"Dismally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all; he'll make her two or three fine speeches, and then she'll be perfectly contented especially if he looks as dismally at her as he does at us! and that probably he will do the more readily for not liking to look at her at all. But she's such a romantic little thing, she'll ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... They gathered before the big fireplace in silent meditation, while outside the wind whipped sheeted snow against the walls and wailed dismally its endless journeying. They could not help but feel the something melancholy in the air. The little cabin, standing so far away from civilization and all the things they were accustomed to know seemed somehow to set ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... were placed in flat bottomed boats, which silently dropped down the current. It was intended to land three miles above Cape Diamond, and then ascend to the high grounds above. The current, however, carried the boats down to within a mile and a half of the city. The night was dismally dark, the bank seemed more than ordinarily steep and lofty, and the French were on the qui vive. A sentinel bawled out, "Que vive," who goes there? "La France," was the quick reply. Captain Macdonald, of the 78th Highlanders, had served in Holland, and knew the proper ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... tell you?" groaned Peggy dismally. "Who looks better now, you or I? I look 'beautiful,' don't I, perfectly beautiful! It's so becoming to have no collar band, and one's arms sticking out like flails! I sha'n't be able to eat a bite. It's as much as I can do to sit still, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... His thoughts went dismally off in the new direction. As he turned away from the window, a long Venetian mirror close by reflected the image of a tall man in naval uniform, with a head and face that were striking rather than handsome—black curly hair just dusted with grey, a slight chronic frown, remarkable ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... child with its face one fearful smear of jam again waved its crust and shouted, "Ruggums!" while the dog was plainly bent on departing with me. Not until he had been secured by a rope to one of the porch stanchions could I safely leave, and as I went he howled dismally after violent efforts to ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... like couriers but like explorers. We do not merely consider the beginning and the end, but the space between. The journey itself is a delight. We do not travel sitting, dismally imprisoned, so to speak, in a tightly closed cage. We do not travel with the ease and comfort of ladies. We do not deprive ourselves of the fresh air, nor the sight of the things about us, nor the opportunity of examining them ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... thus employed, far from his ancient chateau, the portraits of his ancestors that hung upon its walls were frowning darkly at the degeneracy of this last scion of their noble race, and a sigh, almost a groan, that issued from their faded lips, echoed dismally through the deserted house. In the kitchen, Pierre, with Miraut and Beelzebub on either side of him—all three looking melancholy and forlorn—sat thinking of his absent lord, and said aloud, "Oh, where is my poor, dear master now?" a big tear rolling down his withered cheek ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... also a quiet, business-like concentration of mind which the imaginative girl might have overlooked or undervalued, but which the budding, thoughtful woman must needs recognize and respect. Nor will it seem strange, if, by contrast, it made the excitable Reuben seem more dismally afloat and vagrant. Yet how could she forget the passionate pressure of his hand, the appealing depth of that gray eye of the parson's son, and the burning words of his that stuck in her memory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... blade O'erhead, which made aloft a lightning flash In all the fairies' eyes, dismally fray'd! His ensuing voice came like the thunder crash— Meanwhile the bolt shatters some pine or ash— "Thou feeble, wanton, foolish, fickle thing! Whom nought can frighten, sadden, or abash,— To hope my solemn countenance to wring To idiot ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... his nautical costume, was man of all work. He glanced dismally toward the garden border which lay basking in the sunshine under the wall that divided Villa Rosa from the rest of the world. It contained every known flower which blossoms in July in the kingdom of ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... mist hangs over all! And dismally the fog-horn shrieks its warning o'er the wave! How sullenly the billows heave, beneath the funeral pall! An impenetrable ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... top of a tall tree the ape-man clawed his awkward way and after him came Numa, the lion, moaning dismally. At last Tarzan stood balanced upon the very utmost pinnacle of a swaying branch, high above the forest. He could go no farther. Below him the lion came steadily upward, and Tarzan of the Apes realized that ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... wanted to come along, but as he could not very well be looked after on this trip he had to be left behind, much to his sorrow. He howled dismally as the auto ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the County Fair • Laura Lee Hope
... some last appearance that you have to make upon the college stage, in the presence of the great worthies of the State, and of all the beauties of the town,—Laura chiefest among them. In view of it you feel dismally intellectual. Prodigious faculties are to ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... hopeful tone of yours of 11th to Langdon (just received) for in me hope is very nearly expiring. Everything does look so blue, so dismally blue! ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thick and black that to Paul it seemed like a great sable curtain dropping its folds over them. It enveloped the forest, then the clearing, then the hut, and those within it. The inky sky was without a star. The puffs of rain rattled dismally on the roof of the old cabin. But all this somberness of nature brought comfort and lightness of heart to the besieged. Paul's spirits rose with the blackness of the night and the ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... prayed so long and absurdly that the Colonel ordered him under arrest, but that even while soldiers stood over him with gleaming bayonets, the reckless being sang a preposterous song about his grandmother's spotted calf, with its Ri-fol-lol-tiddery-i-do; after which he howled dismally. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... morning, the rain beating against the windows, and the canaries twittering dismally to each other—complaining, perhaps, of the bad weather. Robert could not tell how long the person had been knocking. He had mixed the sound with his dreams, and when he woke he was only half ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... see the last resting-place destined for him in the little village churchyard. It was a dreary patch of ground which looked as if the suns ray's never penetrated through its high walls on the graves below. Crumbling grey-lichened headstones peeped dismally from among the long dank grass, and the little paths were overgrown with weeds. Everywhere there were traces of unloving carelessness of the dead. And though Grace knew full well that the silent sleepers below little heeded this selfish forgetfulness, these surroundings ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... the lower part of which is occupied by the daidokoro, a party of storm-bound students, horses, fowls, and dogs. My room is a wretched loft, reached by a ladder, with such a quagmire at its foot that I have to descend into it in Wellington boots. It was dismally grotesque at first. The torrent on the unceiled roof prevented Ito from hearing what I said, the bed was soaked, and the water, having got into my box, had dissolved the remains of the condensed milk, and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... and laughed a good deal over their books, without the smallest sense of anxiety or responsibility in the matter; but we are called on repeatedly to face problems which we would rather let alone, to dive dismally into motives, to trace subtle connections, to analyze uncomfortable sensations, and to exercise in all cases a discreet and conscientious severity, when what we really want and need is half an hour's amusement. There is no stronger proof ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... the night, and stillness outside—the stillness that whispers of death. Wolves crept up to the plot of land, sat on their hind-legs and howled long and dismally at ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... boy sat there, apparently lost in bitter reflections. Now and then he would give a start, and look around him hastily, after which he would heave a great sigh, or else groan dismally. From this it might be assumed that Bumpus was allowing himself to dwell upon many a glorious supper he had devoured in the company of his Boy Scout chums; and just then he was enjoying things the best ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... I could hear the drip, drip, drip of the rain outside the window; then a steam siren hooted dismally upon the river, and I thought how the screw of that very vessel, even as we listened, might be tearing the body ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... picked up the children and threw them upon the bank, and then strode out, and tried to shake myself, as I have seen a Newfoundland dog do. The shake was not a success—it caused my trouser's legs to flap dismally about my ankles, and sent the streams of treacherous ooze trickling down into my shoes. My hat, of drab felt, had fallen off by the brookside, and been plentifully spattered as ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... which is studded with bodiless blue gentians, primroses, and other Alpine flowers. Overhanging the lake are the frost-bitten crags of the Mountain of Death; and the other mountains about, though less dismally named, are not more cheerful to the traveler. Along the lake margin winds the narrow bridle-path, which follows rushing rivulets in zigzags down steep flower-carpeted slopes to the pine woods of Saint Remy, far below. Among the pines ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... light was thus dismally shrouded, the prospect was not obscured. Down in the valley of the Rhone behind them, the stream could be traced through all its many windings, oppressively sombre and solemn in its one leaden hue, a colourless waste. ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... much as lay in his power; he therefore pricked his arms and breast with a needle, and then rubbed it with bay salt and gunpowder, which made it appear like the small-pox coming out; in the night-time he groaned very dismally, till at length the captain called to him to know the reason of his groaning so in his sleep. Alas! Sir, replied he, I have been dreaming my poor wife was dead, and that she died of the small-pox. Be of good cheer, man, says the captain, dreams are but fables; and, for ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... soul. They were incompatible with the frivolous comments of people who had not seen it. That black jetty, sticking out of the jungle into the empty sea; these roof-ridges of deserted houses peeping dismally above the long grass! Ough! The gigantic and funeral blackboard sign of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, still emerging from a wild growth of bushes like an inscription stuck above a grave figured by the tall ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... when he was likely to be sunk in the most abject poverty, and my reward has been ingratitude. I pray that his dark and stubborn temperament may not turn to vice and folly as he grows older, but I have little hope of its not doing so. I confess that to me his future seems dismally black. You may have acquired some kind of influence over his emotions, if he has any emotions, but I am not inclined to suppose that it ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... break all the morning. The two teams, after hanging about dismally, and whiling the time away with stump-cricket in the changing-rooms, lunched in the pavilion at one o'clock. After which the M.C.C. captain, approaching Adair, moved that this merry meeting be considered off and himself and his men permitted to catch the next ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... daybreak the loungers on Montmartre and the ramparts descended into the streets—most windows in which were open, as they had been all night, with anxious female faces peering palely down-they saw the conveyances of the ambulances coming dismally along, and many an eye turned wistfully towards the litter on which lay the idol of the pleasure-loving Paris, with the dark, bareheaded figure walking beside it,—onwards, onwards, till it reached the Hotel de Vandemar, and a woman's cry was heard ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the capital, so that he might rest for the Sabbath, and hither, apprised in advance by messenger, the Sabbatians of Constantinople hastened with food and money. They still expected to see their Sovereign arrive with pomp and pageantry, but he came up miserably on a sorry horse, chains clanking dismally at his feet. Yet was he in no wise dismayed. "I am like a woman in labor," he said to his body-guard of Kings, "the redoubling of whose anguish marks the near deliverance. Ye should laugh merrily, like ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... for any dark doings in Anjou. For there was not only the false arrest of Angelot; there were also certain dealings with the Prefect's secretary; there were tamperings with papers and seals, all to set forward that marriage affair that had failed so dismally, he hardly understood how. But he had hoped that the Prefect would die, and the news of his rapid recovery seemed strangely inopportune. It appeared to Simon that General Ratoneau's star was on the wane; and so, ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... tall featureless houses to the Cathedral of San Proculo, which occupies the site of a temple of Augustus, that once dominated the ancient city and harbour below. Within, the cathedral of Proculus, who was a companion of St Januarius and a fellow-martyr, is gaudy and painted, one of those dismally gorgeous ecclesiastical interiors that are such a disappointment to the antiquarian in Southern Italy. In opposition to the memorial of Spanish conquest in the square below, we find here an elaborate monument ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... giant liner which, under a full head of steam, vibrated with suppressed energy, straining at mighty cables as if impatient to start on her long and hazardous voyage across the tumbling seas. A raw, piercing northeaster, howling dismally above the monotonous creaking and puffing of the donkey-engine, swept through the cheerless, draughty dock, chilling the spectators to the marrow. The sun, vainly trying to break through the banks ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... him," said Rachel, dismally. "Anybody might know by the noise who it is. He always comes stamping along as if he was paid for makin' a noise. Anybody ought to have a cast-iron head that lives anywhere ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... vagabond, for he is a humorous rascal, and though I know that I ought to be severe with him, I fail dismally when I try to exhort him. "Now, look here, old man," he will say, "stop preaching; what are you going to do to help a fellow; do you think I live this life for fun" and his eyes twinkle! When I tell him that I am sure of it, he roars. Yes, I am certain of it, Downy is a ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... to be the audience," replied Jerry dismally, seeing that, as the audience, he would have nothing to do with ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... and boiling, did duty for a teapot and a slop-basin. They had no crockery. They had only one thing in abundance—namely, air; for the lower frame of the window having long lacked glass in it, a couple of pages of the Examiner, fixed in it, flapped dismally every time the wind came ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... floor would have been startling. Once just outside the door the waiting pony neighed warningly—and again. Upon the ledge beneath the window-pane a tiny mound of snowflakes began to take form; around the shanty the rising wind mourned dismally. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... to offer. It was not that it had come back empty to her side that made her sad. If occasionally she was moved by a little bitterness about her brief existence, it was rather because the kind of things with which her outstretched hand had been filled were so dismally unsatisfying. She counted the men she had been compelled to refuse. They numbered only two, but there were at least three others whom she had never allowed to get as far as ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... perched above him on a lonely branch, croaked dismally, till Andy fancied he could hear words of reproach in the sounds, while a little tomtit chattered and twittered on a neighbouring bough, as if he enjoyed and approved of all the severe things the raven uttered. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... Above us, a government beacon shines brightly through the persistent storm, with the keeper's neat little house and garden a hundred yards away. In the tree-tops, up a heavily-forested hill beyond, the wind moans right dismally. In this sheltered nook, we shall be but lulled to sleep with the ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... could quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Oswald, dismally repentant, handed Castel Forte a letter to Corinne in which he begged permission to see her. In answer she declined the permission, but asked to see his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... place, I had received into my mind, then less able than usual to resist, the stamp and impress of some other mind forced to linger near that spot, and unable to avoid brooding over some haunting remorseful thought or image of a deed, ever dismally recalling how he stood in grim silence watching the tears and prayers of the two soft-faced smooth-limbed Roman boys, kidnapped from some sunny Italian villa, and carried to that gloomy place—held them pitilessly ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... might emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally resounded ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... merited deep consideration; but in truth he was only half thinking of the things she said, he was for the rest simply accommodating himself to the weight of his total impression—the impression of her ardent good faith. She was wrong, but she believed; she was deluded, but she was dismally consistent. It was wonderfully characteristic of her that, having invented a fine theory, about Gilbert Osmond, she loved him not for what he really possessed, but for his very poverties dressed out as honours. Ralph remembered what he had said to his father about wishing to put it into her power ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... thought, rode beside him, while Jack trotted loose-jointedly at Swan's heels. Swan had his rifle, and Lone's six-shooter showed now and then under his coat when the wind flipped back a corner. Neither had spoken since they left the ranch, where Jim was wandering dismally here and there, trying to do the chores when his heart was heavy with a sense of personal loss and grim foreboding. None save Brit had slept during the night—and Brit had slept only because Lorraine had prudently given him a full dose of the sedative left by the doctor for that very purpose. ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... she desired; an offer involving no small degree of self-denial, for Sophia's books were very rarely interesting, or even intelligible, to her sister. But she lifted the nearest two, Barret's "Maga," and "The Veiled Prophet," and rather dismally asked which ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... the coast. Navigation is dangerous, and the entrance to the "Hell's Gates" of Macquarie Harbour—at the time of which we are writing (1833), in the height of its ill-fame as a convict settlement—is only to be attempted in calm weather. The sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... mischief by trampling the beds and rooting up the plants with their snouts, when they were spied by old Towzer, the mastiff, who ran among them, and laying hold of their long ears with his teeth, made them squeal most dismally, and get out of the garden ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... up the stairs and along the hall, and then in her doorway she saw him. His baggy gray tweed suit was dark with the water that saturated it. The lower part of his trousers-legs, in irregular vertical creases, clung dismally to his ankles and toned down almost indistinguishably into his once tan boots by the medium of a liberal stipple of mud spatters. Evidently, he had worn no overcoat. Both his side pockets had been, apparently, strained to the utmost to accommodate ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... watched each other as rival fishermen. Hares by night, and squirrels by day, and wood mice at all seasons played round my tent, or came shyly to taste my bounty. A pair of big owls lived and hunted in a swamp hard by, who hooted dismally before the storms came, and sometimes swept within the circle of my fire at night. Every morning a raccoon stopped at a little pool in the brook above my tent, to wash his food carefully ere taking it home. So ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... whooshed sadly round the house, the window clattered dismally in its frame, the curtains tugged fretfully before the cold breeze which blew in at the broken pane. But the silence in the ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... and unconscious of the danger, stood her ground as a great hawk came circling nearer and nearer, till, with a sudden dart he pounced on the poor chicken, and bore it away chirping dismally, ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... desire was to be let alone, and they took not the slightest interest even in the preparing of their frugal meal. A mug of wine served to each mitigated the general depression, although Kurzbold showed how far gone he was by swearing dismally when roused even to drink the wine. He said he was resolved to lead a temperate life in future, but nevertheless managed to dispose of his allowance in one ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... the Cabool Troops have perished, England has not received such a blow from an enemy, nor anything approaching it, since Buckingham's Expedition to the Isle of Rhe. Walcheren destroyed us by climate; and Corunna, with all its losses, had much of glory. But here we are dismally injured by mere Barbarians, in a War on our part shamefully unjust as well as foolish: a combination of disgrace and calamity that would have shocked Augustus even more than the defeat of Varus. One of the four officers with Macnaghten was George Lawrence, a brother-in-law of Nat Barton; a distinguished ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... They wrangled dismally and unconvincingly together, but no one put into speech the fear that rode them hard. Fast as Jack drove, they kept urging him to "Step on 'er!" A bottle that had been circulating intermittently among the crowd was drained and thrown out on the boulevard, there ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... dread instantly seized upon those who heard these words, and Mrs. Fordyce became nervous and apprehensive; but she was obliged to respect such a request, and they changed the subject, trying dismally to turn the talk into a commonplace groove. But it was a strain and an effort on all three, and at last Gladys rose and began to walk up and down the room, giving an occasional glance out of the window, as if impatient for her lover's coming, but it was an impatience ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... from active trades Have plung'd into sequester'd shades, Will dismally assure ye, That it's a harder task to bear Th' ennui produced by country air, And sigh for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... returned to Mrs. Bal's sitting-room, I found Somerled and Mrs. James gone. Barrie was alone with her newly found—sister, and a more forlorn little figure than our young goddess it would be hard to imagine. Andromeda chained to her rock could not have looked more dismally deserted by her friends. A room had been taken for her, and she was now transformed into Miss Barribel Ballantree. "What a good thing I wouldn't let her be called Barbara after me," said Mrs. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... shadows of morning crept toward me dismally, and the pallid light of the hills was stretched in weary streaks away from me. How I arose, or what I did, or what I thought, is nothing now. Such times are not for talking of. How many hearts of anguish lie forlorn, with none to comfort them, with all the joy of life died out, and ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... whistled to himself long and dismally. "Piled her up," he muttered, "that's what her old man has done. Hit a half-ebb reef, and fairly taken root there. He's not shoved on his engines astern either, and that means she's ripped away half her bottom, and he thinks she'll founder in deep water if he backs ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... dinner at seven. It was a well-ordered meal, but it went off rather dismally. I was depressed, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, and the children were tired, and Duncan, I'm afraid, was a bit disappointed in us all. Tokudo had brought cocktails for us, and Duncan, seeing I wasn't drinking mine, stowed both away in his honorable stomach. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... person. In 1803, while on a visit to the Lake Country, Hazlitt had painted a portrait of Wordsworth. "He has painted Wordsworth," writes Southey, "but so dismally, though Wordsworth's face is his idea of physiognomical perfection, that one of his friends, on seeing it, exclaimed, 'At the gallows—deeply affected by his deserved fate—yet determined to die like a man;' and if you saw the picture, you would admire the criticism." ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... sat "making pigs" for one after another of the group of children round him, a pig of especial humor having drawn a murmur of delight from the circle, this murmur was dismally echoed by a sob from a little maid on the outside of the group. It was Master Chuter's little daughter, a pretty child, with an oval, dainty- featured face, and a prim gentleness about her, like a good little girl in a good little story. The intervening ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... it was said I had gone stark mad, and had been smothered to death between two beds. A friend came, pale and dismally sorrowful, to condole with my wife on the dreadful catastrophe, and was himself almost mad with delight when he found that I was in the parlor writing, as well and as sane ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... question, the liveried gentleman from Mrs. Thomas's shook his head dismally, and answered: "Don't ask me, woman; don't ask me, if you please. That old sinner gets worse and worse every day she lives. These dinners we're 'spectin to have has just set her wild—she is mad as fury 'bout 'em—and she snaps me up just as if I was to blame. That is an awful old woman, now ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... women was hostility, he looked upon them as unfortunate obstacles in the path of adventure, and howled dismally when they caressed him. He had more tolerance for his mother who seemed to him an object provided by Providence in connection with a sofa, on purpose for ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... track, and bones of oxen were bleaching in the sun, the remains of those "whose carcasses fell in the wilderness" on the long and drouthy journey. The daybreak of to-day (Sunday) found us shivering at Fort Laramie, a frontier post dismally situated at a height of 7,000 feet. Another 1,000 feet over gravelly levels brought us to Sherman, the highest level reached by this railroad. From this point eastward the streams fall into the Atlantic. The ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... compelled me to travel in search of my charmer. Though the shades of evening were falling, I replaced the saddle upon my camel, put on my vestments, and girding on my sabre proceeded. I had advanced some distance, when the night became dismally black, and from the darkness I now sunk into sands and hollows, and now ascended declivities, while the yells of wild beasts resounded on every quarter. My heart beat with apprehension, and my tongue did not cease to repeat the attributes ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... one's hair curls naturally. But it can do a lot when one's hair is straight. Look at mine." Mame sighed dismally. "Did you ever see such locks? Every one as straight as a poker. I wish, just for once, I ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... up a shrill call. Two white sheets fluttered dismally. But the great steamer, on her way to Baltimore, neither heard the sound nor saw the white signals of distress. It was ten times more dismal when the friendly smoke had dissolved ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... this underground passage of civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for an apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI. is there with Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hebert ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... by the blast through the loose windows, flapped dismally, and the people drew their wraps about them, for the fireless room was cold. Steadily, insistently, the hive-like drone of ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the wolves had ranged themselves in a semicircle before him, continuing to howl as dismally as ever. One especially large beast came a little forward, ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... perhaps conceivable to readers. But as to the Second, the Germanic or Pragmatic Part,—articulate History, after much consideration, is content to renounce attempting these; feels that these will remain forever inconceivable to mankind in the now altered times. So small a gentleman; and he feels, dismally though with heroism, that he has got the axis of the world on his shoulder. Poor Majesty! His eyes, proud as Jove's, are nothing like so perspicacious; a pair of the poorest eyes: and he has to scan with them, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... nod, ignored my extended hand. I saw that she wished to impress upon me that she was a very grand lady indeed; but, while my ideas of what constitutes a lady were at that time somewhat befogged by my snobbishness, she failed dismally. She looked just what she was—a mean, bad-tempered woman, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... this steel-eyed, close-knit young Westerner— or was he a Southerner?— would be impervious to appeals founded upon the rules of the society to which she had been accustomed. A glance at his stone-wall face, at the lazy confidence of his manner, made her dismally aware that the data gathered by her experience of the masculine gender were insufficient ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... took baby, or seemed to, and Polly really did. Now, baby was heavy, and cross with its teeth; and Polly didn't feel like tending it one bit. Mamma hurried away to the kitchen; and Polly walked up and down the room with poor baby hanging over her arm, crying dismally, with a pin in its back, a wet bib under its chin, and nothing cold and hard to bite with its hot, aching gums, where the little teeth were ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... something in that," said Florence, brightening as she spoke. "I forgot when I spoke so dismally that you, too, were to spend the holidays here. By the way, ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... my word of command, I knew it would comfort her to feel my arm about her neck. She neighed her appreciation, and gently rubbed her nostrils against my side, ever a token of affection with her. When the boat began to move, the two stalwart negroes pulling at their great oars and chanting dismally in time to their pulling, Fatima again showed signs of excitement, but I easily quieted her, and then I had leisure to ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... have done this?" asked Roy, who had not a word of reproach for his chum, although Jimsy had failed dismally in a position ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... silent, save when the rude blast Howl'd dismally round the old pile; Over weed-cover'd fragments still fearless she past, And arriv'd in the innermost ruin at last, Where the elder-tree ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... said the two contracting parties.—Alas, no: the competitor Duke, father of the Bride, died some two years after, probably with diminished hopes of it; and King Johann lived to see the hope expire dismally altogether. There came no children, there came no—In fact Margaret, after a dozen years of wedlock, in unpleasant circumstances, broke it off as if by explosion; took herself and her Tyrol irrevocably over to Kaiser Ludwig, quite away from King Johann,—who, his ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... had one fine evening seen him carrying Theresa's water-pail for her down the hill, an ordinary act of courtesy enough, but the sight of which suddenly darkened the world before her foolish old eyes more dismally than if the golden fleece of the summer sunset had been smothered under the blackest pall ever woven in cloud-looms. "Fine colloguin' they're havin' together," she said to herself as she watched them and their long shadows down the slope, "and he sloppin' the ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the princess started from bed and hastened out to join her gay playfellows, she shuddered and started back at the sight of a group of shrivelled crones, with bent backs and trembling limbs, who supported their tottering steps with staves and crutches, and coughed dismally. A little nearer to the hearth lay the once frolicsome Beni, with all four feet stretched stiffly out, while the sleek cat seemed too weak to raise his head from his ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... at last, a dismally tragic figure, his young face distorted and reddened, his sleek hair ruffled from the back into unsightly perpendicularities (an invariable sign of distracted emotion) and his hands appealingly outstretched—"what the hell ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fail in the exact performance of any of his promises, to enforce them by compulsion of arms or any other method they might think fit. This precious document was signed on September 28, 1499 just twelve months after the agreement which it was intended to replace; and the Admiral, sailing dismally back to San Domingo, ruefully pondered on the fruits of a year's delay. Even then he was trying to make excuses for himself, such as he made afterwards to the Sovereigns when he tried to explain that this shameful capitulation was invalid. That he signed under compulsion; that ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... when Amiel occasionally walked and talked with some stray damsel in the colony. She had no real jealousy of the young ladyhood that at times intruded. But this was different; here she was out- ranked in HER OWN CLASS. In that lay the sting. She reflected dismally that this was only Tuesday and that Jennie was to stay until the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Madeline rather dismally. "Well! perhaps there may be just a touch of that in Rupert. When I'm going to see him I do feel rather nervous and a little as if I was going up for ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... will break thee in pieces!" and they came into the meeting-house, in spite of the fierce tithingman, and sat down in other people's seats with their hats on their heads, in ash-covered coats, rocking to and fro and groaning dismally, as if in a mournful obsession. Quaker women managed to obtain admission to the churches, and they jumped up in the quiet Puritan assemblies screaming out, "Parson! thou art an old fool," and, "Parson! thy sermon ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Jack dismally; "there is no best to it. I only wish I knew what they were going to do with us. Only fancy, after us taking all that ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... March dismally. "I don't b'lieve it can make me worse, an' perhaps it'll make me better. I wonder what in the ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... breadth. The place was buried under layers of mystery. It was silent, it was dark with the blackness of darkness; it was like an unholy sepulchre that gave forth no sound, though we beat upon its sodden door with its rusted knocker until a dog howled dismally ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... cannot be absolute uniformity, there might and should be a far nearer approach to an equable temperature of a much higher range than the readings of most professing Christians give. There is, indeed, a dismally uniform arctic temperature in many of them. Their hearts are fixed, truly, but fixed on earth. Their frost is broken by no thaw, their tepid formalism interrupted by no disturbing enthusiasm. We do not now speak of these, but of those who have moments of illumination, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... There was no life. There were no seas, no lakes, no trees, no grass, no sighing nor moaning of the wind, nothing to remind me of the earth I now found to my terror I had actually quitted. Everything around me was black—the sky, the mountains, the vast pits, the dried-up mouths of which gaped dismally. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... also dismally computing the addition to the grocery bills, the butchery bills, and livery bills, and the others. He was figuring out the added expense of the dinner, with roast beef now costing as much as peacocks' tongues. He had raised a large family and there was not a dyspeptic in ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... happen that would enable him to return to Ballyards and Eleanor with some sort of pride left! ... Uncle Matthew's romantic dreams had remained romantic dreams because he had never left Ballyards; but John had gone out into the world to seek adventures, and all of them had ended dismally ... except his adventure with Eleanor. He had pursued her and won her and made her his wife and the mother of his son, and she was still his, even although he had left her and was living angrily away from her. He remembered how he had wandered into Hanging Sword Alley when he first ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... the slightest probability that the fastidious Mrs. Titus would travel by such a train, so we were forced to the conclusion that something had gone wrong with the plans. Very dismally we prepared for the long drive home. What could have happened to upset the well-arranged plan? Were Tarnowsy's spies so hot upon the trail that it was necessary for her to abandon the attempt to enter my castle? In that case, she must have sent some sort ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... his keeper; a close carriage was at the gate, well guarded. Mr Mayor and his green-eyed clerk took their seats with the prisoner: and the heavy vehicle rumbled dismally through the now deserted streets, wakening many a drowsy burgher ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... very bad, O'Brien," said another scribe mournfully. "Forgive him, Senator. I will have something to say to him later." Withering glances were cast at the unlucky one, who seemed about to sink under the table, and the wind outside howled dismally, and rattled the windows ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... Aubrey shook his head dismally, and leaned his hot forehead against the pane. Neither of them spoke again until they reached Manhattan Transfer, where they changed for the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... decidedly, and, taking Billy's arm, away they went, leaving poor Bab and Sanch to watch them out of sight, one sobbing, the other whining dismally. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... rejected ones sat there, warming ourselves, chatting, and pretty soon one man found there were thirteen of us. You would have thought that none of them could fear bad luck—worse luck—none of them could have been more dismally situated. But, do you know? most of those fellows became nervous—as apprehensive of bad luck as if they had been pampered princes in a time of revolution. I was one of the two that volunteered to restore confidence ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... dismally, and Hippy looked serious. Missing a meal meant taking a good part of the joy of living ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his own interior gaiety—of which a word by and by—is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life; ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... knickerbockers, and Norah held her own head higher in the air. And she let Mr. Williamson, the new book-keeper at Conner's (he who would have mortgaged two farms for her), take her to the ice-cream table, leaving the bungling lover (christened Patrick Maurice, his surname being Barnes), to jostle dismally over to the ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... maiden that she was so closely watched, for Madame bristled and swelled like a mother cat about to spring at a strange dog, if any gentleman of the suite showed symptoms of accosting her. Nay, when Mr. Talbot once brought Diccon in with him, and there was a greeting, which to Cicely's mind was dismally cold and dry, the lady was so scandalised that Cicely was obliged formally to tell her that she would answer for it to the Queen. On Sunday, Mr. Talbot always came to take her to church, and this was a terrible grievance ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... half-ruinous house, in which the rats had grown tame and the spiders fat. The stairs creaked dismally as Stumpy followed his entertainer up them, while the odours rising from every nook and cranny in the place were ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... were rows and rows of cots, and on every cot a wounded man. It appeared that a fresh batch had arrived from the front, and the doctors were just finishing with them. There was a foul smell of blood and sweat and anaesthetics, and the light came dismally through the dirty window-panes, showing dimly the rows and rows of pale, weary faces on the thin pillows. Sometimes the gray blankets came up to the chin, and the man looked dead already, he was so dreadfully still, with his closed eyes and waxlike face. Another moaned continuously, moving ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... She had never loved another; she would put away her love for him at the bottom of her heart and hold it sacred there. The rain had ceased; a flock of crows that circled above the three trees, croaking dismally, affected her like a menace of evil. Was he to be taken from her again, her cherished dead, whom she had recovered with such difficulty? She dragged herself along upon her knees, and with a trembling hand brushed away the hungry flies that were buzzing ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... so dismally recalled Leonidas's late feelings that his face clouded, and he involuntarily sighed. The stranger instantly shifted his head and gazed curiously at him. Then he took the boy's sunburnt hand in his own, and held it a moment. "Well, go ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... hours in reading aloud to her small guests, exhibited a tendency to tears and self-pity. Mr Hallett, disappointed of a hoped-for holiday with his friend as companion, shrugged his shoulders, and inquired dismally: "What can you expect? Things always go wrong ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was the stronger. Aurelia was forced into the chair, tied fast, pushed off, waving' her hand to her husband, shedding floods of tears, looking at him for the last time, as she fancied, and calling out dismally, "Far'well, Basil, far'-well." ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... into her own pleading ones as if he, too, longed for the gift of speech and he licked her cheek as if he would comfort her. Then he threw back his own head, howled dismally, and dejectedly curled himself down beneath the ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... a sort of lantern from the hand of the servant who held it, and, rushing from the shed towards the open fields, again laughed more dismally than before, and cried, "Where? She whom you have made childless, leaves that where to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... by any merit of his own, Ward secured a mount and journeyed dismally toward the north. The farm horse was fat and stolid and plodded with slow pace; for saddle there was a folded blanket. With only the lantern to light the way, he did not dare to hurry the beast. It was not until wan, depressing light filtered from ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... Muffled sirens were hooting dismally all about Limehouse Reach, and he knew that this random dash through the night was fraught with extreme danger, since this was a narrow and congested part of the great highway. But, listen as he might, he could not ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... that had grown upon him. Every now and then he caught himself starting with nervous apprehension, and, to break the spell, he began to whistle a merry tune, to keep up his courage, as boys are wont to do. But he was thinking how dismally it sounded, when, suddenly, in the distance rang out the clear notes of a robin. Tom involuntarily reined in his horse at that; for the call of that bird his Indian friend Long Hair used to imitate for a signal, and had taught Tom how to ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... of impending evil. The traditions of the house told that the Barons of Duncan had again and again felt a premonition of ill fortune. Some of them had yielded and withdrawn from the venture they had undertaken, and it had failed dismally. Some had been obstinate, and had hardened their hearts, and had gone on reckless of defeat and to death. In no case had a Lord Duncan been exposed to peril ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... of disappointed anguish escaping her lips. The candle had burned out in the grease cup, the wind was rocking the shanty and making the rafters creak dismally. Tess shivered as she tossed her clothes upon the floor, and crept exhausted into Daddy's bed. The last thing she heard was the splashing of her pet eel ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... a duty every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see how dismally the arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will repent afterward in vain. ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... I, staying for nought and heedless of all direction, but presently, being weary and short of breath, I halted and leaning against a tree stood thus very full of bitter thought. The storm was quite passed, but a chill wind was abroad that moaned dismally, while all about me sodden trees dripped with mournful, sobbing noises. And hearkening to all this, what should I be thinking but of the sweet, soft tones of a woman's voice that had stirred within me memories of better days, a voice that had set me to ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... long table where each had her own drawer and her own tools. An order had been received for mourning jewels, and haste was essential. Sidonie, whom the forewoman instructed in her task in a tone of infinite superiority, began dismally to sort a multitude of black pearls, bits of ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... bear the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty, either in plants or women. No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... a ladder in sight, either," added Monkey Stallings, dismally, as he swept his eyes around in a nervous way. "As for a fire company, there isn't one closer than Danbury, which is all of ten miles away. Whew! I'm beginning to wish the whole business was over with, boys, and the troupe ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... dismally when she and Mrs. Snawdor picked their way across the factory yard that afternoon. The conglomerate mass of buildings known as "Clarke's" loomed somberly against the dull sky. Beside the low central building a huge gas-pipe towered, and the water, trickling down ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... a short memory made his case less pitiful than it seemed to his more sensitive sister. True, he started upstairs to his lonely cot bellowing dismally, before him a dreary future of pains and penalties, sufficient to last to the crack of doom. Outside his door, however, he tumbled over Augustus the cat, and made capture of him; and at once his mourning was changed into a song of triumph, as he conveyed ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... there was none to shrive them or to give the viaticum to any late penitent in his agony. In the tall towers by the wayside the bells hung mute; no hands to ring them or none to answer to their call Meanwhile, across the lonely fields, toiling dismally, and ofttimes missing the track— for who should guide them or show the path?—parson and monk and trembling nun made the best of their way to Norwich; their errand to seek admission to the vacant preferment. Think of them, after miles of dreary travelling, reaching the city gates at ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... directly," he said at last, sitting up and looking dismally about him; "and it's nearly five o'clock. She said she would be here at four. Ugh! how cold it is! If she doesn't come in five minutes I shall go to the Spotted Dog. There's always a fire there, thank goodness, and they'll stand me ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... her latest born was eating his rather scanty supper. "It's not skim milk and dhry bread ye'd be havin', if you were her child this night, but taffy candy filled wid nuts and chunks o' cake as big as yer head." Whereupon Danny wailed dismally, and had to be taken from his chair and have the "Little Boy Blue" sung to him, before he could be induced to go on ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... They dug too near the chapel foundations, and the chapel fell in upon them. The sexton was killed, almost on the spot; his daughter was saved through the jamming of a piece of stone, and survived him as sexton for fifteen years. Another memorial is a brass kept in the vestry; a long screed begins dismally enough—"Ten children in one grave—a dreadful sight"; but the verse is unequal to the opportunity. Another brass shows Robert Skern and his wife Joan; she, according to Manning and Bray, was a daughter of Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III. A fourth monument, said to be in the chancel ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... began to course overhead, their solid, heavily plated hulls glinting dully in the sun. Their levitator helices moaned dismally, and as their long, slanting shadows slid over the assembled thousands, it seemed that they cast a prophetic pall; that there ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... spectacles overboard, and sings a flippant and absurd song about his grandmother's spotted calf, with his ri-fol-lol-tiddery-i-do. After which he crumbles, in an incomprehensible manner, into the bottom of the boat, and howls dismally. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... have—and that's all that you'll have left," croaked the young chief engineer dismally. "Now, friends, is the game worth a candle of that sort? How many of you have money in the bank? Let every man here who has put up his hand. Not one of you? Who's keeping your money in bank for you? Jim Duff and the sellers of poisons? Will they ever hand ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... mothers and to each other, followed all the movements of the troopers (never before seen by them) with frightened curiosity, or ran after them at a respectful distance. The old Cossacks came out silently and dismally and sat on the earthen embankments of their huts, and watched the soldiers' activity with an air of leaving it all to the will of God without understanding ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... can describe. A lady might go through all this if she had perfect health and the endurance under punishment of a prize-fighter. Your party may travel all those weary miles and strike a fortunate week of pleasant weather, but you may, and more likely will, have a week when it will rain dismally straight through without stopping. We found, on looking up the statistics, that in an average season out of every twenty-two days eighteen will always be stormy, lowering and dismal. No, don't camp out unless you can make up your ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Thus dismally cogitating I was roused by a touch on my shoulder and a kiss on the top of my head. Eugen was ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show. Years ago when that thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others, and I would speak with it always when I had an hour alone. These rags that so dismally trick forth its madness were once the splendid livery my favour wrought for it on my bed at night. Can you see the device on the badge? I dare not read it there myself, yet have a guess—'bad ware nicht'—is not ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... just eight here, that's all!" came the answer that caused the wretched brother of young Karl Stormways to shiver and sigh dismally. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... he worked just as hard for victory nevertheless. Herkimer had fallen in the savage and uncertain fight at Oriskany; in Bennington, stout old Stark had dealt the British a rousing blow; and Burgoyne's boast that with ten thousand men he could "promenade through America" ended dismally enough for him in the smoke of Bemis Heights and ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... landscape dotted over with pretty homesteads to relieve its desolation. Now, nothing was seen but the black patch of sterile moor on which they stood, nothing heard but the wind as it swept in gusts across the bare hill, and howled dismally through a stunted grove of trees that grew in a glen below them, except the occasional baying of dogs from the farmhouses in the distance. That they felt at ease, is more than could be expected of them; but as it would ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... stage-coach. But in Trenton the Federal and Religious party had the upperhand, and when Paine applied at the booking-office for a seat to New York the agent refused to sell him one. Moreover, a crowd collected about his lodgings, who groaned dismally when he drove away with his friend, while a band of musicians, provided for the occasion, played ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... dismally. "I'm afraid you will—put me—in a cell!" Her voice sank to a murmur hardly audible as she spoke the words so fraught with dread import to one of her ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... For more than a mile the embers, yet red and glowing, lay, and in the orchards tree trunks smoldered casting out alternate flame and smoke. Save for those melancholy ruins everything was swept bare. At the edge of the woods an Indian dog poked his nose at the sky and howled dismally. It affected the nerves of Henry and Paul, who walked across the corn fields and chased him ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... universe, and when they shall have a consummation, we may not certainly know. Secrets, these, and such "Secret things belong unto God." We would like to know these secrets, but must wait; for there, "roll those mighty worlds that gem the distant sky," as distantly and dismally as when Chaldean and Egyptian astronomers and astrologers viewed their movements three thousand years ago, rifled meanwhile of but few of their well kept secrets. He that pencils the lily and paints the rose and gives to every blade ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... top of it, the laird turned to the right, and lifted the latch—all the doors were latched—of a dark-looking door. It screaked dismally as it opened. He entered and undid a shutter, letting an abiding flash of the ever young light of the summer day into the ancient room. It was long since Cosmo had been in it before. The aspect of it affected ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... The wind howled dismally about the crenellated turrets; and a row of poplars, standing like black, phantasmal guardians of the evil place, bent groaning before its fury. From the running waters of the moat, swollen by recent rains, came a gurgling ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... ——- "The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest". 'Of all those sounds,' says Goldsmith, speaking of the cries of waterfowl, 'there is none so dismally hollow as the booming of the bittern.' ...'I remember in the place where I was a boy with what terror this bird's note affected the whole village; they considered it as the presage of some sad event; and generally found or made one to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... was I by my position, and so occupied with my frantic efforts to improve it, that I did not even find time to go and see the signorina, much as I needed comfort; and, as the days went on, I fell into such despair that I went nowhere, but sat dismally in my own rooms, looking at my portmanteau, and wondering how soon I must pack and fly, if not for life, at ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... spectacles, took the paw in her lap (she, too, had heard the tale of Androcles), and, after a close scrutiny, discovered the thorn, which, as delicately as possible, she extracted, the patient making wry faces and howling dismally the while. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... Maggie's advent into society. It was the high-flying brent who, knowing how the sensitive girl, made keenly conscious at every turn of her defective training and ingenuous ignorance, had often watched their evening flight with longing gaze, now "honked" dismally at the recollection. It was at this hour and season that the usual vague lamentings of Dedlow Marsh seemed to find at last a preordained expression. And it was at such a time, when light and water were both fading, ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... answer, and he approached. Then he saw that in the centre of the pile, and propped up against some small pieces of wood, a photograph of Geoffrey Cliffe was consuming slow and dismally. The fire had just sent a line across his cheek. The lower limbs were already charred, and ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... peculiarly venerable and striking object—was at last discovered just above the grass at some distance from the house. On examination he was found comfortably seated in a disused drain, in company with a silver spoon and a dead rat. On being removed from this locality he howled dismally and refused ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... in the courtyard, in which ducks and geese waddled, quacking, turkey-cocks fought in quiet corners, barked at impotently by Kabyle puppies. Tall, lean hounds or sloughis, kept to chase the desert gazelles, wandered near the kitchens, in the hope of bones, and camels gobbled dismally as their tired drivers forced them to their knees, or thrust handfuls of date stones down their throats. There were sheep, too, and goats; and even a cow, the "perpetual mother" ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... by memory, and that I should myself prefer to live elsewhere, framing our household on very simple lines—and to let the power of writing come back if it would, not to try and force it. It would be a dreadful prospect to me to live thus, overshadowed by recollection, working dismally for money; but I suppose it would be possible, even bracing. Maud did not hesitate: she spoke quite frankly; on the one hand the very associations, which I dread most, were evidently to her a source of sad delight; and the thought ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that Ena began to sneeze so dismally that the only place for her was bed. And when she could leave its seclusion the next only place was Palm Beach. She said she would die unless she could go to Palm Beach, so mother took her, and Peter took them both, not to speak ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... Henry dropped its mantle over them. And as for Polly, there could not be a wiser, sweeter wife. Then Aunt Lois was so tranquilly happy, and Faith growing brighter, yes, prettier, and buying grays with a peachy or lavender tint instead of that snuffy yellow, or dismally cold stone color, and coaxing Andrew, sometimes, to go to Christ Church to hear the singing or the tender prayers where the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... bunk, sure enough, lay the "chief," groaning dismally. He was a tall, fine-looking fellow, with bright blue eyes, and an arm like a blacksmith's; but when a man is on his back from seasickness, how can ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the cars. Then we should have had none of this worry. I've always said the Paris cabs weren't safe. What d'ye think we had better do? We can't start out and make a round of all the hospitals—the idea's absurd!" Waiting a moment, he added dismally, "It's clear I can't ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... roosting on a blade of grass beneath, his feet, tumbled off and gave vent to his feelings in a belated "chirr." Overhead somewhere a raven croaked dismally and cynically at intervals. Ralph's ears heard these things as he waited, with every sense on the alert, at the place ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett |
