"Hocus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will receive a fraction of this money—perhaps even so large, a fraction as one half. It may be that, ere now, some obliging person about the City Hall has offered to buy the claim for a thousand dollars, and take the risk of the hocus-pocus necessary for getting it—which to him is no ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... no retainers but two, whose common names were Hocus and Pocus, but as he hated the use of common names and as no one had heard of Hocus' lineage (nor did he himself know it) he called him, Hocus, "Freedom" as being a high-sounding and moral name for a footman and Pocus (whose name was of an ordinary ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... me, my lady,' he said, 'it won't do. Mr. Churchill is a man above hocus-pocus. Well I know it that have had dealings with him. But ... well, the long and the short of it is, my lady, that you can't touch pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people'll think you've been defiled—those that don't know you. The foreign nations are all very well, and the grand ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... in Phrase, and quack Destruction; Or roar like Marshal, that Geneva Bull, Hell and Damnation a Pulpit full: Yet to express a Scot, to play that Prize, Not all those Mouth-Granadoes can suffice. Before a Scot can properly be curst, I must, like Hocus, swallow Daggers first. Scots are like Witches; do but whet your Pen, Scratch till the Blood comes, they'll ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... whenever they met; and finally consulted him respecting the barony of Valence which had been in the old Fitz-Warene and Mowbray families and to which it was thought the present earl might prefer some hocus-pocus claim through his deceased mother; so that however recent was his date as an English earl, he might figure on the roll as a Plantagenet baron, which in the course of another century would complete the grand mystification of high nobility. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... and a regiment of Oregon mounted volunteers under command of Colonel James W. Nesmith—subsequently for several years United States Senator from Oregon. The whole force was under the command of Major Rains, Fourth Infantry, who, in order that he might rank Nesmith, by some hocus-pocus had been made a brigadier-general, under an appointment from the ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... in trying! A pound's a pound there's no denying; But think what thousands and thousands of pounds We pay for nothing but hearing sounds: Sounds of Equity, Justice, and Law, Parliamentary jabber and jaw, Pious cant and moral saw, Hocus-pocus, and Nong-tong-paw, And empty sounds not worth a straw; Why it costs a guinea, as I'm a sinner, To hear the sounds at a Public Dinner! One pound one thrown into the puddle, To listen to Fiddle, Faddle, and Fuddle! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... bring into effect. But, in its real, and therefore higher, sense, it means to dedicate, consecrate, and initiate into the arcana of the temple mysteries. But, in the present day it means a piece of imposture, connected with some magical hocus pocus of the ignorant and superstitious mind, a vulgar charm, that is supposed to bring the owner thereof some material benefit, irrespective of his mental, magnetic, and moral condition, "and," says the learned ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Rochus They made him stand and wait his doom; And, as if he were condemned to the tomb, Began to mutter their hocus-pocus. First, the Mass for the Dead they chanted, Then three times laid upon his head A shovelful of churchyard clay, Saying to him, as he stood undaunted, "This is a sign that thou art dead, So in thy heart be penitent!" And forth from the chapel door ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... had a bad case of rheumatism, and your physician came to your bedside and exclaimed loudly, "Hocus pocus, toutus talonteus, vade celeriter jubeo! You are cured." What would you think, what would you do, and what fee would you pay him? Probably, in spite of your aches and pangs, you would make astonishing speed—for a rheumatic person—in proffering him the entire room to himself. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... not particularly anxious to meet Acton, for Phil, in the holidays, had given Jack a pretty correct inkling of Acton's character, and he began to see—in fact, he did see—that Raffles and the shooting and the billiards, and the hocus pocus of "hedging on Grape Shot," and the trip to London, etc., was only one involved, elaborate plot to strike at Phil. Jack now fully realized that he had played a very innocent fly to Acton's consummate spider, and he now, when there wasn't ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... all day long, except at calling-hours, and then Sophie dresses herself and comes down. Aunt Zeruah insists upon it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... let a lot of the men go, they might get all chawed up, and it wouldn't help the boy any, so he thinks we kin get him out of their hands by some hocus pocus ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... a laugh to raise! Pray don't be so fastidious! She But as a leech, her hocus-pocus plays, That well with you her potion may agree. (He compels FAUST ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... woman. A man has to have women in his life no matter how much you talk about it—but I took the kind with the price-tag because when you paid them you were through. I could have married a dozen times if I'd wanted but I didn't want—that old hocus-pocus of tradition was still with me, stronger than death—I thought I knew the kind of wife I wanted and ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... Ferrary, in single combat; whereupon, as might reasonably be expected, he would, in the twinkling of a farthing rushlight, fall down as dead as a bag of sand; yet, by their rictum-ticktum, rise-up-Jack, slight-of-hand, hocus-pocus way, would be on his legs, brushing the stour from his breeches knees, before the green curtain was half-way down. James Batter himself once told me, that, when he was a laddie, he saw one of these clanjamphrey go in behind the scenes ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... compel dieting and exercise. She had the tact which he lacked; she made the allowances for human nature's ignorance and superstition which he refused to make; she lessened the hardship of taking her common-sense prescriptions by veiling them in medical hocus-pocus—a compromise of the disagreeable truth which her father had always inveighed against as both immoral ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... As for me, my scepticism was to me robur et aes triplex. I disposed of the snake, put out the gas; and down we three sat, amid profound darkness, like three male witches in "Macbeth," having previously locked the door to prevent any one disturbing our hocus-pocus. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction. We have been in a grievous error: we thought that we had been at war with rebels against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France, friends and allies to the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... source of the sound now. It came from inside the black walls of Layroh's tent, pitched there in its usual isolation on a slight rise fifty yards from the sleeping group. Foster grunted disgustedly to himself. More of Layroh's scientific hocus-pocus! The man seemed to go out of his way to add new phases of mystery to this crazy expedition of his through the barren ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... a step toward the monk; peremptorily) Enough now! Stop your hocus-pocus. You have played your trick. Now stop, or I'll knock all that jugglery out of ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... scrambling up again, and scratching his broken head,) to be sure I have heard of sleight-of-hand, hocus-pocus and sich like; but by gum this here be a new manouvre called sleight of legs; however as no boanes be broken between us, I'll endeavour to make use on 'em once more in following the game in view: so ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... valuable mineral on earth is mud. Diamonds and rubies are just nowhere by comparison. I don't mean weight for weight, of course—mud is 'cheap as dirt,' to buy in small quantities—but aggregate for aggregate. Quite literally, and without hocus-pocus of any sort, the money valuation of the mud in the world must outnumber many thousand times the money valuation of all the other minerals put together. Only we reckon it usually not by the ton, but by the acre, though the acre ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... and have your little talk with the landlady or take whatever other means suggest themselves for luring this girl from her room. I will summon Hazen and hold him very closely under my eye till the whole affair is over. He shall get no chance for any hocus-pocus business, not while I have charge of your interests. He shall do just what he has laid out for himself and nothing more; you may rely ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... on. "That's just it. The mediums are so nonchalant while causing these marvels that they fail to convince. Why, when I was holding a slate in order that they might write upon it, I minded the scratching no more than a clock a-ticking, they had made me that careless of their hocus-pocus. A voice in my ear can't make me start, and nothing, absolutely nothing, can now 'rouse my fell of hair.' You put a potato in the ashes of the hearth and it will ultimately pop into something to eat. You put a medium in a dark place ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... missionaries in the country, doing good work in a funny, fussy, rigorous fashion of their own. They'd raise a dickens of a hocus-pocus back in Germany if they once suspected their government of playing that game. No. But Germany intends to stand off the other powers, while Turks tackle the Armenians; and the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... some queer, hocus-pocus business on foot," muttered Hal, bitterly. "But I don't believe Jack feels much like telling us anything ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... privileges, candles, bells, votive tablets, and churches, but say that a Christian life consists in faith and love. Let us keep this up for two years and you will see where pope, bishop, monks, nuns, and all the hocus-pocus of the papal government will be; it will vanish away like smoke." God, Luther urged, has left us free to choose whether we shall marry, become monks, fast, confess, or place images in the churches. These things are not vital to salvation, and each may ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man, and his country the primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is, that the said Georgian skull, after ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... counting-house to laboratory, and studied Sanscrit for recreation, moriturus te saluto. And thou, too, Markus, with thy boy's body, and thy old man's look, and thy encyclopaedic, inorganic mind; and thou, O Gans, with thy too organic Hegelian hocus-pocus. Yes, the Rabbis were right, and the baptismal font had us at last; but surely God counts the will to do, and is more pleased with great-hearted dreams than with the deeds of the white-hearted burghers of virtue, whose goodness is essence of gendarmerie. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... it, then. She wasn't his wife any more. A sort of hocus-pocus ... now you are my wife, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... hocus-pocus side of the case," he replied, "turns on matters Egyptian, doesn't it? Very well. Who else, that we know about, is associated, or ever has been ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Why, in Saint Rochus They made him stand, and wait his doom; And, as if he were condemned to the tomb, Began to mutter their hocus pocus. First, the Mass for the Dead they chaunted. Then three times laid upon his head A shovelful of church-yard clay, Saying to him, as he stood undaunted, "This is a sign that thou art dead, So in thy heart be penitent!" ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... queried: for I did not understand all this hocus-pocus of locating any given spot in the Iowa prairies ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Hurtali, that was a brave eater of pottage, and reigned in the time of the flood; Who begat Nembroth, Who begat Atlas, that with his shoulders kept the sky from falling; Who begat Goliah, Who begat Erix, that invented the hocus pocus plays of legerdemain; Who begat Titius, Who begat Eryon, Who begat Polyphemus, Who begat Cacus, Who begat Etion, the first man that ever had the pox, for not drinking fresh in summer, as Bartachin witnesseth; Who begat Enceladus, Who begat ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... towards this plea: besides, before the time of re-election comes about, these inconvenient scruples may, in the din of new contests, be forgotten, or remembered only to be forgiven, and, by the hocus pocus of party, even metamorphosed into a recommendation. When, then, it is so easy to take shelter behind the ark of the constitution, ought we to enlarge the limits of this place of refuge for ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Pipes and iron safes and hocus-pocus! But I do not care!" He turned to Doloria and, taking one of her hands, said: "You, mon ami, shall find your heart's best desire. It is I who say it!—I, who have the authority!" The way he clung to that ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... looked on. Nor was the whole truth told by a long way, but a garbled version about foreign coves who worked the business and bolted, and a doting father who never consented to it—and such a hash-up and hocus-pocus as would ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... everywhere in the utmost confusion; and, by the way, they have never been able to find the balance since that time, and all the fine speeches upon the subject, with which your newspapers are every now and then filled, are all mere hocus-pocus and rhodomontade. However, the caldron was soon set on, and the air was darkened by witches riding on broomsticks, bringing a couple of folios under each arm, and across each shoulder. I remember the time exactly: it was just as the council of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... confess, to be sustained in their main features by my own views and researches here on the ground and in the midst of the Indians, and men will rise to sustain the old views—the original literary mummery and philological hocus-pocus based on the papers and letters and blunders of Heckewelder. There was a great predisposition to admire and overrate everything relative to Indian history and language, as detailed by this good and sincere missionary in his retirement ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... law, was held up in scorn in ballads and mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his hands when the priest elevated the host. The most sacred words of the old worship, the words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery as "Hocus-pocus." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... which I had expended no little pains, he read it attentively, and then remarked 'Unless one's thought pack more neatly in verse than in prose, it is wiser to refrain. Commonplace gains nothing by being translated into rhyme, for it is something which no hocus-pocus can transubstantiate with the real presence of living thought. You entitle your piece, "My Mother's Grave," and expend four pages of useful paper in detailing your emotions there. But, my dear sir, watering does not improve the quality of ink, even ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... experience, that one would be justified in believing either that one's senses were deluded, or that one had not really got to the bottom of the phenomenon. Of course, if one could vary the conditions, if one could take a little silex, and by a little hocus-pocus a la crosse, galvanise a baby out of it as often as one pleased, all the philosopher could do would be to hold up his hands and cry, "God is great." But short of evidence of this kind, I don't mean to believe anything of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... "Hocus-pocus Larifari!" cried Heinrich within, and gave the tankard to a half-grown fellow, of the age between ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... I thy satire's darts To gie the rascals their deserts, I'd rip their rotten, hollow hearts, An' tell aloud Their jugglin' hocus-pocus arts To cheat ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... for he loved not mysteries. "You don't believe any nonsense of that sort, do you? There's nothing in the least mystical in the kind of sympathy that exists between Cyril and myself. It's all purely physical. We're very like one another. But that's all. There's none of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... rudimental organs and similarity of plan, because it has pleased the Creator to set before Himself a "divine exemplar or archetype," and to copy it in His works; and somewhat ill, those who hold this view imply, in some of them. That such verbal hocus-pocus should be received as science will one day be regarded as evidence of the low state of intelligence in the nineteenth century, just as we amuse ourselves with the phraseology about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... went on. "This Bentwood is a doctor who is an expert in the miracles and the hocus pocus of the East. The drug they administered to you is not known in England; the thing has never been seen here. I understand that they could have kept you in a state of suspended animation as long as they pleased. But they desired ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... near which we were outspanned, I took off my shirt to have a good wash, still chuckling at the memory of all the hocus-pocus of my old friend, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... to the supper-room, where she found, as she had expected, Mrs. Sutton in the height of business, directing the setting of the breakfast-table, clearing away the debris of the evening feast, and counting the silver with unusual care, lest a stray fork or spoon had, by some hocus-pocus known to the class, been slipped into the pocket of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... suspected the Papisher of having had a hand in the whole of that black and midnight business, in which the stocks had been broken, bunged up, and consigned to perdition, and that the Papisher had the evil reputation of dabbling in the Black Art, the hocus-pocus way in which the Lenny he had incarcerated was transformed into the doctor he found, conjoined with the peculiarly strange eldrich and Mephistophelean physiognomy and person of Riccabocca, could not but ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is put right as far as possible. A warm at the sanctum's fire diminishes the purple in Miss Parkington's cheeks; and the maid, by some hocus-pocus peculiar to her craft, again inflates Miss Waters into a balloon, and stitches up Miss Brindle's flounces and "gathers." The ladies join their respective gentlemen, who have been cooling their toes and uttering warm anathemas in the hall; and the party sail, arm-in-arm, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... it. And another thing, I won't have her thumped about all over the chest, or any hocus-pocus of the sort. She has bronchitis and asthma, and that's all. If you can cure it well and good. But it only weakens her to have you tapping and listening, and it does no ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Jonas Billings from the crowd. "Chinese dukes, eh! What's it all about?" "Reg'lar hocus-pocus," remarked the vagabond brother of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... feared," he said with a tipsy grin, "but I had forgotten what I carry. I have a hocus-pocus here "—he touched his breast—"written by a wise man in Ravenna, and sealed with a dead Goth's hand, that is proof against devil or dam! And I ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... worshiped the truth, but he did not. He knew that the truth was everything, but a lie came that seemed better than the truth. In his soul he knew he was not acting truly; that had he honestly loved the truth, he would not have played hocus-pocus with metaphysics and logic, but would have made haste to a manly conclusion. He took the package, and on his way to the dining-room, dropped it into the ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... above sea-level, with abundance of wild grapes and other fruits, yams, nuts, flax, tobacco, etc.; but the travelling was difficult owing to the high grass. The people are pleasant-featured and good-natured, and the chief, Katchiba, maintains his authority by a species of hocus-pocus, or sorcery. He is a merry soul, has a multiplicity of wives—a bevy in each village—so that when he travels through his kingdom he is always at home. His children number 116, and the government is quite ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... these things are but trifles to the Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists, who profess to project their astral bodies, and play many other hocus pocus tricks of transmitting voices and articles to immense distances. They may therefore be able to explain these phenomena, I cannot; still I have the belief that there is some spirit-force which can and does act as a medium between distant persons who are ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... presentation of the floral part of Nature's great horticultural show. She alone is competent to say whether there is any available remedy for the stained breadth in Jane's dress,—whether the fatal spot by any magical hocus-pocus can be cut out from the fulness, or turned up and smothered from view in the gathers, or concealed by some new fashion of trimming falling with generous appropriateness exactly across the fatal weak point. She can tell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Mulinuu, as Becker himself owns, they had infringed the treaties, and Sewall entered protest twice. There were two ways of escaping this dilemma: one was to withdraw the warriors; the other, by some hocus-pocus, to abrogate the neutrality. And the second had subsidiary advantages: it would restore the taxes of the richest district in the islands to the Samoan king; and it would enable them to substitute over the royal seat the flag of Germany for the new flag of Tamasese. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... young Barnacle had 'got up' the Department in a private secretaryship, that he might be ready for any little bit of fat that came to hand; and he fully understood the Department to be a politico-diplomatic hocus pocus piece of machinery for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the snobs. This dashing young Barnacle, in a word, was likely to become a statesman, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... once a Greek asked I would fain ask too, Who knows if all the Spectacle be true, Or an illusion of the gods [the Will, To wit] some hocus-pocus to fulfil? ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the girls!" he put in (his ears evidently are as sharp as mine); "the inquiries having proceeded from Franklin, it was only natural for me to suspect that he was trying to mislead us by some hocus-pocus story. So I visited the girls. That I had difficulty in getting to the root of the matter is to their credit, Miss Butterworth, seeing that you had made ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... may be in the toad. It might be a real toad (though actuated and guided by a daemon) which was cut in pieces, and that also which was whipt about, and at last snatcht out of sight (as if it had vanished) by these aerial hocus-pocus's. And if some juglers have tricks to take hot coals into their mouth without hurt, certainly it is not surprising that some small attempt did not suffice to burn that toad. That such a toad, sent by a witch and crawling up the body of the man of the house as he sate by the ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... disgust at the cheap hocus-pocus of it—but the next moment a more violent emotion swept over him as he saw Diane seized and borne swiftly to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... I ask you, Professor Hocus Pocus, or whatever your name is, whom you are calling ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... taken seriously. Behind the hocus-pocus of such fine-sounding words, the bombast, the theatrical clash and clang of the swords and pasteboard helmets, there was always the incurable futility of a Sardou, the intrepid vaudevillist, playing Punch ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... began her hocus pocus by throwing out all the cards in the pack under seven. She shuffled the rest with her left hand for luck; and then she gave them to me to cut. "Wi' yer left hand, Francie. Mind that! Pet your trust in Proavidence—but dinna forget that your luck's in yer left hand!" A long and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the laughing; and I wouldna wonder but what that was the next best. But see to the pair of them! If I didna feel just sure of the lassie, and that she was awful pleased and chief with Alan, I would think there was some kind of hocus-pocus about yon." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may be the more impressive, and tell more effectually. Yet I wish sincerely to help poor Hogg, and have written to Lockhart about it. It may be my own desolate feelings—it may be the apprehension of evil from this political hocus-pocus, but I have seldom felt more moody and uncomfortable than while writing these lines. I have walked, too, but without effect. W. Laidlaw, whose very ingenious mind is delighted with all novelties, talked nonsense about the new government, in which men are to resign ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... from the wings and crosses the stage, his shoes squeaking hideously at each step. Arriving at the piano, he opens it with solemn slowness. The job seems so absurdly trivial, even to so mean an understanding, that he can't refrain from glorifying it with a bit of hocus-pocus. This takes the form of a careful adjustment of a mysterious something within the instrument. He reaches in, pauses a moment as if in doubt, reaches in again, and then permits a faint smile of conscious sapience and efficiency to illuminate his face. All of this accomplished, he ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... stock early in the winter." Dave snickered slowly. "And I'm the pertickler party that hocus-pocused 'em." ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... gave me!" said Chunk, broadening his grin; "well, it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, 'Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square—don't try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.' And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket. And then my lamps fall on another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin' in a proper affection toward his comin' son-in-law, so I watches my chance and dumps ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... danger of being betrayed into any unseemly manifestations of religious fervour. We had not gathered together at that performance to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles and sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly respected Anglican First Cause—undemonstrative, gentlemanly and conscientious—whom, without loss of self-respect, we ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... perfection; for this reason I need music. But Wagner makes one ill—What do I care about the theatre? What do I care about the spasms of its moral ecstasies in which the mob—and who is not the mob to-day?—rejoices? What do I care about the whole pantomimic hocus-pocus of the actor? You are beginning to see that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart. For the stage, this mob art par excellence, my soul has that deepest scorn felt by every artist to-day. With a stage success a man sinks to such an extent in my esteem as to drop out of ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... cases where 'sober, hard-working miners toiled for years, or even a lifetime, without having been able to draw a single dollar, or but few dollars in actual cash,' in 'debt until the day they died;' refuse to fix the wages in advance, but pay them upon some hocus-pocus sliding-scale, varying with the selling price in New York, which the railway slides to suit itself; and most extraordinary of all, refuse to let the miners know the prices on which their living slides, a 'fraud,'" says the report of Congress, "on its face" (pp. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... hocus-pocus," he said, "you know, I believe you. If two fellows were having a pitched battle most of the girls I know would quietly faint or run, but I do believe that you would stand by and help a fellow if he ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Comstockery conjure decency into the stomach and indecency into the bowels? But how rejoiced we should be that it is no worse than indecent to speak of the receptacle of the intestines by its common name. By some hocus pocus of which Comstockery is easily capable it might have been obscene to speak of the digestive process or of any of the digestive organs. We might easily have been taught that digestion was a moral matter, not to be talked of, not to be studied; ignorance of which was ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... more violently: "In this way the whole world, and above all my glorious mountains, with their glittering subterraneous chambers, will be hocus-pocust into mere store-houses, wretcheder ones than if they were made of wood, into miserable wareshops and stalls. What then would the dwarfish sprites, and the mighty mountain-spirit, and all the goblins and elvish imps, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... any hocus-pocus of electricity or viscous fluids would make a living cell.... Nothing approaching to a cell of living creature has ever yet been made.... No artificial process whatever could make ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... was a session devoted merely to ways and means. But she's not saying hocus-pocus and stirring caldrons on his account, you may be certain. She admitted that he was ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... is, ma'am," said Kantwise, "only this, you know, if I hocus you, why you hocus me in return; so it isn't so ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... again! no harm in trying! A pound's a pound, there's no denying; But think what thousands and thousands of pounds We pay for nothing but hearing sounds: Sounds of Equity, Justice, and Law, Parliamentary jabber and jaw, Pious cant, and moral saw, Hocus-pocus, and Nong-tong-paw, And empty sounds not worth a straw; Why, it costs a guinea, as I'm a sinner, To hear the sounds at a public dinner! One pound one thrown into the puddle, To listen to Fiddle, Faddle, and Fuddle! Not to forget the sounds we buy From those who sell their sounds so high, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... hardest-headed, the wittiest, and most sceptical men in France' (a well-merited description), at a seance with Home. Mr. Aide's prejudice, M. Karr's hard-headed scepticism, prove them witnesses not biassed in favour of hocus-pocus. ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the throne of God. The things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian things—the abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly "innocence" that was Greek. If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His dreams were ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... serve you in anything. What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible,—that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that. No subtlest hocus-pocus of "reason" versus "understanding" will avail for that feat;—and it is terribly perilous to try it ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... He's fled back to his cell and stands there as dignified as if he was going to lay a cornerstone. He's a grave rebuke to the whole situation, as you might say. Then the Judge and Cale go through some kind of a hocus-pocus talk, winding up with both of them saying 'Not guilty!' in a loud voice; and Myron says to Pete: 'There! You had your trial; now get out of ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... does he suppose all this hocus-pocus is going to do us?" muttered Harry irritably, "as if an old fire could tell us anything we didn't know already. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... order to damp his too certain expectation for a conviction. Now it needed not repetition, for it forced itself upon his consciousness, and he seemed to KNOW, even before the jury retired to consult, that by some trick, some negligence, some miserable hocus-pocus, the murderer of his child, his darling, his Absalom, who had never rebelled—the slayer of his unburied boy would slip through the fangs of justice, and walk free and unscathed over that earth where his son would never more ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the worst Anscombe stood to lose nothing, I shrugged my shoulders and held my tongue. It was Marnham's deal, and although he was somewhat in the shadow of the hanging lamp and the candles had guttered out, I distinctly saw him play some hocus-pocus with the cards, but in the circumstances made no protest. As it chanced he must have hocus-pocused them wrong, for though his hand was full of trumps, Rodd held nothing at all. The battle that ensued was quite ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... O! mega mar, hocus the baldmare has cantedme ontoss; * Philladram sukami, some Spirit offerme to suckon. Dear Hokey behasty, forbum sufferssore by a Thumpon't; No baldmare my Gammon ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... devoured more in three minutes than a million of maggots could have done in three weeks. After cheese comes nothing; then all we desired was a clear stage and no favour; accordingly everything was whipped away in a trice by so cleanly a conveyance, that no juggler by virtue of Hocus Pocus could have conjured away balls with more dexterity. All our empty plates and dishes were in an instant changed into full quarts of purple nectar and unsullied glasses. Then a bumper to the Queen led the van of our good wishes, another to the Church Established, a third ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... presented by the local Fire Brigade; a Flying Machine of "proved stability. Might be used as a bathing tent;" a National Theatre, "with Cold Water Douche in Basement for reception of English Dramatists;" Recipe for building a Navy, without paying for it, "Gift of that great Financial Expert, Sir Hocus Pocus;" one Conscientious Income Taxpayer, "has been driven by a Lady;" two Socialists in agreement as to what it means, "smaller one slightly damaged;" one Contented Farmer, "Babylonian Period;" and one extra-sized bottle, "Solution of ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in which infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the various submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float idle, or resume the occupations of their life on earth, it would be wearisome to tell. One story I give, for it is singular in itself, is well-known in Tahiti, and has this ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hocus-pocus about the ha'nt, that is easily explained. He needed a scapegoat on whom to turn the blame when the bonds should disappear; so he and this Cat-Eye Mose between them invented a ghost. The negro ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... wish to model myself on my own father who dressed up as a shipmaster for my sake and swindled a slave-dealer out of a girl I was in love with. He felt no shame at going in for hocus-pocus at his time of life, and buying his son's affection, mine, by his kindnesses. These methods of my father's I have resolved to ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... host pursued, "we can be good friends all the same. We don't need a hocus-pocus of false sentiment. We are men, aren't we?—men of sublime good sense." And just here, as the old man looked at me, the pressure of his hands deepened to a convulsive grasp, and the bloodless mask of his countenance was suddenly distorted with a nameless fear. "Ah, my dear young man!" ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... "come and try. Now, hold it so while I say the spell," and I muttered some hocus-pocus, then directed it towards certain of the Mazitu who were gathering again. "There! Look! Look! You have hit them in the eye. You are a master of magic. They run, they run!" and run they did indeed. "Is there anyone yonder ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... a truckling and time-serving judge might do. And, indeed, in a time when justice is, in all its branches, so completely corrupted, I would rather lose my life by open military violence, than be conjured out of it by the hocus-pocus of some arbitrary lawyer, who lends the knowledge he has of the statutes made for our protection, to wrest them ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott |
