"Fifties" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we not say, than this imitation of the Florentine arti of the Middle Ages was the Working Men's College, founded in London in the fifties by that other earnest Christian Socialist, F.D. Maurice, in which Ruskin lectured gratuitously, took charge of the drawing classes, and hied off to the country with its members to sketch from nature and otherwise instruct and entertain ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... condition. I sincerely hope that it may remain thus for a long, long time as a memento of the days and customs gone by. It is very sad for me to think that I am the only living member of that happy company that used to spend their summer vacations there in the fifties; yet I still hope that I may visit the old Inn once more before I rejoin those choice spirits whom Mr. Longfellow has immortalized in his great poem. I am glad that some of the old residents still remember me when I was a visitor there with Dr. Parsons (the Poet), and ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... building before them. Though gardens extended behind it, the house stood so near the pavement that only two short flights of steps intervened between the gate-posts and the portico. Light shone from every window of the pompous rusticated facade—in the turreted "Tuscan villa" style of the 'fifties—and as Miss Brent and Amherst approached, their advance was checked by a group of persons who were just descending from two carriages at ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... continuous appearance of his name may have been irritating to many of my readers; if so I can only plead that it is almost impossible when writing of wild life in the Southern Seas to avoid mentioning him. Every one who sailed the Austral seas between the "fifties" and "seventies," and thousands who had not, knew of him and had heard tales of him. In some eases these tales were to his credit; mostly they were not. However, the writer makes no further apology for reproducing the following ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... old hard and hardy stock that had crossed the plains by ox-team in the fifties, and in him was this same hardness and the hardness of a childhood spent in the conquering of a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... teeth still good and eyes good, in spite of his fifties; still that amazing imagination which brings nearer and enlarges all objects with the power of a telescope. He remains the same man as he of whom the brave Commander Bravida used ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... git one cent more'n two dollars for taking us, I can tell you that," announced Henry Smith, firmly but breathlessly, as he climbed clumsily into the cab after his wife. The hotel was in the fifties, and the cabman had intended to charge a dollar for the ride. He promptly protested against Mr. Smith's offer, however, inquiring anxiously if the gentleman wished an honest cabman's family to go supperless to bed. It appeared that the gentleman was indifferent ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... for Wilkin, a later Serjeant and well-known in the 'fifties, and whose style and manner is reproduced. We could not ask a better junior in a "touch and go" case. He was as ready to take advantage of any opening as was the late Lord Bowen, when he was junior in ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... followed by annexation. The mighty hunters of Africa have often brought back, not alone ivory and skins, but also interesting information of the interior. The gorgeous narratives of Gordon Cumming in the "fifties" were one of the causes which led to an interest in African exploration. Many a lad has had his imagination fired and his career determined by the exploits of Gordon Cumming, which are now, however, almost ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... suppose that men who are trained to look in at one end of a thirty-two pounder, loaded with grape, while the match is put to the other, will so much as wink at their report, though you fired them by fifties. What say you, boys, is a pistol ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in the kettle immediately; which, when we set to work at him soon afterwards, certainly did not belie his looks. The salmon had only commenced to ascend the river that day, and were being taken by fifties at a haul in the nets. The fishery was attended by three men, who kept seven or eight nets constantly in the water, which gave them enough of employment—two of them attending to the nets, while the third split, salted, and packed ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... so," he answered, smiling. Miss Winter looked at Etheldred reprovingly, and she shrank into herself, drew apart, and indulged in a reverie. She had heard in books of girls writing poetry, romance, history—gaining fifties and hundreds. Could not some of the myriads of fancies floating in her mind thus be made available? She would compose, publish, earn money—some day call papa, show him her hoard, beg him to take it, and, never owning whence it came, raise the building. Spire and chancel, pinnacle ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen: and some shall run before his chariots, 12. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. 13. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. 14. And he will take your fields, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... made to believe in this brilliant destiny; but a roll of bank-notes in his pocket would greatly aid him in making the destiny credible. Fifty pounds, as he well knew, would melt away from him like snow. The last fifty pounds of a thousand always goes quicker than any of the nineteen other fifties. ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... At the Nile one of our fifties laid the Orient, a three-decker, athwart-hawse, and did her lots of injury. The vaisseau, in fact, was blown up. Naval combats are decided on principles altogether different from engagements on the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... says to them: How many loaves have ye? Go and see. And when they knew, they say: Five, and two fishes. (39)And he commanded them to make all lie down by companies on the green grass. (40)And they lay down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties. (41)And taking the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave to the disciples to set before them; and the two fishes he divided among them all. (42)And they all ate, and were filled. (43)And they took up fragments filling ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... succeeded in out-living his palate—the famous palate that in the fifties men swore by, and speaking of him, said: "Forsyte's the best palate in London!" The palate that in a sense had made his fortune—the fortune of the celebrated tea men, Forsyte and Treffry, whose tea, like no other man's tea, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the utmost economy was always studied. The increase in the annual appropriations for which I asked was so small that, when I left the office in 1877, they were just about the same as they were back in the fifties, when it was first established. The necessary funds were saved by economical administration. All this was done with a feeling that, after my retirement, the satisfaction with which one could look back on such a policy ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... taken a prominent place in the history of New Brunswick. Mr. Gideon Palmer, a son of Gideon (first), was one of the successful shipbuilders of Dorchester in the fifties, and Philip, another son, was for some years a member of the New Brunswick Legislature. The late Judge Palmer, of St. John, was ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... up from the ground, went out and saw the well without a drop of water. He now began to quarrel with them, saying, "Have I not told ye, 'I am not able to bear you myself alone'? Ye have rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens, princes, chiefs, elders, and magnates, let these attend to your needs." Israel, however, said: "All rests with thee, for it is thou who didst lead us out of Egypt and brought 'us in unto this evil place; it is no place of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... and before he was out of his teens, Henry Willis was appointed organist of Christ Church, Hoxton. In the early fifties he was organist of Hampstead Parish Church, where he had built a new organ, and for nearly thirty years he was organist at Islington, Chapel-of-Ease, which post he only resigned after he had passed the Psalmist's "three score years and ten." In spite of the ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... at Sinclair. The latter was a thin, spare, nervous man in the late fifties, and though generally credited with being John Cardigan's manager, Bryce knew that Sinclair was in reality little more than a glorified bookkeeper—and a very excellent bookkeeper indeed. Bryce realized that in the colossal task that confronted him he could ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... he started at the top. Each slip as he finished it was paged, and tossed over his shoulder out of his way on the floor. When his first pen was worn out, THAT went over his shoulder too, and he pounced on a second from the supply scattered about the table. Slip after slip, by dozens, by fifties, by hundreds, flew over his shoulders on either side of him till he had snowed himself up in paper all round his chair. Hour after hour passed—and there I sat watching, there he sat writing. He never stopped, except to sip his ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... Government brig, a by-word for unseaworthiness and discomfort. In this vessel the South Island members of the first New Zealand parliament spent nearly nine weeks in beating up the coast to the scene of their labours in Auckland. But the delight with which the coming of steamships in the fifties was hailed was not so much a rejoicing over more regular coastal communication, as joy because the English Mail would come sooner and oftener. How they did wait and watch for the letters and newspapers from Home, those exiles of the early days! Lucky did they ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... information flying about the schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the foc'sle or sat on the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... all other architecture on earth. But this admiration was aesthetic rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant in Rossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his early Oxford days. The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in the fifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and a reaction had set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic, and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had been destined to holy ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... built in some little hollow by the roadside by someone who remembered his fellow-traveller. You cannot go five miles along any road without finding them. In villages they can be counted by tens, in towns by fifties. There are far more ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... clerks; and in all the large and little houses of the city, in all the spacious and narrow streets, there were women cooking, washing, sweeping, scouring, rubbing, lifting, carrying, sewing, reading, sleeping—tens and twenties and fifties and hundreds and thousands of men, women, and children. More than two hundred thousand of them were toiling, suffering, struggling, enjoying, dreaming, despairing on a summer day, doing their share of the world's work. The eye was full of the city's activity; the ear was tired ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... subscribed. The slyest old hunks in Fastburg put a faltering forefinger into his long pocket-book, touched a greenback which had been laid away there as neatly as a corpse in its coffin, and resurrected it for the use of Mr. Pullwool. By tens, by twenties, by fifties, and by hundreds the dollars of the ambitious citizens of the little metropolis were charmed into the portemonnaie of this rattlesnake ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Lariats, Boston, 1912. A fictional chronicle, based almost entirely on facts, of a trail herd that tried to get to California in the fifties. The author was a ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... and fancied him looking for the omens of evil which his master despised in the entrails of a chicken. From that picture turn to Elijah sitting on the hill-top on the way to Samaria, amid the smoking bodies of the captains and their fifties, warning the son of Ahab of the wrath of our God. Finally, O my Judah—if such speech be reverent—how shall we judge Jehovah and Jupiter unless it be by what their servants have done in their names? And as for what ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... put the most of myself, the only novel I wrote with tears of emotion. Mrs. Oliphant says that Jeanie Deans is more real to her than any of her own creations, and probably it is the same with me, except for this one work. From an old diary of the fifties, when my first novels were written I take this extract:—"Queer that I who have such a distinct idea of what I approve in flesh-and-blood men should only achieve in pen and ink a set of impossible people, with an absurd muddy expression ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... the finest eyes, the brightest smile. Yet his bronzed forehead was low, and his mouth rather impudent and bold than truly strong. And there was a touch of foppery about him, in the enormous white tie and the much-cherished whiskers of the fifties, which was only redeemed by that other touch of devilry that he had shown me in the corridor. By the rich brown of his complexion, as well as by a certain sort of swagger in his walk, I should have said that he was a naval officer ashore, had he not told me who he ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... well on in the fifties; and ever since I was a boy I have been accustomed to the ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... mist And the drizzling dazzling shower They may mass them as they list, The gray-coat Russian power; They are fifties 'gainst our tens, they, and more! And from the fortress-town In silent squadrons down O'er the craggy ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... voyage in point of distance ever made in this country was that of John Wise and La Mountain, in the fifties, from St. Louis, Mo., to Jefferson County, N. Y., a distance credited under the old custom of a little less than twelve hundred miles, while the actual distance under the new rules is between eight hundred and nine hundred miles, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery. This was the "home-house" of the Thompsons,—slave-barons who drove their coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton industry of the fifties, and with the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front door ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... returned to its original movement by hundreds and fifties; but I had been able in the meanwhile to draw two conclusions. In the first place, Bellairs had made his last advance with a smile of gratified vanity; and I could see the creature was glorying in the kudos of an unusual position and secure of ultimate ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Bucks, England, and emigrated to the States in the early fifties. They settled in Rochester, in the State of New York, where my father ran a large dry goods store. There were only two sons: myself, James, and my brother, Edward. I was ten years older than my brother, and after my father died I sort of took the place ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... arm-holes of his waistcoat, he replied, "I bet a crown you know as well as I do." "Done," said Mr. Jorrocks holding out his hand. "No—I won't do that," replied the man, "but I'll tell you what I'll do with you,—I'll lay you two to one, in fives or fifties if you like, that you knew before you axed, and that Thunderbolt don't win the Riddlesworth." "Really," said Mr. Jorrocks, "I'm not a betting man." "Then, wot the 'ell business have you at Newmarket?" was all the answer he got. Disgusted ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... helped over the stone stile that led to the churchyard. Highly picturesque was the grey structure outside, but within modernism had not done much; the chancel was feebly fitted after the ideas of the "fifties," but the faded woodwork of the nave was intact, and Magdalen still had to sit in the grim pew of ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... who began their career in the fifties of the past century, as I did, and who survive till now, as very many do, have been observant, if inconspicuous, witnesses of one of the most rapid and revolutionary changes that naval science and warfare have ever undergone. It ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She had ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... during the fifties occupied themselves with materialism in Germany did not by any means escape the limitations of their doctrine. All the advances made in science served them only as new grounds of proof against the existence of the Creator, and indeed it was far beyond their trade to ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... words is the secret of his relation to the Whig party. He asked no office, and he gave only the ripe fruit of his meditative life. It is not to be supposed that, in 1838, he saw in the young man at Auburn the astute United States Senator of the fifties; or the still greater secretary of state of the Civil War; but he had seen enough of Seward to discern the qualities of mind and heart that lifted him onto heights which extended his horizon beyond that of most men, enabling him to keep his bearing in the midst of great excitement, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... likely looking and lonely boobs. Then the first thing the lonely boob knows he's had a good dinner with a new acquaintance and is strolling into a quiet but elegant looking house in the West Forties or Fifties." And the maid laughed, continuing her deft offices in the dressing-room, and the girl looked into the glass at her own crimson cheeks ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... value of first-class South American properties. But there are very few enterprises of this class still in German hands, and even their value is measured by one or two tens of millions, not by fifties or hundreds. He would be a rash man, in my judgment, who joined a syndicate to pay $500,000,000 in cash for the unsequestered remnant of Germany's overseas investments. If the Reparation Commission is to realize even this lower figure, it is probable that they will have to ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... ship in the world, on this voyage across practically all of the oceans, proved herself to be extremely seaworthy. Thus we traversed without a single mishap the regions of the northeast and of the southeast trades, the stormy seas of the "roaring forties," the fogs of the fifties, the ice-filled sixties, and reached our field of work at the Ice Barrier on January 14, 1911. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Nareda's Minister of Internal Affairs. Spawn had mentioned him to me. A South American. A man in his fifties. Thin and darkly saturnine, with iron-gray hair, carefully plastered to cover his half-bald head. He sat listening to the President's harangue, twirling the upturned waxen ends of his artificially black mustache. A wave of perfume ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with the rough employment ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... school fifty years ago, and the masters who taught there (peace to their ashes!), are far more to my taste than the actual human beings among whom my dull existence of business and politics and society is mostly spent in these days. The school must have broken up somewhere about the early fifties. The stuccoed Doric dwelling was long since replaced by an important stone mansion, in a very different style of architecture—the abode of a wealthy banker—and this again, later, by a palace many stories ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... cricket cup at Wrykyn has found itself on some strange mantelpieces in its time. New talent has a way of cropping up in the house matches. Tail-end men hit up fifties, and bowlers who have never taken a wicket before except at the nets go on fifth change, and dismiss first eleven experts with deliveries that bounce twice and shoot. So that nobody is greatly surprised ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... thinkers. Brunetiere, his fervent admirer, has named him the theologian of Providence, and has shown that in all his writings this doctrine is a leading note. It is sounded in his early sermons in the fifties, and it is the theme of his most ambitious work, the Discourse on Universal History, which appeared in 1681. [Footnote; It has been shown that on one hand he controverts Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus, and on the other the dangerous methods of Richard Simon, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... locomotive superintendent, {133} a large stride forward was taken in this department. The engines now employed in hauling these long and heavily-ladened tourist trains are mighty monsters compared with what appeared "powerful" enough to travellers in the fifties and sixties. Readers turning to the illustrations on another page may see at a glance the difference between "then" and "now" both in the coaching and the locomotive departments. Even the contrast between the engines as originally constructed and as rebuilt is sufficient ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... were exceedingly generous in extending aid and there is record also of supplies sent from Fall River, Whitestown, New Jersey, Boston and other places in New England. There was plenty of work for the Negroes, the fifties being a period of railroad building in western Ontario, so that writing in 1861, William Troy maintained, that nine tenths of the fugitives had got along without outside aid of any kind. "The fugitives show a marked disposition to help each other and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... had fought a first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself as mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength—except in the late 'fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a temporary lead on paper—ship after ship, through all the grades of progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without firing a shot in anger. The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if you please, and this ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... action was so generous on the part of the boy, so far as satisfying the multitude, it was a dead failure. Then Jesus comes to the rescue. He is apt to come when there is a dead lift. He commands the people that they sit down "in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties," as much as to say: "Order! order! so that none be missed." It was fortunate that that arrangement was made; otherwise, at the very first appearance of bread, the strong ones would have clutched it, while the feeble and the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... begin with, Mount Olivet church was old. And like, all other things old she had a history, partly respectable and partly otherwise. The date of her organization reached back into the fifties, before the days of the Civil War. Some great notables had lived and died in this church. Tradition had it that one of the charter members of this church was a candidate for president of the United States ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... was going from levels beyond the imagination of Drumtochty. Had this happened in the Auld Manse, Drumsheugh would have taken for granted that Donald was "feeling sober" (ill), and recommended the bottle which cured him of "a hoast" (cough) in the fifties. But the Free Kirk had been taught that the Highlanders were unapproachable in spiritual attainments, and even Burnbrae took ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... order. The Romans were a mingled fellowship. Divers outland kings, and many paynim and Saracens, were mixed with the Christian folk, for all these people owned fealty to Rome, and were in the service of the emperor. By thirties and forties, by fifties, by sixties, by hundreds and by legions, the captains apparelled the battle. In troops and in thousands the horsemen pricked to their appointed place. Multitudes of spearmen, multitudes of riders, were ranged in close order, and by hill and valley were despatched against Arthur's host. One ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... way," General Webb began, once they were seated uncomfortably in his office. From a pocket in his khaki jacket, Webb had produced a big-bowled calabash pipe, and was puffing its noxious gray fumes in all directions while he spoke. "Up until the late fifties, war ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey
... like to know what officer in the service, under the circumstances, could do more. We were ordered to keep the frigate always in sight, and as the prize sailed well, we had little difficulty in doing that. In the day time we collected the poor blacks to come on deck in fifties at a time, and walk up and down. We had a black man on board the frigate, who was now sent with us, and he understood the language of some of the slaves. I had not forgotten the poor boy whose mother I had seen die, and I got permission for him to attend at our mess. ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston |
