"Middling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... value on myself; as a man, I am a very faulty one; and as an author, a very middling one, which whoever thinks a comfortable rank, is not at all of my opinion. Pray convince me that you think I mean sincerely, by not answering me with a compliment. It is very weak to be pleased with flattery; the stupidest of all delusions to beg it. From ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... II. The middling order say to them the roads are an inconvenience, instead of being useful, as they have turned them out of their old ways; for their horses being never shod, the gravel would soon whet away their hoofs, so as to render them unserviceable; whereas the rocks and moor-stones, though together ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... "I thought of mask," whimpered Tommy, "but that would mean the kirk was crammed, and I just meant it to be middling full." ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... is a mile and a half, and the banks on both sides are high, steep, and little wooded. It is crossed by a shallow, not above two or three feet deep; but on its east side the channel will admit ships of a middling size fully laden. The current was so strong against us, that it was with much exertion our rowers accomplished crossing the shallow. We landed on the left bank in order to determine the geographical position of the mouth, and found the latitude 38 ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... I began reading and visiting museums and galleries, gave up drinking and took to eating very little. If one keeps oneself well in hand from morning to night, one's heart seems lighter. I began to bore Ariadne too. The people with whom she won her triumphs were, by the way, all of the middling sort; as before, there were no ambassadors, there was no salon, the money did not run to it, and this mortified her and made her sob, and she announced to me at last that perhaps she would not be against our ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in the London City Mission, got some similar appointment in a large manufacturing town. Of the state of things he spoke more sadly than ever. 'The rich cannot guess, sir, how high ill-feeling is rising in these days. It's not only those who are outwardly poorest who long for change; the middling people, sir, the small town shopkeepers especially, are nearly past all patience. One of the City Mission assured me that he has been watching them these several years past, and that nothing could beat ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... describe these in the order in which I have named them. The moccasins were made of wove or knit bark, like the wrapper I have described. Around the top there was a border to add strength and perhaps as an ornament. These were of middling size, denoting feet of small size. The shape of the moccasins differs but little from the deer-skin moccasins worn by the Northern Indians. The knapsack was of wove or knit bark, with a deep, strong ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upward of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upward of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... are," Helen admitted. "Our garden is 'middling' dry, but we can keep the wet lovers moist by watering them more generously ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... they end in a small, flabby substance instead of a true testicle; and on the left side we observed a testicle fixed to the extremity of one of the vessels, as usual, invested in its tunicle, which left testicle we do not find to be at all flabby, but of a middling size: upon the whole, we are of opinion that the said Le Page is capable of the conjugal act but in a feeble manner. Signed and dated March 5, 1684. By the sentence of M. Cheron, the official, the said De Loris's petition is rejected, and ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... that attention to the petites morales forms so great a part of the education of our rising aristocracy, and is considered so vitally important to their proper carriage, as well in their set as out of it, that their children are as far advanced in this particular at fifteen, as the children of middling people at twenty-five. The petticoat-string by which the youth of the non-fashionable class is tied to their mother, is a ligature not in use among the fashionable world; from the earliest period professional persons are employed in their education, and the mother never shows in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... "Neither greatly brave nor middling good," said John, laughing, "at least to my way of thinking, and I know him well. But he was no poorer but by the kreutzers for his advocacy of an ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... that man of whom he expected things so fair. He had asked in a loud voice of the middling funny gentleman (then in the middle of a song) whether he thought Joey would be long in coming, and when at last Joey did come he screamed out, "How do you do, Joey!" and went into convulsions ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... be hung, and he was engaged in hanging it. Several pieces lay piled inside the door suitably for the hand. He stood with his back to these beside the meat bench, scraping the saltpetre off a large middling and rubbing it with red pepper. Suddenly the light of the small doorway failed; and turning he beheld his mother, and a few feet behind her—David said that he did not believe in miracles—but a ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a mind with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... hurtful, as rum, tobacco, and all the meerschaums of divers colors that do accompany the same. Second, retrench all eating not necessary to health and comfort. A French family would live in luxury on the leavings that are constantly coming from the tables of those who call themselves in middling circumstances. There are superstitions of the table that ought to be broken through. Why must you always have cake in your closet? why need you feel undone to entertain a guest with no cake on your tea-table? Do without it a year, and ask yourselves ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... drawback to me in the marriage line, for I had an antipathy to the very thought of marriage. Marriage to me appeared the most horribly tied-down and unfair-to-women existence going. It would be from fair to middling if there was love; but I laughed at the idea of love, and determined never, ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... I kept one of middling size for many months. During two or three weeks I wondered how he lived, for he was never seen to eat. He used to climb to the top of the tank and slide down the slippery glass as though it were a montagne russe. Then he would wander about upon the bottom, ploughing deep ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Brown Sauce for ragout, Game, Poultry, Fish, &c.)—If you want gravy, put in a thick and well-tinned stewpan a thin slice of fat ham or bacon, or an ounce of butter, and a middling-sized onion; on this lay a pound of nice juicy gravy-beef (as the object in making gravy is to extract the nutritious qualities of the meat, it must be beaten so as to reduce the containing vessels, and scored to render ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... last, "is a very remarkable hand. I see stories and people reading them. I see a dark gentleman and a gentleman of middling colour." ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... her chamber, and she was middling old, Her petticoat was satin and her stomacher was gold. Backwards and forwards and sideways did she pass, Making up her mind to face the cruel looking-glass. The cruel looking-glass that will never show a lass As comely or as kindly or as young ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... young men who were amused by the tart briskness of her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She had married the first man who proposed to her—a young insurance agent. Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta's parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was due to Marietta's unrivaled instinct and trained capacity ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... graceful architecture of every window and turret; and the frost-like frailness and delicacy of the whole mass, make an effect altogether upon the eye that must stand high on the list of new sensations. It is a vast structure withal, but a middling easterly breeze, one would think on looking at it, would lift it from its base, and bear it over the Atlantic like the meshes of a cobweb. Neither interior nor exterior inspire you with the feelings ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... "Middling—when all that can grow and flourish there?" Lasse pointed to where birch and aspen stood waving their shining foliage to and fro in the breeze. "No, but it'll be a damned rough bit of work to get it ready for ploughing; I'm sorry now ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... in law) Humming like flies around the newest blaze, The bluest of bluebottles you e'er saw, Teasing with blame, excruciating with praise, Gorging the little fame he gets all raw,[bp] Translating tongues he knows not even by letter, And sweating plays so middling, bad were better. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... four ports, principal bays, in this territory, which take the names of the corresponding presidios. The best guarded is that of San Diego. That of San Francisco has many advantages. Santa Barbara is but middling in the best part of the season; at other times always bad. Besides the above-mentioned places, vessels sometimes anchor at Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, El Refugio, San Pedro, and San Juan, that they may obtain the productions of the ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... upon was far more dangerous than any hitherto attempted by me, needs no further proof than this:—I went and made my will at Porlock, with a middling honest lawyer there; not that I had much to leave, but that none could say how far the farm, and all the farming stock, might depend on my disposition. It makes me smile when I remember how particular I was, and how for the life of me I was puzzled ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... steep declivities of the higher division of the mountain. They stand on uneven ground, and form a small wood. Of the oldest and best looking trees, I counted eleven or twelve; twenty-five very large ones; about fifty of middling size; and more than three hundred smaller and young ones. The oldest trees are distinguished by having the foliage and small branches ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... me—Silas Grant. Let me take your bag. My son John will be here in a minute, and will help you in with your trunk. Needn't worry, it's all right where it is. Folks are middling honest about here," he added, with a dry laugh, and his hand closed on his guest's—a cold limp, dead-fish sort of a hand, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of Checking a Wagon on a Hill-side.—In going down a steep hill a middling-sized tree may be felled, and its root tied to the hind axletree, while its branchy top sweeps along the ground, as is seen in the lowermost wagon in the sketch. [Sketch of horses and wagons on hill] In the south-west of France the leaders of the ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... that these youths come back wearing the American costume, and they continue to do so, rather priding themselves upon it as a mark of self-respect and distinction. A very earnest desire to acquire the English language is evinced by the middling classes especially in the sea-ports. Yet it is an open question with not a few intelligent people of Yokohama, where we heard the subject freely discussed, whether foreign commerce and foreign intercourse, all things considered, have been of any real advantage ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... far without fatigue. I had now got greatly stronger; and, if not quite up to my old thirty miles per day, nor altogether so bold a cragsman as I had been only a few years before, I was at least vigorous enough to enjoy a middling long walk, and to breast a tolerably steep hill. And so I resolved on at least glancing over, if not exploring, the fossiliferous deposits of the Orkneys, trusting that an eye somewhat practised in the formations mainly developed in these islands might enable me to ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... will show the fluctuations of the average prices of prime field hands (unskilled young men) in Virginia, at Charleston, in middle Georgia, and at New Orleans, aL well as the contemporary range of average prices for cotton of middling grade in the chief American market, that of New York. The range for prime slaves, it will be seen, rose from about $300 and $400 a head in the upper and lower South respectively in 1795 to a range of from $400 ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... her fascination over Henry was a puzzle to observers. "Madame Anne," wrote a Venetian, "is not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the King's great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful".[544] She had probably learnt in France the art ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... middling young fellow, only about a thousand years old or so, he went walking up and down the earth one night, ...
— Seven O'Clock Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... of him: 'Dr. Smith was rather above the middling stature, straight, and well proportioned. His head was well formed, though blanched and bald somewhat in advance of his years. His face, too, as to its lineaments, was very regular and comely. His eyes were of a light-blue color, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... varieties common to the West. There is much level, table land, between the streams. Along the Wabash, below Terre Haute, is an undulating surface, diversified with forest and prairie, with a soil of middling quality, interspersed with some very rich tracts. Along the Wabash and its tributaries above Terre Haute, the land in general is first rate,—a large proportion forest, interspersed with beautiful prairies. The timber consists of oaks of various species, poplar, ash, walnut, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... the barking of a dog assailed their ears, and suspended the conversation. Passing onward to the den of the Bonassus, they found a dark-featured gentleman of middling stature, with his hair, whiskers, and ears, so bewhitened with powder as to form a complete contrast with his complexion and a black silk handkerchief which he wore round his neck, holding a large brown-coloured dog ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... author without incongruity. Thus, too, we have Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne writing to his daughters about the learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in conclusion, that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a middling station, and should be reserved for princesses.[63] And once more, if we desire to see the same principle carried to ludicrous extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in God, the Abbot of Brantome, claiming, on the authority of some lord ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they could help it. Here I'd been working like a nigger 'most five months on the Duluth house—and the last three weeks running night shifts and Sundays; didn't stop to eat, half the time—and what does Brown do but— 'Well,' he says, 'how're you feeling, Charlie?' 'Middling,' said I. 'Are you up to a little job tomorrow?' 'What's that?' I said. 'Seems to me if I've got to go down to the Calumet job Sunday night I might have an hour or so at home.' 'Well, Charlie,' he says, 'I'm ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... porch into the house. There was no hall; they walked straight into the sitting-room, where a table was spread with tea, and Miss Hilton, a rather faded-looking lady of middling age, was already ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... death, if I don't die aither ov consumption or production! I ever and always thought that asthronomy was the hardest science that was till now,—and, it's no lie I'm telling you, the same asthronomy is a tough enough morsel to brake a man's fast upon,—and geolidgy is middling and hard too,—and hydherastatics is no joke,—but ov all the books ov science that ever was opened and shut, that book upon P'litical Econimy lifts the pins! Well, well, if they wait till they persuade me that ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... lake near by, and thinking that it would be less fatiguing for the boy to catch fish than to look after the camp, the Supervisor sent him off to try his luck. Wilbur, delighted to have been lucky, returned in less than fifteen minutes with four middling-sized trout, and he found himself hungry enough to eat his two, almost bones and all. That night they slept under a small Baker tent that Merritt had brought along on his pack horse, the riding and pack saddles being piled beside the tent and covered ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... bordering the river, handsome, green, and different from ours, having fruits and flowers each one according to its nature. There are many birds, which sing very sweetly. There are a great number of palm trees of a different kind from those in Guinea and from ours, of a middling height, the trunks without that covering, and the leaves very large, with which they thatch their houses. The country is very level." The Admiral jumped into his boat and went on shore. He came to two houses, which he believed ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... had they stayed at home, foddering the cattle, cleaning dishes,—in fine, performing their moderate share of the labors of life, without being harassed by its cares. The sable inmates of the mansion were not excluded from the domestic affections: in families of middling rank, they had their places at the board; and when the circle closed round the evening hearth, its blaze glowed on their dark shining faces, intermixed familiarly with their master's children. It must ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... meat, dancing, wine, and fiddling, Which turned the isle into a place of pleasure; The servants all were getting drunk or idling, A life which made them happy beyond measure. Her father's hospitality seemed middling, Compared with what Haidee did with his treasure; 'T was wonderful how things went on improving, While she had not one hour ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... affectations of the poetaster, but was not aware that these foibles were united with all the talents and vices which lead to success in active life, and that the unlucky versifier who pestered him with reams of middling Alexandrines was the most vigilant, suspicious, and severe ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Country Whipping is formed by middling the twine around the part of the rope to be marked and half knotting it at every half turn, so that each half knot will be on opposite sides. When a sufficient number of turns are passed, finish it ...
— Knots, Bends, Splices - With tables of strengths of ropes, etc. and wire rigging • J. Netherclift Jutsum
... "Helena is but middling, poor dear," answered Miss Blake—on that occasion she called her niece Hallana. "She frets, the creature, as is natural; but she will get better when we leave England. England is a hard country for anyone who ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... funds, though it is overseen by the government. Persons who enter the institution pay a sum of money, and are entitled to a room, fire, and food, so long as they live, and some enter even as young as the age of twenty. There is another establishment in Paris where only the middling classes are received, and who pay for the attention they receive. Single men who have no homes of their own, when attacked by violent diseases, can by paying a moderate sum enter this institution and ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... life?" And it isn't just me—though that's the burning, close question to my simple selfishness. But it's a lot of women—a lot. We're waking all over the world. We want to help, to be worth while; to help, to count. It won't do much longer to know French and Italian and play middling tennis and be on the Altar Society. You know what I mean. All that—yes—but beyond that the power which a real person carries into all that to make it big. The stronger you are the better your work is. I want to be strong, to be useful, to touch things with a personality which ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... stepped then, and found the earth all paved of a middling gravel, and nought at all growing there, not even the smallest of herbs; and she stooped down and searched the gravel, and found neither worm nor beetle therein, nay nor any one of the sharp and slimy creatures which are ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... to tell of myself: middling well: still here, pottering about my House, in which I expect an invalid Niece; and preparing for my Ship in June. William Airy talks of coming to me soon. I am daily expecting the Death of a Sister in law, a right good Creature, who I thought would outlive me a dozen years, and should rejoice ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... athirst finds joy who drinks of heavenly dew. The elephant being thus converted, the people around were filled with joy; they all raised a cry of wonder at the miracle, and brought their offerings of every kind. The scarcely-good arrived at middle-virtue, the middling-good passed to a higher grade, the unbelieving now became believers, those who believed were strengthened in their faith. Agatasatru, mighty king, seeing how Buddha conquered the drunken elephant, was moved at heart by ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... friends, if you would only give me the wages of a middling mechanic, you would have pleasure in my undisturbed work, which should ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... idly, filling his pipe and lighting it with a small red ember, "and all things considered, I don't think I'll raise any racket about that middling, Big Abel." ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... should be read aloud. When the reader comes to the "great big bear," or to any thing he says or does, he (the reader) should read in a loud gruff voice; all about the "middling sized bear," in the ordinary voice; and all about the "tiny bit of a bear," in ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... presence of their ancestors in the next world. Medicine, as still practised in China, may be compared with the European art of a couple of centuries ago, and its exceedingly doubtful results are fully appreciated by patients at large. "No medicine," says one proverb, "is better than a middling doctor;" while another points out that "Many sons of clever doctors ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... pretty middling, within doors; but I don't like the climate, Mr. John I don't the climate, Sir. There's no country like h'England, I believe, for my business. 'Ere's a fine rose, Sir if you'll step a bit this way quite a new kind I got it over last ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... arose from his inexperience; but he may be still deficient from a want of knowledge in nature. For it is possible that the man in question may stop here, and that the masterpiece of a great hand may please him no more than the middling performance of a vulgar artist; and this not for want of better or higher relish, but because all men do not observe with sufficient accuracy on the human figure to enable them to judge properly of an imitation ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... at the public-houses of Highgate, to administer a ludicrous oath to all the men of the middling rank who stopped there. The party was sworn on a pair of horns fastened on a stick; the substance of the oath was never to kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress, never to drink small beer when be could get strong, with many other ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... reply, for looking over their shoulder he glimpsed a dark, forbidding cavern lighted only by the flashing red eyes of thousands of Middlings. They appeared to be digging, and above the rattle of the shovels and picks came the hoarse voice of one of them singing the Middling National Air. Or so the ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... hundred palas of wool or cotton when worked[275] are increased by ten palas; if the thread be of middling fineness, the increase is five palas; if very ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... in middling circumstances, but having lost her husband by a railroad accident six months previously, the widow was reduced to quite a straightened condition. And when the fever seized her, she was in utter despair at the thought of being taken away ...
— Angel Agnes - The Heroine of the Yellow Fever Plague in Shreveport • Wesley Bradshaw
... letter, Nevil. It's tolerably hard to decipher. It's mild enough; it's middling good pulpit. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... appear certainly to be beginning to study home comforts, all the modern houses being built upon very commodious plans; still the middling classes, in the towns at least, are miserably lodged, in comparison with the same grades in England, families of apparently great respectability inhabiting places so desolate as to strike one ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... neighbors was noted for her molasses sponge cake. If asked for the recipe, she would give it as follows: "I take some molasses and saleratus and flour and shortening, and some milk. How much? Oh, a middling good sized piece, and enough milk to make it the right thickness to bake good." Needless to say, she continued to be the ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... from one country place to another in the south of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by riding home the pony from the moors. Before he was nine he could write such a passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance: "I pulled a middling-sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it. No witches would run after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away together very comfortably to the end of their lives, and when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Well, yes, middling; but as obstinate as a mule. When he gets his mind set on a thing, it's no use to try to budge him. I've whipped him till he was black and blue, and it didn't do ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... are now to speak was a native of the town of Windsor, in the county of Berks. His parents were honest people in middling circumstances, who yet took such care of his education that he was fit for any business to which he would have applied himself. But he, on the contrary, continuing to lead a lazy and indolent course ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... civilization is to increase the number of our wants. The same degree of education which, during the last century, was considered, even by the upper classes, a superfluity, is now a necessary for the middling class, and will soon become a necessary for the lowest, or all but the lowest, members of society. Most of our readers are acquainted with the story of the Highland chief who rebuked his son indignantly for making a pillow of a snowball. Sumptuary laws have always ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... above the level of the sea, has not yet been determined; but I should imagine that it cannot exceed four thousand feet. For the first ten or twelve miles they are tolerably well clothed with timber, and produce occasionally some middling pasture; but beyond this they are excessively barren, and are covered generally with a thick brush, interspersed here and there with a few miserable stunted gums. They bear, in fact, a striking similarity, both in respect to their soil and productions, to the barren wastes on the ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... particularly those that fastened the cleats to the ship's side. This was productive of a double mischief; damage to the ship, and a considerable rise at market. When the gunner offered, as usual, small nails for hogs of a middling size, the natives refused to take them, and produced large spikes, intimating that they expected such nails as these. A most diligent enquiry was set on foot to discover the offenders, but all to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... custom formerly prevailed at the public-houses in Highgate, to administer a ludicrous oath to all travellers of the middling rank who stopped there. The party was sworn on a pair of horns, fastened on a stick: the substance of the oath was, never to kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress, never to drink small beer when he could get strong, with many other injunctions of the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... arnica bloom glowing like sunrise on the back! Those new trousers, of "middling" sacks, "Brand No. 1" proudly ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... marriage as the direct end of her witching the world with her grace on horseback, or with any other accomplishment. That she was to be married some time or other she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her marriage would not be of a middling kind, such as most girls were contented with, she felt quietly, unargumentatively sure. But her thoughts never dwelt on marriage as the fulfillment of her ambition; the dramas in which she imagined herself a heroine were ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... ever be good for me, aunty. I'm gone. This sweet civilization of ours has got me. The first reform school I went to reformed me, all right—formed me into a crook. I used to show signs of growing up to be fair to middling intelligent, once. But now—nothing to it. You people, though you're twice as old as I am, you're twice as young. You got a chance. Look here, Uncle Appleby, why don't you go out for being one of these famous old pedestrians that get their mugs in the papers? Will you do what I tell ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... drawing near to the inn door and the night's rest. The pictures swarmed and vanished in his brain; a surge of temptation, a beat of all his blood, went over him, to set spur to the mare and to go on into the unknown for ever. And then it passed away; hunger and fatigue, and that habit of middling actions which we call common sense, resumed their empire; and in that changed mood his eye lighted upon two bright windows on his left hand, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... narrow carpeted flight of steps, and a bed-room prepared for the ladies to uncloak in, and another in which the men can brush their hair and hide their hats. Some such snuggeries very possibly exist in England, among the middling classes; but I believe all over the continent of Europe style is never attempted without more suitable means to ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... between the different denominations ran high, and the middling good folk who did not go to church counted those who did. In the Established Church there was a sparse gathering, who waited in vain for the minister. After a time it got abroad that a flag of distress was flying from the manse, and then ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes. I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet. You may laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like ours. Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,—a beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 'there are people like me who make good managers! You see,' he went on, screwing his head on one side and sucking his pipe assiduously, 'looking at me, I dare say you think I'm not much... but you, see, I must confess, I've had a very middling education; I wasn't well off. I beg your pardon; I'm an open man, and if you ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... the planking for a certain time, and then went quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all French, and they were not generally, it seemed, of the first fashion, but rather of middling condition in life; the English being represented only by a few young fellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman with an Indian scarf trailing from his hat. There were some fair American costumes and faces in the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and schoolmasters are doing every day, you ought to be hanged; and some day, when we take a sensible view of the matter, you will be; and serve you right. The child does not stand between a good and a bad angel: what it has to deal with is a middling angel who, in normal healthy cases, wants to be a good angel as fast as it can without killing itself in the process, which ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... "Middling," said the President.