"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... xviii, it is Goldtooth, their dog, who warns Buttercup and his mother of the approach of the old hag. In 'Bushy Bride', No. xlv, he appears only as the lassie's lap-dog, is thrown away as one of her sacrifices, and at last goes to the wedding in her coach; yet in that tale he has something weird about him, and he is sent out by his mistress three times to see ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... skin that was yet warm and peach-downy. And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain fact that there was nothing uncanny about her. In spite of her singular faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough. But she was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... that it was owing to her talent, or her costume, or the weird melody proposed by the chef d'orchestre, that she became the rage. Not at all. That was due to her reputation. Sceptics might smile and murmur the French for "Rats!" but, again, nobody could say positively that the tragedies had not ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... sweet baby girl, would slip noiselessly, and he thought unobserved, out of the front door of the section house, and slink stealthily to the very spot where his darling's tiny garments had been found, and there amid heart-rending shrieks, which we in our bunk house could plainly hear above the weird moanings of the winter storms, he would dig with his bare hands deep into the cruel snow, searching for his ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... and they laughed at the suggestion of removing them; evidently to have done so would have been rather bad manners—like using a knife as an aid in eating ice-cream. They held two or three dances, and we were again struck by the rhythm and weird, haunting melody of their chanting. After supper they danced beside the camp-fire; and finally, to their delight, most of the members of our own party, Americans and Brazilians, enthusiastically joined the dance, while the colonel and ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... guide, and shudderingly gazing at the hideous representations of a barbaric faith which seemed starting out of the shadows under the upheld torches. At first they could scarcely separate the crowding figures, so intermingled were they, but presently, as their eyes became more accustomed to the weird lights and shades, they could separate them ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... to it, he came back to the leaning poplar. With a pleasant memory drawing him on, he climbed the tree once more. The round moon was getting low now, and the shadows she cast out across the corn were long and weird. But the downpour of her light was still mysterious in its clarity, and in its sheen the porcupine, rolled up like a bird's nest, swung ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... meeting one of these boats. It had been caught by branches from the bank, and swayed idly to and fro in the stream. We could only see a heap of coloured clothes inside it, but there was a weird, ghastly look about the boat which made us shudder. An unburied corpse, left to the winds and waves, without a prayer or a blessing! how could it be otherwise? Even if we could delude ourselves into fancying the Dyaks happy during their lives without Christianity, there can be no doubt of their ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... has to select those things that appeal to him; has to select those elements that answer to his inmost need of expressing himself as an artist. No wonder a period of artistic dyspepsia is upon us, no wonder our exhibitions, particularly those on the Continent, are full of strange, weird things. The problem before the artist was never so complex, but also never so interesting. New forms, new combinations, new simplifications are to be found. But the steadying influence and discipline of line work were never more ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... given account of weird and extraordinary matters, I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire. And even should any fail to see, as now I see, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... accomplished in the brotherhood which is in the world.' He did not mean to say, 'Take comfort, for other people are as badly off as you are,' but he meant to call to the remembrance of the solitary sufferer the thousands of his brethren who were 'dreeing the same weird' in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... promised to speak o' me to the lanesome moon, An' weird kind wishes to me, in the lark's saft soun'; I doat upon that moon Till my very heart fills fu', An' aye yon birdie's tune Gars ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... conferred for a few moments, and had decided to put back, when a rattling chorus of pistol reports sounded from the depths of the woods. It died away; then was heard a crashing of bush and branch, and out upon the sands sprang a figure—a long, weird figure in black frock of clerical cut. Into their midst it sped with mighty bounds, and sinking down, lifted a glad face to the heavens with the groaning utterance: "O God, I thank thee. Protect me, gentlemen—protect me from ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... an unconscious child; indeed, the absence of self-consciousness, her absolute freedom from anything like shyness, combined with a dignity, a touch of hauteur and pride, struck him as extraordinary, almost weird. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... It was a weird and dreary place, and the boys surveyed it for a moment with vague feeling of abhorrence. Then they hastily strapped on their snowshoes, and turned to the mouth of the valley, which was a few yards to their left. They posted themselves behind rocks, on ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... flashed innumerable rays far-into the surrounding darkness. As I looked at it, my thoughts traveled far away to the proud city by the Seine. Was she holding herself bravely against the German hordes? In olden times these weird lights of the sky were supposed only to flash forth when "kings or heroes" fell. Did the sky mirror the earth, even as the ocean mirrors the sky? While I looked at the gorgeous spectacle blazing above me, the great heart of France was red with the blood of her sons, and ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... worked in your own parlor, will produce as much sensation as a fake "medium." In all appearance, a violin, mandolin or guitar, placed on a table, will begin to produce music simply through stamping the foot and a few passes of the hand. The music will not sound natural, but weird and distant. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... feminine and therefore "varium et mutabile semper," should suddenly deceive her followers, as did Zamiel's seventh charmed bullet (which ought always to have been kept up Caspar's sleeve—but Caspar was an idiot), and the Weird but Larky Sisters ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... looking round him in rather a weird way. "Do you know," he said, "there is something ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... hyperbolic orbit that forbids it ever to return, or an elliptical one that cannot be closed for hundreds or thousands of years; the tail meantime pointing always away from the sun, and fading to nothingness as the weird voyager recedes into the spatial void whence it came. Not many times need the advent of such an apparition coincide with the outbreak of a pestilence or the death of a Caesar to stamp the race of comets as an ominous clan in the minds of all ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the swallows fly, and sail and circle o'er the deep; The light-winged night-hawks whir and cry; the silver pike and salmon leap. The rising moon, the woods aboon, looks laughing down on lake and lea; Weird o'er the waters shrills the loon; the high stars twinkle in the sea. From bank and hill the whippowil sends piping forth his flute-like notes, And clear and shrill the answers trill from leafy isles and silver throats. The twinkling light on cape and height; the hum of voices ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... forest growth where weird branches let the pale moon through in splashes and patches, and grim moving figures seemed to chase them from every shadowy tree-trunk. It was a terrible experience to the girl. Sometimes she shut her eyes and held to the saddle, that she might not see and be filled with this ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... It was weird work in that wild solitude far on towards midnight, but the doctor was too keen a naturalist to think of anything but the specimen of which he was in search. He knew that the native hunters, out night after ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... a privilege to become acquainted, crowd the pages, and their characters, thoughts and doings are sketched in a manner quite suggestive of Dickens. The fawn-like Nan is one of the most winsome of characters in fiction, and the dwarf negress, Tasma Tid, is a weird sprite that only Mr. Harris could ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... hear that the moon which looks so lovely to our sight, is found by those who can get a nearer view to be such a weird and desolate place that it seemed as if only death reigned there? I know I was, when first I read about it, and saw a picture of the moon, and wondered at its bare mountain peaks, with their rugged craters and dreadful ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... and from it took a peculiar looking helmet to which was attached a sort of harness fitting over the shoulders and carrying a tank of oxygen. The head-piece was a most weird contrivance, with what looked like a huge glass eye in front. It was in reality a submarine ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... surely something of "natural magic" in that! The wilder capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story of a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of sensation—witness ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Weird laid he on her, sore sickness he wrought, Fowl are a-singing. That self-same hour to death was ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... to reach the innermost recesses of such caverns, had been taken possession of by the evil spirits that were commonly believed to inhabit these places; and the strangely-echoing sounds we heard were exaggerated in her imagination, and became to her as the weird voices of ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... coarseness, like that of Fielding, is always on the surface, and devoid of the ulterior suggestiveness of the modern psychological novel. But perhaps no work of fiction has ever enjoyed such vogue among literary men as a collection of stories, some graceful, some weird, written in 1679 by P'u Sungling, a disappointed candidate at the public examinations. This collection, known as the Liao Chai, is exceedingly interesting to the foreign student for its sidelights on folklore and family life; to the native scholar, who professes to smile at the subject-matter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... of his yet published gives a better illustration of his genius, and of the weird charm which has given his stories such deserved ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... something that had been forgotten. After that there was silence both within and without the house; even the maids had gone downstairs to sit together and whisper. It was one of those grey days in early autumn which have an almost weird sense of stillness about them. Hardly a leaf stirred, and even the flight of the birds was noiseless and touched with the universal feeling of hush. The begonias and dahlias and flaming autumn flowers in the broad border below the southern terrace ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... steaming. The railway track wound in and out among the passes, now approaching the mountain-sides, now suspended over precipices, avoiding abrupt angles by bold curves, plunging into narrow defiles, which seemed to have no outlet. The locomotive, its great funnel emitting a weird light, with its sharp bell, and its cow-catcher extended like a spur, mingled its shrieks and bellowings with the noise of torrents and cascades, and twined its smoke among the branches of the ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... Thevenin was old—so old that he seemed to be falling to pieces as he tottered forward. His skin was yellow and shrivelled, his mouth sunken, his hair sparse and grey; and from this weird face peered strange eyes—the eyes ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... he wandered around the city with money jingling in his trouser-pockets. He bought himself a good seat at a music-hall, and at the bar boldly ordered cocktails with weird names of which the contents were ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... spot in a dry wash and tried for water. When they found it they unpacked, gave drink to the tired burros, and turned them loose. Dead mesquite served for the campfire. While the strange twilight deepened into weird night they sat propped against stones, with eyes on the dying embers of the fire, and soon they lay on the sand with the light of white stars ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... the eighth wonder of the world, always assumed that Dante got his ideas of the Inferno. Lighted by a million candles, and crowded with peasants in their picturesque costumes, which made wondrous arabesques of moving shadows, the caves presented a weird and unearthly appearance, which the music and dancing subsequently intensified. Shortly afterwards Drake left for Palestine. In May (1874), Burton was struck down by a sudden pain, which proved to arise from a tumour. An operation ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the cards the fire on the hearth burned low, and in its fitful light the gray-haired, thin-featured woman seemed to deserve the weird reputation which rumor and gossip had given her. She shuffled the cards for some moments, gazing intently in the dying fire; then, throwing a piece of pine on the coals, she made three divisions of the pack, disposing them about in her ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... great rock serpent in its wrath. His glance falls upon Joseph's garment, the gleaming sword leaps from its sheath and he turns to seek the slave. She lays her hand lightly upon his arm, great Egypt's shield, a pillar of living brass; she nestles in the grizzly beard like some bright flower in a weird forest; she kisses the bronzed cheek as Judas did that of our dear Lord and soothes him with pretty truths that ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... shell-enamelled sand, where the breakers had roared in angry monotone, the ears thrilled with tender sounds. Though all the winds were dead the undertones of the sea linger in lulling harmonies. The tepid tide on the warm sand crisply rustles and hisses as when satin is crumpled and smartly rent. Weird, resonant tappings, moans, and gurgles come from a hollow log drifting, with infinite slowness. Broken sighs and gasps tell where the ripples advancing in echelon wander and lose their way among blocks of sandstone. As the tide rose it prattled and gurgled, toying with tinkling ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... varied like the colours in a kaleidoscope with the wavering and increasing light. At one time it seemed to me that one of the trees was a gipsy woman enveloped in a cloak, extending her arm towards me threateningly; at another, two weird dogs seemed to be fighting together; but however fantastic and fearsome had been these strange effects of light and fancy mingled together, I should not have minded—I knew what they were; it was a relief to have anything to look at which could keep my eyes from constantly ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... "Weird and interesting to the point of being absorbing. The only way to get the story is to read it."—St. ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a violet, and ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... The weird old woman looked like a spirit of the devouring element, as she stood at her window talking aloud in her strange excitement and enjoyment of the awful destruction about her. The heat within the room was becoming intolerable, yet she did not appear ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... building in the form of a chalet appeared to the left; and to the right side, almost opposite, was the main house. It was a strange-looking building, where there was a mixture of everything, a mingling of Gothic fortress, manor, villa, hut, residence, cathedral, mosque, pyramid, a, weird combination of Eastern and Western architecture. The style was complicated enough to set a classical architect crazy, and yet there was something whimsical and pretty about it. It had been invented and built under the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... and gazed into the interior. Her eyes glittered, her features were emaciated, her hair loose and dishevelled. The moonlight gave her a weird aspect. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 'Reo's house was seen to be in flames, and the owner, uttering wild, weird screams of "Fia ola! Fia ola!" ("Mercy! Mercy!") fled down the beach to his boat, followed by his wife, a large, fat woman, named appropriately enough Taumafa (Abundance). They dashed into the water, clambered into the boat, and began pulling seaward ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... out of the perpendicular; walls vile with the smoke and grime of a generation; mortar that looked as though it never in its best days could have been white; shattered doors whose proper colour none could tell, and which, standing ajar, seemed to lead to nothing but darkness; weird women and gaunt children imparting a dismal life to the rows of ungainly dwellings;—all these made up a picture of squalid woe such as might well have appalled a stouter heart than poor Lady Oldfield's. And was she to find her delicately-nurtured son in such a place as this? They ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... about, gigantic memorials of the great convulsion that in days long gone by heaped up the long ridge of the Shawangunk, and shattered its northern dip into such majestic and fantastic cliffs. The deepest and wildest chasm is filled by the weird, green lake. Straying along the tops of the precipices bordering the water, our travellers beheld lovely vistas of the far-away country, north, south, east, or west, stealing in through rocky or leafy openings. An ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... Pelusiac Nile to Pelusium. And thus it was Cornelia caught glimpses of that strange, un-Hellenized country that stretched away to the southward, tens and hundreds of miles, to Memphis and its pyramids, and Thebes and its temples—ancient, weird, wonderful; a civilization whereof everything was older than human thought might trace; a civilization that was almost like the stars, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. Almost would Cornelia have been glad if the prows of the barges had been turned up the river, and she ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... up his arms, another pitched headlong into the sand, and the Americans swept up the slope in a charge which brooked no obstacles. Little girls handclapped vigorously, while the boys pounded on the floor with their feet and gave vent to weird whistles of enthusiasm. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... wonderful playing, but his weird appearance which helped to gain credence for such surprising anecdotes. Leigh Hunt has left us a graphic description of ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... Amfortas, the king, and of his incurable wound. A wild gallop, a rush of sound—and a weird woman, with streaming hair, springs toward the startled group. She bears a phial with rare balsam from the Arabian shores. It is for the king's wound. Who is the wild horsewoman? Kundry—strange creation—a being doomed to wander, like the Wandering Jew, the wild Huntsman, or Flying Dutchman, always ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... changed. The women drummed upon skins and hummed in a weird way. They tried to show by the sound of the music the coming of ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... laws of space and distance? The bewitching azure of the sky and the divine taste of the air seemed to bear out a feeling that it was exempt from any law of nature with which I was familiar. The mountain-peak directly opposite the hotel looked weird now. Was it peopled with Liliputians? Another bird made itself heard somewhere in the underbrush flanking the brook. It was saying something in querulous accents. I knew nothing of birds, and the song or call of this one sounded so queer to me that I was almost frightened. All of which tended to ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... told Mr. Stewart that in their childhood this weird spot was held to be sacred to the Great Wolf, the totem of their tribe. Here, for more generations than any could count, their wise men had gathered about the mystic birch flame, in grave council of war. Here the tribe had assembled to seek strength of arm, hardness of heart, cunning of ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... a bit of a choke; they're so soft, and lissom; the peace, and the pity—a sort of look of: "Why—why—when I was so alive?" Well, this elderly Johnny took a good squint at it, to see if the hole was big enough, then off he went again, sobbing and digging like a fiend. It was really a bit too weird, and I mouched off. But when I'd gone about half a mile, I got an attack of the want-to-knows, came back, and sneaked along the hedge. There he was still, but he had finished, and was having a mop round, and putting the last ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... lay heavy on my heart, and hope waned and fear waxed, and my soul so grieved my body that I thought to fall sick thereof, and I knew that it would be ill for you to come home hither and find me sick; so that I longed sore to do somewhat which should make me whole again. Then weird would that I should hear all the tale of the Black Valley of the Greywethers, and of how therein is whiles granted fulfilment of desire; and methought how well it were if I might seek the adventure there and ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... announcement of the enemy's plan to the French soldiery supplied the touch of good comradeship which insured their utmost devotion on the morrow. At midnight, as he returned from visiting the outposts, the soldiers greeted him with a weird illumination: by a common impulse they tore down the straw from their rude shelters and held aloft the burning wisps on long poles, dancing the while in honour of the short gray-coated figure, and shouting, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... as in prose, he was eminently successful in the metaphysical treatment of the passions. Hia poems are constructed with wonderful ingenuity, and finished with consummate art. They display a somber and weird imagination, and a taste almost faultless in the apprehension of that sort of beauty which was most agreeable to his temper. But they evince little genuine feeling, and less of that spontaneous ecstasy which gives its freedom, smoothness and naturalness to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the desert dips and gullies for some time, but they could discover no trace of any agency that could have produced the weird cries. Both Red Bill and the black-mustached man ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... explained that I did not believe in love. That only made matters worse. He rolled his eyes and vowed that he would convince me. Then he began sending me letters and love lyrics. The lyrics were so original they were positively weird. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... appreciated the warm magenta coloring of gorgeous poinsettias and bougainvillea, the glowing-hearted, waxy white flowers of frangipani; not until now did he realize the prodigality of Nature towards Java in the matter of weird and ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud, and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull. ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... the pathless forests which infolded like a prison wall, distances which seemed impossible of span, had vanished. In its place had fallen over her an abiding sense of peace, of security. The lusty storm winds whistling about the cabin sang a restful lullaby. When the wolves lifted their weird, melancholy plaint to the cold, star-jeweled skies, she listened without the old shudder. These things, which were wont to oppress her, to send her imagination reeling along morbid ways, seemed but a natural aspect of life, of which she herself was ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... at Yedo, as I was sitting, with a few Japanese friends, huddled round the imperfect heat of a brazier of charcoal, the conversation turned upon the story of Sogoro and upon ghostly apparitions in general. Many a weird tale was told that evening, and I noted down the three or four which follow, for the truth of which the narrators vouched with the ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... a laugh stranger than her first one, and her great black eyes were fixed on him as he had remembered seeing her fix them when she was a child and full of some wild fancy or weird sadness. ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to the gate and opened it. "You must not indulge such weird thoughts," he said, his features set in a mask of tense inner pain. "You must go to bed and ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... lay a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... was my fortune to hear once in a country church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir, but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however chosen, would fail in attempting to describe ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... had taken place, the attacking party had rushed in again, to go on stabbing and thrusting away with their pikes, keeping up a series of rattlings and clashings, till Ralph made his voice heard, and they drew back, growling angrily, and the weird light shed by the torches showed that blood had begun to ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... boatmen bandy lazzi and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... go, it seemed impossible that I could get through safely. My companions said good-bye to me as though I were a scaffold victim about to be executed. But get through I did—how I do not know—and the chillingly weird war-calls of the Indians howling at me from the hills as I rode return to my ears ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... Men All" has been reading and enjoying Mr. BARRY PAIN's Stories and Interludes. The book has a wondrously weird and heavily-lined picture in front, which is just a little too like a "Prophetic Hieroglyphic" in Zadkiel's Almanack. An emaciated and broken-winged devil is apparently carrying an engine-hose through ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... again throughout the course of his dialogue. The result is often similar to that attained by Wagner, in his music-dramas, through the iteration of a leit-motiv. Thus in Rosmersholm, whenever the action takes a turn that foreshadows the tragic catastrophe, allusion is made to the weird symbol of "white horses." Similarly, in Hedda Gabler—to take another instance—the emphasis of repetition is flung on certain leading phrases,—"Fancy that, Hedda!" "Wavy-haired Thea," "Vine-leaves in his hair," and "People don't ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... honey where they find the best: And for the gentle influence of the night, Oh, Heavenly Father! do we bend the knee, That shuts the curtains of our mortal sight, Yet leaves the mind, with range and vision free, For dreams! the solemn, weird, and strange that come And bear the soul to an elysian clime,— Unveiling splendours of that better home, Where angels minister to sons of time! For all Thy blessings that with sleep descend, Our hearts shall praise Thee, God, our Father ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... when he appeared, for disdaining the immaculate costume I had carefully laid out, he had put on a most disreputable-looking pair of trousers, and an old paint-stained Norfolk jacket. A faded flannel shirt and a silk bandanna tied about his throat completed this weird accoutrement, which was topped by a long-vizored cap and a dilapidated canvas gunny sack, the latter but half full and slung lightly over one shoulder. Anticipating my question, he explained that it was useless ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... a spectacle wild, weird, altogether indescribable; and by Captain Redwood not to be looked upon a moment longer than was necessary ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... which, so far as we could see, was absolute desolation, without a neighbor, but which to him was bristling with memories and associations and old friends across the intervale and over the mountain and round the spur. There was something weird to me, as I looked out at the flying whiteness of the moonlit storm, in those acquaintances of his among the hollows of these pallid hills; it seemed as though they must partake of the coldness and whiteness, and as ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... was about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter flood rushed from his heart to his eyes; the iron dropped ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the red-curtained public-houses. The roar of personal experiences sounded through the cloud of tobacco-smoke and steam, and the drinking was steady and determined. Out on the river the shadows fell on the racing tide; the weird lights flickered in the brown depths of the water; and the swirling eddies gurgled darkly and flung the boats hither and thither. In the stern of each boat was a crouching figure; for the little cabin-boy had to wait in the cold until the pleasures of rum and ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... the St. John's River to Enterprise. Florida was the part of the United States to be first touched by the feet of white men, and yet it seemed to me to be the most backward in the march of progress. It was interesting chiefly from its weird and valueless swamps, its sandy reaches and its alligators. It is a peninsula, dividing the Gulf of Mexico from the ocean, and a large part of it is almost unexplored. The part we traversed was low, swampy, with dense thickets, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... didn't go?" she suggested, and he perceived that she meant Ibsen's tragedy. But he did not answer at once. He had had a shock, and for a timeless space he had been back in his room at St. Johnswort, with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to vanish again when he gave a second glance, as it had vanished before, and he drew a long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss Hernshaw. "Ah, I see you did! Wasn't it tremendous? ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... weird temptation: she wanted to remove the heavy coffin lid and slide the coffin into the lake, as a boat, and then to get inside and push away from shore, and afterward stretch herself out on the bed of sawdust at the bottom ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... there is something strangely impressive about all night journeys by rail; and those forming part of an American transcontinental trip are almost weird. From the windows of a night-express in Europe, or the older portions of the United States, one looks on houses and lights, cultivated fields, fences, and hedges; and, hurled as he may be through ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... young self-supporting woman in Honolulu trace their ancestry back to Kamehameha with great pride. The chant is a weird sing-song which relates the conquests ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... thought we simply steered Great motor-cars to champagne dinners And bought tiaras and were cheered By hopes of breeding Epsom winners; Eh, lad, you little knew the weird ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... awakened by Higgs limping into my room in some weird sleeping-suit that he had contrived with the ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... children, and Mary Donner, a serious question arose. None of the eleven, except Mrs. Breen and John Breen, were able to walk. A storm appeared to be gathering upon the mountains, and the supply of provisions was very limited. The lonely situation, the weird, desolate surroundings, the appalling scenes at the camp, and above all, the danger of being overtaken by a snow-storm, filled the minds of Oakley and Stone with terror. When it was found that nine out of the eleven people must be carried ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... continue on foot. The Matopos are a wild and desolate range. It is not until you are well beyond the granite outposts that there bursts upon you an immense open area,—a sort of amphitheatre in which the Druids might have held their weird ritual. Directly ahead you see a battlement of boulders projected by some immemorial upheaval. Intrenched between them is the spot where Rhodes rests and which is marked by a brass plate bearing the words: "Here Lie the Remains of Cecil John Rhodes." In his will he directed that the site be chosen ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... impulse. It suddenly became changed to a feeling of terror. There was something so weird in the look of the reptile, something so strange in the manner of its attack and subsequent escape, that, on losing sight of it, I became suddenly impressed with a sort of supernatural awe—a belief that the creature was ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... of the West, yes—but a most unusual one, touched with an almost weird poetic fancy from the very first page, when over the sandy wastes sounds the clear sweet whistling of Pan of the desert, to the very last paragraph when the reader, too, hears the cry and the call of ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... a thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,—now harlequin, now gossip, now threnodist,—with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy, uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,—now relating the story, with childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart ridiculing mankind, now allegorical ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... song over and over, to the weird harmony of his magic music sticks, until he reached the place where ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... hole they closed poor Beichan. There he stood, night and day, up to his waist in puddle-water; but night or day it was all one to him, for no ae styme of light ever got in. So he lay there a lang and weary while, and thinking on his heavy weird, he made a murnfu' sang to pass the time—and this was the sang that he made, and grat when he sang it, for he never thought of escaping from the mafsymore, or of seeing ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... phantasmagoria have furnished me with the framework, and even details, of stories which from time to time I have contributed to various magazines. A ghost story,* published some years ago in a London magazine, and much commented on because of its peculiarly weird and startling character, had this origin; so had a fairy tale,** which appeared in a Christmas Annual last year, and which has recently been re-issued in German by the editor of a foreign periodical. ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... me to eat and rest, and all retired but the chief's mother, a weird, witch-like woman of eighty, with shocks of yellow-white hair, and a stern suspiciousness in her wrinkled face. I have come to feel as if she had the evil eye, as she sits there watching, watching always, and for ever knotting the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... dree our weird. You are a canny Scotch-woman, and know what that means. Come, you must cheer up, for I have brought a young lady with me who is going to put your daughter-in-law a little more comfortable and see after her from ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... weird story which is told in the Western Mail of Cardiff serves to lend that touch of horror to the tale which renders it more thrilling than any story which the most daring novelist would ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... midst would suggest anew what supernal splendors had once been here vouchsafed to the faltering eye of man. The illusion had come to be very dear to him; in this insistent localization of his faith it was all very near. And so he would go down to the slope below, among the weird, stunted trees, and look once more upon the broken tables, and ponder upon the strange signs written by time thereon. The insistent fall of the rain, the incisive blasts of the wind, coming again and again, though the ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... his blankets. He had retired early leaving his companions continuing their arguments, their conjectures and speculations. The campfire flared up and died down, according to the addition of new fuel. The light flickered on the trees in fantastic and weird shadows. At length there was only a dull red glow left, and quiet reigned. The ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... cave in a boat. It is magnificent, that rushing water, those weird wailings, and the mysterious figures of spray which pass up ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... seeing something going through that door," whispered Carrick. It is noticeable, too, that he had said "something" and not "some one." The gloomy cells, centuries old, the damp memories of the dungeons still clinging to the walls, together with this weird presence which eluded their eyes before they could behold it, might well arouse the superstitions of firmer minds ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... duly sworn, Sergius Thord stood aside, and made way for Lotys, who, rising from her seat, lifted the funeral urn from the table and held it out towards the men. She made a strange and weird picture standing thus,—her white arms gleaming like sculptured ivory against the dark bronze of the metal vase,—her gold hair touched with a blood-like hue from the reflection of the red lamp behind her,—and her face,—infinitely mournful and resigned,—wearing ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... made no reply as he followed the trail into the depth of the wood, which was made weird by the slender forms of the trees whose high tops were hidden by the low hanging mists that were as the breath of the huge ocean. The waters of the ocean not far away were slowly surging through the narrow pass of ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... through the tall old trees in the courtyard outside, that entering by the half-open blinds cast shadows like trembling lace on the wall opposite to him. It seemed to Sulpice then that he could hear the sounds of the weird demon's chase as told by old Catherine, the cook, in bated tones during ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... life; but while it destroys it creates. Is it not almost a romantic idea that just as our waking life images itself in our dreams, so our dream-life may send back some of its shadowy phantoms into our prosaic every-day world, touching this with something of its own weird beauty? ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... nothing clearly, for the same strange and weird conditions continued to permeate the earth ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... gloomy hall was not pleasant. The red wall-paper was soiled and torn, and weird shadows flickered from the small gas taper that blinked from the ceiling. There were suggestions of old dinners, stale fried potatoes and pork in all the corners, and one moving toward the stairs seemed to stir them up and set them going ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... the metal vizor and bounced off, as the weird assailant ran within striking distance. For the first time in his life came the sensation of helplessness in a fight. There was a numbing feeling of horror as he recoiled ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... planks were scraping and hissing over vegetation. This was the winter fur of the land—thick, coarse tundra moss; and on that we pitched a camp, and on that we remained for long weeks while the ship was mending. It was a weird, lonely time. Once or twice strange, wandering creatures came our way—little, belted men, with hairless faces, who rode up on strong horses, and liked to exhibit their skilful management of them. They talked to us in their chirpy jargon (Toongus, I think it was ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... nature comes a love for home and country, and this love serves as a bridge to the patriotism which was the vital force in the Wars of Liberation and which, by well-marked gradations, destroyed the cosmopolitanism engendered by the French Revolution. Art went hand in hand with nature; the wild, weird landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, fascinating and specifically German, express the Romantic spirit fully as well as the delicate, spiritual, and thoroughly sane fancies of Philip Otto Runge, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... new aspect of affairs, still kept his place upon the quarter-deck. He saw objects flitting across the waist of the ship, and heard distinctly the coils flung down with a clang upon the wet decks. There was something weird and ghostly in those half-seen figures, in the indistinct maze of cordage and canvas above, and the phosphorescent streaks of spray streaming away from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... This field we overlooked through a fence-row of persimmon and wild plum. Among these bushes, half fallen into a rain-gully, a catalpa, of belated bloom, was loaded with blossoms and bees, and I was directing Camille's glance to it when the shots came. Another outcry or two followed, and then a weird silence. ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... it the cadaverous head of a dying man. Motionless as the personages painted on a diorama, his stupefied eyes were fixed on the sparkling facets of a cut-glass stopper, but certainly without observing them; he seemed to be engulfed in some weird contemplation of the future or the past. When I had long examined that puzzling face I began to reflect about it. "Is he ill?" I said to myself. "Has he drunk too much wine? Is he ruined by a drop in the Funds? Is he thinking how to cheat ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... brother and Jeanne, her faithful maid, and poor devoted Hector all huddled up in a rickety tumbril, being dragged through the streets of Paris on the road to death. On ahead she had seen the weird outline of the guillotine silhouetted against the evening sky, whilst all around her a howling, jeering mob sang that awful refrain: "Ca ira! Ca ira! les aristos a ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... same thing that makes a horse shy. The horse does not say to himself, "There is a large carriage, moving with no horse to pull it, with nothing to push it, with—so far as I can see—no motive power at all. How weird that is! How frightful!"—and, with a quickly beating heart, jump aside and caper in scared excitement. A horse when he first sees an automobile gets an impression on his brain which is entirely out of his ordinary course of impressions—it is as if some one suddenly ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... and Broad, and I got out to view better the new, three-fifths-built marble edifice, the City Hall, of magnificent proportions—a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight—flooded all over, facades, myriad silver-white lines and carv'd heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle—silent, weird, beautiful—well, I know that never when finish'd will that magnificent pile impress one as it ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the unpardonable deed with a liberal hand. "Frightfully weird, you know," he mimicked with a chuckle, adding: "It takes the rude, untutored mind of a barbarian to be satisfied with sweetening a thing with sweetness instead ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... That weird cry was enough to send Johnnie Green hurrying into the farmhouse, though sometimes he paused in the doorway to listen—especially if Solomon Owl happened to be laughing. His "haw-haw-hoo-hoo," ...
— The Tale of Solomon Owl • Arthur Scott Bailey
... others, as thick as one's leg; they were twisted and wrapped around the branches, so that they looked like boa-constrictors hanging ready to drop upon one's shoulders. The moonlight gave to this forest of great trees a weird, fantastic look. I felt like a knight entering an enchanted wood. But nothing disturbed our silence except the sudden awakening of a great bird or the stealthy rustle of an animal in the underbrush. Near midnight we rode into a grove of manacca palms as delicate as ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... reading in the Gardener's Chronicle an article by Dr. Lindley on one of the London flower shows, where there was a good display of orchids, in which ... he added, 'and Dendrobium Devonianum, too delicate and beautiful for a flower of earth.' This and other references ... gave them, in my mind, a weird and mysterious charm ... which, I believe, had its share in producing that longing for the tropics which a few years later was satisfied in the equatorial forests ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver's skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought Grace Melbury to the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was blowing—that not unacceptable compromise between the atmospheric cutlery of the eastern blast and the spongy gales of the west quarter. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... hot with the breath of tropic winds, and the horizon to the west and south was festooned with fierce red clouds. The sun was just setting, and spreading the broad ocean with a crimson light, giving a weird and curious outline to every feature of the ship. There was something grand, even enchanting and sublime, in the picture here spread out, presenting as it did the highest example of God's ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... impossible to provide coffins or even separate graves for those who perished. And therefore, in order to bury the deceased, great carts passed through the streets after sunset, attended by linkmen and preceded by a bellman crying in weird and solemn tones, "Bring out your dead." At the intimation of the watchmen stationed before houses bearing red crosses upon their doors, the sad procession would tarry, When coffinless, and oftentimes shroudless, rigid, loathsome, and malodorous ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... produced from "Weird Tales" October, 1937. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... glimpse of Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... but sin breeds in-and-in, And a father's grief is stern; Robin is dead, and a distant kin Now calls himself Kildearn. The moon's pale light falls on yonder tomb, By which sits a woman grey, And sings in the blast a revengeful doom, In a woman's weird way. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Most strange and weird is this extraordinary regularity. It seems to mean something, to be arranged on some plan and for some humanly intelligible purpose. In the evenings and early mornings especially, when these oft-repeated shapes ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... slugs have nerves, then," Reggie said, getting up out of his hammock, "and get strung up like people who over-work. Just think of a strung-up slug! There is something weird in the idea. A slug that started at its own shadow. Here is tea! Oh, Mrs. Windsor, where are the tents to be ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... presented, with huge fires blazing away under our pots, and the men with the ladles skimming off the scraps, or baling out the oil into the coolers, was strange and weird in the extreme. Had I been suddenly introduced among them, I should not have recognised them as my shipmates, begrimed as they were with smoke and oil. I was, however, much in the same condition. Dr Cockle had become accustomed to ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... "Quite a weird place it is, too. The walls are damp, and the cellars themselves are like the vaults of a cathedral. All the time at high tide you can hear the sea thundering over your head. To-morrow, if you like, we will get ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... side of the wall came sounds of revelry, shrill squealings and shoutings. The Judies were disporting themselves at one of their weird games. It was known that they played touch-last, and Scandal said that another of their favourite recreations was marbles. The juniors at Wrykyn believed that it was to hide these excesses from the gaze of the public that the playground wall had been made so ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... watched, the basin slowly raised off the table and moved upward a few inches. No one was near it, but it floated there, quivering and tilting a little, in the air. And then, from it, slowly, the water itself came up in a weird fountain, moved completely free of the basin and hung above it in the air, gradually assuming ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... facing each other, as though in some weird fascination; and in the rushing of the blood through his brain Markam seemed to hear the words of the prophecy: 'See thyself face to face, and repent ere the quicksand swallow thee.' He did stand face to face with himself, he had repented—and now he was sinking in the ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... "In a weird sort of way, a hobby is a man's substitute for sport, I believe," said Estelle's father. "Many have no feeling for sport; it's left out of them and they seem to be able to live comfortably without it. Instead they develop an instinct for something else. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... jugglers, armed with bags and boxes and musical instruments, and all the mysterious paraphernalia of the peripatetic Jadugar. While Siddeshur was looking on, and in the broad, clear light of the afternoon, a man was shut up in a box, which was then carefully nailed up and bound with cords. Weird spells and incantations of the style we are all familiar with were followed by the breaking open of the box, which, "to the unqualified amazement of everybody, was found to be perfectly empty." All ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... cave could be found the calcareous deposit so common in caves formed in limestone rocks, and the stalactite hangings on the ceilings and walls, and the stalagmites on the floors made the scene a weird one. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... dog announced that the game was treed; then the wild scramblings and stumblings through briars and bushes and over roots to get to the spot; then the lighting of a fire and the felling of the tree, the joyful frenzy of the dogs and the negroes, and the weird picture it all made in the red glare—I remember it all well, and the delight that every one got out of it, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Was this some kind of spiritism? Had Kennedy turned medium and sought a message from the other world to solve the inexplicable problems of this? It was weird, uncanny, unthinkable. We turned to him blankly for ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... an awesome something. A weird wrench as if some greater power, some greater law had taken hold. A glove of force, invisible, but somehow sensed, had closed about the wire and flame. Instantly the roaring of the burner changed in tone; an odor of gas spewed out ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... Three famous streets in New Orleans bear testimony to the importance of the colored people in the life of the city. Congo Square, one of the great open squares in the old Creole quarter, was named for the slaves who used to congregate in its limits and dance the weird dances to the tunes of blood-stirring minor strains. Those who know the weird liet-motif of Coleridge-Taylor's Bamboula dance have heard the tune of the Congo dance, which every child in New Orleans could sing. Gottschalk's Danse des Negres is almost forgotten by this generation but in it he ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... demonstration there before giving signal for action elsewhere. Obedient to his first instructions, the main body had spread out in long, irregular skirmish rank, their mettlesome ponies capering and dancing in their eagerness. Chanting in chorus some shrill, weird song, the line was now slowly, steadily advancing, still too far away to warrant the wasting of a shot, yet unmistakably seeking to close as much as possible before bursting ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... that a Roman emperor would never proceed victoriously beyond Ctesiphon, Carus was not convinced, but he fell sick, and his projects were delayed; he was still in his camp near Ctesiphon, when a terrible thunderstorm broke over the ground occupied by the Roman army. A weird darkness was spread around, amid which flash followed flash at brief intervals, and peal upon peal terrified the superstitious soldiery. Suddenly, after the most violent clap of all, the cry arose that the Emperor was dead. Some said that his tent had been struck by lightning, and that his death ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... walls of canvas there was a weird design of black shadows, a design which was constantly shifting and taking on new shapes. And as the shadows moved, sometimes with grotesque effect and swiftly, sometimes slowly, voices filtered through the gleaming cloth to mingle with the whispering of the ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... by Hagar came down along the sand in a great hood-cloak that gave her a most weird and witchlike appearance. The fishermen looked at her with startled, suspicious eyes as the bent old figure suddenly emerged from the darkness into the full glare of the firelight. The old negress passed on to where Trafford ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... a certain sunset hour when she came at Pierre's call out to the shed he had built at one side of their cabin. Its open side faced the west, and, as Joan came, her shadow went before her and fell across Pierre at work. The flame of the west gave a weird pallor to the flames over which he bent. He was whistling, and hammering at a long piece of iron. Joan came and ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... magnificent alabaster coffin. The walls and pillars of each chamber are wonderfully carved and painted. The pillars show pictures of the King making offerings to the gods, or being welcomed by them, but the pictures on the walls are very strange and weird. They represent the voyage of the sun through the realms of the under-world, and all the dangers and difficulties which the soul of the dead man has to encounter as he accompanies the sun-bark on its journey. Serpents, bats, and crocodiles, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... landing-place frowns from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, 'Moresco Castle,' as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir John de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked his works of darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone, through which all the winds of heaven ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... each particular cock were as big as the mythical rooster of antiquity and could crow in proportion to his size. My readers who dwell on the hills and in dales and wheat-fields, and who are unfamiliar with the wild, weird early morning din of the city, may not know that the metropolitan cock-crow is made up of the jingle and jangle of a million tin milk cans jolted over a million blocks of stone to the tune of thousands ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... he heard rumblings, steamy vibrations, and, as it were, sudden escapes of gas; and comprehended that these were the hoarse responses of the 32 and 64 foot pipes, laid horizontally along the roof of the screen, to the summoning fingers of the organist. It was all uncanny, weird, supernatural, demoniacal if you will—it was part of the secret and unsuspected mechanism of a vast emotional pageant and spectacle. It unnerved Priam, especially when the organist, a handsome youngish man with lustrous eyes, half turned and winked ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... long, spectral arms outstretched to grasp the child, the frantic gallop of the horse, the alarmed father clasping his darling to his bosom in convulsive embrace, the siren-like elves hovering overhead, to lure the little soul with their weird harps. There can be no better illustration than is furnished by this terrible scene of the magic power of mythology to invest the simplest physical phenomena with the most intense human interest; for ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... dusk were very impressive. So long had the bell-metal cogwheel sung its deafening song into Will's ear that, as he walked away into the dusk, he had a weird feeling of being suddenly deaf, and his legs were so numb that he could hardly feel the earth. He stumbled away like a ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... in the forest belt, girt round with shadows and lit up at eve by flitting flames. Every night Grendel came forth and carried off some of the Danes to devour in his home. The description of the monster himself and of the marshland where he had his lair is full of that weird and gloomy superstition which everywhere darkens and overshadows the life of the savage and the heathen barbarian. The terror inspired in the rude English mind by the mark and the woodland, the home of wild beasts and of hostile ghosts, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... mind instantly conjured up the picture of a vivid figure in a frock that gleamed blue as sulphurous flames. A hysterical woman sprang up screaming shrilly, and had to be taken away; a solitary sea gull, its plumage shining with a weird blueness in the electric light, chose this moment to fly low along the deck, crying its wailing cry. That was enough. Another woman began to scream; the music stopped, and there was almost a panic to get away from a spot that seemed haunted. In a little ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... the most imperial theme of modern times? Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of what real parentage we know not; reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward, ungainly even among the uncouth about him: it was reserved for this remarkable character, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity, raised to supreme command at a supreme ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... what appeared to be a vast lake, but might only be mist on the meadows; cloud-like masses shaped themselves into spectral forms and rolled away into the dim and nebulous distance, where they settled into weird domes and towers and walls, a veritable elf king's castle. It was so uncanny and silent and strange that Carmel was far more frightened than she had felt before. Old fairy tales of her childhood crowded ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... it was then near the end of October—the weird song of a solitary brave was heard. In an instant the camp was thrown into indescribable confusion. The meaning of this was clear as day to everybody—all of our war-party were killed, save the one whose mournful song announced the fate of his companions. The lonely ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... tiny dabchick dived so deep that we thought, "This time she must be drowned," when, lo and behold! she would appear twenty yards off, a little black ball with a yellow bill, only to take breath and plunge again. Sometimes in a hard winter we would hear high in the sky the cry of a weird pack of hounds. Nearer and nearer drew that unearthly music, till we held our breath in a kind of delightful terror, and then above our heads appeared a flock of wild swans on the search for water; and down they dropped, like white cannon-balls, into the lake, sending a mass of spray into the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various |
