"Specter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... head to their monstrous body." Two leaders indeed appeared, Davis and Pate by name, but having neither the standing nor the strength of the Virginia rebels, they were finally taken and hanged. What supporters they had dispersed, and the specter ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... seek that rest that will bring Nepenthe to his dreams, but the specter of that murdered old man will arise before his vision, and rest is impossible. Ah, how many long, weary days and nights, fraught with terror and remorse, will come to this unfortunate man ere he finds a final release and ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... the specter of scandal, as it touched the Remingtons, touching that dearest purchase of femininity, social standing; there was the specter of poverty, which threatened from the exposure of the source of her income and the enforcement of the law; nearer and quite as poignant, ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... intrusive, yet always by her side and at her beck and call, never at a loss to do and say the right thing, Miller had wooed her in his own masterful way, trampling down prejudice, suspicion, unbelief, until he had gained his heritage—love. The specter of the past was laid—involuntarily ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... was fated to be a sight-seer that morning. When he entered Buckingham Palace Road, the strains of martial music banished the gaunt specter called into being by the red cotton banner. A policeman, more cheerful and spry than his comrades who marshaled the procession shuffling towards Westminster, strode to the center of the busy crossing, and cast an alert eye on the converging lines of traffic. Another section of the ever-ready ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... grew scant and dwarfed. At the edge of timber-line he showed a gnarled and knotted spruce-tree, twisted out of all semblance to a beautiful spruce, bent and storm-blasted, with almost bare branches, all reaching one' way. The tree was a specter. It stood alone. It had little green upon it. There seemed something tragic about its contortions. But it was alive and strong. It had no rivals to take sun or moisture. Its enemies were the snow and wind and cold of ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... terrible figure, like that of a man, but of unusual stature and severe countenance. He was somewhat frightened at first, but seeing it neither did nor spoke anything to him, only stood silently by his bed-side, he asked who it was. The specter answered him, "Thy evil genius, Brutus, thou shalt see me at Philippi." Brutus answered courageously, "Well, I shall see you," and immediately the appearance vanished. When the time was come, he drew up his army near Philippi against Antony and Caesar, and in the first ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... fools himself, I guess. I am looking for a kind of ghost, a specter in black that leaves the palace early in the evening and returns late, whose destination ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... bucket there are old wicks and other departed things. At the foot of a wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in paper shirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums. All is dilapidated and ruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light is elaborated. The specter of a huge window stands yonder. The panes only half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered with yellow paper. The great stones—the rocks—of the walls are upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... the real causes of the increasing emigration from Finland. If, along with them, political agitation has also played a certain part, alarming the credulous peasantry with the specter of military service on the distant borders of Russia, yet their emigration was and remains an economic phenomenon. Having originated long before the issue of the manifesto of 1899, it kept increasing under the influence of bad ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Stygian gloom a torrent of sheet-lightning rolled down across the heavens, bringing in its wake a moment of terrible light. It was in one of these brief moments of illumination that the wan watchers at Hall's Harbor discerned a long gray ship being swept like a specter before the winds towards the Isle of Haut. Until the flash of lightning the doomed seamen appeared to have been unconscious of their fast approaching fate; and then, as if suddenly awakened, they sent a long thin ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... in general, it does. If it does not die, she has for the rest of her life a Damocles' sword hanging over her head, and she is in constant terror lest her sin be found out. She does not permit herself to look for a mate, but if she does get married, the specter of her antematrimonial experience is constantly before her eyes. After years and years of married life, the husband may divorce her if he finds out that she had "sinned" before she knew him. And unless ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... gave him visions wild, Such as might suit the specter's child. 150 Where with black cliffs the torrents toil, He watched the wheeling eddies boil, Till, from their foam, his dazzled eyes Beheld the River Demon rise; The mountain mist took form and limb, 155 Of noontide hag, or goblin grim; The midnight wind came wild and dread, Swelled with the ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... hid her face in her hands, murmuring: "Oh! Good Heavens!" And seeing this stranger who seemed to be threatening his mother, George sprang up, ready to seize him by the collar, while Limousin, who was thunderstruck, looked at this specter in horror, who, after panting for a few moments, continued: "So now we will have an explanation; the proper moment for it has come! Ah! you deceived me, you condemned me to the life of a convict, and you thought that I should never ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... was timid. The only thing he had ever been afraid of in his life was woman, and he had been afraid all his life. Nor was that timidity to be put easily to flight now that he felt the first glimmering need and desire for woman. The specter of the apron-string still haunted him, and helped him to find excuses for getting on no forwarder ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... vengeance. There is no sufficient reason, however, to surmise that Tasso's conscience was really burdened with a guilty secret touching Leonora d'Este. On the contrary, everything points to a different conclusion. His mind was simply giving way. Just as he conjured up the ghastly specter of the Inquisition, so he fancied that the duke would murder him. Both the Inquisition and the duke were formidable; but the Holy Office mildly told him to set his morbid doubts at rest, and the duke on a subsequent ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... announced an emergency economic program that included federal budget cuts and plans for more privatizations, but it failed to restore investor confidence quickly. While the devaluation is likely to help Mexican exporters, whose products are now cheaper, it also raises the specter of an inflationary spiral if domestic producers increase their prices and workers demand wage hikes. Although strong economic fundamentals bode well for Mexico's longer-term outlook, prospects for solid growth and low inflation have deteriorated considerably, ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... career, Peter knew nothing more than Sheldon, Senior, had told him—a successful man who told nothing of his business except to the Treasury Department, a silent man, with a passion for making money. What could he fear? Whom? What specter out of the past could conjure up the visions he had seen dancing between McGuire's eyes ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... house and Anastagio's.] Two noble families of Ravenna. She to whom Dryden has given the name of Honoria, in the fable so admirably paraphrased from Boccaccio, was of the former: her lover and the specter were ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... rallied from that shock of grief; but was not strong enough to sustain a shock of joy! I ought not to have given you this surprise! But try now to compose yourself, and give me welcome. I am here; alive, warm, loving, hungry even! a woman, and no specter risen from the grave, although you look at me just as if I were one! Dear Herman, kiss me! I have come a long way to join you!" she said, in a voice softer than the softest ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Americans. The father of this youth held Chuan Kai in the hollow of his hand, and Chuan Kai knew that a few words spoken to the enforcers-of-law would send him away from these shores, where living came so easily, back to China where stalked a specter which he had reason to fear with the fear of one whose heart trembles like the heart of a field mouse that hears the cry of the long-taloned owl. Those reasons trooped through the Oriental's mind as his black eyes shifted from the face of Campbell to the ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... the mirror of our imagination the specter of the day after the orgy; it will evoke the monster of the headache which works upon the suffering cranium with its claws of steel; and, at some future day, it will show us precocious decrepitude ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... specter stern rejoined, "These are unpardonable yearnings; If you are lame, and deaf, and blind, You've had your three sufficient warnings, So, come along; no more we'll part." He said, and touched him with his dart: And now old Dodson, turning pale, Yields ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... rarely, and in whispers, when we were children, and how we had regarded it as a mysterious region, unfit for mortal habitation. Was It—the dark form with the chain—a creature of this world, or a specter? And again—more dreadful still—could it be that the corpses of wicked men were forced to rise and haunt in the body the places where they had wrought their evil deeds? And was such as these my grisly ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... higher wages and shorter hours of labor. But in 1895 the term began to have a different meaning, and almost immediately it made the tour of the world as a unique and dreadful revolutionary philosophy. It became a new "red specter," with a menacing and subversive program, that created a veritable furore of discussion in the newspapers and magazines of all countries. Rarely has a movement aroused such universal agitation, awakened ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... created the Gods, fear still holds their empire in the mind of mortals; they have been so early accustomed to tremble even at the name of the Deity, that it has become for them a specter, a goblin, a were-wolf which torments them, and whose idea deprives them even of the courage to attempt to reassure themselves. They are afraid that this invisible specter will strike them if they cease to be afraid. The religious people fear their God too much to love Him sincerely; ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... in the balsam's ear That sets it blushing, or the hollyhock's,— A syllabled silence that no man may hear,— As dreamily upon its stem it rocks? What spell dost bear from listening plant to plant, Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant, Some specter of some perished flower ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... became the tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... The specter saluted. "Lieutenant Alfred Pendray, of the Shane," he said, in a voice that had almost no strength. He held up a pouch. "Microfilm," he said. "Must get to Earth immediately. ...
— The Measure of a Man • Randall Garrett
... have been some other woman in my set whom I could have fallen in love with and asked to marry me without a word of explanation; but the more I knew this girl, the less could I find it in my heart to deceive her. And yet, in spite of this specter that was constantly looming up before me, I could never have believed that life held such happiness as was contained in those ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... attentively, and the dim light just revealing their countenances showed their different emotions of confidence or distrust in his plans. General Sidney Johnson stood apart from the rest, with his tall straight form standing out like a specter against the dim sky, and the illusion was fully sustained by the light-gray military cloak which he folded around him. His face was pale, but wore a determined expression, and at times he drew nearer the center of the ring and said a few ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... really interesting story," insisted Frank. "You see, the fellow shot himself three times, and when he did not die quickly enough to be suited, he cut his throat from ear to ear, and his specter was a most ghastly-appearing object, bleeding from the bullet wounds and having a ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... pushed the craft into deep water, and with muffled stroke moved through the inky waves, a somber specter sneaking along the ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus to roll his fantastic stone up—image, himself, forever of the greater part of our ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie along its ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... over Winny's eyes, and on the far border of the field of vision, somewhere toward the top of her head, a yellow chest of drawers with white handles grew dim and quivered and danced like the yellow and white specter of a chest ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... America and Europe, is there one who is alarmed at an eclipse, at a comet, at an ignis fatuus, or at the notes of a death-watch? or who postpones his experiments on account of what is called an unlucky day? Who ever heard of a specter appearing to such a person, dragging him from bed at the dead hour of midnight, to wander through the forest, trembling with fear? Such beings appear only to the ignorant and illiterate, at least ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... soldiers forget their wounds amid the stir and trumpets of the battle. With a busy life, a gay life, we manage to forget the skeleton of the heart, rarely permitting ourselves to look upon the ominous specter which some way or other has entrenched itself within us, and which is ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... It was very lonely. Over his shoulder the boy saw indistinct shapes that followed after, and hid themselves whenever he looked squarely at them. Then, suddenly, he saw before him in the gloom, a gaunt white specter waiting for him—waiting to get him, its arms spread wide out in menace. He was of our breed, though, this boy. He did not turn and run. With God knows what terror knocking at his ribs, he trudged ahead to meet his ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... movements, if, peradventure, at some moment he might find them off their guard, either to be drawn into an ambuscade by day or surprised in camp by night. Unswervingly due north-east the night-marchers held their course for several miles, the warrior gliding on before them, like a gigantic specter there to lead them over the shadowy borders of another world. So it seemed to Burl, who felt his spirit strangely troubled within him whenever an opening through the forest, letting in the hazy glimmer of the moon, brought that huge bulk less vaguely before his eyes; and once in particular, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... suspension of free trade negotiations with the US. These measures, combined with chronic underinvestment in the state oil company, Petroecuador, led to a drop in petroleum production in 2007. PALACIO's successor, Rafael CORREA, raised the specter of debt default - but Ecuador has paid its debt on time. He also decreed a higher windfall revenue tax on private oil companies, then sought to renegotiate their contracts to overcome the debilitating effect of the tax. This generated economic uncertainty; private investment ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... choral works of great brilliancy. In 1892 Dr. Dvorak was called to New York as director of the so-called National Conservatory of Music. In 1895 he returned to Bohemia. The choral works of Dvorak were generally first written for English musical festivals. "The Specter's Bride," "Stabat Mater," "Saint Ludmilla." The list of his works includes five symphonies for full orchestra, several concert overtures, a very beautiful air and variations for orchestra, and seven ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... As only two dollars was paid for killing a wolf, it is easy to see how the pioneers regarded the forest folk in point of relative noxiousness. But ten years later a handful only of the Kickapoos remained in Sangamon County, the specter of the vanished people. A chief named Machina came one day to a family who were clearing a piece of timber, and issued an order of eviction in these words: "Too much come white man. T'other side Sangamon." He threw a handful of dried leaves in the air to show ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21] without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that at Florence he was in the vicinity ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the apparition—although he was habitually unimaginative outside the field of barks and chemicals it did not occur to Simon Varr in that first moment to doubt that this was truly a specter from another world—should startle him to the verge of sheer fright. To begin with, there was something suggestive of Death in that somber, motionless figure, and of death he had a horror. Then it had come so pat on his bitter question of "What ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the two officers studied the haze of the night sea around them, unable yet to discern the form of the approaching vessel. And then came a huge specter, looming up directly off the starboard quarter of the Dewey in the proportions of a ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... this menace, it seems like the Black Jack specter becomes intim'dated, an' tries ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... listening to the music. Memories were crowding thick upon him. Again and again he wished that he had never opened the door of the sitting room that other night and caught the old man off his guard. It had left a specter in his mind, horrible in its pathos and intense. Strung fiercely to the thought of emptiness, it came upon him nevertheless, as he opened the door, with a curious chill sense of palpability; as if silence and emptiness could strike one in the face ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... voice and spoke out boldly to the undefined specter in her mind. "And if it's the mating instinct you mean, that may be fooling both of us, because of our youth and bodily health . . . good heavens! Isn't our love deep enough to absorb that a million times over, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... 530. [Fallacies of vision] deceptio visus[Lat]; refraction, distortion, illusion, false light, anamorphosis[obs3], virtual image, spectrum, mirage, looming, phasma|; phantasm, phantasma[obs3], phantom; vision; specter, apparition, ghost; ignis fatuus &c. (luminary) 423 specter of the Brocken magic mirror[Lat]; magic lantern &c. (show) 448; mirror lens &c. (instrument) 445. V. be dimsighted &c. n.; see double; have a mote in the eye, have a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... site for their new home, and it was as though the horrid specter of a few moments before had never risen to menace them, for the girl felt that a great burden of apprehension had been lifted forever from her shoulders, and though a dull ache gnawed at the mucker's heart, still he was happier than he had ever been before—happy to ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... its immediate realization, but one of even more terrifying possibilities for the near future. For through the haze of the smoke-clouds from burning towns and above the rattle of the machine guns in Dinant and Louvain could be seen the hovering specter of starvation and heard the wailing of hungry children. And how the specter was to be made to pass and the children to hush their cries was soon the problem of ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... ride for Forty-Mile Canyon. The red star is Hi Lang's beacon. Hippy Wingate mourns at missing a meal. Emma comes a cropper in a mountain stream. "The last spot made when the world was built." In camp in the Specter ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... merciless tearing of sleep from his soul wrought magic and transformed him into a glowing, jeweled specter. He sprouted toes and long legs; he rose and inflated his sleek emerald frog-form; his sides blazed forth a mother-of-pearl waist-coat—a myriad mosaics of pink and blue and salmon and mauve; and from nowhere if not from ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... to California a new specter appeared—the last that Adelle expected to encounter in her life. Archie hinted that it would be well to go slow with their "improvements" at Highcourt. The times were getting bad, he said, and the market looked as if they would get worse rather than better. Every one was talking ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... talk in both countries of intervention. Napoleon, especially, loomed large on the horizon as a possible ally of the Confederacy. And yet, all this while, Lincoln had it in his power at any minute to lay the specter of foreign intervention. A pledge to the "Liberal party throughout the world" that the war would bring about the destruction of slavery, and great political powers both in England and in France would at once cross the paths ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... character and habits finds next to impossible. A beneficent limitation of nature; for the cases in which the judgment of a girl of eighteen is better than that of her parents are very few. Besides, the inevitable "heart-disease" was a specter that guarded the gates of Julia's prison. Night after night she sat looking out over the hills sleeping in hazy darkness, toward the hollow in which stood the castle; night after night she had half-formed the purpose of visiting August, and then the ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... semblance of return for such hospitality as they extended, Mrs. Mumpson would remain indefinitely. Moreover, the homely, silent child made the women nervous, just as her mother irritated the men, and they did not want her around. Thus she had come to be but the specter of a child, knowing little of the good in the world and as much of the evil ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... what did I promise? Wretch! what do I attempt? How all my courage Hath vanished from me since Aegisthus vanished! I only see the immense atrocity Of this, my horrible deed; I only see The bloody specter of Atrides! Ah, In vain do I accuse thee! No, thou lovest Cassandra not. Me, only me, thou lovest, Unworthy of thy love. Thou hast no blame, Save that thou art my husband, in the world! Of trustful sleep, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... by the tettix, see, I return! See, 'tis myself here standing alive, no specter that speaks! Crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, Athens and you, "Run, Pheidippides, run and race, reach Sparta for aid! Persia has come, we are here, where is She?" Your command I obeyed, Ran and raced: like stubble, ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... always happy. Misery surprises The luckiest with unexpected terror. Then, in addition, unseen powers breed Most heinous maladies and fever heat. E'en if we were exceptions, thou must grant That finally we too will meet our doom. The ghastly specter Death, the stern king Yama, Awaiteth all of us. Such ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... de Vere, There stands a specter in your hall; The guilt of blood is at your door; You changed a wholesome heart to gall. You held your course without remorse, To make him trust his modest worth, And, last, you fixed a vacant stare, And slew him with ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... alternative looming like a specter in his path was it to be wondered at that Dick resolutely turned his gaze from the allurements of the harbor and settled himself in the big chair with all his attention focussed on Bob King's radio lesson. Moreover, human nature is selfish enough to like company in its misery and were ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... she had been fighting a specter, never daring to lift her eyes to it, but fighting it blindly, passionately, unceasingly. She had denied its existence, refuted every memory, filled her life to the brim with other interests, other ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... Mexican, standing beside the long mound, head bowed, with the Specter probably staring over his shoulder, going methodically through the complete Memorial Service, ending with: And the whole galaxy is the sepulcher ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... demanded the twins from Horace, Everett Brimbecomb sat in his office, brooding over the shadow that had so suddenly darkened his life. The dream he had dreamed of a woman he could call Mother, of some man—his father—of whom he had striven to be worthy, had dissolved into a specter with a shriveled face and shaggy hair, into a woman whom he had left in the cemetery to die. Although he was secure in the thought that he would not be connected with the tragedy, he shuddered every time he thought of her and of the coming spring, when the body would be discovered. ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... now extended. Matrena Petrovna pulled her back by the arms. Then she took her by the neck and threw her into the drawing-room in a heap. When she had almost strangled her step-daughter, Matrena Petrovna saw that the general was there. He appeared in the pale glimmerings of dawn like a specter. By what miracle had Feodor Feodorovitch been able to descend the stairs and reach there? How had it been brought about? She saw him tremble with anger or with wretchedness under the folds of the soldier's cape ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... might be disposed of in the same way. In this instance "F'' saw the white-robed specter open the door, walk around the room and finally, taking his position as if to depart, say: "I have taken all you have.'' No doubt this vision took place at the exact moment of the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... and Olga, who stood in speechless astonishment at this strange dialogue. She could understand nothing of this uncanny stranger; this specter in black and white, who seemed to emit a lurid radiance as if his red waistcoat ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... "No! such love as you can give, is too poor even for me. Love you I will not. If you speak to me so again, you will drive me away. Talk to me as you will of your void idol. Tell me of the darkness of his dwelling, and the sanctuary it affords to poor, tormented, specter-hunted humanity; but do not talk to me of love also, for where your idol is, love can ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... her journey, Jemima had also made ready for a journey, grimly; Jacqueline wandering between the two like a woebegone young specter, all her gaiety dissolved in tears. Mrs. Kildare herself had written to her husband's aunt, for the first time in years, explaining briefly her own intentions and Jemima's attitude with regard to them. The reply had come by telegraph, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... which will take no other sustenance than the blood of its owner, but it rewards him by aiding him in carrying out revengeful purposes. The harmless owl has strange superstitions attaching to it, and is called the "specter bird;" you may remember that the fear of encountering it was one of the reasons why the Permatang Pasir men would not go with us ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... were nothing. He did not lack courage to laugh back into the faces of the jeering multitude. But to own himself beaten by a mocking ghost, a specter from another sphere; to relinquish for her gratification the traditions of his race and the trust of his fathers; to leave her triumphant on the field,—this he could not do for any ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... Behind the gaunt specter of what had once been the city hall a blizzard of flame swept back into the gore between Turk and Market streets. Peeled of its heavy stone facing like a young leek that is stripped of its wrappings, the dome of the city hall rose spectral ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... can't pretend I'm not different. And I'm not a bit sure I know what's any better for them to do than what they're doing!" She had spoken impetuously, hotly, addressing not the men beside her but a specter of her ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... sockets; in short, an individual, by the side of whom the most atrocious of Salvator Rosa's brigands would be as one of Watteau's shepherds. Never did a man's vanity enjoy such a treat! This charming person added that I had threatened her, and that I had jumped at her horse's bridle like the specter of the forest ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... vision of lightning playing above the crest of a great mound on the edge of the ice field,—a mound that she did not remember seeing before. Then the gale sank back to its sustained howling, the snow swirled in denser volume, and the specter vanished. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... pulpit recognized her, as she had certainly recognized him? She hoped not. She believed not. As soon as she had heard the voice—the voice that had been silent for her so many years—she had impulsively looked up. And she had seen him! A specter from the past—a specter from the grave! But his eyes were fixed upon the book from which he was reading, and she quickly dropped her head before he could raise them. No; he had not seen her. But oh! if she had heard his name before she had gone to hear him preach, ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the strategic nuclear balance and pushing back the specter of nuclear war. A decisive step forward was taken in the Vladivostok Accord which I negotiated with General Secretary Brezhnev—joint recognition that an equal ceiling should be placed on the number of strategic ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... first season progressed. But never a salary day that the "white specter" did not perambulate. Every obligation met promptly, a few folks began to take notice of the new show, persons who had held their faces the other way. The manager was forced to practice the greatest economy. There was a few weeks around Christmas time when his shoes leaked. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... had to dread were the revolution which is held up as a specter to terrify us! Since I cannot imagine a society more detestable than ours, I feel more skeptical than alarmed in regard to that which will replace it. If I should have to suffer from the change, I should be consoled by thinking that the executioners of that day were the victims of the previous time, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... throwing his sword upon the bed, "this man must be the devil in person; he has disappeared like a phantom, like a shade, like a specter." ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... man strolled disconsolately enough into the billiard-room, thence (dogged by a specter of loneliness) to the bar, and finally, in sheer desperation, to the dining-room, where he selected a table and ordered an ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... of no pleasurable nature; for they were frequently interrupted by convulsive starts and rapid glancings around the room—as if she were fearful lest some terrible specter were present ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... of God and man. I cannot prove it, but as you once said, our hearts know it and will continue to know it as long as either of us lives. But I am not going to obtrude my claims upon you, Carleton, or stand like a specter in your path. Had this woman you have deceived been weak or foolish or unloving, or indeed anything but what she is, I might have held to my rights and insisted upon a recognition which would have ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... and he told these things from his own experience largely. He had seen many ghosts in his time, and witches and enchanters, and once he was lost in a fierce storm at midnight in the mountains, and by the glare of the lightning had seen the Wild Huntsman rage on the blast with his specter dogs chasing after him through the driving cloud-rack. Also he had seen an incubus once, and several times he had seen the great bat that sucks the blood from the necks of people while they are asleep, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dark as night; the rain beat against the hut, and meanwhile the thunder rolled with fearful reverberations through the mountains; quivering lightning lighted up the black, frightful giant-forms, which seemed quite specter-like to come nearer and look down menacingly. The cattle ran together in alarm and bellowed loudly, and great birds of prey ...
— Toni, the Little Woodcarver • Johanna Spyri
... administration of justice burdensome for sparsely settled communities, a money system that penalized them for being debtors, or taxes levied for the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on, proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... God," said the boy gravely, for he saw a hollow-eyed specter staring toward him from the bed in the corner, "let me ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... standard within—that obsessing ideal which requires that all things be measured by it—was still dominant. Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better thing? How it creeps over the spirit of one's current dreams! Like the specter at the banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy the makeshift feast. The what-might-have-been of her life with Cowperwood walked side by side with her wherever she went. Once occasionally indulging in cigarettes, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... let the Ghost of strangl'd Amnon come, A Specter that will strike Amazement dumb; Amnon the Proto-Martyr of the Plot, The Murder'd Amnon, their Eternal Blot; Whose too bold zeal stood like a Pharos Light, Israel to warn, and track their Deeds of Night. Till the sly Foe his unseen Game to play, Put out the Beacon ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... that had gathered at the scene of the crime had not been large. The very thought of the Nipe kept people away from places where he was known to have been. The specter of the Nipe evoked a fear, a primitive fear—fear of the dark and fear of the unknown—combined with the rational fear of a ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun. That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed, she mourned ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... closed his eyes and awaited the end. He knew that he would suffer, for he recalled the faint memories of past burns. He knew that he would suffer and die; but he did not flinch. Death is no great adventure to the jungle bred who walk hand-in-hand with the grim specter by day and lie down at his side by night through all the years of their lives. It is doubtful that the ape-man even speculated upon what came after death. As a matter of fact as his end approached, his mind was occupied by thoughts of the pretty ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... young and old sobbing bitterly when the Noa-Noa left for San Francisco though they stormed the stokers lustily when aroused. Their life is so simple in these beloved islands that the dangers of the mainland are exaggerated in their minds, and to the old the civilization of a big city appears as a specter of horrible mien. The electric cars, the crowds, the murders they read of and are told of, the bandits in the picture-shows, the fearful stranglers of Paris, the lynchers, the police, who in the films are always beating the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Again the maddened horses were driven head on to the dreaded fortress. And instantly their quarry rose to his full height, a grim specter thrilling with a murderous purpose, his arms outstretched, his guns held low, that there should be no ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... let her glance rest upon his, such as the realization of another's goodness awakens in us, especially when the goodness is undeserved and disinterested. Yet there was never any of love's surrender. Only she was glad to know herself observed by these quiet, steadfast, clear eyes, from which the red specter of passion, which had so frightened her that day upon Aebeloe, had long been banished. She believed that she had in Soelver a friend given her for life and death, a friend who could not desire her in love nor be desired, a brother whom one might trust with infinitely ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... eye roamed about the shadowy pile, it was struck with the dimly seen figure of a man on horseback, near a distant altar. I touched my companion, and pointed to it: "The specter statue!" said I. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Like a forbidden specter the skeleton of the Ferris Wheel stands out gaunt and fleshless. All around is full of ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... it down to Como across the Spluegen, put himself there at its head, and in the early spring of 1176, the fifteenth year since he had decreed the effacing of the name of Milan, was met at Legnano by the specter of Milan. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... slow lemurs of South India, small tailless nocturnal animals, somewhat resembling sloths in appearance, and almost as deliberate in their movements, except when in the act of seizing their insect prey; the Tarsier, or specter lemur, of the Malay islands, a small, long tailed nocturnal lemur, remarkable for the curious development of the hind feet, which have two of the toes very short, and with sharp claws, while the others have nails, the third toe being exceedingly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... The specter of ecclesiastical authority reared itself, and the question of sharing public school moneys with parochial schools and of reading the Bible in the public schools became a burning issue. Here and there ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... expired, regaining his consciousness before death, and blessing his devoted wife with his last breath. Ten days later the brave woman had succeeded in reaching Techichipa in so wasted a condition that she looked like a specter risen from the grave. Here by careful nursing she was at length restored to health. The gold-dust which had cost so dearly was found after a long search, beneath the carcass of the mule, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... gayety gone from her face, her eyes questioning the two wretched women. Neither could for the moment control her agitation; neither was capable of thinking. All that was in their minds was this dire specter of a month's silence. Alive, Jack or Dick would have found means to relieve ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... a long pause. The boy was wrestling with the most terrible specter that had yet laid hold upon him. "I don't believe he knows it!" he whispered half to himself. "I ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... "emigrant." They are {x} poor, they are desperately poor, so poor that a month's illness or a shut-down of the factory may push them from poverty to the abyss. They are thrifty, but can neither earn nor save enough to feel absolutely sure that the hollow-eyed specter of Want may not seize them by the throat. They are willing to work, so eager to work that at the docks and the factory gates they trample and jostle one another for the chance to work. They are the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... religion"—but it soon degenerated into an unholy league for the mutual protection of these three despotic dynasties against the dormant forces of constitutional liberty, which began to stir again in every European state as soon as the Napoleonic specter had been laid. The French Revolution had given currency to opinions which no congress of sovereigns could wholly repress, and now the policy of the "Alliance," to strangle all constitutional aspirations and rivet the chains of Bourbonism upon limbs ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... portico on a hint from William Sweetapple, he stood at a little distance, smiling. He was smiling, but as a dead man might smile. Lois could neither rise nor speak, from awe. Claude himself could neither speak nor advance. He stood like a specter—but a specter who has been in hell. The very smile was that of the specter who has no right to come out of hell, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... bear as well as her own. She knew that she had lost him forever. The coquetries she had used to win him back were impossible even to attempt. He had no use for her forgiveness or her charms. He was a mere specter in her home, doomed for his sins to walk ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... drove back toward the sanatorium. The rain was over, but a heavy fog had rolled in, so that the doctor's little car seemed to float in a sea of cloud. Now and then another car passed him, specter-like amid the grayness. Silent figures, magnified by the mist, came and went like shadow pictures on a screen. From the far distance sounded the ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... you have the money, but, my dear little girl, you are going to need every cent of it and more too before you get rid of this specter. But I couldn't charge David anything if he were a millionaire. Don't you understand,—this is the only way we doctors have of showing what we think of the big work these preachers are doing here and there around ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... shivered. A specter rose before her that she had seen before—hard-featured, domineering, unloved, unloving, chafing in ghastly solitude, alone with her sheep and her money, and the best years of her life behind her. She saw herself as her work and her thoughts would make her. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... the night he had slipped out of his Fifth Avenue home, disappeared from his business, vanished like a specter, while the domestic tragedy of the Collinses paused ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... solemn invoking of the dead man's spirit was uneffectual. The specter of poverty was too insistent, too terrible. ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... angels who were the advance guards of the destruction that was about to sweep the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into oblivion, leaving only a blazing ash-strewn tradition to scare the slumbers of the wicked, and stalk a warning specter down the paths ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... then, as a consequence, that the mind is least able to contemplate the present with equanimity, the future with fortitude, and the past without regret. Every thinking man, however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and specter-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief moment of our armor of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves as we are,—frightful chumps ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... in another section of the town. Arrived there, safe in the refuge of his commodious bed-room, sage argument would follow in the effort to attain persuasion that the terrifying vision had been but "the effect of accidental causes." Be sure, though, that our philosopher, dreading a return of the specter if he permitted food to pass his lips, would go hungry to bed ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... side-lawn near at hand and had now stopped to look towards them. It was the old Contessa, who owned the house and still occupied a part of it, and the Contessina, her daughter. He knew the former as a disconcerting and never disconcerted specter of an aged lady, with lips that trembled and eyes that never faltered, and the latter as a serious, silent, tall girl with the black hair and oval Madonna face of her country and he knew her, too, as a vague and aching disturbance in his mind, a ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... And now the specter of starvation rose up before me in strongest force. Should I try to find my way back again?—once more attempt the darkness? No! no! Too precious was the daylight. It would not do. And what could be gained? I could not possibly live to reach ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... strangers; and into every window the old garden trees thrust their dark boughs, like the arms of night-burglars; and ever and anon the nails start from the wainscot; while behind it the mice rattle like dice. Up and down in such old specter houses one loves to wander; and so much the more, if the place be haunted by ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... of her children and lover stirs her to stab the aged bigot. The novel is admirably genial, full of convincing characters and pregnant thoughts; the play much changed, and inferior to it. It teaches that Dogmatism is sterile and only Love is fertile. Only Love is powerful enough to drive away the specter that oppresses Spain. Unconscious well-doing alone aids humanity, not ostentatious aristocratic charity. It is doubtful if the elaborate allegory suggested by R. D. Pers (see above, p. xxii, note ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... about it fond dreams of what should be in the years to come, when, grown to manhood, it entered the arena of the world. A bony hand stole over his shoulder and seized the child, and looking up he beheld Death standing by his chair. He clasped his treasure close and struggled with the grisly specter, but it only mocked him, and tearing the child from him, fled into the outer void. He struggled to his feet and from his parched lips there burst a cry that echoed and reechoed through the dark woods and was hurled back from the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... And beyond, where the single door opened into a passage of Stygian darkness, that yawning entrance was thrown into hideous detail. Had any upright figure been standing there, the light would have made an unholy phosphorescent specter out ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... trusty friend AEschere is dead... The cruel hag has wreaked on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them, one the semblance of a woman; the other the specter of a man. Their haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the wind-beaten cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream plunges into the drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark and grizzly wood rooted down to the water's edge, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... problems of Spitzbergen, Morocco, Dantzig, and the feeding of the enemy populations, leaving each problem where they had found it. The moment the discussion of a contentious question approached a climax, the specter of disagreement deterred them from pursuing it to a conclusion, and they passed on quickly to some other question. And when, after months had been spent in these Penelopean labors, definite decisions respecting the peace had to be taken lest the impatient people should rise up and wrest matters ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... am, too," he answered. And instinctively, like two children, they drew close together. They both gazed at the specter sketch spread before them and drew ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... straightened himself instantly, and glanced at the three girls. As his eyes fell on Lilias and Dulcie, his expression changed to one of utter consternation and amazement, and he colored to the roots of his fair hair. They on their part gazed at him as if they had encountered a specter. ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... while the phantom of the ancient empire alone remained erect amid so many fragments. Grand in its outlines and decorations, it stood there, august, dazzling, in a halo, the unique masterpiece of art and of reason, as the ideal form of human society. For ten centuries this specter haunted the medieval epoch, and nowhere to such an extent as ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... you meant it nicely. But I fear that 'specter' would be a more appropriate word. V'la ma meilleure robe ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircase—suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to me that I should have to take. ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... there looking With a face of livid white Like the specter of the prairie That I saw one horrid night, Riding through the endless darkness Like a being doomed from birth Just to roam outside of heaven And denied a place on earth. Say one word to me! Speak, Nancy, If you have a voice and live! Tell the worst, e'en though you ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker |
