was young he sometimes "leistered a kipper, and made a shift to shoot a moorfowl i' the drift." He was uncommonly well made. I never saw a limb, loins, and shoulders so framed for immoderate strength. And, as Tom Purdie observed, "Faith, an he hadna' been crippled he wud ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various

... struck an immense snowdrift obliquely, but the fireman's side caught the brunt. As the powerful locomotive dove into the drift, the snow packed through the denuded window-frame at the fireman's seat like grain into a bin. A solid block of snow was formed under the terrific pressure of the compact. It lodged against the coal of the tender with a ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman

... made the 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 ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin

... Dart easily, "I ain't sure it was ninety-six. Might have been ninety-seven. Funny he ain't ever told you about me. Never mentioned, did he, how we got into a snow drift one time and had to eat our dogs and I got ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... Hollander Volunteers marched through Botha's Pass. In the centre the main column, under General Joubert's personal command, crossed Lang's Nek and moved forward via Ingogo. On the left a large commando advanced from Wakkerstroom via Moll's Nek and Wool's Drift. The object of all three columns was Newcastle, which was occupied on the night of the 14th, the central column having slept the previous night at Mount Prospect, General Colley's old camping-place. On Sunday an advance party of 1500 Boers, with artillery, pushed south of Ingagane, but the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... running, and there is no surplus, either for leisure or improvement. This was the outcome of a similar centralization of authority under Feudalism, and it shows itself in any organization that permits itself to drift into the ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing

... year, and the cattle like it, just a little of it, as well as we like a bit of broiled bacon for breakfast. There is a nice bit of beach, too,—real beach; but there are trees on it, and it looks friendly: not as if it were just made on purpose for wrecks to drift up on, like the big beaches: oh, but I hate a great, long sea-beach! There is a farm-house there, not two minutes' walk from this beach, where they always take summer boarders. In July it wouldn't be pleasant, because it is crowded; but now it will ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous

... doorway and see Harriet near the fireplace rocking and sewing. Sometimes she hums a little tune which I never confess to hearing, lest I miss some of the unconscious cadences. Let the wind blow outside and the snow drift in piles around the doorway and the blinds rattle—I have before me ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... asked you to keep an eye on Miss Malroy while he was away from home?" said the judge. Hicks, suspicious of the drift of his questioning, made no answer. "I suppose you told the house servants to keep her ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... very well said. Look you, sir, Enquire me first what Danskers are in Paris; And how, and who, what means, and where they keep, What company, at what expense; and finding, By this encompassment and drift of question, That they do know my son, come you more nearer Than your particular demands will touch it: Take you, as 'twere, some distant knowledge of him; As thus, 'I know his father and his friends, And in part him;—do ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... and fired at what, now here, now there, they conceived might be a moving object. The mist lay close to the river, like a pall. They fired and fired again. Other infantrymen, arriving, talked excitedly. "Thar!—No, thar! That's him, downs-tream! Fire!—Darn it! 'T was a piece of drift." Across the river, tall against the south, wreathed and linked by lianas of grape, showed, far withdrawn and shadowy, the trees of the Virginia shore. The rifles continued to blaze, but the mist held, and there came no answering scream of horse or cry ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... ours has this yellow bill at any season. Female — Similar in appearance. Range — Massachusetts to Maryland. Not common beyond 100 miles inland. (Native of northern Europe and Asia.) Migrations — Permanent resident, but flocks show some tendency to drift southward in winter. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties: Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... Don Carlos, whose story bears but little resemblance to that of St. Real's hero, we are not particularly concerned. The French Abbe's drift is to exalt the French princess and to give a telling picture of a pair of high-minded lovers who are brought to their death by a complicate intrigue begotten of jealousy, political hatred and religious fanaticism. After the death of Carlos the queen ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... this figure that lured him rose to her full height; I saw her in all her plume of a peacock, it was spotted with gold and green and citron dyes, she raised her arms upwards, her robe, semi-transparent, purple and starred over with a jewel lustre, fell in vaporous folds to her feet like the drift over a waterfall. She turned her head with a sudden bird-like movement, her strange eyes looked into mine with a prolonged and snaky glance; I saw her move her arms hither and thither, and the waves of this inner ocean began to darken and gather ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... of the drift of the words, so utterly out of the reach of love did she suppose herself, replied, composedly, "Our Aurelia is a dear good girl, and I am thankful that through all her trials she has so proved herself. I am glad she has been a comfort to you, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of learning within which the cognitive or intellectual interest is dominant—the sciences properly so called—the case is somewhat different, not only as regards the attitude of the leisure class, but as regards the whole drift of the pecuniary culture. Knowledge for its own sake, the exercise of the faculty of comprehensive without ulterior purpose, should, it might be expected, be sought by men whom no urgent material interest diverts from such a quest. The sheltered ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... under a hat like a cart-wheel beckoning persistently with his whole arm. Examining the edge of the forest above and below, I was almost certain I could see movements—human forms gliding here and there. I steamed past prudently, then stopped the engines and let her drift down. The man on the shore began to shout, urging us to land. 'We have been attacked,' screamed the manager. 'I know—I know. It's all right,' yelled back the other, as cheerful as you please. 'Come along. It's ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... believe in Christ, and be so filthy? Now all this is because the spirit of the law still ruleth in such souls, and blinds them so that they cannot see the terms of the Gospel. To clear this, take the substance or the drift of these poor souls, which is this—"If I were better, then I think I could believe; but being so bad as I am, that is the reason that I cannot." This is just to do something that I may believe, to work that I may have Christ, to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... called the Wolf-coats, for on them would no steel bite, and when they set on nought might withstand them. Thorir defended him very stoutly, and fell in all hardihood on board his ship; then was it cleared from stem to stern, and cut from the grapplings, and let drift astern betwixt the other ships. Thereafter the king's men laid their ship alongside Onund's, and he was in the forepart thereof and fought manly; then the king's folk said, "Lo, a forward man in the forecastle there, let him have somewhat to mind him how that he was in this battle." ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... alive. The journey is described by one who volunteered to go with the engineer on his perilous journey. "When we got to the foot of the shaft, Mr. Taylor lighted a cigar. He blew out a great cloud of smoke and watched it drift into a passage. 'This way,' he said, 'The smoke will follow the pure air draught.' So we went on, Mr. Taylor blowing clouds of smoke, and we following them. Suddenly he wheeled and yelled; 'The black damp is coming!' ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... encampment, opposite to which is a high and beautiful prairie on the southern side, and passed up the south of the islands, which are high meadows, and a creek on the north called Pare creek. Here for half an hour the river became covered with drift wood, which rendered the navigation dangerous, and was probably caused by the giving way of some sandbar, which had detained the wood. After making five miles we passed a stream on the south called Turky creek, near a sandbar, where we could scarcely ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

... them entirely. They communicated everything to M. de Chartres, who quietly looked on, allowed things to take their course, and, when he believed the right moment had arrived, disclosed all he had learnt to Madame de Maintenon. She was strangely surprised when she saw the extraordinary drift of the new doctrine. Troubled and uncertain, she consulted with M. de Cambrai, who, not suspecting she had been so well instructed, became, when he discovered it, embarrassed, and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... are three points here. In the first place—if I do not misapprehend Mr. Asquith's drift—in working for the abolition of militarism, we are working for a great diminution in those armaments which have become a nightmare to the modern world. The second point is that we have to help in every fashion ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney

... from such an enormously different level that conversation on them was merely waste of time. It was as if a man upon a cliff started a dissertation with another in a boat lying on the sea beneath. Half the excellent arguments would drift away upon the wind, lost, rendered nil by the mere difference of level in the two planes. The two main chains that bound my whole psychological system—self-control and self-respect—were entirely absent in him. He looked at his every good action from the point of utility, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... hills, the biting gale appeared to greet them with a fury pent up for the purpose. Unobstructed it swept across the desert of snow, flinging not only the shotlike particles from the sky, but also the loose, roving drift, as dry as salt, that lay four inches deep upon the solider snow that floored the plain. And such miles and miles of the frozen waste were there! The distant mountains looked like huge windrows of snow wearing away in the ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels

... her, gave her lover no encouragement. "Is it possible that the girl is such a fool as not to see that this here gentleman is in love with her? No; that is out of the nature of things. Oh! it's all artifice; and I will find out her drift, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... of these quotations and this appreciation of Sterne is proof sufficient that Goethe considered Sterne the author of the Koran at the time when the notes were made. At precisely what time this occurred it is now impossible to determine, but the drift of the comment, combined with our knowledge from sources already mentioned, that Goethe turned again to Sterne in the latter years of his life, would indicate that the quotations were made in the latter part of the twenties, and that the re-reading of Sterne included the Koran. Since ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... northward along the course of the last-mentioned river, we arrived at its junction with the Limpopo, on the farther side of which lay my goal, Mashonaland; and here we again outspanned, while Piet and I went on a prospecting tour in search of a drift by means of which the wagon might be safely ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... It will be dark in less than an hour; but we are too far out yet to venture swimming. We shall have to hang tight to the raft a while yet, and drift; the current is carrying us all right. Do you see any sign of life over ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish

... plunging through the snow from one spinney to another and hoping that I might hear a whine. I heard none: and if the little trail he had made in his departure might have been seen in the evening, long before that morning the drift would ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... he repeated. "Judah, foam flakes drift away pretty often and sometimes they blow away, but I never saw one run away yet. And if this Foam Flake of yours ever started to run I should die of surprise before anything else could happen to me. Don't worry about me. You'll be here to help ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... as he slowly climbed out of the water. "No," said he. "No, it isn't filled with drift stuff brought down by the water. It is filled with sticks and mud that somebody has put there. Somebody has filled up the hole that I worked so hard to make yesterday, and it will take me all day to open ...
— The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat • Thornton W. Burgess

... pyramid of civilization which rests upon the soil is shrinking through the drift of population from farm to city. For a generation we have been expressing more or less concern about this tendency. Economists have warned and statesmen have deplored. We thought for at time that modern conveniences and the more intimate contact would halt the movement, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding

... baraque,—they call it," Drusilla told him, "with three other women. We have fixed up one room a little better than the others, and whenever the men come through the town some of them drift in and are warmed by our fire, and I sing to them; they ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... the snaw-drift, Her throat is like the swan, She's jimp about the middle, Her waist ye ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... I remember that the many descriptive accounts I had read of it in England did not in the least visualize it for me? I watched the rockets rising from the German lines, watched them burst into points of light, over the devastated strip of country called "No-Man's-Land" and drift slowly down. And I watched the charitable shadows rush back like the very wind of darkness. The desolate landscape emerged from the gloom and receded again, like a series of pictures thrown upon a screen. All of this was so new, so terrible, ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... could not gather the drift of the conversation; but a month later, when their knowledge of the language had greatly increased, Olga, when driving in a sledge with Jack, enlightened him as to the ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty

... whither I am fled to snatch what cooler airs may drift into this cup of earth, I can see above the straggling tiles of gable and loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know they are all dead; for I have wound a devious way through the close inhospitable streets and met them or their ghosts ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... us the fires fade gradually away, and disappear one after another. Before us nothing at present visible. We seemed to drift on for about one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards more. We cannot distinguish a single point in front of us on which to fix our gaze. But we still ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion

... I couldn't say, could barely even imagine. All was darkness, but such utter darkness that after several minutes, my eyes were still unable to catch a single one of those hazy gleams that drift ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... Irish members, were commonplaces of information long before the Speech was read in the House of Lords. It used to be different. Within the range of recent memory, the publication of the Queen's Speech, or at least a forecast in the morning papers, was the first authoritative indication of the drift of legislation in ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... this remark until they had turned up the Arm; then dropping the sail and changing his seat to one opposite Dexie, he let the boat drift with ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth

... the cope careering swift In breathless motion fast, Fleet as the swallow cuts the drift, Or the sea-roc rides the blast, The sapphire sheet of eve is shot, The sphered moon is past, The earth but seems a tiny blot On a sheet of azure cast. O! it was sweet in the clear moonlight, To tread the starry plain of even, To meet the thousand ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake

... imbedded in the drift, that Lancy was afraid the shafts would pull apart if the horse put forth sufficient strength to extract it, so he decided to take the horse out and turn the sleigh himself. But when the horse found himself free, he refused to stand still, and Dexie insisted ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth

... never get out. You have done it, sir. I knew it'd end in something like this. She will never weather, and you are too close now to stay. She'll drift ashore before ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

... shoulders in a bog, whichever way they attempted to move, and from this spot they had two miles to travel before they could reach the nearest rising ground. The river Glenelg was at this time overflowing its banks, and, to the natural alarm of men wandering in its rich valley, drift-wood, reeds, grass, &c. were seen lodged in the trees above their heads, fifteen feet beyond the present level of the water, affording a proof of what floods in that country had been, and, of course, might be again. ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... that a career, mother? Slavery is the right word to use. I wish to be of some benefit to the world and not to drift through ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody

... it the stumps of many trees, still in an erect position, with remains of living plants, and the bones of recent and extinct quadrupeds. It is overlaid by fresh-water and marine beds, all the shells of which belong to existing species, and it is finally surmounted by true "glacial drift." While all the shells and plants of the Cromer Forest-bed and its associated strata belong to existing species, the Mammals are partly living, partly extinct. Thus we find the existing Wolf (Canis lupus), Red ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... for the comforting and establishing of his own, and also for the convincing and converting of some of them, who aforetime was not converted. And friend, why dost thou say, that we join with Magog in the defence of the dragon against the Lamb, when thou seest the whole drift both of my brother's epistle, and also of my writing, is to exalt and advance the first-born of Mary, the Lord of glory, and to hold on his side, notwithstanding there are so many tempests go through the world, And the rather, because we know that it is he, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... that final curve which forms the Provincetown Harbor.) The dunes are hills and strange forms of sand on which, in places, grows the stiff beach grass—struggle; dogged growing against odds. At right of the big sliding door is a drift of sand and the top of buried beach grass is seen on this. There is a door left, and at right of big sliding door is a slanting wall. Door in this is ajar at rise of curtain, and through this door BRADFORD and TONY, life-savers, are ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... for the living machine. The blind action of physical forces seemed inadequate. Thus the phenomena of life, which had been studied longer than any other phase of nature, continued to stand aloof from the rest and refused to fall into line with the general drift of thought. The living world seemed to give no promise of being included among natural phenomena, but still persisted ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... the men, running alternately to the front, delivered their fire, stopped for a moment to load, and then again ran on. Nearer and nearer they came, until the defenders of the trenches, already half demoralised, could mark through the smoke-drift the tanned faces, the fierce eyes, and the gleaming bayonets of their terrible foes. The guns were already flying, and the position was outflanked; yet along the whole length of the ridge the parapets still blazed with fire; and while men fell headlong in ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto of "Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From beginning to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess. Anyone who is wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair, has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera—failed to see that two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining themselves to those not possessed ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... was taken up, I went to the river bank, and there, from a sand breastwork so white that it looked like a snow-drift, I watched with my field-glass a duel between the monitor "Montauk" and Fort Anderson. The monitor, which lay about a mile from the fort, was of the original single-turret form, armed with the large-calibre smooth-bores, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... 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 needed, that they ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... thought of Kettering and the last words he had said to her on the steps at Upton House, and a little sigh escaped her. She thought Jimmy was asleep, she put down the magazine and let herself drift. There was something about Kettering that had appealed to her as no other man had ever done, something manly and utterly reliable which she found restful and protecting. She wondered what he ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres

... sea wails loud, and the sea wails long, As the ages of waiting drift slowly by, But the sea shall sing no bridal song— As well ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field

... technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is correctly referred to as {Finagle's Law}. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... musicians, writers, and, for aught I know, a count or two. They drank and smoked a great deal, talked art and music, and discussed, it seemed to me, everything that ever entered man's mind. I could only follow the general drift of what they were saying. When they discussed music, it was more interesting to me; for then some fellow would run excitedly to the piano and give a demonstration of his opinions, and another would follow quickly, doing the same. In this way, I learned that, regardless of what his specialty ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... Now, without turning the deal you're working on, you've got to quit. Get that. Get it right into your souls. You men that have been hired to steal, you've got to drift. Where, does not concern me at all. Where Duke went is good—Parts Unknown. Or if it's to hell—why, the going is good. Never better. You'll go quicker, but there won't be any coming back, ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower

... he began to flower anew, and from his innermost nature, like some great aboriginal plant of our Northern wilderness suddenly transferred to a tropical region, roots and all, by some convulsion of nature,—by hurricane, or drift, or shipwreck. And always thereafter, with a very few brief exceptions, instead of echoing and re-echoing the musical thunders of a buried past,—instead of imitating, oftentimes unconsciously (the worst kind of imitation, by the way, for what can be hoped of a man whose individuality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... excited above ground, Mr. Meek, the English engineer who was constructing the work, after having quietly measured the distance from the shaft to the sunken ground, satisfied himself that if the men, at the moment of the accident, were at the head of "the drift" at which they were working, they ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... there was added to me ten thousand years. And I know another place in England, far distant from this, where a man said to me that if I wished to cross in a winter mist, as I had determined to do, Cross-Fell, that great summit of the Pennines, I must watch the drift of the snow, for there was no other guide to one's direction in such weather. And I remember another man in a little boat in the North Sea, as we came towards the Foreland, talking to me of the two tides, and telling ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... towards it,—yet now I commenced it with a coolness and tranquillity far exceeding that I had possessed on many comparatively trifling occasions. It is often so. We are borne along on the current like drift-wood, and, spying jutting rocks or tremendous cataracts ahead, fancy, "Here we shall be stranded, there buoyed up, there dashed in pieces over those falls,"—but, for all that, we glide over those threatened catastrophes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... league. This is where the sailors went to get fresh water for the ships. He found that the sand at the mouth of the river, which is very large and deep, was full of very fine gold, and in astonishing quantity. The Admiral thought that it was pulverized in the drift down the river, but in a short time he found many grains as large as lentils, while there was a great ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various

... and all the inside of the stockade had been cleared of timber to build the house, and we could see by the stumps what a fine and lofty grove had been destroyed. Most of the soil had been washed away or buried in drift after the removal of the trees; only where the streamlet ran down from the kettle a thick bed of moss and some ferns and little creeping bushes were still green among the sand. Very close around the stockade—too close for defence, they said—the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... while, Rawlins drew the Captaine to lye for the Northerne Cape, assuring him, that thereby he should not misse a prize, which accordingly fell out, as a wish would have it: but his drift was in truth to draw him from any supply, or help of Turkes, if God should give way to their Enterprize, or successe to the victorie: yet for the present the sixth of February, being twelve leagues from the Cape, ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various

... is a poetic interpreter of the thought of the Victorian age. Huxley called him "the first poet since Lucretius who understood the drift of science." In these four lines from The Princess, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the world, from nebula ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... marginal gloss to Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599), ed. McKerrow, III, 154, Nashe says: "I having begun but the induction and first act of it, the other four acts without my consent or the best guess of my drift or scope, by the players were supplied, which bred both ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... Plato; and never, it may be safely asserted, was a plan of society framed so consistent, harmonious and beautiful in itself, or so indifferent to the actual capacities of mankind. Following out what we have already indicated as the natural drift of Greek ideas, the philosopher separates off on the one hand the productive class, who are to have no political rights; and on the other the class of soldiers and governors. It is the latter alone with whom he seriously concerns himself; and the scheme ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... your good old-fashioned order of regimental scribes who take their cue from their colonel, and march this way and that, right about face, with as little impediment of principles to hamper their twists and turns as the straw he tosses aloft at midnight to spy the drift of the wind to-morrow. Quite the contrary; Rockney was his own colonel; he pretended to think independently, and tried to be the statesman of a leading article, and showed his intention to stem the current of liberty, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... exciting and tempting proposition. Like most girls of her type, when her personal concerns became too complex for reason, she abandoned herself to impulse. She merely shut her eyes and allowed herself to drift toward a destination that was not of her choosing. Like a peripatetic Sleeping Beauty, she moved through the days in a sort of trance, waiting liberation from her thraldom, but fearing to put her fate to the test by laying the matter squarely ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... great number of those excellent cigarettes, and I dropped the ash all over the space in front of the suspected bookcase. It was a simple trick, but exceedingly effective. I then went downstairs and I ascertained, in your presence, Watson, without your perceiving the drift of my remarks, that Professor Coram's consumption of food had increased—as one would expect when he is supplying a second person. We then ascended to the room again, when, by upsetting the cigarette-box, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... church was all in white; great lilies in vases, wreaths of stephanotis; and, above all, roses—great garlands of white roses had been woven, and they hung along and across. A blossom fell, a sob sounded in the stillness. An hour of roses, an hour of sorrow, and the coffin sank out of sight, a snow-drift of delicate ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... was from the south, blowing fresh breezes, accompanied with showers of snow. In the morning the snow showers were so thick that it was with difficulty the landing-master, who always steered the leading boat, could make his way to the rock through the drift. But at the Bell Rock neither snow nor rain, nor fog nor wind, retarded the progress of the work, if unaccompanied by a heavy swell ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... clambering up the precipices. In the first days of September of that memorable year, a well-known aeronaut named Wilker came to Morganton with his balloon. By waiting for a breeze from the east, he could easily rise in his balloon and drift over the Great Eyrie. There from a safe height above he could search with a powerful glass into its deeps. Thus he would know if the mouth of a volcano really opened amid the mighty rocks. This was the principal question. If this were settled, it would be known if the surrounding country ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne

... by immediate events. At evening the Clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open fireplace while Jennie and Uncle Ned told tales and hair-lifting legends. Even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror and delight of its curdling thrill. The tales always began with "Once 'pon a time," and one of them was the story of the "Golden Arm" which the smallest listener would one ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... the problem of checking the steady drift of the young people from American farms into the cities has occupied the attention of statesmen, able editors, farm leaders and economists. It is universally agreed that agriculture is the basic industry upon which the prosperity of manufacturing and commerce depends. When the farmers ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... you will often find that they first occur when the thought becomes difficult to follow, the sentence ambiguous, or a single word unusual. As a result, the meaning grows hazy in your mind and you fail to comprehend it. Naturally, then, you drift into a channel of thought that is easier to follow. This happens because the mental stream tends to seek channels of least resistance. If you introspect carefully, you will undoubtedly discover that many of your annoying ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson

... Iris rapidly gathered the drift of her lover's wishes. "Come, father," she cried merrily. "I am aching to see what the ship's stores, which you and Robert pin your faith to, can do for me in the shape of garments. I have the utmost belief in the British navy, and even a skeptic should be convinced of ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... sot, our law-makers, and if they lifted their eyes at all to witness the long procession of the dead drift by, sixty thousand corpses yearly slain by the Saloon, if they lifted their eyes at all to look at the ghastly procession, they dropped 'em agin quick as they could so's not to delay their work of signin' licenses, makin' new laws, fixin' over old ones, and writin' permits to the murderers to ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... indifferent just now to what becomes of him, or whither he goes; it is all the same to him, he says; there is no one to care for him anywhere, and I think he is best pleased to go where it is all new. And there, you see, the poor lad will be left to drift to destruction—mother's darling that he has been—just for want of some human being to care about him, and hinder his ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to keep. Enough. Man can climb higher and be free. Leave be the veil and let men struggle through. Let roots strike down and seek the growing needs; And living stock stretch up toward the sun With life and hope. Then let men work and woo, Not anchorless, nor tumbling drift as weeds. Fulfilment in the ...
— Clear Crystals • Clara M. Beede

... he announced in an arrogant, almost insulting tone, though below the surface he was an entirely genial person, "that the new vein in the Amphalula runs into the west drift of Horse's Neck almost to where we quit work in Number ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... bringing down the supply required for the use of the party. Each person undertook this duty in turn, and thus the labour was divided. After breakfast I went up myself to examine the state of the water and found great abundance in its bed; there were strong traces of recent and high flooding, the drift timber being lodged among the bushes several feet above the ordinary channel. The grass I was sorry to find was rather old and dry, but still there was a very fair supply of it, a point of great importance to us at a time when ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... pleasant day. At South Wellmouth, his first port of call, he had strengthened his political fences by dropping in upon and chatting with several acquaintances who prided themselves upon being "in the know" concerning local political opinion and drift. Mr. "Raish" Pulcifer—no one in Ostable county ever referred to him as Horatio—had already held the positions of town clerk, selectman, constable and postmaster. Now, owing to an unfortunate shift in ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... profess unbelief, and talk of the Incarnation and kindred doctrines as "beautiful myths." We find the children of our parishes brought up in creedless Schools, where all dogmatic teaching is excluded, and we may well fear lest England should drift into the utter unbelief ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton

... there was duty frowning upon her yielding senses. "Please don't let that smoke drift into my face," said she crossly. "It's ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... instance, the case of a bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the Gazette do not go through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension, special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state of their liver. In this average process ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... the Papacy it was their great object to destroy; and this, now openly avowed and steadfastly acted upon, might have been discerned with very little acuteness of sight, from the very first dawnings of the Revolution, to be the main drift of their policy: for they professed a resolution to destroy everything which can hold states together ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... 'Frisco Kid said, referring to the breeze, "we 'll drift to the California coast sometime to-morrow. Nothing to do ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London

... water-level, and descended in steep rocky ledges to within a few hundred yards of the sea, where the lower ground was flat and alternated in open glades and thick masses of mastic scrub; the beach being edged by drift sand-dunes covered by the dense jungle of ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... with the hope of success. In developing as it has done, the Library in the United States of America has not been simply obeying some law of its own being; it has been following the whole stream of American development. You can call it a drift if you like; but the Library has not been simply drifting. The swimmer in a rapid stream may give up all effort and submit to be borne along by the current, or he may try to get somewhere. In so doing, he may battle with the current and achieve nothing but fatigue, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... said, not seeing his drift, but on guard against a trap. "No, monsieur; I am never in the shop. I am far too busy with my work. Monsieur does not seem to understand what a servant-lass has ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle

... religion makes wild beasts civil, superstition makes wise men beasts and fools; and the discreetest that are, if they give way to it, are no better than dizzards; nay more, if that of Plotinus be true, is unus religionis scopus, ut ei quem colimus similes fiamus, that is the drift of religion to make us like him whom we worship: what shall be the end of idolaters, but to degenerate into stocks and stones? of such as worship these heathen gods, for dii gentium daemonia, [6545]but to become devils themselves? 'Tis therefore exitiosus error, et maxime periculosus, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... and there dreamed our sea-dreams. We ate our lunches and played at being smugglers; then we built fires of drift-wood to warn the passing ships that we were castaways on a desert island; but when they took no heed of our signals of distress we were not too sorry ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... straight back. He was made to be eaten, and he knows it. So it is with the whole tribe of deer, and even with the horse, pampered and cared for and unacquainted with danger; his ears are a weathercock registering the drift of all his petty hopes and fears. I see the left ear go forward and prepare for a desperate shy at that wheelbarrow. He knows a wheelbarrow familiarly—there is one in his stall all day—but I am taking him a road he does not want to go, and so the hypocrite ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... was now whipping the sea into angry breakers that dashed resoundingly against the rocky barrier of the island. To drift within reach of those frightful destroyers would mean the instant annihilation of the Halfmoon and all her company, yet this was precisely what the almost unmanageable hulk was doing at the wheel under the profane ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... to do is to find out whether there is a path either from this river, or the other branch, to the pool. If so, at dark, after destroying the town, we will recall all the men on shore, buoy the anchor and drop it noiselessly, and drift down the river till we are far enough away to use the engines, then steam down to the junction of the two streams, and up again to the entrance to the creek on that side. Then we will at once land a very strong party, land also two twenty-four pounders, and drag them to the pool. We might ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty

... into order with the admission that it is better in every way that a young man should go to Jerusalem early in his life and acquire reverence for the ritual and traditions of his race, else he will drift later on into heresy, or maybe go to live in cities like Tiberias, amongst statues. But why do I trouble myself like this? For there was a time before I had a son, and the time is getting very close now when ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... this afternoon. I am the only outside person in Washington who knows of a certain game that is to be played. It would mean a big scoop for my paper and a lot of money for me if I would just let things drift. But I like you too well to hold my tongue, though I am not going to tell you anything more. And I certainly won't beg you to do what I ask of you. Of course you may do just as you please. Good-bye; ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane

... to Charles Young, who enthusiastically admired her great genius, "Vous trouvez qu'elle chante et joue bien, n'est-ce pas?" "Je crois bien," replied he, puzzled to understand her drift. "Well," replied the daughter of the great lyrical artist, "to us, to whom she belongs, and who know and love her, her great talent is the least admirable thing about her; but no one ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... her sled against a drift and waited for Billy to cross the farmyard. He was a large, awkward boy several years older than Lydia. He seemed a very homely sort of person to her, yet she liked his face. He was as fair as Kent was dark. Kent's features were regular and clean-cut. Billy's were rough hewn and irregular, ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... or we shall go back. And especially ought we to go forward in developing co-operation, on a basis of equality and partnership, with the great self-governing communities of our race in the distant portions of the world, else they will drift away from us. Do not let us think for a moment that we can afford such another fiasco as the late Colonial Conference. Do not let us imagine for a moment that we can go to sleep over the questions then raised, ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner

... flood it was fast running and there was no delay, no stopping between dawn and dusk. Standing all day at the sweeps Rasba cleared the shore in sharp bends, avoided the obstacles in mid stream, and outran the wave crests and the racing drift, entering the Big Sandy and emerging into the unimaginable breadths ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... observed that she was becoming a little conscious in her air, and giving a slightly sentimental turn to the conversation. It was not for some time that he saw her drift, so utterly without connection in his mind were Ida and this comfortable matron before him; and when he did, a smile at the exquisite absurdity of the thing barely twitched the corners of his mouth, and ended in a sad, puzzled stare that rather put ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... the subject of investments. Mr. Bowman, backed in his statements by Mr. Bangs, spoke to Scattergood of a certain mine whose stock could be had for a song, but whose riches in mineral, about to be reached by a certain shaft or drift or tunnel, were fabulous. Scattergood was interested. An appointment was made for ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland

... memories of his anguish and despair. They killed him, and with ravenous avidity portioned out his flesh. The hideous repast sustained them till the French coast rose in sight, when, it is said, in a delirium of insane joy, they could no longer steer their vessel, but let her drift at the will of the tide. A small English bark bore down upon them, took them all on board, and, after landing the feeblest, carried the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... of the lower courses of masonry during construction, temporary sides of timber were drift-bolted to the margin of the upper course of the timber platform, and carried high enough to be above the surface of the water when the platform was sunk to the head of the piles by the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various

... to Janice Day as though the drift of trouble, which had set her way with the announcement by her father of his unfortunate situation among the Yaqui Indians, had now risen to ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long



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