—"By the way," he added, "if you have any money, it is usual to offer some champagne. It keeps up a good spirit, and is one of my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of your old Romans. Yet your Seneca, in his day, did play the villain. Or maybe some at the Court of Mahound. I know not, for I was never there. But here is a goodly world, with prizes for them that can take them. Yet virtue may still flourish, for I have done middling well by serving my country. Now I am minded to retire into my lands, to cultivate good letters and to pursue virtue. For here about the Courts there are many distractions. The times are evil times. Yet will I do one good stroke more ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... are at the Kydd School, and they will get no scarlet fever. Nobody is ever sick there. They will be better cared for than my children are when they are left to me, and they will be seven hundred miles nearer to us than if they were here. The little ones can go to the Model School, the middling ones to the Academy, and the oldest can go to college. How ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... the colours bright—we leave the rest to you." Such seems to have been the Royal artistic edict issued in the beginning of the present reign. In no instance has the choice fallen on a painter of talent; but the middling from every country in Europe seems to have found a ready welcome at the Court of Queen Victoria. We find there middling Germans, middling Italians, middling Frenchmen—and all receiving money and honour ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... thirty millions per annum. If cotton can be sold in the Liverpool market at anything less than 4-3/4d. per lb., the slaveholders in America will cease to grow what, under altered circumstances, would be unprofitable. Cotton of middling quality (which is in the greatest demand) may be obtained in West and Eastern Africa at 4d. per lb.; and, already, cotton from Western Africa (Liberia) has been sent to Liverpool, there re-shipped, and sold at Boston, in the United States, ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... it was impregnated with a flavor of a like character, and after it was swallowed this flavor would cling to the palate with provoking tenacity for several minutes. The sailors smacked their lips over it once or twice, and pronounced it "from fair to middling." When boiled, and drank under the name of tea or coffee, it might have deserved that character; but when taken directly from the cask, and quaffed in hot weather, as a pleasant and refreshing beverage it ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... The middling of a pig weighing less than a hundred pounds, well scraped, washed clean, and likewise roasted on a rack after seasoning it well, makes a fine dish. The sauce for it should include minced green peppers, instead of cucumbers. If you happen to have a ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... Gilbert was indeed a man among a thousand. I knew him very intimately in the beginning of the century, and, which was very agreeable, was much at his house on very easy terms. He loved the Muses, and worshipped them in secret, and used to read some of his poetry, which was but middling. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... curtains. She saves a little money, and spends a great deal of time over them. The Englishwoman, when she possibly can, likes to spend her time in a different way. In both countries there are admirable housekeepers, and middling housekeepers, and extremely bad ones. The German who goes the wrong way about it sends her husband to the Kneipe by her eternal fussing and fidgeting. She is not his companion mentally, but the cook's, for her mind has sunk to the cook's level, while her temper ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... turn to whichever one of us had hailed, heeling over to that side as if her ballast had shifted. She acted to me kind of uneasy, but everybody that come into that parlor—and they kept piling in all the time—looked more'n middling joyful. They kept pretty quiet, too, so that every yell we let out echoed, as you might say, all 'round. I begun to git shaky at the knees, as if I was preaching to ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and wealth. The third was that of the ultra Democrats or Jacobins, who wished to raise the multitude from degradation, penury, and infamy, into power, by the destruction of the throne, and the subjection of the middling classes, and the entire subversion of all the distinctions of wealth and rank. The approach of the allies united both of these latter classes against the throne. A motion was immediately introduced into the Assembly that ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... stick into the wood at some distance from the flesh. It is the rapidity of the throws, the glitter of the blades, the curve which the handles make towards their living aim, which give an air of danger to an exhibition that has become common-place, and only requires very middling skill. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... millionaire-envying were not the sole preoccupations of the average man. And such an age will undoubtedly succeed to ours. Few things would surprise me less, in social life, than the upspringing of some anti-luxury movement, the formation of some league or guild among the middling classes (where alone intellect is to be found in quantity), the members of which would bind themselves to stand aloof from all the great, silly, banal, ugly, and tedious luxe-activities of the time and not to spend more than a certain sum per annum ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... philosopher, because you agree with him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead at noon. It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested. We are all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often take them tamely upon trust. But the man, the philosopher or the moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the purpose of any system looks ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... transcending the conception of man—overwhelming to such need as even that of Paul Faber, whose soul has begun to hunger after righteousness, and whose hunger must be a hunger that will not easily be satisfied." For a poor nature will for a time be satisfied with a middling God; but as the nature grows richer, the ideal of the God desired grows greater. The true man can be satisfied only with a God of magnificence, never with a God such as in his childhood and youth had been presented to Faber as the God of the Bible. That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... joined them, and from him she directly received the amends which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short bow. He was a stout young man, of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... about with some sort of a garment on it. We are so used to a leaven of falsehood in all we hear and say, nowadays, that nothing is more likely to deceive us than the absolute truth. If a shopkeeper told me that his wares were simply middling, of course, I should think that they were not worth a farthing. But all that has nothing to do with my poor brother. Well, what was ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... furniture with its tidies and a Rogers group in the front window sometimes got on her nerves she forced herself to laugh over it and say: "It's mother's house, and all she has." She concerned herself far more with Luke, an active, fair-to-middling American boy somewhat inclined to be spoiled. Mary had taken Luke into the office after school hours to keep a weather eye on him and make him contribute a stipend ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... sudden fame, has its drawbacks. Gray read the poem, and wrote of it to his friends, in a style thought at the time depreciatory, although it comes pretty near the truth. He says, "It seems to me above the middling, and now and then for a little while rises even to the best, particularly in description. It is often obscure and even unintelligible. In short, its great fault is, that it was published at least nine years too early." Gray, however, had not as yet himself emerged as a poet, and his ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... 'Only middling', was the answer; 'he goes about begging from house to house, and has neither food nor a rag to his back. As for money, he hasn't a ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... said to the jury when it came to his turn to charge them. "Are they guilty, or not? If the question was put to me I should say the Laird of MacLachlan, arrant Papist! should keep his men at home to Mass on the other side of the loch instead of loosing them on honest, or middling honest, Campbells, for the strict virtue of these Coillebhraid miners is what I ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... repeatedly said to him, "Now, George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." Schiller's negligence and lack of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his final school thesis was unsatisfactory. Hegel was a poor scholar, and at the university it was stated "that he was of middling industry and knowledge but especially deficient in philosophy." John Hunter nearly became a cabinetmaker. Lyell had excessive aversion to work. George Combe wondered why he was so inferior to other boys in arithmetic. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... women as there are men engaged in this fascinating pursuit. As late as 1843, Dibdin remarks that "it is a remarkable circumstance, that the bibliomania has almost uniformly confined its attacks to the male sex, and among people in the higher and middling classes of society. It has raged chiefly in palaces, castles, halls, and gay mansions, and those things which in general are supposed not to be inimical to health,—such as cleanliness, spaciousness, and splendour, ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... you some idea of the state of society. Among the upper classes gaming is reduced to a science and is almost exclusively the order of the day. There is little or no taste for litterature among any part of the native society. The upper classes are sensualists; the middling ignorant and superstitious. With regard to the Lazzaroni, I do not think that they at all deserve the ill name that has been given to them. They always seem good humoured and willing to work, when employment is given to them; and they do not appear at all ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... the bear felt the stone, and saw him, he turns about, and comes after him, taking devilish long strides, and strolling along at a strange rate, so as he would put a horse to a middling gallop. Away runs Friday, and takes his course, as if he ran towards us for help; so we all resolved to fire at once upon the bear, and deliver my man; though I was angry at him heartily for bringing the bear back upon us, when ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... I'm not displaying these to you as a salesman—not that I'm so very delicate about offering my things, but I try to wait till a second visit." He really did feel mean about it. "Don't take 'em—wait till to-morrow. They're pretty middling bad anyway. They're supposed to be mountain lions, but as a matter of fact I never saw a mountain lion outside ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... when an old king is taking her, and she without a thought but for her beauty and to be straying the hills. OLD WOMAN. The gods help the lot of us. . . . Shouldn't she be well pleased getting the like of Conchubor, and he middling settled in his years itself? I don't know what he wanted putting her this wild place to be breaking her in, or putting myself to be roast- ing her supper and she with no patience for her food at all. [She looks out. LAVARCHAM. Is she coming ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... make a large store, with the assistance of different sorts of dungs. I had a great tact in discovering amongst my customers the real connoisseur, and to him I gave it almost genuine. My whole profits, in fact, depended upon my discrimination of characters. To those of the middling ranks, I gave it half-mixed; to the lower sort, three-quarters; and to the lowest, almost without any tobacco at all. Whenever I thought I could perceive a wry face, I immediately exerted my ingenuity in favour of the excellence of my tobacco. I showed specimens of the good, descanted on its superior ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... kinds of persons could do it," replied Cyrilla—"a dull person—a plodder—and a genius. Middling people—they're the kind that fill the world, they're you and I, my dear—middling people have to fuss with the trifles that must be sacrificed if one is to do anything big. You call those trifles your freedom, but they're your slavery. And by sacrificing ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... furniture, would probably have been one hundred pounds; furnished, it is one hundred and sixty pounds. Rock Park, as the locality is called, is private property, and is now nearly covered with residences for professional people, merchants, and others of the upper middling class; the houses being mostly built, I suppose, on speculation, and let to those who occupy them. It is the quietest place imaginable, there being a police station at the entrance, and the officer on duty allows no ragged or ill-looking person to pass. There ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... yours—come to me at the Ostable station and dragged Nellie and me off the train. We rode with that person the rest of the way and—the said person told us what had happened and begged us to help you. Seemed to have made a middling good guess that I COULD ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pleasure- garden attached to it. All this belonged, under the name of Mademoiselle, to Madame de Mare, her governess. I sat down and chatted with them; but the impatience of the Duc d'Orleans to learn the news could not be checked. He asked me if I was very satisfied. "Middling," I replied, not to spoil his dinner; but he rose at once and took me into the garden. He was much affected to hear of the ill-success of my negotiation; and returned downcast to table. I took the first opportunity to blame his impatience, and the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... scriptures of Modern Hinduism, the Mahanirv[a]na Tantra, thus explains the three stages in the path and their respective merits: "The knowledge that Brahma alone is true is the best expedient; meditation is the middling [ the means?]; and (2) the chanting of glories and the recitation of names is the worst; and (3) the worship of idols is the worst of the worst.[128] Of the pantheist's "saving knowledge," perhaps enough has been said. But again, it is the piercing of the ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... trudge like the rest. All the true philosophers are gone, and the middling true are going. I made up my mind like the truest that ever was as soon as I heard ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... considerably swollen. At seven o'clock the King sent for De Comines, who found him already armed and mounted on the finest horse he had ever seen. The name of this charger was Savoy. He was black, one-eyed, and of middling height; and to his great courage, as we shall see, Charles owed life upon that day. The French army, ready for the march, now took to the gravelly bed of the Taro, passing the river at a distance of about a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... bail, an indented servant man named Christian Miller, born in Germany, by trade a Tailor, he is about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches in stature, well made, middling long black hair, speaks English tolerably well, he was formerly a servant to a German Hessian officer, one Mr. Seiffort, Lieutenant in Capt. Schoels regiment, has very much the art and behaviour of a sham beau and has a variety of cloaths, viz. a Maroon Coat, a brown ditto, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... lived servant in the house, how did you observe Miss Blandy behave towards her father, and in what manner did she use to talk of him, three or four months before his death?—Sometimes she would talk very affectionately, and sometimes but middling. ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... 1/4 inches; to flags, hand, nainsook, white, with dark blue stripe, 2 ft. by 2 ft.; watches, stop; bolts, steel, screwed, bright, hexagonal-headed, 1 in. by 2 in.; sealing wax, foolscap, paper fasteners, and pencils; and paint, green, Brunswick, middling, whatever that may be. This is just a small selection of the articles he keeps and has to account for at stocktaking, and if you turned out his various storerooms you would find he had sufficient articles ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... from the Subscriber, on the 4th of May, a Negro Man named Cato, of a middling Stature, has lost the Sight of his left Eye, had on a kersey Jacket and leather Breeches. Whoever shall take up said Negro, and bring him to his Master in Salem, shall have Two Dollars Reward, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... of fogs, snow, and frost, carry the inconveniencies of the frigid zone far into the temperate. The Samoiede and the Laplander, however, have their counterpart, though on a lower latitude, on the shores of America: the Canadian and the Iroquois bear a resemblance to the ancient inhabitants of the middling climates of Europe. The Mexican, like the Asiatic of India, being addicted to pleasure, was sunk in effeminacy; and in the neighbourhood of the wild and the free, had suffered to be raised on ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... bright live coale within it. He had two kinds of looks; when he laught, was witty, and in a merry humour, one could scarce see his eies; by and by, when he was serious and earnest, he opened his eies round his eie-lids: he had middling eies, not very big nor very little. He was six foote high and something better, and went indifferently erect, or rather, considering his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... eastwards, and E. By S. having from 30 to 20 and 10 fathoms, and still no land to be seen. The greatest depth was on an oose bottom, the least a coarse yellow sand. About nine o'clock we espied land, bearing N.E. about 8 leagues distant, being a round hummock of middling height. By noon we were in latitude 7 deg. 56' N. having steered all day east, sometimes half a point north or south, as our water deepened or shoaled, for we would sometimes have ten fathoms or more one cast, and the next seven fathoms, the ground ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... find the case of a man entering the Indian Service by force of Languages alone, which I cannot but think a miscarriage. Then the very high marks assigned to Mathematics allow a man to win with no other science, and no other culture, but a middling examination in English. To those that think so highly of foreign languages, this must seem a much greater anomaly than it does to me. I would prefer, however, that such a candidate had traversed a wider field of science, instead of excelling ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... 139. INGREDIENTS.—8 middling-sized onions, 3 oz. of butter, a tablespoonful of rice-flour, salt and pepper to taste, 1 teaspoonful of powdered sugar, thickening of butter and flour, 2 ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... of Guards are not so much practised, with Sword in Hand, as the middling Guard, People being more careful of parrying with the Sword, and a Man is in much better Condition to parry from the middling Guard than from ...
— The Art of Fencing - The Use of the Small Sword • Monsieur L'Abbat
... and fertility, and he was able to draw nothing from them. One overseer, and a confederate, he wrote, "I believe, divided the profits of my Estate on the York River, tolerably betwn. them, for the devil of any thing do I get." Well might he advise knowingly that "I have no doubt myself but that middling land under a man's own eyes, is more profitable than rich land at a distance." "No Virginia Estate (except a very few under the best of management) can stand simple Interest," he declared, and went even further when he wrote, "the nature of a Virginia Estate being such, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... AND GENTLEMEN:—The gentleman on my right, with the unmistakably Puritan name of McKelway, in the issue of the "Eagle" to-night alluded to me as a Yankeeized Hollander. I am a middling good Yankee. I always felt that at these dinners of the New England Society, to which I come a trifle more readily than to any other like affairs, I and the president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, who is also invariably in attendance, represent, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... governor, for some time, gave me the help of a convict man, but he is taken away. Both my wife and myself receive our provisions regularly at the store, like all other people. My opinion of the soil of my farm, is, that it is middling, neither good or bad. I will be bound to make it do with the aid of manure, but without cattle it will fail. The greatest check upon me is, the dishonesty of the convicts who, in spite of all my vigilance, ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... light lands of the Tuamini and Pimichin are extremely productive.* (* At Javita, an extent of fifty feet square, planted with Jatropha manihot (yucca) yields in two years, in the worst soil, a harvest of six tortas of cassava: the same extent on a middling soil yields in fourteen months a produce of nine tortas. In an excellent soil, around clumps of mauritia, there is every year from fifty feet square a produce of thirteen or fourteen tortas. A torta weighs ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... in a ferny hill, Twix' a liddle low shaw an' a great high gill. Oh hop-bine yaller an' wood-smoke blue, I reckon you'll keep her middling true! ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... shown in immediately: a middling-sized man, with a sharp, unwholesome-looking face, and with a flippant, reckless manner, dressed in a style of shabby smartness, eying me with a bold look, and not so overburdened with politeness as to trouble himself about taking off his hat when he came in. I had never seen him before in my ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... scientific observer of mankind. They are scarcely our fellow-creatures, so to speak; they live in a world of their own, ruled by eccentric traditional laws. They have their own heroes, and are much more interested in Mr. Alan Steel or Lohmann than in persons like Mr. Arthur Balfour, whose cricket is only middling. They have rules of conduct which cannot be called immoral, but which are certainly relics of a very ancient state of tribal morality. The humour of it is that the modern boy is so grave, so self-assured, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty) ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... went into the house, she soon found by the smell that something nice had been cooked. On going into the parlour, sure enough she saw there three jars smoking away: the first, a very large one, for Mr. Bruin; the next of middling size, for Mammy Muff; and the smallest of all was Tiny's jar; and in each of them was a wooden spoon. The little busy-body now went to work tasting the soup in each jar by turns; but she found that in the smallest jar was the nicest to ...
— A Apple Pie and Other Nursery Tales • Unknown
... is no darling of your political Repairer. Call the party and the men by their right names: and give me for utility in legislation or administrative action an Old Tory and Obstructive party rather than this middling, ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... Middling wise should every man be; never overwise. No man should know his fate beforehand; so shall he live ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... letter from the ambassdriss, brot by the ambasdor's Shassure, and sealed with his seal of arms, would affect anybody in the middling ranx of life. It droav Lady Griffin mad with delight; and, long before my master's arrivle, she'd sent Mortimer and Fitzclarence, her two footmin, along with a polite reply ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was taking place at one end of the exercising ground, a horseman rode up to the front of the reposing soldiers. He was of middling stature, but of athletic frame, and was clothed in a shirt of linked mail, his head protected by a helmet, and in full warlike equipment, and followed by five noukers. By their dusty dress, and the foam ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... the excise of beer, ale, brandy, &c., and hearth-money will be paid in such coin, the same falling first into the hands of the poor and middling people. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... words; and Cooke, the writer of his life, observes that he was very reserved among those whom he did not know, but a most delightful and improving companion among his friends. John Aubrey, who knew him personally, thus describes him: 'He was of a middling stature, pretty strong set, roundish cherry-checked, hazle-eyed, brown-haired.' He was (as Wood also says) in conversation very modest, and of a very few words. He was wont to say, that he would not ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... see Southey soon, so I need only send my remembrance to him now. Doubtless I need not tell him that Burnett is not to be foster'd in self-opinion. His eyes want opening, to see himself a man of middling stature. I am not oculist enough to do this. The booksellers may one day remove the film. I am all this time on the most cordial supping terms of amity with G. Burnett and really love him at times: but I must speak freely of people behind ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... said, "and let me have a look at you." And Ethel went to her side, laid her hand lightly on the old lady's shoulder and kissed her cheek. "You do look middling well," she continued, "and your dress is about as it should be. I like a girl to dress like a girl—still, the sapphires. ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... repairs to the Continent, first to Rouen, then to Switzerland and Italy, in company with his friend Evelyn, and, in fine, settles for a season in Paris. Here he keeps open table for the banished royalists, as well as for the French wits, till his means are impaired by his liberality. A middling poet, a pitiful politician, a fickle dangler in affairs of love, Waller was an admirable host, and not only gave good dinners and suppers, but flavoured them delicately with compliment and repartee. In Paris he recovered his tone of spirits, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... old woman, undoing the iron hasp with a trembling hand. The door flew open, and there entered a man of a middling stature, and of a handsome but melancholy countenance. He was clad in the Circassian dress: the water trickled down his bourka and bashlik.[22] Without any apologies, he threw it on the feather-bed, and began to untie the lopasti of his bashlik which half covered his face—Fatma, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... return'd. I spoke of it to Volatilio who bid me apprehend nothing; for, said he, the Magnetick Virtue of the Load-stone is so far from being in Proportion to its Size, that the very large ones have less attractive Power than those which are middling. ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... general have not civility in their possession, but they will not, either from pride or design, produce it, particularly to strangers. My wooden-house landlady indeed, was a prodigy; and it must be confessed, that no woman of the lower order in England, nor even of the middling class, have any share of that ease and urbanity which is so common among the lower order of the people of this kingdom: but the woman I now speak of, had not, you will perceive, the least design even upon my purse; I made no previous ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... above their school learning they've been taught to swim, ride, dance, use tools, play on the piano, and speak fair to middling French. Yet, as you say, Fred, the most difficult part is to come, just as we fancied that we were through. And the terrible reflection is that we're not so sure now what we ought to do for them as we ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... "came what you might call talking close to real swells before. I've seen 'em, of course—at a distance. Some of 'em, taking 'em by and large, looked pretty punk, to me; some of 'em was middling, and a few looked as if they might have the goods. But none of 'em struck me as being real live breathing people, same as other folks. Why, parson, some of those dames'd throw a fit, fancying they was poisoned, if they had to breathe the same air with folks like me—me being what I am and ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... soon were chopping away for dear life, even Marjorie wielding a light axe, and wielding it well. Many hands, it is said, make light work, and there were enough of us to make the business move pretty quickly. Choosing trees with trunks of a middling thickness, we soon had a great quantity cut down and made of the length that was needed. These we proceeded to set up in the places that Lancelot had marked out, but first we dug deep trenches in the ground so as to ensure their being firmly established, ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... three children in destitute circumstances following the father's death. The boy asserted there were no children in the family. And they had just moved in, within a very few days, during which time the neighbourhood had only glimpsed a "middling old" woman. It was strange at least, adding distinctly to the puzzle of the whole affair. West grew nervous, wondering why the two should remain so long within, out of sight and hearing. If this was merely a charitable ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... said I. 'Oh, you know,' says she; 'about the same that I bought last time. And put in the tape for strings, and a reel of white cotton, No. 30. And I don't mind if you put in a piece of that German ribbon, middling width,' she went on. 'It's nicer than tape for nightcaps, and them sort o' things.' And with that, sir, she was turning out again, when her eyes was caught by some lavender prints, as was a-hanging just in the doorway. Two ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... can't have you call Utica inferior. It isn't supreme—that's what's the matter with it, and I hate anything middling," said Pandora Day. She gave a light dry laugh, tossing back her head a little as she made this declaration. And looking at her askance in the dusk, as she trod the deck that vaguely swayed, he recognised something in her air and port that ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... whatever, and I doubt whether the preaching had any adaptation whatever to children. As to intellectual training, I believe that, like the other boys, I shirked my work as much as I could. I went to Eton in 1821 after a pretty long spell, in a very middling state of preparation, and wholly without any knowledge or other enthusiasm, unless it were a priggish love of argument which I had begun to develop. I had lived upon a rabbit warren: and what a rabbit warren of a life it is that I ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat—at least with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you want for the present; not the largest kind, but simply good, middling-sized whales!—Mark Twain's Letter to ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... other in volume that grew as the twilight deepened. Along with the troops, the motors flowed up, and soon there was an unbroken roar. Limousines glided through an enormous sea of lorries, little, middling, and big. All these cleared aside, wedged themselves in, subsided in their appointed places. A vast hum of voices and mingled noises arose from the ocean of men and vehicles that beat upon the approaches to the station and began ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... dissent than what was expressed by a look or a low murmur. But I perceived the corpulent gentleman and the wan mathematician slily exchange their dishes, by which they both seemed to consider themselves gainers. The dish allotted to me, being of a middling character, I ate of it without repining; though, from the savoury fumes of my right-hand neighbour's plate, I could not help wishing I had been ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... "Just middling," replied Wayland, reticent from weariness and with joy of their camping-place. The lake, dark as topaz and smooth as steel, lay in a frame of golden willows—as a jewel is filigreed with gold—and above it the cliffs rose three thousand feet ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... comfortable than outside at eighty-two. The Turkish bath in the hotel is very nicely fitted up, but the native masseur wasn't a pleasing experience, his weak chocolate-coloured hands gave me the sensation of the touch of a middling strong eel; his lean, lithe figure and the charms round his neck, and grey hair died brick-red I expect to see again in dreams—a crease in his teeth and venom ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... productions would be doubled. If the yield seems small, the price, however, makes it one of the most profitable products known. The usual quotations for choice Sea Islands in Charleston market has been for many years about four times as great as for the middling qualities of Uplands,—probably an average of from thirty-five to forty-five cents per pound; and for particular brands[C] sixty to seventy cents is often paid. The writer has seen a few bales, of a most beautiful color and length ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Mr. Shrimplin, looking into the round innocent face of his son, "that's the stuff the traders used to sell the Indians. Strong? Well, you might say it was middling strong—just middling—about three drops of it would make a rabbit spit in ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester |
