"As a matter of fact" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... papers criticised my language on that occasion and declared that my words provoked the hostile demonstration. As a matter of fact, the hostility was manifested before I began to speak, and it was some minutes before I could obtain a hearing. This is the only speech in which I have inserted the applause, and it is only done here because the interruptions are also quoted. The report ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... pleaded the young man. "As a matter of fact, if you want to know, I think your mouth is absolutely perfect. I think," he proceeded, a little feverishly, "that you are the most indescribable ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... would have been, of course, "Well, as a matter of fact I do;" but you cannot make answers of that kind to Editors; they don't understand it. And that brings you to the real drawback of comic poetry; it means constant truck with Editors. But I must not be drawn into a discussion about ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... had to go somewhere. The night is not a tumultuous black ocean in which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wet November night. The lamps of Soho made large greasy spots of light upon the pavement. The by-streets were dark enough to shelter man or woman leaning against the doorways. One detached herself as Jacob ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the first man hit was a private, who got a ball through his head by the ear. He was carried away, but died before he got off the field. A young officer was struck soon afterwards, and then the bearers began to be busy. There were far too few of them, and no one could find the ambulance carts. As a matter of fact they had not left Ladysmith—twelve miles at least away. Most of the wounded tried to creep back out of fire. Some lay quite still. I heard only two or three call out for help. Meantime the rest were keeping up a steady fire, not by volleys, but as each could sight a Boer among ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... no need to think of defence, in which men led the religious life. Compare this abbey even with Castle Hedingham a few miles away, once the home of the great De Veres, by no means so gloomy as such castles are wont to be, and I doubt if you would prefer it to live in; as a matter of fact it has been little used for centuries, while Beeleigh is still a home. Here in these rich and peaceful gardens, Abbot Epicurus of Beeleigh—who held in his hands, at convenient arm's length, the prosperous town of Maldon—could discourse ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... that incontrovertible fact, have you? Then I hope you will permit me to drive you home, especially since these packages are much too numerous and too weighty for you to carry in your arms. As a matter of fact, I have been hoping for an opportunity to meet our new neighbors. Neighbors are precious in our sight, I assure you, Miss Stevenson, and only the misfortune of illness in the household has prevented my sister from looking you up long ago. How long have you been here? Three ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... above-described struggle for convoking the All-Russian Congress of Soviets—we, openly declaring, in the name of the Petrograd Soviet and the Northern Region Congress, that the Second Congress of Soviets must set Kerensky's government aside and become the true master of the Russian land. As a matter of fact the uprising was already on. It was developing quite openly before the ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... march upon her husband in providing Lesley with a standard of youthful good-breeding and good-looks. It might tend to preserve her from forming any silly attachment in her father's circle, Lady Alice thought. As a matter of fact, she was singularly ignorant of what that circle might comprise. She had left him before his more prosperous days began to dawn, and she continued therefore to picture him to herself as the struggling journalist in murky lodgings—"the melancholy literary man" who smoked ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... walking slowly and the kind clergyman attributed her leisurely pace to dejection, but as a matter of fact, Edith was feeling quite happy and much interested in the tiny bright yellow snail shells the beach was providing for entertainment. She had been spared all that was possible of the depression and sorrow of the past weeks. ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... so many details, I beg you! By looking out for the details you create them, and you would want a list a yard long to contain all your maladies. As a matter of fact, with you it is the mental outlook which is wrong. Well, make up your mind that it is going to get better and it will be so. It's as simple as ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... that will not undercut our bipartisan budget agreement. As a matter of fact, if adopted, it will improve our deficit reduction goals. And what an example we can set, that we're serious about getting our financial accounts in order. By acting and approving this plan, you have the opportunity to override a congressional process ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... "As a matter of fact," I went on, "I don't exactly recall a similar case in my experience. You will doubtless admit yourself that it is a bit unusual for a man even of your age to flirt with the maiden aunt of his fiancee, and possibly you realize that we would all be very much relieved if you could give us some reasonable ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... have done so either before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (in which case he would have been hardly three years old, for he was born in 1639), or else in the summer of 1660, the year of the Restoration, and the year in which he died. As a matter of fact, cedars were hardly known at the time, for John Evelyn in his Sylva, published in 1664, only mentions them as unsatisfactory seedlings, difficult to grow; and the earliest cedar planted in England is probably the Enfield cedar, which may have been set in the ground by ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... As a matter of fact, those who read La Capitale had been advised through its columns that an attempt would be made to solve the mystery of the Singing Fountains, which had intrigued Paris for so many weeks. A small army of newsboys offered the paper ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... achievements of its big neighbours has resulted in making Adelaide a far more advanced town for its size than either of them. Proportionately to population, everything in Adelaide ought theoretically to be on a fourth scale of its like in Melbourne. As a matter of fact, most things are on more than half-scale, many on a two-thirds, and a few things, such as the Botanic Garden, the Exchange, the Banks of South ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... part of the journey was performed, and what befell him when he reached the monastery, he never afterwards remembered. As a matter of fact, he was already in the grip of a burning fever; and for weeks he lay sick upon his pallet bed, tended by the kindly monks. Indeed, the spring had penetrated even to those rugged heights ere he had recovered strength enough to think of travelling ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that he may get over the difficulty. He contends that Eusebius did not know at what precise period these martyrdoms occurred. "We can," says the bishop, "only infer with safety that Eusebius supposed Polycarp's martyrdom to have happened during the reign of M. Aurelius." "As a matter of fact, the Gallican persecutions took place some ten years later [than A.D. 167], and therefore, so far as this notice goes, the martyrdom of Polycarp might have taken place as many ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... and early summer upon the fading grasslands and on the dry sunny slopes of the hills, the Mariposa tulips set their long-stemmed chalices of delicate color. Bulbous plants of the lily family, they are frequently called Mariposa lilies, but as a matter of fact their relationship is very near to the true tulips of the Old World, and like the latter, they have been extensively introduced into cultivation both in ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... that the stern and proud old gentleman should have blamed West Point for the heart-breaking failure of his favorite son, but, as a matter of fact, West Point was in no way responsible for what had occurred. Neither during his cadetship at the Academy nor for some years after his graduation from that institution had Ulysses Grant touched wine or stimulants in any form. He had, ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... large. No, the public which reads, in any sense of the word worth considering, is very, very small; the public which would feel no lack if all book-printing ceased to-morrow, is enormous. These announcements of learned works which strike one as so encouraging, are addressed, as a matter of fact, to a few thousand persons, scattered all over the English- speaking world. Many of the most valuable books slowly achieve the sale of a few hundred copies. Gather from all the ends of the British Empire the men and women who purchase grave literature as a matter of course, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... arbitrarily and the other five named in 5! 120 different ways, but since, as we have seen, two different assignments of names give the same line, it follows that there cannot be more than 60 different lines LMN obtained in this way from a given set of six points. As a matter of fact, the number obtained in this way is in general 60. The above theorem, which is of cardinal importance in the theory of the point-row of the second order, is due to Pascal and was discovered by him at the age of sixteen. It is, no doubt, the most important contribution to the theory ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... Chaucer so easy to read? At a first glance a page of the "Canterbury Tales" appears more formidable than a page of the "Faerie Queene." As a matter of fact, it is less formidable; or, if this be denied, everyone will admit that twenty pages of the "Canterbury Tales" are less formidable than twenty pages of the "Faerie Queene." I might bring several recent editors ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had for a year held the office of steward to Heliodora. That his functions were not, as a matter of fact, all comprised under that name was well known to all in the house, and to some ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... "As a matter of fact, we're supposed to go out and stay out. We're the permanently mobilised lot. I don't think there are more than eight I.G. battalions in England now. We're a hundred battalions all told. Mostly on the 'heef' in India, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... times, as in the case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the thought may cross him that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year's expenditure if the side he votes for wins.' He votes as a matter of fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. 'His motive, when it is an honourable one, is the desire to do right. We will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter's frame of mind a solemnity ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... further questions. He knew Paris. He knew that the most refined and noble and disinterested of women—a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a bouquet—can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any opera girl of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, dancers and actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character of respected and respectable mothers of families, and act ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... persons who neither had cultivation nor desired any. Francis answered him very little, so Marjorie, wifely before her time, found herself trying nervously to keep up with Logan, and hurling more thoughts at him about Baudelaire than she had known she possessed. As a matter of fact she'd never read any of him, but Logan thought she had to his dying day, which says a good deal for her brains. Presently Francis summoned the waiter in rather a martial voice, demanded a taxi of him efficiently, ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... made to explain it on the ground of the instinctive aversion of the male sex for domestic crises. But the impulse that causes the prosperous householder to move to his club when house-cleaning time arrives will hardly serve to explain such a custom, and as a matter of fact other domestic crises, such as illnesses of the children, do not have any such effect upon the man who habitually absents himself from home before the birth of each child. Other possible reasons for it are the well-known irritability and "difficulty" of women in this condition, and their ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... idea of herself was that without some one in love with her she could not exist—that, unless she knew some man cared for her and for her alone, she would wither and die. As a matter of fact, whether any one loved her or not did not in the least interest her. There were several dozen men who could testify to that. They knew! What she really wanted was to be head over ears in love—to adore some one, to worship him, to imagine ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... studs," he went on. "You drop a stud, and it promptly and inevitably rolls away into some quite impossible hiding-place. So most of us believe. As a matter of fact it only does so approximately three times out of a hundred. Or bootlaces. If you are exceptionally late in the morning; your bootlace always snaps, you say. Not at all. It breaks in such circumstances only four times out of a possible hundred. And with bicycles, to take another ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... the physical life is widely at variance with the mental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact each blends into the other, when we rightly understand their place and purpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend into the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... stronger than our reasoning powers, and as a matter of fact, collective human action is and during any period which we need consider will be controlled by humanitarian instincts and not by the rigidity of economic theory. Individually, we do and always shall, seek each his own particular interest. Collectively, we invariably consider ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... suitable politeness. She said afterwards that her instinct had warned her against Mr. Gorst, with his restlessness and brilliance; but, as a matter of fact, her instinct had done nothing of the sort, and his manners had prejudiced her in his favour. Fanny Eliott had told her that he belonged to a very old Lincolnshire family. There was a distinction about him. And he really had a ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... leaped up and said: "How is it you have come back to me?" The princess answered: "To tell the truth, according to your own habit of treating people badly, I should have followed my father's advice and taken another husband. And, as a matter of fact, the wedding gifts of the Yuan family have been lying in my home for a long time. But I thought and thought and could not bring myself to do so. The wedding was to have been this evening and my father thought it ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... like what you call a joke,' replied the lady calmly. 'As a matter of fact, he is my lawyer's clerk, and has been here to-night charged with disastrous news. I am in sore straits, Senor Harry. Will you ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... treated the old knight very tenderly. They were shrewd enough to see his character very plainly; and that he was a simple man who knew nothing of sedition, but only had harboured agents thinking them to be as guileless as himself. As a matter of fact, Mr. Stewart was an agent of Dr. Storey's; and was therefore implicated in a number of very grave charges. This of course was a very serious matter; but both in the examination of the Council, and in papers in Mr. Stewart's bags, nothing could be found to implicate Sir ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... passages which were a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided and driven; it is, on the contrary, that ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... spread out to dry and the boats were overhauled, while the Major and I climbed up the wall to where he desired to make a geological investigation. We joked him a good deal about his zeal in going to examine the geology at the bottom of the river, but as a matter of fact he came near departing by that road to ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... discussion on the three finest game-shots of the world. If you happen to know that he shot eighteen hundred birds, you can say that most people fixed the figure at fifteen hundred. He will then say,—"Ah, I know most people seem to have got that notion—I don't know why. As a matter of fact, I managed to get eighteen hundred and two, and they picked up twenty-two on the following morning." Your obvious remark is, "By Jove!" (with a strong emphasis on the "by") "what magnificent shooting!" After that, the thing runs along of its own accord. With a bad shot your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... assertion of the usually placid but now irate Lord Bazelhurst was not quite as momentous as it sounded. As a matter of fact, the title to the land was vested entirely in his young American wife; his sole possession, according to report, being a title much less substantial but a great deal more picturesque than the large, much-handled piece of paper down in the safety deposit ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... the system and not manifest itself until years after. This belief obtains with many people to-day. The "madstones" in the possession of many credulous people help to perpetuate the fear of this awful disease. As a matter of fact, the madstone is simply a porous rock which may adhere to a warm, moist surface and exert an absorbent action. Any poison introduced under the skin is disseminated through the system in less than two minutes. If the doctor ever gave you a hypodermic, your knowledge on this point is convincing. ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... Howroyd could no longer pretend not to hear what they said. The road was wide, and bordered by banks and hedges. He took Sarah by the hand and pulled her up on to the bank with him; but even in that moment he noticed that her hand did not tremble in the least, but was, as a matter of fact, steadier than his own. ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... seem to mend matters much. He was astonished to find that losing the great polo match did not distress him at all. A year before it would have broken his heart, but the multiplicity of new interests had changed him entirely. As a matter of fact, he had been long ripe for the change, though he had not known it. As he had matured, the blood of his heredity had begun to clamor for its expression; that ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... champion," he answered, eyeing her up and down. "As a matter of fact you are right, though you assert it rashly. How are you sure that I have not visited Hetty, seeing that three times I have been absent from home and for ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the public sheepfold. In the drawing-room he is a sleeker lapdog, and lies upon more and choicelier-clothed laps than he would in "the two-pair back;" and that is about all that needs to be said or speculated in such a case. As a matter of fact, the demeanor of Moore among the socially great seems to have been that of a man who respected his company, without failing to respect himself also—any ill-natured caviling or ready-made imputations to the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the truth, I wasn't," he said. "As a matter of fact, you must have seen me despatching my last cargo of—yellow. Why? Were you thinking of ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... (smiling sweetly). I don't see that! As a matter of fact, I am sufficiently successful not to care for competition. I believe that I am first-rate in my own walk; and, however the School Board may educate, they will not ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... morphological comparison was the presence of two kinds of spore, and this was known to occur in the recent Lycopods and Water-ferns (Rhizocarpeae) and was also found in fossil representatives of the third phylum, that of the Horsetails. As a matter of fact all the three great Cryptogamic classes have found champions to maintain their claim to the ancestry of the Seed-plants, and in every case fossil evidence was called in. For a long time the Lycopods were ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... was such that there was no possibility or explanation or defence against the accuser whose condemnation weighed heaviest on her soul. He loomed before her, hovered over her, with the tubes of the heart-probing stethoscope in his ears (as a matter of fact they gave him a somewhat grotesque appearance, remotely suggestive of a Hindoo idol; but Miss Quincey had not noticed that); his bumpy forehead was terrible with intelligence; his eyes were cold and comprehensive; the smile of a ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... Pantheism, as a matter of fact, whichever way we travel, is ultimately compelled to deny the qualitative distinction between good and evil, declaring both to be equally necessary, and thus arrives once more at its conception of a Deity who, though said to be "perfect"—presumably in some "super-moral" ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... saying with old Boston families that their ancestors came to America in the "Arbella" with Governor Winthrop, but as a matter of fact there were at least fifteen vessels that brought colonists to Massachusetts in 1630, and I cannot discover that any lists of their passengers have been preserved. The statement that certain persons came over at the same time with Governor Winthrop might ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... As a matter of fact, those who are conceited are always the dupes of their own desire to bulk largely in the minds of others, and at the mere thought that they will not shine as they have hoped to do the majority of them are put entirely out of countenance ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... Muriel had realised the murderous intention in time to frustrate it. Certainly a native had tried to help her, but since the native had disappeared, his share in the conflict was not regarded as very great. As a matter of fact, the light had been too uncertain and the struggle too confused for even the eye-witnesses to know with any certainty what had taken place. Theories and speculations were many and various, but not one of them went near to ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... "Well, I was, as a matter of fact, there that very afternoon. I walked through the wood with Bunker—rather late. I met no one during the ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... the armistice was that England had revoked the orders in council obnoxious to Americans, five days after the declaration of war by the United States, and that intended peace negotiations would therefore have in all probability a happy result. As a matter of fact England had not yielded, and had no intention, as it proved, of yielding on the question of impressment, which was the principal American grievance. But even if England had surrendered every point it was an outrageous ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... "While, as a matter of fact," he continued, with his exasperatingly smooth smile, "it seems to be holding a very much overdressed young lady, presumably from the Folies-Bergere or ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... sent the Kanaka back; at other times he would take him to town; but whether Cockatoo remained or departed, the museum was always locked up lest it should be profaned by the servants of the house. As a matter of fact, Braddock need not have been afraid, for Lucy—knowing her step-father's whims and violent temper—took care that the sanctity of the place should ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... feminine tyranny responded in Rose's breast, and that on the very threshold of the honest soldier's home she tacitly agreed with the wife to look down upon him. Mrs. Randolph departed to inform her son and daughter of their guest's arrival. As a matter of fact, however, they had already observed her approach to the house through the slits of their drawn window-blinds, and those even narrower prejudices and limited comprehensions which their education had fostered. The girl, Adele, had only grasped ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the papers that football goes on as usual. This is so, outwardly, but as a matter of fact the games are played with no spirit and are kept going wholly by force applied by the Government, whose aim is thus to suggest a feeling of security in the country. A few misguided people, who completely misunderstand the situation, hold that footballers should go ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... Were this not so, if we allowed six drunkards to each house as an average, or five habitual drunkards for one arrested for drunkenness, we should arrive at a total of a million adults who are more or less prisoners of the publican—as a matter of fact, Isaac Hoyle gives 1 in 12 of the adult population. This may be an excessive estimate, but, if we take half of a million, we shall not be accused of exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... destroy you, if possible, because you and that insignificant boy Prince have openly threatened to take away my captives and have positively refused to go back to the earth's surface and let me alone. I'm very tender-hearted, as a matter of fact, and I like you immensely and would enjoy having you as a friend, but—" Here he pressed a button on the arm of his throne chair and the section of the floor where Rinkitink stood suddenly opened and disclosed a ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... yet in the enjoyment of his vigorous intellect, are due partly to the change which has befallen "the literature of fiction during the last thirty years," but principally to the fact of his embracing the temperance movement with more zeal than discretion. As a matter of fact, however, long before this step had been taken, there had been causes equally potent at work which seem to have escaped Mr. Bates' attention, and these causes, which appear to us the leading factors in the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the big rivers flow is very flat, and is therefore liable to great floods. Australia has the reputation of being a very dry country; as a matter of fact, the rainfall over one-third of its area is greater than that of England. In most places the rainfall is, however, badly distributed. After long spells of very dry weather there will come fierce storms, during which the rain sometimes falls at the rate of an inch an hour. This fact, ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... trousers pocket. She rode until she felt that her color was at its best, and then she made for town—a swift, direct ride, her heart beating high as if she were upon a most daring and fateful adventure. And, as a matter of fact, never in her life had she done anything that so intensely interested her. She felt that she was for the first time slackening rein upon those unconventional instincts, of unknown strength and purpose, which had been making her restless with their ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... begin, Mrs. Williams. It's you who are raising all this trouble for nothing; because, as a matter of fact, they did not come alone. They had a man with them. An elderly, most respectable man. There he stands yonder, with a feather in his hat. Hey! You! Senor caballero, hidalgo, Pedro—Miguel—Jose—what's your particular saint? Step this ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Tom—who had only been seven years old when Godfrey went away—would be wondering how she felt, and watching to see how she would behave. It was a comfort to be alone with only Timmy who was still at table eating steadily. Till recently tea had been Timmy's last meal, though, as a matter of fact, he had nearly always joined in their very simple evening meal. And lately it had been ordained that he was to eat meat. But much as he ate, he never ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... ladies were good singers, one soprano and the other contralto, while I sang tenor and my brother tried to sing bass; but, as he explained, he was not effective on the lower notes (nor, as a matter of fact, on the high ones either). He said afterwards it was as much as he could do to play the music without having to join in the singing, and at one point he narrowly escaped finishing two bars after the vocalists. Still we spent a very pleasant evening, the remembrance of which ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... sacrificial feasts and the gods of the different Greek and Latin city-states were held to be distinct and hostile, and a citizen of one state could not join in the sacrificial feast of another, though the gods and sacrificial animals might be as a matter of fact the same. And the earth-goddess of each village was a separate form or part of the goddess, so that her land should only be tilled by the descendants of the cultivators who were in communion with her. The severe caste penalties attached to getting vermin in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... As a matter of fact, there were no more cases in the mill; and Lena herself had the terrible disease more lightly than any one had dared to hope. The doctor, hurrying through back ways and alleys to change his clothes and take his bath of disinfectants, was hailed ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... so exaggerated and hysterical," said Louie afterwards, talking things over. But as a matter of fact Henrietta spoke only the ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... as a matter of fact, nothing the matter with it. It was as spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house by the tracks, but at the last moment ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... Cf. Cornwall's satirical remarks on Kent's 'plainness' in II. ii. 101 ff.,—a plainness which did no service to Kent's master. (As a matter of fact, Cordelia had ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... As a matter of fact, my friend, the rich have not abstained from anything. They have not accumulated riches out of their savings, through abstaining from buying things. On the contrary, they have bought and enjoyed the costliest things. They have lived in fine ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... As a matter of fact, I heard Mr. West preach that morning to the boys suffering from war neurosis, or "shell shock," in Hospital 117. He had helped them out on former Sundays there, and they sent for him again ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I was doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to teaching in view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with the unaccustomed generosity of a sixteen-penny Chianti, ran on from that without any ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... that some months ago Mrs. Hornby, the wife of John Hornby, purchased one of these toys—" "As a matter of fact," interrupted Reuben, "it was my cousin Walter who bought the thing and gave it ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... I tell you, words can never describe the horror of the agonising months as they crawled by. "My island" was nothing but a little sand-spit, with here and there a few tufts of grass struggling through its parched surface. As a matter of fact the sand was only four or five inches deep in most places, and underneath ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... As a matter of fact, it is much more important to be taught how to drive than how to ride. A horse in front of a vehicle can do all the mean things a horse under a saddle can do, and more; and it is far more difficult to handle an animal in shafts by means of long ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... the host, and as it was Jim's business to keep up the supply of spirits, lemons and hot water, he had no sinecure on his hands. It might well be supposed that he might, if so minded, have found a more congenial situation, but as a matter of fact, he was not over scrupulous as to the nature of his employment, and probably had his full share of the fun. The Captain paid good wages, and was lavish in gratuities when he was in good humor. On the whole Jim considered that ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... the Governor-General came out with a proclamation ordering that German money be accepted in all business transactions. It is to have forced currency at the rate of one mark to one franc, twenty-five centimes. As a matter of fact, it is really worth about one franc, seven centimes, and can be bought at that rate in Holland or Switzerland, where people are glad enough to get rid of their German money. Any shop refusing to accept German paper money ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... As a matter of fact, though her life as a whole is not an outstanding asset for Christian Science and is likely to grow less so, one must recognize the force of a conviction which changed the neurotic Mrs. Patterson of the ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... written in four flats, but as a matter of fact only one person is flat, viz.: Blue-beard, who has just been slain by Mustapha. The other three flats must refer to the sheep accidentally hit by the younger brothers, who aim for Bluebeard, but miss him, ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... limits are the brook, the ponds it feeds, and the ditches that enter it. He can only move a short distance up the stream because there is a high hatch, nor can he go far down because of a mill; if he could, the conditions would be much the same; but, as a matter of fact, the space he has at his command is not much. The running water, the green flags, the lesser fishes, the water-rats, the horses and cattle on the bank—these are about all the things that he is ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... been times when Bowman thought that to punish poor service and set an example to others, he would omit the customary tip. But such a resolution, embraced with the soup, has never lasted beyond the entree. And, as a matter of fact, Bowman said, such a resolution always spoils his dinner. As long as he entertains it, he dares not look his man in the eye. He stirs his coffee with shaking fingers. He ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... in a fairly wild state. Or indeed in a wholly tame one. My interest at any time is purely scientific and would never lead me to marry into their family circle. My wife's father, as a matter of fact, is English. A professional man, retired, and living upon a small—er—estate near Vancouver. Her mother, who died when Desire was a child, ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... was deliberately clouded by an enemy to prevent my raising money at the time of the Big Jam, when I was pinched," said he. "Frank Taylor straightened it out for me. You can see him. As a matter of fact, most of that land I bought outright from the original homesteaders, and the rest from a bank. I was very particular. There's one 160 I wouldn't take on ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... fertilising elements throughout the soil. In the case of the sludge, on the other hand, its composing particles are closely compacted together, and thus offer the greatest resistance to mechanical and chemical disintegration. "As a matter of fact," says Dr Munro, "the sludge-plots in my experimental series were all readily identified, when the roots were pulled, by the presence of unbroken and undecomposed clods of cake, which had evidently given up, at most, a small portion of their ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... not necessary to prove that the average human life is uninteresting; most of us know that. As a matter of fact the average existence is a monotonous, hopeless dreary stretch of time, dotted at more or less frequent intervals with physical pain and suffering, and with ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... optimistically. "They can't do anything but steal berries, and they're most gone, anyhow. Go ask him what he wants, down there." The last sentence was but feeble sort of fiction that his boys would await his commands; as a matter of fact, they were ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... audience of to-day would be in its presentment according to the customs and manners of the time. In fact, one would be very much entertained were it possible to make Letitia and Charlotte discuss their social schemes and ambitions in a parlour which reflected the atmosphere of New York in 1787. As a matter of fact, however, the audience that crowded into the little John Street Theatre, on the opening night of "The Contrast," was treated to an interior room, which was more closely akin to a London drawing-room than to a parlour in Manhattan. According to the very badly drawn frontispiece, which Wignell ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... cots; but I had scarcely begun to undress, when a foolish accident for which I was responsible happened, an accident that might have had serious consequences, and which, as a matter of fact did have—though ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... get ef ye unwind the time too fast. Ye see, growin' young isn't a thing folks is used to, an' it disgrummages the hull constitution ef ye grow young too fast. Well, 's I was a-sayin', I guess it'll take 'bout eighteen hours by the clock to cut back six years. Thet's by the clock, ye understand. As a matter of fact, of course, we'll be just six years less'n no time in finishin' ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... beginning with 1789. This came about from the circumstance that under the act of September 13, 1788, of "the Old Congress," the first Wednesday in March, which was March 4, 1789, was fixed as the time for commencing proceedings under the said Constitution. Although as a matter of fact Washington was not inaugurated until April 30 of that year, by an act approved March 1, 1792, it was provided that the presidential term should be reckoned from the fourth day of March next succeeding the date of election. And so things stood until the adoption of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... drunkards they found that but few cases, not more than 10 per cent, were hopeless. Did they not rescue these men most of them would sink utterly; indeed, according to their own testimony many of such wastrels were snatched from suicide. As a matter of fact, also, they employed more men per ton of paper than any ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... Olympic, where I'm a patroness or something. If you really want to see me for only a moment, is it possible for you to meet me at Winchester? The train gets in at 12.29 and leaves at 12.33 (aren't I getting clever with the time-table? As a matter of fact I made father's secretary work it all out for me). If you'd like to wait on the platform, I'll put my head out of the window and we can be together for a moment. Dear Eric, I do hope you're not in any kind of ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... should enact that they may, if they wish, lawfully renounce their son by the proclamation of a herald in the face of the world, or of sons who think that they should be allowed to indict their fathers on the charge of imbecility when they are disabled by disease or old age. These things only happen, as a matter of fact, where the natures of men are utterly bad; for where only half is bad, as, for example, if the father be not bad, but the son be bad, or conversely, no great calamity is the result of such an amount of hatred as ...
— Laws • Plato
... no intention of disclosing the source of my information, Senor Andrade," I replied as politely as I could, "I am, as a matter of fact, here in Madrid attempting to solve a very remarkable mystery which occurred in ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... morning, between ten and eleven, I was reaming out a rivet-hole in the tip of the last beam. I was feeling out of sorts that forenoon. Lancy had given his orders to me gruff and short, though, as a matter of fact, he was probably just as gruff with everybody else. But when you're looking for trouble, you know, you don't have much ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... the line of conduct he had mapped out for himself would be a complete reversal of his customary mode of life. As a matter of fact, he had never been in the habit of caring very much what ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... who wishes to be without both. 2. To disuse the term Infidel, since Christians understand by that term one who is unfaithful or treacherous to the truth.... 3. To recognize, not as a matter of policy merely, but as a matter of fact, the sincerity of the clergy and the good intentions of Christians generally.... 4. To seek the maxims of duty in the relations of man to society and nature, and, as the Christian Spectator did us the honor to admit, 'to preach nature and science, morality and art: nature, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... refer to this little monument, Madam? As a matter of fact, it is distinguished by an exceptional inscription of a sufficiently curious nature. But may I ask what has procured for me the honour of ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... o'clock. The food is not high class but of a good bourgeois description, and the place is kept by a Belgian named Renault. It is one of the best hotels in St. Petersburg, and its situation is suited to the purpose; but, as a matter of fact, there is absolutely no first-class hotel either in St. Petersburg or Moscow, and sanitation is a factor that has not yet penetrated into the Russian intellect. A man who eats oysters in Russia, eats his own damnation, and at a high price in both ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... of tools described in Chapter II one flat oilstone and two slips will be found sufficient for a beginning, but as a matter of fact, it will be advisable, as the number of tools is enlarged, to obtain slips of curves corresponding to the hollows of all gouges as nearly as possible. Many professional carvers have sets of these slips ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Nor, as a matter of fact, had the posse. Their courage had cooled during the long ride from Sulphur Falls as the whisky had evaporated from their systems. They were by no means exceedingly anxious to catch up with and encounter what was reputed to be the fastest gun in ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... fingers was like velvet as she worked away the sticking, stinging bits of ore and rock that worried him. He had not known how chief a part in his sensation of discomfort those bits had played until he could bury his face in the relief of her soft hands. As a matter of fact, with those bits out of his cheeks,—and his face in her hands,—he felt no great discomfort at all. If it had not been for her shivering sigh of relief he would have been sorry when the miners drew Madeira up. Madeira had not spoken, and he was purple ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... But, as a matter of fact, she made a very easy and good-natured chaperon, and it was only some of her irritating little ways that troubled them. Without being really deaf, she usually failed to hear any opening speech, and this Diana coped with very summarily. "Aunt Emily," she would begin. "Eh ... eh ... eh ... eh ... ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... little lonely. She does not think the motor monstrous because it is new. She thinks it monstrous because she has eyes in her head; she thinks it monstrous because it is monstrous. That is, her mothers and grandmothers, and the whole race by whose life she lives, have had, as a matter of fact, a roughly recognizable mode of living; sitting in a green field was a part of it; travelling as quick as a cannon ball was not. And we should not look down on the seamstress because she mechanically emits a short sharp scream whenever the motor begins ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... many of my other doings in those days will no doubt be severely condemned. By no one more severely than by myself—now that the necessities which then compelled me have passed. There is no subject on which men talk, and think, more humbug than on that subject of morality. As a matter of fact, except in those personal relations which are governed by the affections, what is morality but the mandate of policy, and what is policy but the mandate of necessity? My criticism of Roebuck and the other "high financiers" is not upon their morality, but upon their policy, which ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... jealousy, that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dick's great annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read "The Demon Lover," and didn't intend to until every one stopped talking about it. As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were pouring in—first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the bric-a-brac of forgotten family friends to the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... round and flanked on the right by high walls with small barred windows. An observer from the street glancing up at the windows might conclude that they were those of the cells in which prisoners were confined. As a matter of fact, the cells have no windows, only a grating which looks directly out into ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... abundantly certain that the present argument must, from its very nature, be powerless as an argument to anyone save its assertor; as a matter of fact, the alleged necessity of thought is not universal; it is peculiar to those ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... panelled with black oak, was the Christmas-tree. Squire Carson stood in front of it. He was a tall, dark man, very quiet in his manners, and he wore a bunch of seals on his waistcoat. We used to think him old, but as a matter of fact he was then not more than forty. He had been, as I afterwards learned, a great traveller in his youth, and some six or seven years before this date he married a lady who was half a Spaniard—a papist, my father called her. I can remember her well. She was small and very pretty, with a rounded ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... you at once the details which I heard from Mrs Fyne later in the day, as well as what little Fyne imparted to me with his usual solemnity during that morning call. As you may easily guess the Fynes, in their apartments, had read the news at the same time, and, as a matter of fact, in the same august and highly moral newspaper, as the governess in the luxurious mansion a few doors down on the opposite side of the street. But they read them with different feelings. They were thunderstruck. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... [5] As a matter of fact there is a marked distinction between the heads of the animals of the east and west porticoes: those of the west are undoubtedly bulls, but those of the east are grotesque mythological creatures ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... said to his companion. And turning to Isak: "As a matter of fact, they ought to give you the place for nothing, and pay you into the bargain, the way you've worked. I'll say as much when I send in the report. Then we'll see how much the State will ask ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... not wandered amongst their recesses, and learnt by slow experience what is indicated by marks which an ignorant observer would scarcely notice. True, even one who sees a mountain for the first time may know that, as a matter of fact, a scar on the face of a cliff means, for example, a recent fall of a rock; but between the bare knowledge and the acquaintance with all which that knowledge implies—the thunder of the fall, the crash of the smaller fragments, the bounding energy of the descending mass—there is almost as much ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... and the water in turn cools the coil through which the water-supply to the calorimeter passes. The brass coil only is shown in the figure. The system is very efficient and we have no difficulty in cooling the water as low as 2 deg. C. As a matter of fact our chief difficulty is in regulating the supply of brine so as not ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... "But, as a matter of fact," began Dorothy seriously, as she stopped, and her companions halted with her, "what had we best do? We cannot walk into Glenwood Hall with a herd of sheep at our heels," for the animals were now following the girls along ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... perceptions. If actually accredited, either would lead to quiescence; if everything were equally good or evil all striving would be meaningless, one might as well jump from a housetop or walk into the fire. But as a matter of fact such mystical assertions are indulged in only in the inactive moments of life, and mean no more than a lyric poem or a burst of music. Every one in his practical moments acknowledges tacitly, at least, the difference between the intrinsic goodness and badness of experiences. A life of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... custom with our story. I have already pointed out in Folk- Lore, p. 403, that the existence of the tale in Kashmir without any reference to the mallet makes it impossible for the rhymes on the mallet to be the source of the story. As a matter of fact, it is a very embarrassing addition to it, since the rhyme tells against the parent, and the story is intended to tell against the ungrateful children. The existence of the tale in India renders it likely enough that it is not indigenous to the British Isles, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs |
