"Small hours" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terrible portent for humanity was that shape, a beginning that must surely spread and widen and change and dominate all the affairs of men, but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything but a narrow and personal light. Several people heard him pacing in the small hours—for the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor editor who, before all understood compression. And about five o'clock, if not before, Filmer left his room and wandered out of the sleeping house into the park, alive by that time with sunlight and birds and squirrels and the fallow deer. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... latter's complaints of pain and forecasts of what he would do when he got up, the laugh had not been completely against him. He had received the honourable distinction of extra lesson for ragging in French. He had been "touched up" by the prefect of his dormitory for creating a disturbance in the small hours. In fact, he had gone through all the usual preliminaries, ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... who had been captured at sea and unwarrantably, as they contended, reduced to slavery. The rebels to the number of twenty-three provided themselves with guns, hatchets, knives and swords, and chose the dark of the moon in the small hours of an April night to set a house afire and slaughter the citizens as they flocked thither. But their gunfire caused the governor to send soldiers from the Battery with such speed that only nine whites had been ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... with quotations from these his favorite authors. A pertinacious arguer, so much so that sometimes he watched my awakening in order to continue a discussion on some topic of science, poetry, or practical life, cut short by the chime of the small hours, he never lost his mild and amiable temper. Our faithful companion was Count Alexander Keyserling, a native of Courland, who has since achieved distinction as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... not much liked. He had been at the head of the police so long that he could not shake off the habits he had acquired in that position: He had been accustomed to give audiences upon all sorts of police matters at dead of night, or at the small hours of the morning, and he appeared to see no reason why he should not do the same now that he was Keeper of the Seals. He irritated people beyond all bearing, by making appointments with them at these unreasonable ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... got over the parting with his mother. The emigrants' train started in the small hours, and the emigrants were to rendezvous at a common lodging-house close by the big terminus. We inquired about poor Mrs. Sheeny with feeling. Mick responded with a return of tears that he'd left her screeching for bare life and tearing her hair out in handfuls. The memory caused Mick such remorse ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... displayed a most extraordinary partiality for sitting up till three or four o'clock in the morning, drinking whiskey-and-water, and smoking cigars; then he invited friends home, who used to come at ten o'clock, and begin to get happy about the small hours, when they evinced their perfect contentment by singing songs with half-a-dozen verses of two lines each, and a chorus of ten, which chorus used to be shouted forth by the whole strength of the company, in the most enthusiastic and vociferous ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... into the small hours of the morning when Brencherly sought his own rooms in an inconspicuous apartment hotel, where he, his activities and, at times, strange companions, were not only tolerated, but welcomed. He was weary, but too excited and elated to desire sleep. He nodded to the friendly ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... already engaged sleeping peacefully before our tent was closed, it seemed likely that a couple of sleeping men would be as useful as four. I fear they had a troubled night, for though the "Sons of Lions" did not trouble us, a short, sharp shower came with the small hours and woke the poor fellows, who asked for extra money in the morning by way of consolation for their broken rest. By five o'clock we were astir, and soon after we were on the road again, bound for the village of Hanchen, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... wildly enthusiastic as any Englishman, cheering and waving his arm from the open windows in hearty accord with the crowd below. There was no sleep for anyone in London that night. Around our hotel, the blowing of horns and cheering lasted till the small hours of the morning. It seemed very much like the excitement in America after the capture of ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... Mrs. Selfridge danced well into the small hours. The California champagne that Wally had brought in stimulated a gayety that was balm to his wife's soul. She wanted her dinner-dance to be smart, to have the atmosphere she had found in the New York cabarets. If everybody talked at once, she felt they were having a good ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... however, though the following afternoon we saw a steamer with two smoke stacks come down the river and take a look, perhaps to see as to her chances of getting out that night. The twilight darkened into night, and night wore on into the small hours, and now we gazed into the gloom anxiously, for at this time, if any, she would seek to run out. With straining eyes and the most intense quiet, we listen for the sound of paddle wheels. A stranger passing along our decks, seeing in ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... cold and wet through in the evening; we sat up talking till the small hours; we got cold and wet again this ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... early after banking up leaves over the fires under the biltong strips, to give them a good smoking during the night, but in the small hours, when the night is at its quietest, the moonlight, shining on Venning's face, woke him. The fires were glowing bright, altogether too bright for safety, and he rose to cover the glare with some green leaves. He looked at ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... and deer in the immediate vicinity, and having the promise of a well trained pack, Arthur Young and I gathered our archery tackle and started from San Francisco at night in an automobile. We traveled until the small hours of the morning, then lay down on the side of the road to take a short sleep; and rising at the first gray of dawn, ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... and brought for my share a few bottles of Johannisberg, that had been sent me by my uncle from the last vintage. Over these we got more than usually merry, and sang all the songs and choruses of Mother Heidelberg, till the small hours arrived. The sitting room we were in, communicated on one side with the bedroom;—on the other, with a little closet, containing nothing ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... be home to-night till the small hours have struck. Miss Atherton will take care of that. There is no fear of her ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... great clanking of horse-trucks and gun-carriages. Vast stores of timber for huts. Bookstalls open all night. These trains seem to hoot and whistle most horribly. Far more noisy than English trains, surely. That, combined with all the shouting and clatter of trollies, etc., rather racking in the small hours. At 5 a.m. we arrive at ——, ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... gaps; and there were plenty of them towards the morning; but, luckily, people don't notice those things when the small hours draw on.' ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... within hard, unyielding walls of double thirds, it lost all its spirit, all its evanescent hues. It is a butterfly caged. And do you call that music, that topsy-turvying of the Weber Rondo? Why, it sounds like a clock that strikes thirteen in the small hours of the night! And you, sir, with your thunderous and grandiloquent Liszt Ballade, do you call that pianoforte music, that constant striving for an aping of orchestral effects? Out upon it! It is hollow music—music without a soul. It is easier, much easier, to play than a Mozart sonata, despite ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... by preference for a big fight. Last night—about 8—the Turks appear to have made a feint attack on the French, this going on for hours, the rifle fire very heavy. Then in the small hours of this morning they had concentrated on our left—the other end of the line—where they were in great force. My informants are three wounded from the Essex Regiment who have walked in to hospital. They ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... attention again to the body. Like a flash there had come to me the vision of the woman with the bronze hair and the tragic face, whom I had surprised in the vestibule between the cars, somewhere in the small hours of the morning. I had acted on my first impulse—the masculine one of shielding ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... some time in the small hours that he entered his house burglariously by forcing open the window of a room that had once ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... companies and regiments, accommodating himself to the wilful democracy of our institutions which insists upon seeing the man in chief command and will not take its answer from a subordinate, until in the small hours of the night the noises were hushed, and after a brief hour of effective, undisturbed work upon the matters of chief importance, he could leave the glare of his gas-lighted office, and seek a few hours' rest, only to renew the same ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... their clients during the noon luncheon hour; politicians came thither to confer one another and to devise those schemes by which parties were to be humbugged. It was here that the painter and the actor discussed their respective arts; here, too, in the small hours of morning, the newspaper editor and reporters gathered together to dismiss professional cares and jealousies for the nonce, and to feed in the most amicable spirit from the same trough. Jobs were put ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... is the equivalent of Maxim's of Paris. The great place for luxurious entertainments, it opens its doors at twilight, and does not close them till the small hours are well advanced. When evening falls, the scene grows animated: business men and women of pleasure crowd the rooms. Gradually the crowd assumes a cosmopolitan character. A band of Hungarian gipsies plays inspiriting and seductive music. The ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... doings at the club and begged her, for about the hundredth time, never to sit up for him again. Yet, though Papa's winnings or losings (upon which his substance practically depended) in no way interested her, she was always the first to meet him when he returned home in the small hours of the morning. This she was incited to do, not only by the strength of her devotion, but by a certain secret jealousy from which she suffered. No one in the world could persuade her that it was ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... handsome, I need not say; she soon was possessed of every charm that desire can lend to a woman in whatever rank of life. A fortnight after the notary's visit, one evening, or rather one morning, in the small hours, I ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... years—watched his rise through all the stages of journalism to the Olympian pinnacle of the Investigator's editorial office. In the thick-set man with grizzling hair there were few traces left of the hungry-eyed young reporter who, on his way home in the small hours, used to "bob in" on Granice, while the latter sat grinding at his plays. Denver had to pass Granice's flat on the way to his own, and it became a habit, if he saw a light in the window, and Granice's ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... and then followed songs and parlour games, and it was in the small hours when the merry goodnights were all said and we had retired to rest. Aunt Helen dropped to sleep in a short time; but I lay awake listening to the soft distant call of the mopokes in ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... and I'll help you rip and cut out from the skirt," I said, and began to undo my belt. I knew better than to let that family pride get to simmering in Roxanne in the wee small hours of the night. "A trade is a trade, as soon as it is ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... described as being "a short way from here." It would have taken eight or nine hours—a day's journey. Mr. Pickwick left Eatanswill about one or two, for the lunch was going on, and got to Bury in time for dinner, which, had he left Yarmouth, would have taken him to the small hours ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... spatter them all over the course with one old ball and a cut-down cleek stolen from his father; or some spavined elder who not only rubbed it into them, but was apt, between strokes, to bore them with personal reminiscences of the Crimean War. So they began to play together early and late. In the small hours before breakfast, long ere the first faint piping of the waking caddie made itself heard from the caddie-shed, they were half-way through their opening round. And at close of day, when bats wheeled against the steely sky and the "pro's" had stolen home to rest, you might see them in ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... got there I helped him out, one hand under his chin, the other back of his ears. I done it as much from regard of the neighbours as animosities to him, for it was the still, medium small hours. I tiptoed in with my treatise on the infamies of photography gurgling under my hand, but at the door I stopped. It was ajar; and there, under the light, I spied Morrow. In his arms I got glimpses of black lace and wavy, brown hair, and a white cheek that he was ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great ones of the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation and Cat, for instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into the small hours "quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where Carlyle and Emerson counted the afternoon well spent, though neither one had said a hundred words—had they not smoked together? Or Piscator and Viator, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Ronleigh commenced with a sort of half-hour's preliminary practice in the various classrooms; the school then assembled for prayers, after which came breakfast. During the progress of this meal on the Friday morning, in the small hours of which had been enacted the scene described at the end of the previous chapter, it became evident that "something was up." The table, at which sat most of the boys of the Third Form, was in a state of ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... Springfield to see that it got safely over to the House. The two women wished the bill to go into the friendly Elections Committee and the opponents were planning to put it into the Judiciary Committee, where it would remain during the rest of the session. The suffrage lobby worked into the small hours of the night making plans to frustrate this scheme. Arrangements were made with Speaker McKinley to turn it over to the Elections Committee, and when the morning session opened this was done before the opponents realized that ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... fast asleep when some warm fur softly caressed me, and waking up I understood that the dissolute rodent—almost bigger than a cat—had returned home in the small hours, just as if he had been provided ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... which he took right good care to defeat in his own person; for in less than five hours after we retired, which was about the first of the small hours, he rushed into my room, and finding that the awful noises which he made, had no effect in waking me, dragged me bodily out of bed, and clapping my wet sponge in my face, walked off, as he said, to fetch the bitters, which ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... added fuel to the fire. For a time the wind increased in velocity until a stiff gale was blowing, then, as the small hours came on, it waned, and the beacon flared straight up ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... inoffensive old party,' 'a cheery soul,' 'a genial old boy,' and in like terms of approval. That half of society which did not visit in Arlington Street, in whose nostrils the semi-aristocratic, semi-artistic, altogether Bohemian little dinners, the suppers after the play, the small hours devoted to Nap or Poker, had an odour as of sulphur, the reek of Tophet—even this half of the great world was fain to admit that Sir George was harmless. He had never had an idea beyond the realms of sport; he had never had a will of his own outside his stable. To shoot pigeons at Hurlington ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... other house," cried Eugenia, "they are terrible people! I don't know what they may do over there. I am a quiet little humdrum woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them. One of them is not to have visitors in the small hours—especially clever men like you. ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour. Mr Pickering's rare interviews with his subconscious self had happened until now almost entirely in the small hours of the night, when it had popped out to remind him, as he lay sleepless, that all flesh was grass and that he was not getting any younger. To-night, such had been the shock of the evening's events, it came to him at a time which was usually ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... complete character sketch of my Aunt Agatha. I could go on indefinitely about brutality and lack of consideration. I merely say that she routed me out of bed to listen to her painful story somewhere in the small hours. It can't have been half past eleven when Jeeves, my man, woke me out of the dreamless and broke ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the day of, or, rather, to be accurate, on the day after my arrival, toward the small hours of the morning, in the smoking room at Rathdrum. Our host was peacefully snoring over his empty pipe and his seventh glass of whisky, also empty. The rest of the men had slunk off to bed. The baron, who all unknown to himself had been a subject of most interesting observation to me the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He returned and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination notes. He went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells. Red reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay astonished, wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad. Then he jumped ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... noble Duke!" exclaimed Lethal, with a sneer,—"impossible, under the roof of our friend, the Honorable Walter Denslow, in the small hours of the night, and in the presence of the finest women in the world. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... the insensible relief afforded to both father and daughter by his companionship, his unselfish devotion and helpfulness, his unfailing readiness to be a companion to Sir William, to come and play chess with him, or to sit up and do intricate patiences through the small hours of the morning, all this gradually made him insensibly slide into the position of a son of the house. And Rachel, convinced that she was doing the best thing for her father and admitting in her secret heart that for herself she was doing the thing ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... the same room at night, and talked in low tones far on into the small hours. Edward, who had suffered many hardships and privations since leaving the French court, was glad enough of a few days' rest in the hospitable farmhouse, and of the opportunity of hearing all the village gossip which the wedding festivity would give ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... small hours of the night Thyrsis lay awake in his little room, and the soul within him was sick with horror. He was trapped—there was no use trying to dodge the fact, he was trapped! His powers were waning hour by hour, his vision was dying within him; every day he knew that he was weaker, that the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... rectory on the morning following Dick's sensational return was a very solemn meal, for the blight of fear had fallen upon the whole household. No one slept. The father and mother had remained with Dick until the small hours of the morning, and, when they finally bade each other good-night, both were conscious that the old days of sweet comradeship were ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... theatre doors were open to the public, with their faces made up all ready to go on the stage; also, they were apparently so reluctant to leave the scene of their labours that they would commonly not return till the small hours. The top front room was rented by an author, who made a precarious living by writing improving stories for weekly and monthly journals and magazines. Whenever the postman's knock was heard at the door, it was invariably followed by the appearance ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... as I sat there in the small hours alone—I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize. My uncle breathed heavily, his deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside, ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... an unpleasant experience the night before. Generally she and Loveday slept together, but on this occasion they had been given separate rooms. Diana, who had a tiresome trick of waking, furiously hungry, in the small hours of the morning, put a couple of biscuits under her pillow before she got into bed, so as to be prepared for any emergencies of appetite. She woke suddenly in the night, with the horrible sensation that a hand was groping under her pillow. She switched on the electric light ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... here in England reading of raids on the North-West Frontier in India realise the full horror of these outrages. What generally happens is that in the small hours of the morning, a wretched village is suddenly assailed by a gang of perhaps 50, perhaps 200, well-armed raiders, who put out sentries, picket the approaches, and conduct the operation on the most skilful lines. The houses ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... small hours of November 28 the wind rose to a velocity of sixty miles per hour, but gradually diminished to a twenty-knot breeze as the day advanced. Light snow fell from a sky which was ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... was to end with a trumpery match on the Saturday, which two or three of us intended abandoning early in order to return to town that night. The match, however, was never played. In the small hours of the Saturday morning a tragedy ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... the old trousers in which I had been working, hung them in a closet, and started home; and it was not until the cold wind struck my bare knees that I realized I was on the street in my shirt. Often, when I was given a brief to work up for Mr. Thompson, I would slave over it until the small hours of the morning and then, to his disgust—and my unspeakable mortification—find that my work was valueless, that I had not seized the fundamental points of the case, or that I had built all my arguments on ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... his pipe, and gossip was prolonged till something after one o'clock. Malkin was never known to retire willingly from an evening's congenial talk until the small hours were ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of elegant gossip, tell of strange and interesting events, the secrets of families, brave deeds of war, the miraculous discovery of crime, the visitations of the dead. Nance and her uncle would sit till the small hours with eyes wide open: Jonathan applauding the unexpected incidents with many a slap of his big hand; Nance, perhaps, more pleased with the narrator's eloquence and wise reflections; and then, again, days would follow of abstraction, of listless humming, of frequent apologies and long hours of ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... watch, in the small hours, a Tommy with a water-cart strayed into our lines, asking for the Boer prisoners, for whom he had been sent to get water. He swore copiously at the nature of his job in particular, and at war in general. I showed him the way, and ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... appeared to be as his father had left them, though he could easily pull them out. At ten o'clock he retired as usual, but the hour of meeting was one o'clock, for the young rascals had come to the conclusion that their purpose could be better executed in the small hours of the morning, when the farmer and his ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... it for an hour or two before breakfast, lifted out of bed by the bounding of his heart. But whereas he had been in the habit of leaving it at any time between nine o'clock and midnight, he now sat up with it till the small hours of the morning. This extreme devotion was necessary if he was to finish it by the twenty-seventh. It ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the rest had proved of such benefit to the troops that the subsequent acceleration of progress fully compensated for the delay. The column moved on again at midnight and halted at daybreak at Salmi. In the small hours of the next morning the march was resumed. The road by the Nile was found too difficult for the Maxim guns, which were on wheels, and these had to make a detour of twenty-eight miles into the desert while the infantry moved ten miles along the river. In order that the Maxims should ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... to leave us yet, captain, are you? We have not reached the small hours of the night," said a second. "Another stoup of liquor, man; we are on firm ground, and no king's cruisers are in chase of us; you need not fear if it sends you to sleep, or makes you see double for ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... dining-room, and did not join his sister at luncheon at all. In the afternoon he walked out, or wrote, or saw friends; dined at six, and went down to the office of his paper at eight. From the office he did not usually return until the small hours of the morning; and then, as Miss Brooke explained, he often sat up writing or reading for an ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... on amid clouds of fragrant tobacco smoke and with potations, not excessive but comfortably frequent, was quiet and unflagging, possessing, for the most part, that mellow quality which is seldom attained before the small hours and ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... till night, and once or twice his assistant John, hammering outside for admittance in the winter dark, wakened the master of the shop from the rickety chair where he had fallen asleep over his books in the small hours of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The small hours of the morning still found them there. When at last they parted, she said in that arch, captivating way, which none better than ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... Terry was gloriously drunk, and utterly reckless, and after the meeting was over quite a bunch of us became as drunk as he, though not quite so gloriously. He was quite helpless toward the small hours, when our party broke up, and I took Terry home with me, as Katie was not there, and on the way I had the pleasure of acting as a referee when he and a stranger, who Terry fancied had insulted him, did really have a fist-fight; I gathered up their hats and neck-ties and kept out ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... "I expected that you would ask that. I did not tell him personally, nor would I in any circumstances have done so. But the fact that I arrived in great haste in the small hours of the morning had a peculiar meaning to the commando, and it was not necessary for me to open my mouth. I daresay to-night there will be one hundred Africander girls in the saddle in different parts of the Colony. When the urgency is great, a girl is more reliable ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... clouds coming up with sundown and overspreading all; not a star showed; there was only an end of a moon, and that not due before the small hours. Round the village, what with the lights and the fires in the open houses, and the torches of many fishers moving on the reef, it kept as gay as an illumination; but the sea and the mountains and woods were all clean gone. I suppose it might be eight o’clock when I took the road, laden ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the success in mounting the guns had given Jim's people such a feeling of confidence that he ventured to leave the battery under charge of two elderly Bugis who had seen some fighting in their day, and went to join Dain Waris and the storming party who were concealed in the ravine. In the small hours they began creeping up, and when two-thirds of the way up, lay in the wet grass waiting for the appearance of the sun, which was the agreed signal. He told me with what impatient anguishing emotion he watched the swift coming of the dawn; how, heated with ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... their throats. There, too, among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above, was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small hours, by a nightly ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... post. The light keeper hearing the victorious barking of the dog, came out with a gun and Paul could not explain his presence there any too quickly. The keeper called off the dog, gave the Captain a supply of matches, who lighted up his bull's eye and was soon forging ahead again. During the small hours of the night, he passed the steamers Osceola, James Howard and Andy Baum, all of which spoke him and inquired if he was in need of anything. At daybreak, the Osceola Belle stopped and gave him some hot coffee and the City of ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... his way to London in the small hours of the day following his scene with Rachel, intending to keep his promise, and let his former wife alone. The cashing of Rachel's cheque had given him and Anita some agreeable moments; though Anita ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... repair, and yields an excellent supply of water, greatly to the convenience of the neighbourhood. Both the pump and the prayers are the legacy of an old fish-woman of the last century. It is said, that for forty years of her life she was in the habit of purchasing fish in the small hours of the morning at Billingsgate Market; these she washed and prepared for her customers at a small spring near St Antholin's Church, and afterwards cried them about the town upon her head. Having prospered ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... feasting more on Helen's face than on the viands spread before him. It was hard for him to leave her, hard for her to let him go, but the duty was imperative, and so when at last the frosty air grew keener as the small hours of night crept on, he stood with his arms about her, nor thought it unworthy of a soldier that his own tears mingled with hers as he bade her good-by, kissing her again and again, and calling her his precious wife, whose memory would make his camp-life ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... at the moment when a most delicate balance between good and evil, life and death, safety and danger, might be overthrown on the side of terrible calamity. I was thankful when he once more showed himself tractable by climbing on the driver's seat and turning our course homeward. It was the small hours of morning that found me under the lamp in my study, giving the distracted young man a narcotic. When his head was nodding, he struggled once to ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... a visit (he described it to me himself). They talked of books, they talked of politics, they talked of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, of Brougham, Horner, Wilson, Macaulay, Jeffrey, of Carlyle's dealings with Napier's father - 'Nosey,' as Carlyle calls him. They chatted into the small hours of the night, as boon companions, and as what Bacon calls 'full' men, are wont. The claret, once so famous in the 'land of cakes,' had given place to toddy; its flow was in due measure to the flow of soul. But all that ends is short - the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... blurred and smirched with vice the day's sad pages end, For while the short 'large hours' toward the longer 'small hours' trend, With smiles that mock the wearer, and with words that half entreat, Delilah pleads for custom at the corner of the street — Sinking down, sinking down, Battered wreck by tempests beat — A dreadful, thankless trade is hers, that Woman ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... man whose business it was to break into homes when the small hours of the morning found their inmates wrapped in slumber, "some time ago I had a most remarkable experience, and as you have shown yourself such a good fellow, I will tell you about it, if you do not think it too ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... my glorious youth except the violence of our family quarrels. Reckless waves of high and low spirits, added to quick tempers, obliged my mother to separate us for some time and forbid us to sleep in the same bedroom. We raged and ragged till the small hours of the morning, which kept us thin and ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... former occupants. I expected nothing less. The fire flickered and the shadows danced, memories of strange historic things rose vividly in my mind; but midnight chimed solemnly from a seven-foot clock, and nothing happened. My imagination would not be hurried, and the chill that is with the small hours had come upon me, and I had nearly abandoned myself to sleep, when in the hall adjoining there arose the rustling of silk dresses that I had waited for and expected. Then there entered two by two the high-born ladies ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... that there were rejoicing and thankful hearts in Candlemaker Row that night? We think not. If any of the wraiths of the Covenanters were hanging about the old churchyard, and had peeped in at the well-known back window about the small hours of the morning, they would have seen our hero, clasping his mother with his right arm and Jean with his left. He was encircled by an eager group—composed of Mrs. Black and Andrew, Jock Bruce, Ramblin' ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... been kept up to a late hour, I left Hirsede in the small hours of the morning, and came up to Jung Bahadoor's ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... not at headquarters, but we finally found him at his home, and it was well into the small hours when we arrived there. Trusting to the first deputy's honour, which had stood many a test, Craig began to unfold the story. He had scarcely got as far as describing the work of the suspected hired yeggman, when O'Connor raised both hands and brought ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... you are making a search, I entreat you to take care of the papers on the table in my bedroom. They are notes that have cost me a great deal of labour in the small hours ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... others, Bobby was bored to death; the habits of twenty years were not to be thrown off in a day. It was impossible for him to go to bed before the small hours, and not knowing how else to kill time he dropped in at the Savoy restaurant. It was late when he got there, and he strolled through the foyer, stopping at various tables to talk to acquaintances. He had no intention of taking supper, but just ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... wondered what everything meant. Did any of them feel—did any of them love passionately as she did?—or were they all dolls more or less bored and getting through life? And would she, too, grow like them in time, and be able to play bridge with interest until the small hours? ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... of the day with John Splendid and one Tearlach Fraser, on old comrade, and as luck, good or ill, would have it, the small hours of morning were on me before I thought of going home. By dusk the bulk of the strangers left the town by the highroads, among them the MacNicolls, who had only by the cunning of several friends (Splendid as busy as any) been kept from coming to blows with the MacLachlan tail. Earlier in the ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... drawing-room. Sorell had gone in after dinner to consult with Ewen Hooper, one of his fellow examiners, over some doubtful papers, and their business done, the two men allowed themselves an interval of talk and music with the ladies before beginning work again till the small hours. ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... many others, stood listening, however, with an awestruck expression on his face. He carried a somewhat formidable armament—at least two large Colt revolvers strapped on to his thin body, and possibly a third stowed away in his hip pocket. From midnight to the small hours there was a constant stream of our most distinguished personages coming and looking down this street and wondering what would happen next. It was not a ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... you trouble. But that you're used to. What we want to know—what we must know—is this: The name of the man who has incurred Madame's enmity to such a degree that she spends the small hours of the night in knocking out his features from a fifteen-year-old photograph. If it should prove to be that of a public man, rich or otherwise, we might consistently lay it to social hatred; but if, on the contrary, it turns out ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... then you must strike straight across country for here. You can look up your routes on the map. There will be less risk of attracting attention if you come and go by different ways. You ought to be here again some time in the small hours. I'll let you in, and you'll have cleared your own score with Rupert Dunsmore and earned more money than you ever have had in all your life before. Now, can ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... was the favourite rendezvous after the play. Here till the small hours assembled nightly the elite of European Tiflis. Russian and Georgian officers in gorgeous uniforms of dark green, gold lace, and astrachan; French and German merchants with their wives and daughters; with a sprinkling ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... of the glamour which had mastered him when in the presence of Madame de Medici, but failed. Yet he knew that, once near her again, it would all return. His reflections were bitter, and when at last wearily he undressed and went to bed it was to toss restlessly far into the small hours ere sleep came to soothe ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... a boy like thee), old lander Jordan's gang, and I among them, were in this very cave on such another night. I was new to the trade then, as thou might be, and could not sleep for noise of wind and sea. And in the small hours of an autumn morning, as I lay here, just where we lie now, I heard such wailing cries above the storm, ay, and such shrieks of women, as made my blood run cold and have not yet forgot them. And so I woke the gang who were all deep asleep as seasoned contrabandiers should be; but though ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... students, but in their application to poets and novelists they have far greater significance. It may be said that journalists (whose writings, it is whispered, have a close connection with fiction) always write in the 'small hours,' but their mode of life is more or less shaped to meet their exceptional requirements; whereas we storytellers live like other people (only more purely), and if we consume the midnight oil, use perforce another system of illumination also—we burn the candle at both ends. A great novelist who ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... miserable pretences and deceits; tonight, at least, she would try and sleep. Her hand was on the switch to turn out the lights when there came a knocking at the door. It was such a strange, peremptory knocking—such a careless outraging of the small hours, that for a moment she stood rooted with astonishment and apprehension, staring at herself in the mirror that composed the back of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... redolent with perfumes, as yet beardless or with the first down upon their chins, wearing scarves and veils and sleeved tunics reaching to their ankles, industrious but only with the dice-box, night-watchers but in the supper- rooms, in the small hours before dawn, immodest, dissolute boys, whose education had been in learning to love and to be loved, to sing and to dance naked at the midnight orgies, and along with it to handle poniards ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... With the small hours of the night came a cold so intense that he was driven to sleep in the cabin where reigned the small iron stove that brewed the skipper's odorous pot. After he had slept a good way into the next day, he came up again ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... did not come. He could not make friends with her, and at last, in despair of finding a better opportunity, he had slipped into her room one night in the small hours to steal the chain. But it was wound round her neck in such a way that he could not slip it over her head. She had awakened while he was fumbling with the clasp and had begun to cry. Hearing her mother moving about in the next room, he had hastily ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... developments. Her office window commanded the entrance to Blake's suite of rooms, and no one went up by day whom she did not see. Her bedroom commanded Blake's house and grounds, and every night she sat at her darkened window till the small hours and watched for possible suspicious visitors, or possible suspicious movements on ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... feeding. They graze until about ten o'clock and then sleep on well into the small hours, wake and begin to feed again at ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... quietly shelved her, and told her that they were to have their own way at home; so Miss Snow became ornamental and critical. Miss Butterworth had spent the night with her, and they had talked like a pair of school-girls until the small hours of the morning. The two younger girls had slept together, and discussed at length the duties of their respective offices. One was to do the bride's hair and act as the general supervisor of her dress, the other was to arrange the flowers ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... he had to requisition men's incomes. As for Jekyll, he called the present proposals "a detestable measure of extortion and rapacity." The debates dragged on, until, after a powerful reply by Pitt in the small hours of 5th January 1798 the Finance Bill passed the Commons by 196 to 71. The Lords showed a far better spirit. Carrington declared that Pitt's proposals did not go far enough. Lord Holland in a maiden speech ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... manner was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and there engage in discussions of Determinism—it always seemed to be Determinism—which became heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the small hours. It seemed impossible to settle about this Determinism of theirs—ever. And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam about us one ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Burke, the "Kid's" sponge, sponge-holder, pal, Mentor and Grand Vizier, drew him out to the bootblack stand at the saloon corner where all the official and important matters of the Small Hours Social Club were settled. As Tony polished the light tan shoes of the club's President and Secretary for the fifth time that day, Burke spake words of wisdom to ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and company both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the small hours of the night. Whenever he is heard advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other times they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion and dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting with ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... also afford them some protection from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning, I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... in the soundless saloon long after the fire had gone out. There was no danger of her feeling the cold; she was in a fever. She heard the small hours strike, and then the great ones, but her vigil took no heed of time. Her mind, assailed by visions, was in a state of extraordinary activity, and her visions might as well come to her there, where she sat up to meet them, as on her ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... debates are usually conducted in the small hours, it was cruel to disturb their infant slumbers. If you want to do that here you will have to get Mabel's consent; it is out of my province. Best play with your children before they go ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... to be devoted to a bath and dressing in his rooms. This was something not so unpleasant to contemplate. It was the afterwards that repelled him: the dinner at Sherry's, the subsequent tour of roof gardens, the late supper at a club, and then, prolonged far into the small hours, the session around some green-covered table in a close room reeking with the fumes of good tobacco and hot with the fever ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... the force was rapidly disintegrating. Pottinger and Haughton, the latter only just able to keep the saddle, pushed on toward Cabul, rested in a ravine during the day, evaded the partisan detachment sent out from Cabul to intercept them, rode through sleeping Cabul in the small hours of the morning, and after being pursued and fired upon in the outskirts of the city, finally attained the cantonments. It was afterwards learned that a portion of the regiment had struggled on to within twenty miles from Cabul, gallantly headed by young Rose and Dr Grant. Then the remnant was ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... beat on my window, the clouds came lower still down the mountain. Then (as is finely written in the Song of Roland), 'the day passed and the night came, and I slept.' But with the coming of the small hours, and with my waking, prepare yourselves for the most extraordinary and terrible adventure that befell me out of all the marvels and perils of this pilgrimage, the most momentous and the most worthy of perpetual record, I think, of all that has ever happened since ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of their little houses and dug-outs to gather around the brazier; and for every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event, an American appearing in the trench in the small hours of the morning. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... he was first to turn in, it was along in the wee small hours of morning before slumber crept in ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... made on another occasion in the small hours of the morning and so far as I know I am the only surviving eye and ear witness of the occurrence. Shortly before the dinner hour on the preceding evening, somebody brought up from the lobby to the gallery the intelligence that Mr Disraeli had called for a pint of champagne, ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... unexpected occasion, that he had not come home the whole night, he simply felt positive, in his own mind, that he was certain to have run about, if not drinking, at least gambling, and dissipating in houses of the demi-monde up to the small hours; but he never even gave so much as a thought to the possibility of a public scandal, as that in which he was involved. The consequence was that during the whole length of the night he ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... had charge of the bill, and Senator G. A. Noftzger (Rep.) led the opposition. The vote resulted in 22 yeas—16 Rep., 4 Pop., 2 Dem.; 13 nays—12 Rep., 1 Pop. The friends had every reason to believe the House would pass the bill, but in the still small hours of the night following the action of the Senate, its Republican members in caucus decided that this might injure the party at the approaching State election, and the next morning it was reconsidered and defeated by 14 yeas—9 Rep., 4 Pop., ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... o'clock Mary Garth relieved the watch in Mr. Featherstone's room, and sat there alone through the small hours. She often chose this task, in which she found some pleasure, notwithstanding the old man's testiness whenever he demanded her attentions. There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... small hours of the morning did the young girl wrestle with the conflicting forces ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... suited them admirably, and the tariff was modest. Why do anything to disturb the perennial peace of so discreet and confidential an establishment? One did much as one pleased there, providing one's bill was paid with tolerable regularity and the hand kept supple that operated the cordon in the small hours of the night. Papa Troyon came from a tribe of inn-keepers and was liberal-minded; while as for Madame his wife, she cared for ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... had preceded him from the sala, as Kit supposed to go to bed. The day and night had been trying to the old man, and already it was the small hours ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... object of his passion and its degrading accompaniment. Then he would nibble at the whisky bottle, having "earned his tonic," as he would say, until the potent spirit had warmed his courage and he would hurry off to the saloon for "half an hour's flutter," which generally terminated in the small hours ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... was, was safe from me. But what of the man Hawk? There no such considerations swayed me. I would interview the man Hawk. I would give him the most hectic ten minutes of his career. I would say things to him the recollection of which would make him start up shrieking in his bed in the small hours of the night. I would arise, and be a man and slay him—take him grossly, full of bread, with all his crimes, broad-blown, as flush as May; at gaming, swearing, or about some act that had no ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... them were rising from table, they greeted Lute Desten and Rita Wainwright arriving. Over the billiard table with Bert, Graham learned that Dick Forrest never appeared for breakfast, that he worked in bed from terribly wee small hours, had coffee at six, and only on unusual occasions appeared to his guests before the twelve-thirty lunch. As for Paula Forrest, Bert explained, she was a poor sleeper, a late riser, lived behind a door without a knob in a spacious wing with a rare and secret patio that even he had seen but ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... made a conscious effort to recover it, of his audacious success during the small hours of that morning in bringing triumphantly into the world the small new life that Pollard would have destroyed, came back to fortify him; no trace of his own afterglow that had so fascinated and alarmed his sister. "I shall sleep fast for an hour or two this morning and make ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... days in adjusting business interests that extend from the arctic snows to the tropics. His evenings belong generally to his friends, for he possesses in a rare degree the art of companionship. The small hours are his own, and frequently he spends them in painting beautiful copies of his Japanese potteries. It is his homage to the artisans who contrived those strange forms and imagined those gorgeous ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... fitted out with anti-aircraft guns, for the Turkish aeroplanes occasionally tried to "lay eggs," a by no means easy affair with a moving train as a target. Whatever the reason was, and I never succeeded in discovering it, the trains invariably left Baghdad in the wee small hours, and as the station was on the right bank across the river from the main town, and the boat bridges were cut during the night, we used generally, when returning to the front, to spend the first part of the night sleeping on the station platform. Generals or exalted ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... the two young men, the rest of the guests left the Clays' house. There was no special run on the pawnshop that night. Saturday night was the real night for business; then work went on until far into the small hours of the morning, and Louisa was obliged to turn to and help her father, but to-night there was nothing to prevent her going to bed. She lit her candle in the hall, and turned to say "good-night" ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... by many actors and actresses. They had little rooms upstairs, got their morning coffee in the little restaurant and after the evening's performance sat in the little apartment off the bar, where the floor was sanded and drank beer until the small hours. These men were representatives of their profession so far as America is concerned. There were no stars among them and none of the lowest stratum. They were of the middle class of the people of the footlights. Nearly all of them were married and a few of them had children. They ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of sympathy. Catherine's bursting heart was equally oblivious. She only knew that her aunt was taking her into her arms. Mrs. Penniman drew her into Catherine's own room, and the two women sat there together, far into the small hours; the younger one with her head on the other's lap, sobbing and sobbing at first in a soundless, stifled manner, and then at last perfectly still. It gratified Mrs. Penniman to be able to feel conscientiously ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... by the pound," Lonegan observed, regarding the other's bulk with one eye shut. "I never heard of Mowbray spending much time in bed outside of the small hours." "How old ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... was opposed, on principle, to drinking intoxicating liquors, but his doctors had ordered that he should drink a pint of ale every day with his dinner. That was provided. The Bar sat down to dinner at an early hour and the fun and frolic were kept up far into the small hours of the night. Brother Bacon was the subject of every speech and of every toast. He seemed to think it was necessary for him to reply to every speaker and toast. So he was kept on his legs a great part of the night. As he sipped his modest tumbler of ale, Brother Dewey, who sat next to him, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... submitted by Reginald Whinney in the great competition presided over by Chief Baahaabaa. It is rare indeed to find a beach in the Filbert Islands so deserted. An hour after this photograph was taken more than three thousand natives were assembled to witness the judging of the exhibits. In the small hours of night, the entire strand is covered with pita-oolas, or giant land-crabs, about the size of manhole covers, who crawl inland to cut down the palm trees with which they build their nests. An examination of the picture with a powerful microscope will reveal the presence on the surface of the ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... children, especially little girls, to servants, to animals. When he was himself in great poverty he would put pennies in the hands of the children sleeping on doorsteps in the Strand, as he walked home in the small hours of the morning. He left most of his property to his negro servant Frank: and so united a delicate consideration for Frank's feelings with an affection for his cat Hodge that he always went out himself to buy oysters for Hodge lest Frank should think ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... replied Mrs. Treacher, setting down the bottle of gin. "And what's more, I don't go a-sheevoing it around Garrison Hill in the small hours, and a-holding on to railings, and a-clammering for ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to-night a fearsome sight The fishermen behold, Keeping the ghost watch in the moon When the small hours ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... came back, and asked us up to the library, the front room on the floor above. Here a footman was lighting a fire on the hearth, for the house had the chill of the small hours. ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... on the small table such supper-cheer as a cold roast capon, bread, grapes, and a flask of old Rhine wine— where the reverberating doors close on their retreat, one after another, like so many peals of sullen thunder—and where, about the small hours of the night, we come into the knowledge of divers supernatural mysteries. Legion is the name of the haunted German students, in whose society we draw yet nearer to the fire, while the schoolboy in the corner opens his eyes wide and round, and flies off the footstool he ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... hair rested in the little open palm. The other stretched down toward the centre of the bed, as if fearlessly to invite the touch of those weird things with which imagination peoples the solemn night—which the wakeful eye, in the still, small hours, sees moving in the darker corners, or passing swiftly by the bedside, or hovering in the air, wearing the semblance of one's dead friends, or filling large portions of the room with some formless presence ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... of us used to retire to Douglas Jerrold's room in one of the towers, and there we spent a jovial evening, prolonging the entertainment until the small hours of the morning. ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books. That it is not to read them is certain: the closest inspection always fails to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them — all night if you let him — wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed tears over them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not read them. Yet it would be rash to infer that he buys his books without a remote intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers start with the honest resolution that some ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... to let him go alone." It was one of her sorest trials that she could not minister to her husband as formerly; but disease had laid its hand on her too. Their life at Trieste at this time was naturally uneventful. Instead of getting up, as they used to do, and beginning their labours in the small hours of the morning, the Burtons now rose at seven, and did as much literary work as they could until nine, when the doctor would come in. At twelve o'clock they had breakfast, and after that the time was devoted either to more ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... said my mother is the most wonderful of women? I waked her in the small hours with the startling information that Mary Virginia was downstairs in John Flint's workroom, and that she herself must dress and accompany her home. And my mother, though she looked her stark bewilderment, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... his followers would now see their folly in the same light in which others saw it. It was reported as a very good joke that when one white-clad woman had returned to her home, wan and weary, in the small hours of the night, her husband had refused to let her in, calling to her from an upper window that his wife had gone to have a fly with the angels, and he did not know who she might be. Another and coarser version of the same tale was, that he had taken no notice ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... utmost unease and disquietude came over me. All my talks with Seaton returned on me with a suddenly enriched meaning. I recalled again his face as we had stood hanging over the staircase, listening in the small hours to the inexplicable stirrings of the night. There were no candles in the room; every minute the autumnal darkness deepened. I cautiously opened the door and listened, and with some little dismay withdrew, for I was uncertain of my way out. I even ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... amusing, their courtiers and flatterers are doubly so. They rise in the small hours of the night, to go their round of the city, to have doors slammed in their faces by slaves, to swallow as best they may the compliments of "Dog," "Toadeater," and the like. And the guerdon of their painful circumambulations? A vulgarly magnificent ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... report of the great gun in the small hours of the morning had startled all the people in the vicinity, though it was not till they left their beds that the news was conveyed to them. A party in the town just below the scene of the disaster to the Vampire had been collected, and they ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... a dozen years or more in London, a man I knew bewailed to me one night the fact that he had to leave Fenchurch Street Station in the small hours of the next morning, and did not know how on earth ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... In the small hours of a bitter January morning I sat in my room gazing into the fire, and thinking over many things. I was alone in the house, except for the servants, but this circumstance did not affect me. My childhood and upbringing had been of no ordinary nature, and I was used to looking after myself and ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... small hours of that night there was a short sharp scuffle in the servants' quarters. The Merriman boatmen and peons were set upon by a score of sturdy men who promptly roped them together, and, hauling them down to the ghat and into ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... yourself. He gave Albert's sheet a tentative shake. In all his experience he thought he had never come across anything so supremely unstable. (One calls it Albert's sheet for the sake of convenience. It was really Reggie Byng's sheet. And when Reggie got to his room in the small hours of the morning and found the thing a mass of knots he jumped to the conclusion— being a simple-hearted young man—that his bosom friend Jack Ferris, who had come up from London to see Lord Belpher through the trying experience of a coming-of-age party, had done it as a practical ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... unto which are attached camels and mules, bear me. With all my relatives and friends I now eat food rich with meat. Worshipped by all, sleep, O highly blessed one, on costly beds in delightful rooms into which disagreeable winds cannot blow. Towards the small hours of every night, Sutas and Magadhas and encomiasts utter my praises even as the deities utter the agreeable praises of Indra, their chief. Through the grace of thyself that art firm in truth and endued with immeasurable energy, I who was before a worm have now become ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... I'll tell it thee. When William Molines lay a-dying his mind was sore distraught at leaving his poor, motherless maid alone, for his son Joseph had gone before him, so he sent for me to watch with him that night, and somewhere in the small hours we thought his time had come, and he besought me to promise that I would take the maid under my keeping and not let her come to want. He said naught of marriage, nor did I, for my wife was but then at rest, and such speech would have been unseemly for him and hateful to me. I took his words ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... admonition of his mother was, "We will leave the candle burning for you, John, but you must be sure and be home before twelve o'clock!" I am sure that the memory of this admonition is lingering among our friends now, that we are entering on the small hours, and that I must only acknowledge your courtesy and sit down. I feel, indeed, all along in your talk of hoar antiquity, that I owe my place here only to your extreme hospitality. In these aged cities you may well say to me, "You Bostonians are children. You are of yesterday," as the Egyptians said ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... a period in the evening, or more generally towards the still small hours of the morning, in which we so far unbend as to take a single glass of hot whisky and water. We will neither defend the practice nor excuse it. We state it as a fact which must be borne in mind by the readers of this article; for we know not ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... active style, singing a song the while from the gladness of his heart. It was a merry song, about mother slowly going down the hectic path of phthisis pulmonalis, and sister, who has—one is led to believe—taken to small bottles, small hours and undesirable companions, refusing to come home and lift the mortgage which is shortly to be foreclosed—all in the narrow confines of ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips |
