"Preternaturally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Auld Licht always looked as if he were returning from burying a near relative. Yet when I met him hobbling down the street, preternaturally grave and occupied, experience taught me that he was preparing for a christening. How the minister would have borne himself in the event of a member of his congregation's wanting the baptism to take place at ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... the interval) a delicate-looking young woman, plain and poor, a widow evidently from the style of her shabby mourning and sad expression of face, bearing in her arms a weird and sickly-looking child, evidently a sufferer from spinal disease—an infant as to size, but preternaturally ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... man sixty years of age, clean-shaved, with smooth iron-gray hair and bushy eyebrows, from beneath which shone a pair of preternaturally bright blue eyes. His face was of a strong, even, healthy red; he was stout, but rather thick and massive than corpulent; his hands were of the square type, with thick straight fingers and large nails, the great blue veins showing strongly ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... a tone of voice that was a curious alternation of a high treble with a preternaturally deep bass—due to the fact that the speaker's voice was "breaking"—and accompanied by the reckless banging of a tin pannikin upon the deal table that adorned the midshipmen's berth of H.M. frigate Althea, instantly awoke me to the disagreeable consciousness that my watch below had ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... question himself more acutely as to the exact justice of this attitude; and while he was sunning himself on the veranda and listening for the hoof-beats of the big trap horse on the stable approach, he was doing it again. In those graver analytical moments he had called Margery a preternaturally clever little barbarian, setting his own immense obligation to her aside in deference to what he assumed to be the immutable realities. In the sun-warming excursion came another of those precious moments of insight; a moment in which he was given a sobering glimpse of the deathless ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... in the Neighbourhood, the Indictment being drawn up, according to the Form in such Cases usual. And pleading, Not Guilty, there were brought in several persons, who had long undergone many kinds of Miseries, which were preternaturally inflicted, and generally ascribed unto an horrible Witchcraft. There was little occasion to prove the Witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders. Now to fix the Witchcraft on the Prisoner at the Bar, the first thing used, was the ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... lady with a low bow which, despite herself, she acknowledged by a shudder. She was very pale, and her eyes were dilating and preternaturally bright. Fear began to possess her, yet she suffered herself to be ushered into the chapel, which was dimly illumined by a couple of candles standing beside a basin on a table. The altar light had been extinguished. Her maid would have hung back, but that she feared ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Mrs. Wheaton in making the room and bed a little more like what they should be by means of the articles they had brought. Clara wonderingly saw that her little closet was stocked with supplies for days to come. Her mother's preternaturally brilliant eyes followed every movement, also, with a dumb but eager questioning. Tired Belle in the meantime had drawn a chair to the table, and with her head resting on her arms had dropped ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... preternaturally active, masking every movement under his accustomed seeming of imperturbable calm. At last he brought his report to the King. "It signifies one thing which I had not suspected. Among the men whom I thought I could most implicitly trust, there is treason. How deep ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... of the windows sat a young girl of sixteen, a delicate creature of rapid growth, whose every limb and feature seemed preternaturally thin and fragile. She was occupied with some sort of sewing. At another little sewing-table, immediately opposite to her, was a red-cheeked damsel with a frightful mop of light hair and a figure which had all the possibilities of stoutness before it. She was a sort of ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... repeated he, fiercely. It was impossible to resist; and Abel and Gabriel moved slowly toward the door. The former was furious at finding himself doomed in company with Gabriel. But he betrayed nothing. He was preternaturally calm. Hope, dismayed and pale, stood looking on, but saying nothing. Gabriel went quietly out of the room. Abel turned to the door, and bowed ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... first day, and the second was very like it, so that it is not necessary to describe it in detail in order to produce an impression of profound dulness in the reader's mind. Lushington's hair continued to be as preternaturally smooth as before, his beard was as glossy and his complexion as blooming and child-like, and yet the look of pain that Margaret had seen in his face was there most of the time during ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... More than once he found himself looking out of his study window at her quiet play with the little boys in the garden. Solemn little boys they were; and sometimes he wondered whether little Jacky were not too solemn, too preternaturally quiet for four and a half, and rather too fond of holding Gertrude's hand. He remembered how the little beggar used to romp and laugh when Jinny——And remembering he would turn abruptly from the window with a sore heart and ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... was a pause. The ticking of the little Swiss clock, the joyous warble of the thrushes, the soft rustle of the trees sounding preternaturally loud. Beatrix Stuart sat white to the lips, with anger, mortification, amaze, disappointment. Then she covered her face with her hands, and burst into ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... though propelled by a spring, she stared at him and then, as slowly, sank back, still holding him with her eyes that seemed preternaturally large. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... (Fables of the Bees, ed. 1724, p. 179), 'that the real pleasures of all men in nature are worldly and sensual, if we judge from their practice; I say all men in nature, because devout Christians, who alone are to be excepted here, being regenerated and preternaturally assisted by the divine grace, cannot be said ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... feet and bundles in the endeavour to be preternaturally quiet, the crew poured into the warm kitchen. Bearded Oliver, oldest of the clan; stout Edson, big Ralph, tall and slender Guy—and the two daughters of the house, Carolyn, growing plump and rosy at thirty; Nan, slim and girlish at ...
— On Christmas Day in the Morning • Grace S. Richmond
... have been preternaturally sharpened by a long course of sensation novels will probably leap to the conclusion that Batushka was a mysterious individual, very different from what he seemed—either the illegitimate son of some great personage, or a man of high birth who ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... summer such as I would hardly know again. When I think of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and I shall hear his deliberate speech—always deliberate, save at rare intervals; always impressive, whatever the subject might be; whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... West lay back and smoked a cigar. His face was expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music. I almost doubted that he heard it. He made no remarks between whiles, betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure. He seemed preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote. And while I watched him I wondered what his duties were. I had not seen him perform any. Mr. Pike had attended to the loading of the ship. Not until she was ready for sea had Captain West ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the band, and, obedient to its scraping and blowing, two or three hundred dancers trampled across the dry ground, wearing away the grass with their booted feet. Round this patch of all but daylight, alive with motion and noise, the night seemed preternaturally dark. Bars of light reached out into it, and every now and then a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross the bright shaft, flashing for a moment into visible existence, to disappear again as quickly and ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... smoke, the room became intolerably hot, the level of the wine grew steadily lower in the decanters, and the boy's face took a strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened eyes seemed preternaturally large. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... began, in a voice which was every now and then preternaturally loud, but which, at each fourth or fifth word, gave way from want of power, and descended to its natural weak tone. "Men of ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... this time come to the ass, the boy enfolded in his arms the creature's fuzzy head and gently stroked its preternaturally long ears. And the ass, for its part, responded to the caress by rubbing its head against the boy's breast and by most energetically twitching its scrag of a tail. Thus for a little time these friends manifested for each other their affection; ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... had only been another woman she could have told him this, but a glance would have been wasted on him: so she kept her triumph to herself. She looked at the bullet-headed young juror, at the benignant old juror, at the fat-faced and dropsical juror, at the preternaturally-solemn negro juror, at the lantern-jawed foreman with the black moustache; she was on a perfectly good understanding with them, and knew what to say to each one of them. She felt that she could have afforded to be a little less brief. However, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... became preternaturally alert, so that when, rounding a corner, he perceived entering the main road from a side-street in front of him a small knot of pedestrians, he did not waver, but was seized with a keen spasm of presence of mind. Without pausing in his stride, he pointed excitedly before him, and at the same ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... endeavored to relate the story of a boy's early experiences in college life—a boy who was neither unnaturally good nor preternaturally bad, wholesome, earnest, impulsive, making just such mistakes as a normal boy would make, and yet earnest, sincere, and healthy. We all have known just such boys and are grateful that they are ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... surprised if she had vanished in it as suddenly as she had appeared. He stared and listened; listened for some sound, but the silence round him was absolute—as though he had in a moment grown completely deaf as well as dim-eyed. Then his hearing returned, preternaturally sharp. He heard the patter of a rain-shower on the window panes behind the lowered blinds, and below, far below, in the artificial abyss of the square, the deadened roll of wheels and the splashy trotting of a horse. He heard a groan also—very ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... prototype of the woods than Robert M'Corkindale, Esq., Secretary and Projector of the Glenmutchkin Railway, differed from Bob M'Corkindale, the seedy frequenter of "The Crow." In the days of yore, men eyed the surtout—napless at the velvet collar, and preternaturally white at the seams—which Bob vouchsafed to wear with looks of dim suspicion, as if some faint reminiscence, similar to that which is said to recall the memory of a former state of existence, suggested ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... for common companionship, too deep and tenacious in her moods, of a delicacy preternaturally lofty and far- reaching in its sensitiveness, was solitary, sad, thoughtful, yearning, prescient of an early death; yet, by the whole impression of her being, she gave birth, in those who lovingly looked on her, to the surmise that she ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... when the door closed upon the outgoing pair, and Pedro rose and locked it. There was something preternaturally solemn and mysterious in his manner as, placing a chair nearer to the desk for Mrs. Trent, he motioned Wolfgang to take another opposite. Then, standing between them he drew the basket toward himself, and keeping one hand upon it, thrust the other within his shirt and drew from that ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... had closed the door behind her that it struck her that when she came into the room both the princess and Frau von Treumann were looking preternaturally bland. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... is characteristic (Fig. 200). The enormous dome of the skull surmounts a puny and preternaturally old face; the eyes are pushed downwards and forwards by the pressure on the orbital plates, and the eyebrows are displaced upwards. The head rolls helplessly from side to side; the child moans and cries a great deal; and vomiting ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... of health and constitution, but always seemed to me as if their redundant masses had exhausted hers, and were almost too great a weight for her slim throat and drooping figure. Her complexion was transparently delicate, and she had dark blue eyes that looked almost preternaturally large. It seems strange to remember this ethereal vision of girlish fragile beauty as belonging to my dear cousin, who, having fortunately escaped the doom by which she then seemed threatened, lived to become a most happy and excellent wife and mother, and one of the largest ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... whether in face, figure, or dress, is exaggerated, and yet the likeness is preserved. A straight nose is presented unnaturally straight, a short nose unnaturally depressed; a prominent forehead is drawn unusually bulbous; a protuberant jaw unnaturally underhung; a fat man is depicted preternaturally fat, and a thin one correspondingly lean. This at least was the idea of caricature during the last century. Old Francis Grose, who, in 1791, wrote certain "Rules for Drawing Caricaturas," gives us the following explanation of their origin:—"The ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... him, he had been hoisted aboard the English ship, and in the waist of her he had stood for a moment face to face with an old acquaintance—our chronicler, Lord Henry Goade. I imagine the florid countenance of the Queen's Lieutenant wearing a preternaturally grave expression, his eyes forbidding as they rested upon the renegade. I know—from Lord Henry's own pen—that no word had passed between them during those brief moments before Sakr-el-Bahr was hurried away by his guards to be flung into those dark, cramped ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... conversation,—became galvanically active the moment they were punched up, and fell flat the moment the punching was remitted. I did all I could for them, but, having Daniel in tow, dared not sail too near the edge of the Doldrums, lest he should drop into sympathetic stagnation and be taken preternaturally bashful, with his sails all aback, just as I wanted to carry him gallantly into action with some clipper-built cruiser of a nice young lady. Finally, Lu bethought herself of that last plank of drowning conversationists, the photograph album. All the ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... whipped up his horses. A drive of a half mile brought them to an ideal white cottage surrounded by porches and hidden in a tangle of vines. The door was opened for them by the Rev. John Langdon in person. He seemed a preternaturally grave young man to Anna and his clerical attire was above reproach. Any misgivings one might have had regarding him on the score of his youth, were more than counterbalanced by ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... with all the assurance and cheerfulness he could command. But she instinctively detected a slight shade of anxiety or uncertainty in his tone. The physician must be a consummate actor who can deceive a patient whose perceptions are preternaturally acute as were Feodora's. He saw that he had not ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... moment. With a mighty effort, a chattering scream and a preliminary downward cast, he impels himself with the ardour of flight—almost vertically—up above the level of the tree-tops. Then, after a momentary, thrilling pause, with a gush of twittering commotion and stiffened wings preternaturally extended over the back and flattened together into a single rigid fin, drops—a feathered black bolt from the blue—almost to the ground, swoops up to a resting-place, and with bowing head and jerking tail gloats over his ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... jumps of it up the boulder, bearing a stick in his hand. Presently his face, preternaturally solemn and gnomish behind the goggles, protruded over the rim. The girl was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, contemplating the scenery as if she'd never had another interest in her life. Apparently she had ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a brilliant and complicated manoeuvre. Tom and Susan Peters flit across the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the Ewanses,—all of whom had come up in a special car; Ralph Hambleton was "best man," looking preternaturally tall in his frock-coat: and his manner, throughout the whole proceeding, was one of good-natured tolerance toward a folly none but he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... did; the issue of the combat being that the Valiant Soldier was slain by a preternaturally inadequate thrust from Eustacia, Jim, in his ardour for genuine histrionic art, coming down like a log upon the stone floor with force enough to dislocate his shoulder. Then, after more words from the Turkish ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... first at Adam Tellwright, tall, spick and span, self-confident, clever, shining, with his indubitable virtues mainly on the outside. If ever any man of thirty-two in all this world was eligible, Adam Tellwright was. Decidedly he had a reputation for preternaturally keen smartness in trade, but in trade that cannot be called a defect; on the contrary, if a man has virtues, you cannot precisely quarrel with him because they happen to be on the outside; the principal thing is to have virtues. And then ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter with such a wealth of luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas," but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... very dusky, but Helen knew perfectly the way she was going. A strange excitement possessed her, and lifted her above all personal fear. The instant she found herself in the open air, her faculties seemed to come preternaturally awake, and her judgment to grow quite cool. She congratulated herself that there had been no rain, and the ground would not betray their steps. There was enough of light in the sky to see the trees against it, and partly by their outlines she guided herself to the door in the park-paling, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... which held the record book trembled ever so slightly. In an opposite corner of the room, two little girls giggled hysterically. The ring of pupils around him, true to the child's creed of no talebearing, glanced at school books or lesson papers with preternaturally grave faces. Discipline had been so badly broken that the class was at the stage where a dropped piece of chalk or a sneeze will ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... Bemis's arm as she came out of the meeting-house the next Sunday, Ephraim's boys, preternaturally smooth of hair and shining ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... be proud of his share in the transaction, and his friends laughed loudly at the adroit turn he had given to the matter. Natt's drowsy eyes were preternaturally bright at ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... his feet, and there was a strong dash of color in his face. As for the hitherto pallid Madge, her visage was like a peony, and she was preternaturally quiet. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... from me. I have accepted my Kismet, and have made it as bright as thought and contrivance could manage. I believe, without egotism, that there are few blind men who have trained themselves to be as conscious of their surroundings as I am. But my powers have great limitations. However preternaturally sensitive a man may be to all manner of sounds, he cannot tell everything from sound alone, not even though his sense of touch besides is laboriously refined. Without the gift of sight there must always be (so I had been forced to decide) a black gaping hiatus which it seemed that no ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... seemed preternaturally attuned to that rising and waning sound without her chamber. It seemed to come toward the door, pass it, move lightly away, and then turn and repass again. It ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... had, ending as indeed it has ended, in the fulness of glory; we all feel that we have had an abundant measure of glory, though painfully earned; every body recollects the sort of electric effect produced upon this town the moment the news now under consideration arrived; the funds were raised preternaturally; one cannot indeed on looking back, account for it, how the omnium should have been up to twenty-eight at that time; there was a considerable elevation beyond that price during the course of that day; it rose to thirty ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... eye gazing on him. He jumped hastily over the threshold, and was immediately on his road home. He had not been gone more than a few minutes when he heard a sharp footstep on the crisp snow behind him. Turning round, he saw the dark tall peak of the stranger's hat, looking tenfold darker, almost preternaturally black, on the white background, as he approached. Mike felt his hair bristling through terror. His knees, usually bent somewhat inwards, now fairly smote together, so that he could not accelerate his pace, and the stranger was quickly at ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... lived among his own radiant and shadowy creations. We need not, therefore, be surprised to find that, in the first place, his daughters ran wild, and neither liked nor understood their father; and that, in the second place, for the rendering of his thought he invented a system of preternaturally majestic diction, perfectly fitted for the utterance of his own conceptions, but, when divorced from those conceptions, so monstrously artificial in effect, that his imitators and followers, hoisting themselves ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... finished dressing; consulting that witness moreover on this last opinion. WAS he looking preternaturally fit? There was something in it perhaps for Chad's wonderful eye, but he had felt himself for hours rather in pieces. Such a judgement, however, was after all but a contribution to his resolve; it testified unwittingly to his wisdom. He was still firmer, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... was no good in passing by something flung into one's very arms, so to speak. He had had no leisure to examine the bundle, and indeed took little interest in it. Probably he stole it simply from force of habit, and because there was nothing else in sight to steal, everybody's premises being preternaturally tidy and empty, almost as if his visit had been expected! Rebecca was a practical child, and it seemed to her almost impossible that so heavy a bundle should fall out of Mrs. Meserve's buggy and not be noticed; ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... after showing Angeel the various little trifles she had brought with her. The child's infirmity did not prevent her from enjoying the good things of life; indeed, as frequently occurs in such cases, her senses were almost preternaturally acute and her faculties bright and sensitive in the extreme. In place of any system of general education, impossible during those sequestered years at Hawthorne in charge of her incapable mother, she had picked up one or two desultory ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Lancelot had never dreamed of. It was admittedly too high-powered for England; you were across the county in about a minute. And then he had departed in a kind of thunderstorm of his own making. Lancelot, preternaturally moved, said to his mother, "I say, Mamma, what a man—eh?" She, lightly, "Yes, isn't he wonderful?" and Lancelot, with a snort: "A man? Ten rather small men—easily." And James, poor James, saw nothing kissable ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... moment, I either heard or fancied I heard a loud noise of pursuit, a hue and cry behind me. Zeal for your safety had made me preternaturally nervous. I looked about me hurriedly, thrust the negatives I'd recovered into my breast-pocket as fast as ever I could, flung the apparatus away from me with the sixth plate jammed hard in the groove, ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... pedlar-boys offer me razors and penknives at prices unheard of in the shops. Porters bring carpet-bags and strange-looking packages of all sizes, and, to my great inconvenience, keep lifting up the foot-board, to deposit them in the "front boot." A solemn-looking man, whose nose is preternaturally red, holds carefully a silver-mounted whip. Passengers arrive, and climb to the roof of the coach, before and behind, until we are "full outside." Then the guard comes with a list, carefully checks off all our names, and retires to the booking office, from which a minute later he ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... a start, and with wavering eyes looked at the saloon clock. I had slept for one hour only, but it appeared to me that I was quite refreshed. My mind was strangely clear, every sense preternaturally alert. I began to wonder what had aroused me. Suddenly the ship shuddered through the very heart of her, and I knew that it was this shuddering, which must have occurred before, that had ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... inspiration." Indeed, if she were not constant in love, she would not have spurned the many opportunities in the absence of Khalid; and had she not a fine discerning sense of real worth, she would not have surrendered herself to her poor ostracised cousin; and if she were not intuitively, preternaturally wise, she would not marry an enemy of the Jesuits, a bearer withal of infiltrated lungs and a shrunken windpipe. "There is a great advantage in having a sickly husband," she once said to Shakib, "it lessons a woman in the heavenly virtues ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... The child was exceedingly intelligent—precociously, nay, preternaturally so, it appeared to Mr. Cardross, who, like many another learned father, had been blessed with rather stupid boys, who liked any thing better than study, and whom he had with great labor dragged through a course of ordinary English, Latin, ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... announcement this time. Superintendent Sutherland entered first, then the constable, and Carrington last. The superintendent went straight up to the lawyer, his large face preternaturally solemn. Touching him ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... thus abruptly uttered, actually thrust her face through the door; but she again drew back, and, all her senses preternaturally quickened at that name, while she held the door almost closed, listened with her whole soul ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... one very small room, which served him for bed and sitting room, in a small cottage upon the outskirts of the little secluded town of Briarwood. He looked extremely ill; his beautiful countenance was preternaturally pale; his large eyes far too bright and large; his form attenuated; and his voice so faint, husky, and low that it was with difficulty he could make himself heard, at least for any length of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the threshold of which I was still lingering appeared, from the dim light of the windows, to be of very considerable size. I now recollected that the quantity of plate I had seen—a portion of which at this moment felt preternaturally heavy in my pockets—must have been three times greater than any the governor ever possessed, and that various pieces were of a size and massiveness I had never before seen in the establishment. In vain ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... in a few moments another tall boy entered, looking preternaturally grave, with his ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... Her face flushed scarlet, and then, paler than before. But in dread of herself, with the tremendous secret imprisoned within her, she exerted every power she had to keep in the full understanding of what was going on, of what she was asked, and of what she answered. With all her faculties preternaturally alive and sensitive, she heard the next question from the pert young barrister, who was delighted to have ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... aspect of the Roman intellect it is but justice that we should turn away to contemplate those situations in which that same intellect showed itself preternaturally strong. To face a sudden danger by a corresponding weight of sudden counsel or sudden evasion—that was a privilege essentially lodged in the Roman mind. But in every nation some minds much more than others ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the room seemed to go round; yet all her senses were preternaturally acute, so that she could distinctly smell the mud of the river at low tide. She ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bed, rushed impetuous over the sloping country, till, its force being spent, it waded tediously through the slushing reeds of the hill-land again, and so rolled down to sea. For, while I stood there, it seemed as if my vision were preternaturally sharpened, and I followed the bright river in its course, through the alternating marsh and desert,—through the land where Zeus went banqueting among the blameless Ethiopians, —through the land where the African ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... scrutiny—sighed—but said nothing. I was glad to see how thoroughly devoted she was to Stella, and the child returned her affection with interest—though as the November days came on apaces my little one looked far from strong. She paled and grew thin, her eyes looked preternaturally large and solemn, and she was very easily wearied. I called Assunta's attention to these signs of ill-health; she replied that she had spoken to the countess, but that "madam" had taken no notice of the child's weakly condition. Afterward I mentioned the matter myself to Nina, who merely ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... preternaturally warned, Fenwolf opened his eyes, and seeing the old forester standing by, sprang upon him, and seized him by ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that the smallest child would know more about books than I did; and there was hardly a nondescript face to be seen. All could be classified in historic Scottish types. But the whitewashed, thatched cottages in the suburbs would have looked Irish if they had not been too preternaturally clean. In the streets of Newton-Stewart there was not so much as a stray stick or bit of paper. It looked to me a deeply religious place, and Basil said perhaps it was trying to be worthy of St. Ninian, who first brought Christianity to Scotland. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... preternaturally solemn female, swathed in crape, bent slightly forward in her chair, without making an effort to rise, and reached forth a black-gloved hand tightly grasping a letter, which was tremulously addressed to ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... than the other, producing a deep line thence downwards to the side of his chin. Each eyebrow rose obliquely outwards and upwards, and was thus far above the little eye, shining with the clearness of a pond that has just been able to weather the heats of summer. Below this was a preternaturally fat jowl, which, by thrusting against cheeks and chin, caused the arch old mouth to be almost buried at ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... dancing only once with each, and not making even that one dance pleasant. Under cover of brotherly familiarity he teased Adelaide till she had the greatest difficulty in keeping her temper; while he was so preternaturally respectful to Leam, whom he wished he had not been forced to respect at all, that it seemed as if they had met to-night for the first time, and were not quite so cordial as sympathetic strangers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... tremendous excitement, and all its faculties, especially the imagination, were preternaturally active, vivid, and rapid-working. Such was my mental excitement and bodily irritation that for ten days and nights I slept hardly at all, nor enjoyed one moment's release from pain. That I was thoroughly in earnest in what I had undertaken will appear from the fact that all this time ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... boar-like eyes upon her as a preternaturally innocent and trusting companion of Ulysses might have regarded the transforming Circe. Rosey turned away with the faintest sigh. The habitual look of abstraction returned to her eyes as if she had once more taken refuge in her own ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... preserved in the Queste, the achievement of the task is not preceded by any failure on the part of the hero, and the advantages derived therefrom are personal and spiritual, though we are incidentally told that he heals the Fisher King's father, and also the old King, Mordrains, whose life has been preternaturally prolonged. In the case of this latter it is to be noted that the mere fact of Galahad's being the predestined winner suffices, and the healing takes place before the ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... rebuke, said she wouldn't raise Cain; and, indeed, she and Johnny were preternaturally quiet until things had been cleared away and the taffy could be started. When it was on the stove, there was at least ten minutes of whispering while they watched the black molasses shimmer into the first yellow rings. Then Johnny, in a low voice, talked for a good while ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... the coming of Aunt Jemima seemed likely to drive all happiness from the lot of the hapless child. Rigid and cruel rules were laid upon the tiny mite. Requirements were made, and enforced, which bewildered and terrified the little thing beyond degree. She was made to go to bed and get up at preternaturally early hours; and her employment during the day was mapped out in obedience to similarly senseless rules. Her playthings, which had all been swept into a drawer and placed under lock and key, were handed out by ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... and who was introduced to the two callers as Detective-Inspector Davidge looked neither preternaturally wise nor abnormally acute. What he really did remind Mr. Tertius of was a gentleman of the better-class commercial traveller persuasion—he was comfortable, solid, genial, and smartly if quietly dressed. ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... in my several meetings with the man who penned that message I leave to adjudge if it be the letter of a madman bent upon self-destruction by strange means, or the gibe of a preternaturally clever scientist and the most elusive being ever born of the ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... with grass-woven covers invited everywhere, and there was a grand piano, that played, I was sure, nothing more exciting than lullabies. Servants— Japanese maids in native costume—drifted around and about, noiselessly, like butterflies. Everything was preternaturally cool. Here was no blazing down of a tropic sun upon an unshrinking sea. It was too good to be true. But it was not real. It was a dream- dwelling. I knew, for I turned suddenly and caught the grand piano cavorting in a spacious corner of the room. I did not say anything, for just ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... girl, who had promised such great things, seemed further than at the beginning from that holiness which is not of the earth, and which delights only in the contemplation of heavenly things. She could see it now with what painful clearness! for her eyes in such matters were preternaturally sharp, like those of a sailor who has followed the sea all his life with regard to atmospheric changes; no sooner would the lesson begin than all brightness would fade from that too expressive countenance, and the girl ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... predisposed to it, by any sudden shock to mind or body. What could have caused its attack upon Miriam, they could not imagine. And Alice Murray, in fear and doubt, held her tongue and kept her own counsel. In all her illness, Miriam's reason was not for a moment clouded—it seemed preternaturally awake; but she spoke not, and it was observed that if Mr. Willcoxen, who was overwhelmed with distress by her dreadful illness, approached her bedside and touched her person, she instantly fell into spasms. In grief and dismay, Thurston's eyes asked of all around an explanation ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... both red and white, in which the flowering stem rises up preternaturally flattened, and carries on its summit a long-extended ridge of flowers, frequently of an enormous size; this monstrous production seems to arise from the coalescence of two or more flowering stems: and as it is of accidental origin, so we find that ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... the spell, feeling almost inclined to enquire "And why may it not be true?''[FN245] His brain is dazed and dazzled by the splendours which flash before it, by the sudden procession of Jinns and Jinniyahs, demons and fairies, some hideous, others preternaturally beautiful; by good wizards and evil sorcerers, whose powers are unlimited for weal and for woe; by mermen and mermaids, flying horses, talking animals, and reasoning elephants; by magic rings and their ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... first attracted his attention; and as he looked in at the window he saw the Duchess sitting at the feet of a real gipsy-queen: her head upturned—her whole being expanding—as the gipsy's hands waved over her, and the gipsy's eyes, preternaturally dilated, poured their floods of life into her own. Then the music broke up into words, and he knew what hope and promise that fainting spirit was drinking in: for he heard what the gipsy said. She was telling the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... light was in the large room, and there was something so extraordinarily characteristic of her husband in those stooping shoulders, in the head hung a little forward, and in the preternaturally solemn voice, that Sheila had to bend a little over the bed to catch a glimpse of the sallow and keener face again. She sighed; and even on her own strained ear her sigh sounded ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... determined to accept the invitation. "I am going," she said to herself, "to show Ellen that I am not too obstinate to take her advice, and I don't care how I appear." So she sat still in a corner and listened to the conversation, which was indeed preternaturally stupid. She felt perfectly at her ease and was quite unconcerned about "making conversation." If anybody asked her a question she answered simply without cudgeling her brains for any wise or witty reply. By and by something was said which did attract her notice, and ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... with a slightly trimmed beard on his dark, weather-beaten cheeks, well-cut features, a quick, observant eye, and a sailor's upward glance and bearing. The stranger saw a thin, youthful, anxious, yet refined and handsome face beneath straggling damp curls, and dark eyes preternaturally bright with suffering. Perhaps his experienced ear, too, detected some harmony with all ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the war the veteran poet published Moments of Vision. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled. With the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observing everything in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, has become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so, "knowing," with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learned to track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of a gamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, and ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... preternaturally calm all the afternoon, uttered a shriek of rage, and with a carving-knife chased that man out into the brush. Nor would he be appeased to the point of getting supper until Orde ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... was much praised, especially that of a good-looking young woman and her escort, a very tall man of cadaverous aspect, his shanks like the wooden stilts of the shepherds on the Bordeaux Landes. His face, preternaturally emaciated and fatigued, opened to emit an amazing yodel. When the Schuhplattltanz was reached he surprised the audience by an extraordinary exhibition. He threw his long legs about like billiard cues, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was more absorbed in that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when lost by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of the universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted? It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... little horses, and the marvellous brown driver, who seemed to be always going to perdition, but made the horses do apparently impossible things with absolute certainty; and the pretty tiny boy who came to help his uncle, and was so clever, and so preternaturally quiet, and so very small: then the road through the mountain passes, seven or eight feet wide, with a precipice above and below, up which the little horses scrambled; while big lizards, with green heads and chocolate bodies, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me; which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... himself on the edge of the quay, and executing a double shuffle on the very brink of it by way of showing his complete mastery over his feet, fell into the rigging and descended. He was followed by Dick and the cook, both drunk, and both preternaturally solemn. ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... her Uncle in the carriage, Mary was borne swiftly through the town out into the country. It was one of those preternaturally quiet, sultry days when the whole universe appears lifeless and inert, free from loud noise, or sound of any description, days which we occasionally have in early Spring or Summer, when ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... of his assistance, and told him he was resolved to pass through Mesopotamia, where he had left a great many brave Roman soldiers; whereupon the Armenian went his way. As Crassus was taking the army over the river at Zeugma, he encountered preternaturally violent thunder, and the lightning flashed in the faces of the troops, and during the storm a hurricane broke upon the bridge, and carried part of it away; two thunderbolts fell upon the very place where the army was going to encamp; and one of the general's horses, magnificently caparisoned, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Raoul's clever tongue. Endymion Westcote, like many pompous men, usually hurt somebody when he indulged in a joke, and for this cause, perhaps, had a nervous dislike of wit in others. Dull in taking a jest, but almost preternaturally clever in suspecting one, he had disliked Raoul's sallies in proportion as they puzzled him. The remembrance of them rankled, and this had been his ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... strength and intuition. He limped through the thicket not unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and there to peer out through the openings over the marshes that lay beyond. His sight, hearing, and even the sense of smell had become preternaturally acute. It was the latter which suddenly arrested his steps with the odor of dried fish. It had a significance beyond the mere instincts of hunger—it indicated the contiguity of some Indian encampment. And as such—it ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... terror. You can suppress alarm, excitement, fear, fright, and all those small-fry emotions, but the real terror is as dependent on the inner make of you as the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your nose; and when terror ascends its throne in my mind I become preternaturally artful, and intelligent to an extent utterly foreign to my true nature, and save, in the case of close quarters with bad big animals, a feeling of rage against some unknown person that such things as leopards, elephants, crocodiles, etc., should be allowed out ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and feeling it the more deeply because for them an idealized retrospect, and a retrospect besides being potently contrasted so deeply with the existing atmosphere, peaceful as if it had never known a storm—are stimulated preternaturally to those obstinate questionings which belong of necessity to a complex state of society, turning up vast phases of human suffering under all varieties, phases which, having issued from a chaos of agitation, carry with them too certain ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... mysterious engines broke the utter stillness. Was I growing deaf? I snapped my fingers to reassure myself, and the sound startled me like the crack of a pistol. Evidently my sense of hearing had become abnormally acute. My mind, too, was preternaturally clear, and the solitude became so irksome that I rose from my seat, and looked out of the scuttles to relieve the tension of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... loyally responded. "For how CAN, how need, a woman be 'proud' who's so preternaturally clever? Pride's only for use when wit breaks down—it's the train the cyclist takes when his tire's deflated. When that happens to YOUR tire, Mrs. Brook, you'll let me know. And you do make me wonder just now," he confessed, "why you're taking such particular precautions and throwing out such a ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... With senses preternaturally sharpened, as they generally are during one's first hours in the wilderness, Helen listened. She heard Talpers stirring about among the horses. It was evident that he was alarmed about something, as he was pulling the ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... was on the bridge thinking how dark it was and how preternaturally still; I felt all alone in the world; nothing stirred; even the French 75's had ceased their nerve-racking bark, and then, suddenly, in one instant, hell was let loose upon earth. Like a hundred peals of thunder the Turkish artillery ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... filled with seeds as large as peas. Not for a second did this castinet accompaniment to the stupendous bass of the storm cease, and Alexander, whose imagination, like every other sense in him, was quickening preternaturally, could fancy himself surrounded by the orchestra of hell, the colossal instruments of the infernal regions performed upon by infuriate Titans. He was not conscious of fear, although he knew that his life was not worth a second's purchase, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the least imaginative a picture of out-door desolation and fireside comfort that prolonged the hush of attention. Tom Barksdale's pretty wife slipped her hand covertly into his tight grasp, and their smile was of mutual congratulation that they were brightly and warmly housed and together. Rosa, preternaturally grave and quiet, lapsed into a profound study of the mountain of red-hot embers. Several young ladies shuddered audibly, as well as visibly, and were reassured by a whispered word, or the slightest conceivable movement of their gallants' chairs nearer ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... quickened. She knew that Sally, his elder sister,—her own intimate friend,—had persisted in a correspondence with her brother against her father's wishes. And that, perhaps, was in his favor. At least, he had a good mouth and honest eyes. His neck, his hands, and his legs were preternaturally thin, and she wondered if the gap between his collar and his throat told a truthful story of South African fever. If so, the change had been appalling. However, neither bullets nor fever ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... became preternaturally grave, and presented arms. The young surgeon, Dr. Monteith, who had met Ruth the night before, tramped in from ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... the custom to lure out the unwary, on the plea of an agreeable entertainment, and then to abandon him into the society of eleven club-bearing adversaries, one of whom may be depicted as in the act of imparting an unnecessary polish to the edge of his already preternaturally acute weapon, while those of his own band offer no protection, and three tiers of very richly-dressed maidens encourage him to his fate ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... hoof beats distinctly now, and he became quite sure that they were made by only a single horseman. His own senses had become preternaturally acute, and, with the conviction that he was followed by but one, came a rush of shame. Why should he, strong and armed, seek to evade a lone pursuer? He stopped, holding his rifle ready, and waited, a vague, shadowy figure, black on ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... after dinner he was slightly feverish, and his thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sonya was sitting by the table. He began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... poor wretch who, since uncountable time, had set eyes on none but the most miserable dregs of struggling humanity, who had seen little else but rags, and faces either cruel or wretched. This man was clad in a huge caped coat, which made his powerful figure seem preternaturally large. His hair was fair and slightly curly above his low, square brow; the eyes beneath their heavy lids looked down on her with ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... delighted in thwarting its purposes. But he knew what was due to it in the way of respect, and, however angry passions might rise, however turbulent the scene, he would never address it looking upon it with the naked eye. As his eye-glass was constantly tumbling out, and as search for it was preternaturally deliberate, it played an appreciable part in the prolongation of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... store for her. There must be endless misery, while there might have been joy, so ecstatic in its nature as to make it seem to her to be perennial. Then she had almost fallen, and had declared him to be preternaturally cruel. But these moments had been short, and had endured only while she had allowed herself to dream of the ecstatic joy, which she confessed to herself to be an unfit condition of life for her. And then she had told herself that Mr Whittlestaff was not ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... remain in the family sitting-room at night, as her mother followed the good, healthy rule of early to bed and early to rise, seemed thrown by fate upon Miss Thusa's miraculous resources for entertainment and instruction. Thus her imagination became preternaturally developed, while the germs of reason and judgment ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... hear L. tell a story. She is one of the very few who can undertake with impunity to talk and laugh at the same time. Look and listen, while she describes some comic occurrence. There is no unladylike, boisterous noise, but musical peals of laughter come thick and fast; and faster and thicker, preternaturally fast and thick, come the words with them. And yet each word is distinct; you do not lose a syllable. And I should like to see the man who can resist her, if she chooses he should laugh, even at ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... silent and vaguely sinister, but after a few hours it suddenly occurred to him that the air was preternaturally still. A few minutes later, when he struck a match to light his pipe, this impression was vividly confirmed. As is the habit with all woodsmen he watched the match-smoke to detect the direction of the wind. The blue strands, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... in progress, nothing is set off the fire on to the ground but that a hungry pig stands and eyes it wistfully, but sundry burnings of their sensitive snouts during the days of their youthful inexperience have made them preternaturally cautious, so that they are not very meddlesome. The sleeping room is really a part of the pig-sty, nothing but an open railing separating pigs and people. A cobble-stone path now leads through a hilly country, divided up into little rice-fields, peanut ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... the door opened quietly and the Mother Superior stood on the threshold, looking preternaturally white, even for her. Sister Giovanna rose at once and went to meet her. They exchanged a few words in a scarcely audible whisper. The Mother had come in person to take the nun's place for a while, judging that it would ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... adventures. The man's dreary expectation of incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In The Manuscript Found in a Bottle, too, we may trace the first suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and memorable expression in Ligeia (1837). The antique ship, with its preternaturally aged crew "doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss," is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph Glanvill's declaration so strikingly illustrated in the return of Ligeia: "Man doth not yield ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... gradually blurring his long clean lines; silvering his muzzle and eyebrows; flecking his burnished mahogany coat with stipples of silver; spreading to greater size the absurdly small white forepaws which were his one gross vanity; dulling a little the preternaturally keen hearing and narrowing ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... Lane, and who is supposed, from the omission of his name in the register of St Dunstan's parish, to have been a Dissenter. His mother was left poor, but had a strong desire for her son's education, and influence to get him admitted as a king's scholar into Westminster. His mind was almost preternaturally precocious, and received early a strong and peculiar stimulus. A copy of Spenser lay in the window of his mother's apartment, and in it he delighted to read, and became the devoted slave of poetry ever ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Tithes Bill. Not particularly lively. Towards midnight TANNER, preternaturally quiet since House met, suddenly woke up, and, a propos de bottes, moved to report progress. COURTNEY down on him like cartload of bricks; declined to put Motion, declaring it abuse of forms of House. This rather depressing. In good old times there would have been an outburst of indignation ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... an Indian can be taken off the guard. Years of danger have made the senses of the savages preternaturally acute, and they are as distant as the timid antelope of the plains. But, for all that, there was a boy within a dozen yards of a swarthy warrior whose senses were on the alert, and yet had failed to ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... for frogs in the gutter, totally oblivious of that infantile charge, whether sleeping or waking. If no young sister or brother be available, the husband, the uncle, the father, or grandfather hitches on his back the baby, preternaturally good and contented." ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... as though he thought me a mind-reader, but I fancy the knack of divining when people need a confidant is preternaturally developed ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... almost wailed the colonel, as at last that young gentleman, likewise singed and scorched and soaked and dripping, yet preternaturally cool for one just out of a blazing hell, found his feet and faced his commander—"in God's name, why didn't you jump when they told you? There was ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... agreed to omit prayer. Neither Felix, Peter nor I felt equal to praying in public. But we took up a collection. The proceeds were to go to missions. Dan passed the plate—Felicity's rosebud plate— looking as preternaturally solemn as Elder Frewen himself. Every one ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... from the stinging freshness of the night to the stale overheated atmosphere of the Haslemere Hotel had checked the preternaturally rapid working of his mind, and he was now scarcely conscious of thinking at all. His head was heavy, and he would have thrown himself on the bed had he not feared to oversleep the hour fixed for his departure. He thought it safest, instead, ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... who had been a friend of Sir Charles Abingdon, shook his head slowly. He was a tall, preternaturally thin Scotsman, clean-shaven, with shaggy dark brows and a most gloomy expression in his deep-set eyes. While the presence of his sepulchral figure seemed appropriate enough in that stricken house, Harley could not help thinking that it must have ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... chokes, then coughs solemnly, and finally, lowering the fan, shows himself preternaturally grave, as a set-off ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... after the departure of the happy pair, was being revived and led away, they left occasion for thought. Carolyn Thorpe cast a startled glance. The aunt from Iowa, who knew that Bertrams did not grow on every bush, and whose senses the function had preternaturally sharpened for any address from Romance, seized and shook her sister's arm; and, later on, in a Louis Quinze causeuse, up stairs, they agreed that if young Cope really had had another claimant on his attention, it was all the better that their Amy had ended by taking ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... distance, 'do not trouble to give so marvellous an exhibition for the benefit of this unworthy individual, who is the only observer of your illustrious dexterity! Indeed, your honourable condescension so fills this illiterate person with shame that his hearing is thereby preternaturally sharpened, and he can plainly distinguish many voices from beyond the Hoang Ho, crying for the Heaven-sent representative of the degraded Ti Hung to bring them more idols. Bend, therefore, your refined footsteps in the direction of Poo Chow, O Li ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... eyes; but she never had adapted herself to the modern ideas of the corsage. She could not fit a bias to save her life; she could only stitch up a straight slant, and leave the rest to nature and fate. So all her people had the squarest of wooden fronts, and were preternaturally large around the waist. Delia sewed with her, abroad and at home,—abroad without her, also, as she was doing now for us. A pattern for a sleeve, or a cape, or a panier,—or a receipt for a tea-biscuit or a johnny-cake, was something ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... dropped; her eyes, which had till now been preternaturally bright, filmed over; her head fell back upon the pillow; and the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to reach Fairhaven I was compelled to spend some three hours of an April afternoon in Lichfield, where upon Regis Avenue was to be met, in the afternoon, everyone worth meeting in Lichfield; and Stella drove there on fine afternoons, under the protection of a trim and preternaturally grave tiger; and the afternoon ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... that was my only reason for entering upon a transaction which was now outside my interest, but which (as it chanced) repaid me fifty-fold in entertainment. Fowler and Sharpe were both preternaturally sharp; they did me the honour in the beginning to attribute to myself their proper vices; and before we were done had grown to regard me with an esteem akin to worship. This proud position I attained by no more recondite arts, than telling the mere ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... never quite himself until he throws his leg over the horse he loves. He is facile princeps the light rider of the regiment, and to this claim there are none to say him nay. A tip-top soldier too is Ray. Keen on the scout, tireless on the trail, daring to a fault in action, and either preternaturally cool or enthusiastically excited when under fire. He is a man the rank and file swear by and love. "You never hear Loot'nant Ray saying 'Go in there, fellers.' 'Tis always, 'Come on, boys.' That's why I like him," is the way Sergeant Moriarty puts it. Among his comrades, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... he was very much awake. In fact, his sense of wakefulness seemed almost superhuman. His faculties were preternaturally alert, and he had a feeling of what might properly be called mental extension—it was not exaltation—- which seemed to widen his mental vision enormously. Problems which had puzzled him to desperation suddenly became as obvious as the first axioms of geometry. In short, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... the moment that he had opened the trap, had been swift and as nearly noiseless as the difficulties of the task had permitted. Nevertheless, they had not been so silent as to escape the attention of the preternaturally acute Sin Sin Wa. Kerry found the place occupied only by the aged Sam Tuk. A bright fire burned in the stove, and a ship's lantern stood upon the counter. Dense chemical fumes rendered the air difficult to breathe; but the shelves, once laden ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer |
