"Rambling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... everywhere treated as if they were at home. If they stay in any place longer than a night, every one follows his proper occupation, and is very well used by those of his own trade; but if any man goes out of the city to which he belongs without leave, and is found rambling without a passport, he is severely treated, he is punished as a fugitive, and sent home disgracefully; and, if he falls again into the like fault, is condemned to slavery. If any man has a mind to travel only over the precinct of his own city, he ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... which—coming suddenly on the appointed morning—broke up the Directory. Bonaparte then put out his hand as commander of the troops. Too late the Republicans of the Council of Five Hundred felt the earthquake swelling under their feet. Napoleon appeared at the bar of the Assembly, and attempted a rambling and incoherent justification for what was going on. A motion was made to outlaw him; but the soldiers rushed in, and the refractory members were seized and expelled. A few who were in the revolution remained, and to the number of fifty voted a decree making Sieyes, Bonaparte and Ducos provisional ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... answered Tryon's description, on the Lillington road, which crossed the main road to Patesville a short distance beyond the farmhouse. He had spoken to the woman. At first she had paid no heed to his question. When addressed a second time, she had answered in a rambling and disconnected way, which indicated to his mind that there was something ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... difficult to walk much in this climate; lassitude and feverish symptoms follow on the slightest exertion; but—if one can disregard the evil smells which everywhere catch one's breath—Cosenza has wonders and delights which tempt to day-long rambling. To call the town picturesque is to use an inadequate word; at every step, from the opening of the main street at the hill-foot up to the stern mediaeval castle crowning its height, one marvels and admires. So narrow ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... through Coulommiers, a jolly rambling old town, to our billet in a suburban villa on the Rebais road. The Division was marching past in the very best of spirits. We, who were very tired, endeavoured to make ourselves comfortable—we were then blanketless—on the abhorrent surface ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... gone above a league when I fell in with a scattered platoon of the mob, who were rambling along as if on a party of pleasure; tossing their pikes and clashing their sabres to all kinds of revolutionary songs. I was instantly seized, as a 'courier of the Aristocrats.' Their sagacity, once at work, found out a hundred names for me:—I was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... grey stucco, against which flamed the orange of its lichened roof. It had been built in Queen Anne's time, and enlarged and stuccoed over about fifty years ago. It was a good, solid house, less rambling than Ansdore, but the ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... attempt to rival Addison upon his own ground Mrs. Haywood was more than moderately successful in the estimation of many of her contemporaries. Rambling and trite as are the essays in her periodical, their excellent intentions, at least, gained them a degree of popularity. A writer in the "Gentleman's Magazine" for December, 1744, applauding the conspicuous ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... the wags abroad do call Each other forth to rambling: Anon you'll see them in the hall For nuts and apples scrambling. Hark! how the roofs with laughter sound! Anon they'll think the house goes round: For they the cellar's depth have found, And there ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... am meditating, will produce her consent, I hope, to other favours of the like kind: for, should she not choose the place in which I am expecting to see her, I can attend her any where in the rambling Dutch-taste garden, whenever she will permit me that honour: for my implement, high Joseph Leman, has procured me the opportunity of getting two keys made to the garden-door (one of which I have given him for ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... next morning came sight of the rambling old towns that lay at the river's mouth,—being little more than patches of gray and white, strewed over an almost treeless country, with some central spire rising above them. Then came great stretches of open ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... front of the Schweitzerhof; Lady Garnett and Mary, Mrs. Sylvester and Eve. Lady Garnett and her companion were but newly arrived, and, as birds of passage, preferred the hotel to a pension. The Sylvesters had been staying in the quaint, rambling town for nearly a fortnight. It was their usual summer resort, and although the spring of each year found them deciding to go elsewhere for a change, in the end they nearly always proved faithful to the familiar lake. Their ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... woe began to fill the hearts of the suitors. Their speech became rambling and they laughed insanely. They ate and drank ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... pictures delineates in luminous softness a peculiarly lovely side of English rural life, but one need not travel to England or France to see this loveliness. Weymouth, that rambling stretch of towns and hamlets, of summer colony and suburb, possesses in certain areas bits of rural landscape as serene, as dewy, as idyllically tranquil ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... half-ripened young wood taken in July or August, and inserted in sand under a glass. When the pots are full of roots shift the plants into larger sizes. They bloom nearly all the year round, especially in the winter and spring. The plants have rather a rambling habit, and are usually trained over balloon or pyramidal trellises; but this trouble can be spared by cutting them back freely and employing a few light sticks to keep them ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... French a good deal better than I can some of Jessie's United States," said Evelyn, plaintively, and so they laughed their way out onto the broad, picturesque porch of the rambling old inn and ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... off, and, after much rambling, I at last seated myself near the card-table : but Mrs. Cholmondeley was after me in a minute, and drew a chair next mine. I now found it impossible to escape, and therefore forced myself to sit still. Lord Palmerston and Sir ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... we arrived; and as I am very partial to new objects discovered by this dubious visionary light, I went immediately a-rambling. Not a sound disturbed my meditations; there were no groups of squabbling children or talkative old women. The whole town seemed retired into their inmost chambers; and I kept winding and turning about, from street to street, and from alley ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... in his thoughts, and rather obstinately, too—he knew that the time would pass more quickly in the old castle than anywhere else. At forty years of age, the idea of beginning again the wandering life he had led so long, rambling from one country and capital to another, now spending a year at a University and then six months in Paris, or a winter in St. Petersburg, never settled, never at home, though at home everywhere—the mere thought was painfully repugnant. To live with Greif and Hilda in their ancient home, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... The rambling path through the woods brought the party out at last upon a wild barren hill-side, where stones and a rank growth of blackberry bushes were all that was to be seen. Only far off might be had the glimpse of other hills and of patches of cultivation on them; the near ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... end of a rambling mountain path to which he was making his way, among the pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs above the town, stood the hermitage, hardly more than a cavern fenced with thorn, in which the third of the great brethren had long hidden himself from the world. He, thought Prince Otto, could ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... rambling way, wandering from the subject, after the fashion of old age. Olive could have listened long to the pleasant stream of talk, which seemed murmuring round her, wrapping her in a soft dream of peace. She laid down her tired head on the pillow, with an ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... reached an ancient, timbered house, long, low, and rambling, with a yard by its side full of barrels, anchors, and other marine stores such as rope, that had to do with the trade I carried ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... the Three Bears" is perhaps the only instance in which a piece of literature by a known English author is found among accepted folk tales. It appeared in Robert Southey's rambling miscellany, The Doctor (1837). He may have taken it from an old tale, but no amount of investigation has located any certain source. In the most familiar versions the naughty old woman gives place to a little girl whose ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... for a return towards a laxer, more spacious form of novel-writing. The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt against those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artistic perfection to which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the lax freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of the earlier English novel, of "Tristram Shandy" and of "Tom Jones"; and partly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold and original enterprises as that of Monsieur Rolland ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... felt her senses returning, and at the same time an impulse to action. During Mr. Hammond's rambling story she had remained quiet, listening and yet all the time knowing ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... the dogfish," gave opportunity to a wag, seated near the piper, to play upon the old man's well known foible by adding, "an' Cawmill o' Glenlyon;" whereupon Duncan, who had by this time taken more whisky than was good for him, rose, and made a rambling speech, in which he returned thanks for the imprecation, adding thereto the hope that never might one of the brood accursed go down with honour ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... wandering about beyond his native place, but not for travelling abroad. The love of home seems to be merged, to a great extent, in love of country. A Russian feels himself at home everywhere within Russia; and, in a political sense, this rambling disposition of the people, and the close intercourse between the inhabitants of the various provinces to which it leads, contributes to knit a closer bond of union between the people, and to arouse and maintain a national policy and a patriotic love of country. Although he may quit his ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... hall—is too definite and distinct, but the conception of the wraith of the dead child outside the manor, pleading piteously to be let in, and luring away the living child, is delicately wrought. The tale is told in the rambling, circumstantial style, suitable to the fireside and the long leisure of a winter's evening. Dickens tells a very different nurse's story in one of the chapters of An Uncommercial Traveller. The tone of Mrs. Gaskell's nurse is kindly and protective; that of Dickens' nurse severe, admonitory and ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... time, been in the habit of going to bed with the sun, as we had no pressing call to work o' nights; and, indeed, our work during the day was usually hard enough,—what between fishing, and improving our bower, and diving in the Water Garden, and rambling in the woods; so that, when night came, we were usually very glad to retire to our beds. But now that we had a desire to work at night, we felt a wish ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... unbound the sandals from her feet. Then Crocale, the most skilful of them, arranged her hair, and Nephele, Hyale, and the rest drew water in capacious urns. While the goddess was thus employed in the labors of the toilet, behold Actaeon, having quitted his companions, and rambling without any especial object, came to the place, led thither by his destiny. As he presented himself at the entrance of the cave, the nymphs, seeing a man, screamed and rushed towards the goddess to hide her with their bodies. But she was taller than the rest and overtopped ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Helen reflected, speaking more to herself in a rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... changed; it was in such conditions I had myself grown up, and played, a child, beside the borders of another sea. And some ten miles from where I walked, Cook was adored as a deity; his bones, when he was dead, were cleansed for worship; his entrails devoured in a mistake by rambling children. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dalton, "when you were indeed young, and long before you took your degree in morality at the rambling court of the second Charles, did I ever counsel you to do aught that your—that, in short, you might not do with perfect honour? I know too well what it is to sacrifice honour to interest ever to wish you to make ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... strolling leisurely through the quiet old streets. The church and parish-house and a large hall were across the common, the library and museum nearer the centre of the town—all dignified, rather stately, very attractive buildings in harmonizing styles of architecture, whose low and rambling character, with the ivy that well-nigh covered them, and the wonderful green of their lawns, gave them an air of age, particularly appealing to one whose home had been in the West. Handsome houses and charming cottages bespoke ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... the delight of that one hour passed in rambling through the lonely green wood that covered the island down to the shore. The ferns were young and freshly unfurled, the moss was everywhere, green and close and soft like velvet and star-clustering, gray and yellow. The surviving flowers were the large white blossoms of the woodland ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... tunnels Master Meadow Mouse could look for seeds and grain in the stubble. And while he was rambling along his network of halls he didn't have to worry about anybody's making trouble for him, unless it was Peter Mink, perhaps, or ...
— The Tale of Master Meadow Mouse • Arthur Scott Bailey
... started upon a tale, so long and rambling that Rory took his fiddle and strummed impatiently in the background. Scotty understood enough of Gaelic to gather that it was the story of a beautiful maiden who had died that night when her father and brother and lover lay slain in the bloody ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... had gone off into a rambling conversation that had led Hermione's attention far away from the ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... each sagged wooden sidewalk was in as bad repair as its brother over the way. The small, shabby frame house, buried in honeysuckles and balsam vines, which stood close up to the pavement line on the opposite side of Clay Street, facing Judge Priest's roomy and rambling old home, had no flag of pestilence at its door or its window. And surely to this lone pedestrian every added step must have been an added labor. A stranger would never have understood it; but Judge Priest understood it—he had seen that same thing repeated ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... of Canadian laws. Although it was desirable to maintain peace, it was also necessary to prepare to resist the attacks of the Iroquois, who were becoming more and more active. A party of the Iroquois had approached Quebec, and were observed to be rambling in the vicinity of the Recollets' convent, on the north shore of the River St. Charles. They finally made an attack, but they were repulsed with loss by the French and the Montagnais, whose chief was Mahicanaticouche, Champlain's friend. This chief was ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... that, one or another of them is always studying German, or French, or history, or mineralogy, or taking up some social reform. Two of them find time to write acceptably for magazines. It would seem as if they could not have much leisure to entertain friends, yet their great rambling house, which stands in the midst of a shady old-fashioned yard and garden just outside the city, is seldom without a guest or two, and there never was a place where a tired soul and body could find sweeter rest. A cup and plate at table and a bed to sleep in are provided for the visitor, and ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... degree altering his gait, and, if a fence crosses his course, steers for a break or opening to avoid climbing. He is too indolent even to dig his own hole, but appropriates that of a woodchuck, or hunts out a crevice in the rocks, from which he extends his rambling in all directions, preferring damp, thawy weather. He has very little discretion or cunning, and holds a trap in utter contempt, stepping into it as soon as beside it, relying implicitly for defense against all forms of danger ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... man's features, it was believed that he came from Spain or Mexico. His rambling, delirious utterances were a jargon of mixed tongues. He lived for a week at the camp, but never gave any ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... ordinary society man, and he had been a long time away from England, and had not had his attention turned to these social problems of Great Britain. He was therefore deeply interested in the whole business, and he asked a number of questions, and got shrewd, keen answers sometimes, and very rambling answers on other occasions. The deputation was like all other deputations with a grievance. There was the fanatic burning to a white heat, with the inward conviction of wrong done, not accidentally, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... more general arguments engage,— The court or camp, the pulpit, bar, or stage; If half-bred surgeons, whom men doctors call, And lawyers, who were never bred at all, Those mighty letter'd monsters of the earth, Our pity move, or exercise our mirth; Or if in tittle-tattle, toothpick way, Our rambling thoughts with easy freedom stray,— 110 A gainer still thy friend himself must find, His grief suspended, and improved his mind. Whilst peaceful slumbers bless the homely bed Where virtue, self-approved, reclines her head; Whilst vice beneath imagined horrors mourns, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... rambling words out of your system, and then call me up and tell me what I want to know!" And Luck hung up the receiver and went shivering back to bed. From the things he said to himself, he was letting that temper of his run away with him ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... shadows of palm-thatched sheds, where thirsty travellers imbibe pink and yellow syrups, the favourite beverages of the Malay race. The ascending road commands superb views of the mountain chain, and the rambling two-storied hotel, widened by immense verandahs, stands opposite cloud-crowned Gedeh, half-veiled by the spreading column of volcanic smoke. The misty blue of further hills leads the eye to the three weird peaks of the Tangkoeban Prahoe, the boat-shaped ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... O'Donnell did the same to him, and asked where did he come from. "It is where I am," he said, "I slept last night at Dun Monaidhe, of the King of Alban; I am a day in Ile, a day in Cionn-tire, a day in Rachlainn, a day in the Watchman's Seat in Slieve Fuad; a pleasant, rambling, wandering man I am, and it is with yourself I am now, O'Donnell," he said. "Let the gate-keeper be brought to me," said O'Donnell. And when the gate-keeper came, he asked was it he let in this man, and the gate-keeper said he did not, and that ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... his clew as he had hoped, and instead of lifting the fog grew heavier. He found himself at last no longer striving for any end, but rambling along mechanically, feeling like a man in a dream—a nightmare. Once he recognized a weird suggestion in the mystery about him. To-morrow might one be wandering about aimlessly in some ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... England, and honest penny dreadfuls—ripping stuff, stuff that anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerly illustrated, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes wide and far about the land, talking experimentally, dreaming wildly. There was much in those walks! To this day the landscape of the Kentish world, with its low broad distances, its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts and square ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... wily Mr. Mitchell justify his headship. In these profuse strains of unpremeditated art, apparently the merest of rambling commonplace, he had plainly conveyed to his henchmen that, though foiled by the countryman's straightforward single-mindedness, they were not to adopt a policy of scuttle, but persevere in the paths of manifest destiny to benevolent assimilation; at the same time adroitly extricating his embarrassed ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... more and they found themselves established in their new quarters, delighted with everything about them. The old, timbered house was rambling and spacious, and the plenishings of their own apartments seemed sumptuous to them; for those were not days of great luxury in the matter of household furniture, and they had never before seen such hangings, such mirrors, ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of patience commensurate with the need of it. She would have endured more inconvenience than resulted from Jennie's inexperienced hands because of the realization that her son and the girl she had so quickly learned to admire were on the lake, rambling the woods, ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... be the most perfect specimen of a ruinous old castle in the whole world; it quite fills up one's idea. We first walked round the exterior of the wall, at the base of which are hovels, with dirty children playing about them, and pigs rambling along, and squalid women visible in the doorways; but all these things melt into the picturesqueness of the scene, and do not harm it. The whole town of Conway is built in what was once the castle-yard, and the whole circuit of the wall is still standing in ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there a great many times, for we were fond of rambling in the woods, and almost everything which is usually found on hilltop or valley, seemed to grow there. There were May flowers, violets and anemonies, in spring time; box, whortle, and black berries, in summer, and acorns ...
— No and Other Stories Compiled by Uncle Humphrey • Various
... Rambling in his house he tried, in order to make it less sinister, to light in the large, lower chimney a fire of branches, but it went out smoking. Outside, torrents of rain fell. Through the windows, as through gray shrouds, the village hardly appeared, effaced under a ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... Seminoles," explained Charley. "They come in to the outlying towns at rare intervals to exchange their venison and skins for ammunition and cloth, and it's wonderful how quickly they pick up the language. But I am rambling. The question before us is, shall we abandon all our things and run away with a fair chance of escaping with whole skins, or stay and fight it out with the certainty of being killed, sooner ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the smokers lighted their pipes and a rambling conversation began on the sights and sounds of the day. For my own part, unable to quiet the uneasy questioning which possessed me, I wandered down to the shore and took a seat in the stern of one of the boats, which, hauled part of their length upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the group with affected cheerfulness, but his heart was heavier than he liked to admit. He made his way to the "ladies' parlor," as the little sitting-room in the south wing of the rambling old tavern, overlooking the court-green was called, ...
— The Sheriffs Bluff - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... question but that if such a hospital was erected within a mile or two of the city, one great circumstance would happen, viz., that the common sort of people, who are very much addicted to rambling in the fields, would make this house the customary walk, to divert themselves with the objects to be seen there, and to make what they call sport with the calamity of others, as is ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... alarm, care, and anxiety in which I have been kept for the last fortnight. She died without being conscious of any thing—her life went out like a taper. Three days ago she confessed, received the sacrament and extreme unction; but since that time she has been constantly delirious and rambling, until this afternoon at twenty-one minutes after five, when she was seized with convulsions, and immediately lost all perception and feeling. I pressed her hand and spoke to her; but she neither saw me, heard me, nor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... grown out of the recollection of almost all the inhabitants of the village. She had long been a pensioner of Mrs. Aubrey's, by whom alone, indeed, she was supported. Her great age, her singular appearance, and a certain rambling way of talking that she had, had long earned her the reputation, in the village, of being able to say strange things; and one or two of the old gossips knew of things coming to pass according to what—poor old soul—she ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... are united, as happily as they were in him, a steady application to the business of the world, and an almost unrestrained indulgence in its harmless pleasantries. The grave doctor was a boy at his fireside. I spent my last day in preparing for my removal, and in rambling for some hours amongst the hills, with which I had become too familiar to separate without a pang. Long was our leave-taking. I lingered and hovered from nook to nook, until I had expended the latest moment which it was mine to give. With a burdened spirit I returned to the house, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the Lady Mary where I had left her in the ante-room. She had gone, so I went to her apartments, but could not find her. I went to the queen's salon, but she was not there, and I traversed that old rambling palace from one end to the other without finding ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... first thought to go abroad. It was always his dream to go abroad. But I persuaded him out of that, seeing how perilous it would be for a young fellow of his inexperience and impressible disposition to go rambling alone over the Continent. Paris was his idea. Paris would not make a mouthful of him. I have talked him out of that, I repeat, and have succeeded in convincing him that the wisest course for him to pursue is to go to some pleasant town or village ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of Governor Wentworth at Little Harbor—a pleasant walk from Market Square—is well worth a visit. Time and change have laid their hands more lightly on this rambling old pile than on any other of the old homes in Portsmouth. When you cross the threshold of the door you step into the colonial period. Here the Past seems to have halted courteously, waiting for you to catch up with it. Inside and outside the Wentworth mansion remains nearly ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... boy into the quiet but stylish young gentleman. He had given up the bill-posting business, not because he was sick of it, or ashamed of it, but because old Van Quintem loved his adopted son so well, that he could not spare him from his side. Bog passed the greater portion of every day with him, rambling through the streets, or riding to the suburbs in the old family carriage, or reading the dear old books to him. Bog read well now, and had learned to love those repositories of wit and wisdom with almost as keen a relish as the venerable white-headed listener. This was another bond of affection ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... possibility, and never actually took shape. This theme would certainly have proved more frightful and possibly more interesting than the one which Polidori eventually adopted in Ernestus Berchtold, a rambling, leisurely account of the adventures of a Swiss soldier, whose wife afterwards proves to be his own sister. Their father has accepted from a malignant spirit the gift of wealth, but each time that the gift is bestowed some great affliction follows. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... could afford to live in princely magnificence. But the old-man-of-the-sea burden of parsimony and avarice which he had voluntarily taken upon him was not to be shaken off, and the only show he made of his wealth was by purchasing, on his knighthood, the rambling but comfortable house at Hampstead, and ostensibly ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... and worked myself up in its shadow till I was come under the garden wall of my friends' house. The cottage was a little quaint place of many rough-cast gables and grey roofs. It had something the air of a rambling infinitesimal cathedral, the body of it rising in the midst two storeys high, with a steep-pitched roof, and sending out upon all hands (as it were chapter-houses, chapels, and transepts) one-storeyed and dwarfish projections. To add to this appearance, it was grotesquely decorated with crockets ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Europe, Ruth and I," he told them. "Just rambling around a bit. Our honeymoon, you know. Look us up if you're ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... of the earth; for Nature everywhere acts according to a uniform plan, and the harmony of creation is such that small things constitute a faithful type of greater things." Another instance is afforded in the grand intuition of Oken, who, when rambling in the Hartz Mountains, lit upon the skull of a deer, and saw that the cranium was but an expansion of vertebrae, and that the vertebra is the theoretical archetype of the entire osseous framework,—the foundation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... on religion, art, literature, politics and the questions of the day, sometimes putting them into the mouths of his characters and sometimes into the note-book of the afore-mentioned Henry Savile, a leisured cripple whose disquisitions on letters and on people are, if a trifle rambling, at any rate delightfully critical and much more interesting and profound than certain others which flow periodically from the windows of cloistered retreats. Mr. Henry Savile quotes from the Classics perhaps a little too freely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... his plays with him; yet he needs sympathy in joy as much as in sorrow. Her presence, her interest in what he is doing, doubles his delight in it and doubles its value to him. Moreover, it offers her opportunity for that touch and direction now and then, which may transform a rambling play, without much sequence or meaning, into a consciously useful performance, a dramatization, perhaps, of some of the child's observations, or an investigation ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... and were driven almost in silence to the Professor's home—a large, rambling old house, situated in somewhat extensive but ill-kept grounds on the outskirts of New York. The Englishman glanced around him, as they passed up the drive, with an ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... now pretty well cured of my rambling to sea; yet I could wish my boat, which had cost me so much trouble and pains, on this side the island once more, but which indeed was impracticable. I therefore began to lead a very retired life, living near a twelvemonth in a very contented manner, wanting for nothing except ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... into a rambling, monotonous account of some military movement near Wissembourg until ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... its rambling courts and gardens, stood on an island in the river. The upper stream flowed in a straight artificial channel through the garden, still and broad, towards the Priory mill; while just above the Priory wall half ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... entered the inclosure. We followed. Nobody was to be seen. In the gathering darkness all that we could distinguish was that we were in a garden—from the rose bushes that scattered over us a minute spray from their dripping leaves—and before a long, rambling wooden building. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of their trip to Catherine Edwards and she could find time to accompany them, so much the more pleasant; for Catherine was better acquainted with the woods and possessed that practical knowledge of all rural matters which only a bright girl, bred in the country with a taste for rambling about, ever acquires. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pasture, established paths through the bushes, on each side of which the good folks built their houses; which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque turns and labyrinths, which distinguish certain streets of New ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... beautiful green valley, following a very bad trail deeper and deeper into the mountains, the soft meadows gay with flowers forming a charming contrast to the snow-peaks that barred the upper end of the valley. We came first to the New Palace, a large rambling building having no more architectural pretensions than an ordinary Chinese inn. As the king's brother, who makes his home there, was away, I saw nothing more of the place than the great courtyard filled with mangy, half-starved dogs and unkempt men. Not far off is one of the great attractions ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... for which it is impossible to account, but which occur at the instant when the mind is wavering on the balance; that I feel no wonder at the old superstitions of guessing our destiny from the shooting of a star, or the flight of birds. While we were rambling onward, discussing the merits and demerits of the profession of arms, we heard the winding of the mail-guard's horn. I sprang the fence, and waited in the road to enquire the last news from the metropolis. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... upcurving lane, hedged high, An ancient stile, A rambling path, A brook, And musk,— Golden bells of fragrance, Fusing all the ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... might from bed to border, were you an actual visitor in the exquisite Surrey garden that is their ostensible subject. One thing with them leads to another. "Lilacs," they say. "Ah, lilacs—" and immediately one of them is started upon a whole series of rambling, DU MAURIERISH recollections of school-days in Second Empire Paris. Kittens and Pekinese puppies, village types, politics (just a little) and Roman villas—all these are the themes of their happy talk. "The Garden Garrulous" they might have called the book; and I for one have found it infinitely ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... of doubt and astonishment which had seized every faculty of Cecilia, now changed into certainty that Delvile indeed was present, all her recollection returned as she listened, to this question, and the wild rambling of fancy with which she had incautiously indulged her sorrow, rushing suddenly upon her mind, she felt herself wholly overpowered by consciousness and shame, and sunk, almost fainting, upon ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... I was staying in Flintshire and near Capel Curig, rambling through the dells or fishing in the brooks, it was surprising how soon the companionship of a Gorgio would begin to pall upon me. And here the Cymric race is just as bad as the Saxon. The same detestable habit of looking upon nature as a paying market-garden, the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... wandered on, making a round, I suspect, and returning upon the road to Forbach, a league or two nearer to that town than the blacksmith's house. But as we never made inquiries I hardly knew where we were, when we came one night to a small town, with a good large rambling inn in the very centre of the principal street. We had begun to feel as if there were more safety in towns than in the loneliness of the country. As we had parted with a ring of mine not many days before to a travelling jeweller, who was too glad to purchase it far below its real value ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and that such that have Negroes, be careful of them, bring them to meetings, have meetings with them in their families, and restrain them from loose and lewd living as much as in them lies, and from rambling abroad on First-days or other times."[2] As early as 1713 the Quakers had in mind a scheme for freeing the Negroes and returning them to Africa, and by 1715 their efforts against importation had seriously impaired the market for ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... of the day was spent at the fort in that feverish excitement which cannot calm down to steady conversation, but vents itself in eager, rambling questions and abrupt replies. Meanwhile, the necessity of discharging the cargo of the vessel, and preparing the furs for shipment, served to distract the attention and occupy the ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... sufficiently well to be convinced that he would not spare me. Nevertheless I could not hesitate: duty bound me to the Spanish government, by which I had been so well treated. I left the barracks, rambling where chance might lead me. I shortly found myself at the head-quarters of the artillery; an officer behind the gate stood observing me. I went up to him, and asked him whether he was for Spain. Upon his answering me in the affirmative, I begged him to open the gate, declaring ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... when I was taking a picture, Midget managed to get her nose into my mammoth outside coat-pocket. There she found something to her liking. It was my habit to eat lightly when rambling about the mountains, often eating only once a day, and occasionally going two or three days without food. I had a few friends who were concerned about me, and who were afraid I might some time starve to death. So, partly as a joke and partly in earnest, they would mail ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... Asceticism, though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from controversy. Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing: a neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more. For when we do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us: we have the prized gift to infancy under the piloting of manhood. But before ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bedroom and study—that with the window looking out on the wood. It was the quietest in the house—not only because of our youthful bull of Bashan and his roaring, but because it was at the farthest end of the long rambling house, away from the stables and ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... journalist, and eventually became chief-justice of Vermont. His comedy, The Georgia Spec, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his Algerine Captive, published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels. It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war between the United States and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... 19-21.—Spent those days in Kaskia and its neighborhood in hunting, and rambling through this garden of a country, every day affording new amusement and presenting very interesting subjects for the mind to dwell upon. On this day, the 21st, Dr. Hill returned from the lead mine, a distance of forty-seven miles. He traveled over a poor and barren country and was not ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... resolution of the unadjusted is complete so soon as the stimulus is drained off, re-distributed and dynamically absorbed, as in the case of mechanical "lost motion." A useful and intelligent solution is by no means requisite: mere rambling often suffices. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... notwithstanding the asseverations of Mr Colburn and his literary employes, it is difficult to conceive that any revision whatever can have been bestowed on the rough notes of the writer, since they were first hastily committed to paper amidst the scenes which they describe. The style is as rambling and unconnected as the incidents to which it refers; but wherever the author's devious footsteps lead us, from the jungles of Bundelcund to the holy ghats of Hurdwar, the principal figure is always that of the colonel himself, who, in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Chatwold was a big, rambling place, which had been added to from time to time until it was capable of accommodating about twenty people in addition to J. P., whose quarters were in a large granite structure, specially designed with a view to securing complete quietness. This building was ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... approaching a recapitulation; but the character of the little Wizard was one which fascinated her, and even more so, perhaps, the quaint picture of him, which stood at the head of the tale; and she wove round this skeleton idea a rambling romance from her ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... to see the long line of the brown folk crouched along the wall with lanterns at intervals before them in the big shadowy hall, with an oak cabinet at one end of it and a group of Rodin's (which native taste regards as PRODIGIEUSEMENT LESTE) presiding over all from the top - and to hear the long rambling Samoan hymn rolling up (God bless me, what style! But I am off business to-day, and this is not meant ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Souilly, too," said Dook. "Hell, yes.... A funny thing happened there. The hospital was in a big rambling house, looked like an Atlantic City hotel.... We used to run our car in back and sleep in it. It was where we took the shell-shock cases, fellows who were roarin' mad, and tremblin' all over, and some of 'em paralysed like.... There was a man in the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... my volume of rambling sketches, with a chapter more didactic and serious. The duties of the housekeeper and mother, usually unite in the same person; but difficult and perplexing as is the former relation, how light and easy are all its ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... their families moved back. Also Lorenza Brodie, and John Brodie and their families moved back. Several of the young men and women who once belonged to him came back. Some were so glad to get back they cried, 'cause fare had been mighty bad part of the time they were rambling around and they were hungry. When they got back marster would say, 'Well you have come back home have you, and the Negroes would say, 'Yes marster.' Most all spoke of them as missus and marster as they did before ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... the close of the year 1684, he was prevented, by a slight attack of what was supposed to be gout, from rambling as usual. He now spent his mornings in his laboratory, where he amused himself with experiments on the properties of mercury. His temper seemed to have suffered from confinement. He had no apparent cause for disquiet. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be entirely beautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be given concerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front in itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it overtops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite another material. What we admire is not so much a facade as a triumphal gateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world, wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home. This was not vanity in the Italians so much as civility to the public, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... he hoped still to join Morgan a little later, and then it would be needed as he had planned. Christmas morning my father was so much better that my mother went to church, taking me, and leaving little Philip, then four years old, to amuse him. What happened that morning was the point of all this rambling; so now ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews |
