"Preternaturally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has the fever." I wondered if some fiend were lurking by my side, who kept saying the words over and over in my ear. With that indescribable mixture of dulled and preternaturally sharpened sense which often marks the first moments of such distress, I walked slowly to my room, and in a short time had made all the necessary preparation for leaving home. I felt like a thief as I stole slowly ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Lanier," almost wailed the colonel, as at last that young gentleman, likewise singed and scorched and soaked and dripping, yet preternaturally cool for one just out of a blazing hell, found his feet and faced his commander—"in God's name, why didn't you jump when they told you? There ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... was almost as pale as Eva's own, but pale brown, the tint of rich ivory. His eyes were preternaturally bright. And they never glanced my way, but flew straight to Eva, and rested on her very humbly and sadly, as her two hands gripped the arms of the chair, and she leant forward in horror ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... which in scorn of his wife he had spread on a hard wooden bench. His hands and feet turned cold, his eyes glowed, and the power to move even a finger had wholly deserted him; only his lips twitched, and his inward eye, looking back on the past with preternaturally sharpened vision, saw, far away and beyond, the last ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the smallest child would know more about books than I did; and there was hardly a nondescript face to be seen. All could be classified in historic Scottish types. But the whitewashed, thatched cottages in the suburbs would have looked Irish if they had not been too preternaturally clean. In the streets of Newton-Stewart there was not so much as a stray stick or bit of paper. It looked to me a deeply religious place, and Basil said perhaps it was trying to be worthy of St. Ninian, who first brought Christianity to Scotland. He was a native of the Solway shore, but went to ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his head piously several times, while the pores of his fat visage exuded holy oil. Duprez sniggered secretly. Macfarlane looked preternaturally solemn. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... of its hiding-place, and, dashing down over its rocky bed, rushed impetuous over the sloping country, till, its force being spent, it waded tediously through the slushing reeds of the hill-land again, and so rolled down to sea. For, while I stood there, it seemed as if my vision were preternaturally sharpened, and I followed the bright river in its course, through the alternating marsh and desert,—through the land where Zeus went banqueting among the blameless Ethiopians, —through the land where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the moment caused her heart to stop beating and paralysed her with fear. It was a great gaunt cinnamon bear, which, seated on its haunches, was watching her with a look of comical surprise upon its preternaturally shrewd, human-like face. ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... time for one—a' excellent time," said Joseph Poorgrass, straightening his back; for he, like some of the others, had a way of resting a while from his labour on such hot days for reasons preternaturally small; of which Cain Ball's advent on a week-day in his Sunday-clothes was one of the first magnitude. "Twas a bad leg allowed me to read the Pilgrim's Progress, and Mark Clark learnt All-Fours ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... always represented as diaphanous, and preternaturally tall—only the upper part of the figure being distinctly outlined, and the lower part fading utterly away. As the Japanese say, 'a ghost has no feet': its appearance is like an exhalation, which becomes visible only at a certain distance above the ground; and it wavers arid lengthens and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... he said: "he seems to me, one half, blind—I mean one half of all he looks at is dark—preternaturally bright and vivid all the rest; and the worst of it is, it seems wilful. I can't get him—I mean he won't—I've had some experience of him as a physician, but I look on him as, in that sense, no better than a paralytic ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... working of terror on the human mind. Some it renders incapable of thought or action, paralysing their limbs and stagnating the blood in their veins; such creatures die in anticipating death. Others under the stress of that grim passion have their wits preternaturally sharpened. The instinct of self-preservation assumes command of all their senses, and urges them to swift and ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... she seemed not to see anything very distinctly: even the loved form took on a strange and ghostlike shape. He now looked preternaturally tall, and there was a mist between her ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... man a few years his senior, with a slightly trimmed beard on his dark, weather-beaten cheeks, well-cut features, a quick, observant eye, and a sailor's upward glance and bearing. The stranger saw a thin, youthful, anxious, yet refined and handsome face beneath straggling damp curls, and dark eyes preternaturally bright with suffering. Perhaps his experienced ear, too, detected some harmony with ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... inquiry from all around, then bows and gestures and murmurs of disavowal. I alone remained irresponsive, for at that very moment every fibre of my being was strained to nervous rigidity. My senses were preternaturally at work. The marble column against which I was leaning with seeming carelessness, vibrated under my hand. Within its circular depths I could see Abdul descending stealthily and slowly, his one free arm pressing ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... feel that, unknown to him, she was his guardian angel. She began to think about the future, and almost to forget Andy and the possible and very great peril of the present, when, shortly before the hour of one, all her senses were preternaturally excited by the sound of a footfall. It was a very soft footfall—the noise made by a bare foot. Nora heard it just where the shadow was deepest. She stood up now; she knew that, from her present position, the one who was making this dead sort of heavy ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... is characteristic (Fig. 200). The enormous dome of the skull surmounts a puny and preternaturally old face; the eyes are pushed downwards and forwards by the pressure on the orbital plates, and the eyebrows are displaced upwards. The head rolls helplessly from side to side; the child moans and cries a great deal; and vomiting is often a prominent symptom. In most cases the intelligence ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... sense of the word been her boy. His feelings for her had passed from the distrust of childhood to the lofty contempt of a schoolboy for all things preternaturally virtuous, finally settling down into the more tolerant contempt of manhood. The dead, however, have perforce to accept much affection which they scornfully refused ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... till the signal should be given, drawing trembling fingers across his mouth. Winston, brawny, solid, unperturbed, his hands behind his back, waited immovably planted on his feet with all the gravity of a statue, his eyes preternaturally watchful, keeping Kelly—whom he had divined had some "funny business" on hand—perpetually in sight. The Porteous trio—Fairchild, Paterson, and Goodlock—as if unalarmed, unassailable, all but turned their backs to ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... up and listened. With preternaturally sharp senses she heard the movement of all the darkness that swirled outside. For a moment she lay still. Then she went to the window. She heard the sharp rain, and the deep running of water. She knew ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... adversary of his parent. Finally, the trial of the new car: an engine of destruction such as Lancelot had never dreamed of. It was admittedly too high-powered for England; you were across the county in about a minute. And then he had departed in a kind of thunderstorm of his own making. Lancelot, preternaturally moved, said to his mother, "I say, Mamma, what a man—eh?" She, lightly, "Yes, isn't he wonderful?" and Lancelot, with a snort: "A man? Ten rather small men—easily." And James, poor James, ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... upon Nature. Here, for instance, is Chevalier Ziegler's picture of "St. Luke painting the Virgin." St. Luke has a monk's dress on, embroidered, however, smartly round the sleeves. The Virgin sits in an immense yellow-ochre halo, with her son in her arms. She looks preternaturally solemn; as does St. Luke, who is eying his paint-brush with an intense ominous mystical look. They call this Catholic art. There is nothing, my dear friend, more easy in life. First take your colors, and rub them down clean,—bright carmine, bright yellow, bright sienna, bright ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of humanity, a starved, slender elf with a freckled face, wizened and peaked, which at times looked a thousand years old. It reminded you of the face of one of those preternaturally aged monkeys that sit motionless in a dark corner of the cage, oppressed with the sins and sorrows of a hundred centuries. And yet it mustn't be supposed that Patsy was either a pessimist or a misanthrope. Patsy's gray Irish eye could sparkle merrily ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... attackable in that way, by diagrams made roughly, and seen to grow under the lecturer's hand. In this manner you, at any rate, insure the co-operation of the student to a certain extent. He cannot leave the lecture-room entirely empty if the taking of notes is enforced; and a student must be preternaturally dull and mechanical, if he can take notes and hear them properly explained, and yet ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... seemed to be always going to perdition, but made the horses do apparently impossible things with absolute certainty; and the pretty tiny boy who came to help his uncle, and was so clever, and so preternaturally quiet, and so very small: then the road through the mountain passes, seven or eight feet wide, with a precipice above and below, up which the little horses scrambled; while big lizards, with green heads and chocolate ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... Madame Delaherche was already there, for she was always on foot at daybreak, notwithstanding she was seventy-eight years old. Her hair was snowy white; in her long, lean face was a nose almost preternaturally thin and sharp and a mouth that had long since forgotten how to laugh. She rose, and with stately politeness invited the captain to be seated before one of the cups of cafe au lait ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... his will at another table, whither Mr. Fountain removed him and parchments on pretense of inspecting the leases, listened with hearing preternaturally ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... was preternaturally grave as he turned to the little music teacher. "I hope, Miss Marie, that you wear rubber heels on your shoes," he ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... Bees, ed. 1724, p. 179), 'that the real pleasures of all men in nature are worldly and sensual, if we judge from their practice; I say all men in nature, because devout Christians, who alone are to be excepted here, being regenerated and preternaturally assisted by the divine grace, cannot be said to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and bundles in the endeavour to be preternaturally quiet, the crew poured into the warm kitchen. Bearded Oliver, oldest of the clan; stout Edson, big Ralph, tall and slender Guy—and the two daughters of the house, Carolyn, growing plump and rosy at thirty; Nan, slim and girlish at twenty-four—they were all there. Marietta ...
— On Christmas Day in the Morning • Grace S. Richmond
... all very peaceful and beautiful, however, and very welcome to eyes that had not looked upon sun, moon, or star for eight whole nights and days, and whose ears had grown hardened to the ceaseless clamour of the gale. Nature, indeed, seemed preternaturally quiet, as though exhausted with her previous violence or desirous of wiping out the remembrance of it; just as small humanity after an outbreak endeavours at times to purge the memory of its offence by display ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... forms these into platoons, who prime and load, and seem preternaturally changed from what they were into ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... us to judge of these things. Perhaps if he had been maintained at the national expense to do that for which he was preternaturally fitted, he might have worn himself out prematurely; whereas by giving him routine work the scientific world got the benefit of his matured wisdom and experience. It was no small matter to the young Royal Society to be able to have him as their President for twenty-four years. His portrait ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... feeling of a recruit who for the first time is taking part in a brilliant and complicated manoeuvre. Tom and Susan Peters flit across the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the Ewanses,—all of whom had come up in a special car; Ralph Hambleton was "best man," looking preternaturally tall in his frock-coat: and his manner, throughout the whole proceeding, was one of good-natured tolerance toward a folly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... perfectly well—never was better in my life," he said, becoming all at once preternaturally grave. "You were once in the Pacific—lived on ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... this time. Superintendent Sutherland entered first, then the constable, and Carrington last. The superintendent went straight up to the lawyer, his large face preternaturally solemn. Touching him on the shoulder ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... appeared to the poor wretch who, since uncountable time, had set eyes on none but the most miserable dregs of struggling humanity, who had seen little else but rags, and faces either cruel or wretched. This man was clad in a huge caped coat, which made his powerful figure seem preternaturally large. His hair was fair and slightly curly above his low, square brow; the eyes beneath their heavy lids looked down on ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... moment they were punched up, and fell flat the moment the punching was remitted. I did all I could for them, but, having Daniel in tow, dared not sail too near the edge of the Doldrums, lest he should drop into sympathetic stagnation and be taken preternaturally bashful, with his sails all aback, just as I wanted to carry him gallantly into action with some clipper-built cruiser of a nice young lady. Finally, Lu bethought herself of that last plank of drowning conversationists, the photograph album. All the dejected ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... really born either hopelessly idle, or preternaturally industrious. They may move in one direction or the other as will or circumstances dictate, but it is open to any man to work. Hogarth's industrious and idle apprentice point a moral, but they do not tell a true tale. The real trouble about industry is ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... the first day, and the second was very like it, so that it is not necessary to describe it in detail in order to produce an impression of profound dulness in the reader's mind. Lushington's hair continued to be as preternaturally smooth as before, his beard was as glossy and his complexion as blooming and child-like, and yet the look of pain that Margaret had seen in his face was there most of the time ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... but Ray is never quite himself until he throws his leg over the horse he loves. He is facile princeps the light rider of the regiment, and to this claim there are none to say him nay. A tip-top soldier too is Ray. Keen on the scout, tireless on the trail, daring to a fault in action, and either preternaturally cool or enthusiastically excited when under fire. He is a man the rank and file swear by and love. "You never hear Loot'nant Ray saying 'Go in there, fellers.' 'Tis always, 'Come on, boys.' That's why I like him," is the way Sergeant Moriarty puts it. Among his comrades, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... sees people's lips move and their gestures. How difficult it is to imagine such a state of existence! As for me, I suffer from the opposite inconvenience of hearing too well. When I am unwell my hearing is preternaturally acute, so that my watch in my waistcoat ticks as if it were held almost ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... of an anther lobe, or rather of that portion of the anther which, under ordinary circumstances, produces pollen. In the malformed flowers no pollen is formed, at least in the more complete states of the malformation, but the walls of the anther lobe become preternaturally enlarged, and petaloid in texture and appearance. This change occurs in some semi-double rhododendrons and azaleas, in crocuses, and in a species of violet found at Mentone by ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... said Vince, looking preternaturally serious; "let's be certain who it was. Let me see: there was Paul Jones, and Blackbeard, and the Buccaneers. What do you say to its having belonged to ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... functions of their sex. This difference is, in my opinion, solely due to the fact that in the simplicity of their manners the imagination remains calm and peaceful, and does not stir the blood till much later, and thus their temperament is much less precocious.] Children are preternaturally quick to discern immoral habits under the cloak of decency with which they are concealed. The prim speech imposed upon them, the lessons in good behaviour, the veil of mystery you profess to hang before their eyes, serve but to stimulate their curiosity. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... mountain; and once more down, as among rats and beetles, and down, as among faceless horrors, and down, where all things seemed prostrate and with a taste of brass. It was the poor fellow's nervous imagination, preternaturally excited. When the handkerchief was caught away, his jaw was shuddering, his eyes were sickly; he looked as if impaled on the prongs of fright. It required just half a minute to reanimate this mercurial creature, when he found himself under the light of two lamps, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Her ears had a sense of hearing that was preternaturally acute. The most distant step in the corridors was audible. Was it a reprieve? One such sound multiplied itself into the footsteps of two men walking, coming ever nearer—nearer—nearer till they stopped outside her ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Esq., Secretary and Projector of the Glenmutchkin Railway, differed from Bob M'Corkindale, the seedy frequenter of "The Crow." In the days of yore, men eyed the surtout—napless at the velvet collar, and preternaturally white at the seams—which Bob vouchsafed to wear with looks of dim suspicion, as if some faint reminiscence, similar to that which is said to recall the memory of a former state of existence, suggested to them a notion ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... horror, then he sprang down into the flood. The water boiled up nearly to his arm-pits. With his feet he felt the great timber, fastened in the dike, on which his boy had been sitting. He peered through the dark, with straining eyes grown preternaturally keen. He could see nothing on the wide, swirling surface save two or three dark objects, far out in the marsh. These he recognized at once as his fish-tubs gone afloat. Then he ran up the dike toward the Point. ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... cruelty. And the most diabolical act of cruelty she could imagine was that of baking alive in a hot oven one of the ducks. And that was what she did. The sequence of thought in her mind was that the spell that had been laid on the ducks was that of preternaturally wicked wilfulness; that this spell could only be broken through intensity of suffering, in this case death by burning; that the intensity of suffering would break the spell in the one roasted to death; and that the spell broken in one would ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... was sure that somebody besides himself was in the wood. Once more the soul and spirit of his great ancestor were poured into him, and for the moment he, too, was the wilderness rover, endowed with nerves preternaturally acute. ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Joab's preternaturally lengthened countenance became short, broad, and genial. He threw back his head and breathed relief. "Dar now! What I tell em? Cyarn Selim nor no urr boss kill you, Marse Lewis! Mornin', sah. I reckon hit is time I wuz in de field, but I ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... shone full on his face, pale, sad, very quiet; and into his eyes, mournful as she had never known any eyes to be. He had taken off his hat and held it in his hand, and a light wind blew his thick hair about his forehead and temples. She, looking at him with senses preternaturally aroused, afterwards remembered ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... no letters passed on either side. To my surprise and delight, Benjamin quietly made his appearance one morning in our pretty French drawing-room. He was so preternaturally smart in his dress, and so incomprehensibly anxious (while my husband was in the way) to make us understand that his reasons for visiting Paris were holiday reasons only, that I at once suspected him of ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... end," Mitchy loyally responded. "For how CAN, how need, a woman be 'proud' who's so preternaturally clever? Pride's only for use when wit breaks down—it's the train the cyclist takes when his tire's deflated. When that happens to YOUR tire, Mrs. Brook, you'll let me know. And you do make me wonder just now," he confessed, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... with a jolt that threw him hard upon self-consciousness. "I am superintendent of the public school." The very sound of the words rang as a warning, and he became preternaturally solemn. ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... recovering from brain-fever, was a startling object to contemplate on a first view of him. His shaven head, tied up in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild; his rough black beard; his long, supple, sinewy fingers, wasted by suffering till they looked like claws—all tended to discompose the rector at the outset of the interview. When the first feeling of surprise had worn off, the impression that followed ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... all the assurance and cheerfulness he could command. But she instinctively detected a slight shade of anxiety or uncertainty in his tone. The physician must be a consummate actor who can deceive a patient whose perceptions are preternaturally acute as were Feodora's. He saw that he had ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... person, and he and Tamara were great friends. He chatted on now, and she smiled at him, but with ears preternaturally sharpened she heard the conversation ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... it up the boulder, bearing a stick in his hand. Presently his face, preternaturally solemn and gnomish behind the goggles, protruded over the rim. The girl was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, contemplating the scenery as if she'd never had another interest in her life. Apparently she ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Marshalls now saw for the first time, and who was in every way a specimen novel in their limited experience of children. During their first encounter, the well-groomed, white-linen-clad boy with his preternaturally clean face, his light-brown hair brushed till it shone like lacquer, his polished nails and his adult appendage of a tutor, aroused a contempt in Judith's mind which was only equaled by her astonishment. On that occasion he sat upright in a chair between ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the moment that he had opened the trap, had been swift and as nearly noiseless as the difficulties of the task had permitted. Nevertheless, they had not been so silent as to escape the attention of the preternaturally acute Sin Sin Wa. Kerry found the place occupied only by the aged Sam Tuk. A bright fire burned in the stove, and a ship's lantern stood upon the counter. Dense chemical fumes rendered the air difficult to breathe; but the shelves, once laden with the largest illicit collection ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Seven preternaturally long faces at this point started up like the Seven-sleepers. The Consistorial Councillor, a man still young but celebrated throughout all Germany for his oral and printed sermons, considered himself the one ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... not move, but stood as if carved out of a block of hardened putty by the hand of an artistic drill-sergeant; listening, though, with his ears, which looked preternaturally large from the closeness of the regimental barber's efforts, and seeming to gape. Then he left his rifle in a ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... first descends after being swallowed. This bag is very conspicuous in the granivorous tribes immediately after eating. Its chief use seems to be to soften the food before it is admitted into the gizzard. In young fowls it becomes sometimes preternaturally distended, while the bird pines for want of nourishment. This is produced by something in the crop, such as straw, or other obstructing matter, which prevents the descent of the food into the gizzard. In such a case, a longitudinal incision ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... he, fiercely. It was impossible to resist; and Abel and Gabriel moved slowly toward the door. The former was furious at finding himself doomed in company with Gabriel. But he betrayed nothing. He was preternaturally calm. Hope, dismayed and pale, stood looking on, but saying nothing. Gabriel went quietly out of the room. Abel turned to the door, and bowed gravely ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... accurately placed by the best milliner in New York. Her clothes were so well-worn, and her grooming was so meticulous, her accent so clean and crisp, her manner so devoid of patronage, yet subtly remote, her controlled heart so kind that she perennially fascinated the buxom, rather sloppy, preternaturally acute, and wholly unaristocratic young ladies of ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In The Manuscript Found in a Bottle, too, we may trace the first suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and memorable expression in Ligeia (1837). The antique ship, with its preternaturally aged crew "doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss," is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph Glanvill's declaration so strikingly illustrated in the return of Ligeia: "Man doth ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... daisy, both red and white, in which the flowering stem rises up preternaturally flattened, and carries on its summit a long-extended ridge of flowers, frequently of an enormous size; this monstrous production seems to arise from the coalescence of two or more flowering stems: and as it is ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... broken it may be, but conquering. One month I waged the fight, and I have now been nearly two without looking at the drug. Before, four hours was the longest interval I could endure. Now I am free and the demon is behind me. I must not fail to add that the advantage of a naturally sound and preternaturally vigorous constitution, and (except in the use of opium) one carefully guarded against any of the causes which impart a vicious state of system and so render it incapable of recuperative effort, was my main-stay, and acted the ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... found, that various kinds of natural actions, done by many of the accused in or to their own bodies, as leaning, bending, turning awry, or squeezing their hands, or the like, were presently attended with the like things preternaturally done upon the bodies of the afflicted, though they were so far asunder, that the afflicted could not at all observe the ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... the Yard this morning, and he told me he had come round to Bunner's view, that it was a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So there's the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! What an ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he's being preternaturally clever!' He seized the bulky envelope from the table and stuffed it into the heart of the fire. 'There's for you, old friend! For want of you the world's course will not fail. But look here! It's getting late—nearly seven, and Cupples and I have an appointment at half-past. We ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... balanced himself on the edge of the quay, and executing a double shuffle on the very brink of it by way of showing his complete mastery over his feet, fell into the rigging and descended. He was followed by Dick and the cook, both drunk, and both preternaturally solemn. ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... flowers, and in having larger, rounder, and more heart-shaped leaves; Mr. AITON regards this as a variety of the crassifolia, we are inclined to consider it as a species under the name of cordifolia. The parts of fructification in the crassifolia are apt to be preternaturally increased. ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... the way of respect, and, however angry passions might rise, however turbulent the scene, he would never address it looking upon it with the naked eye. As his eye-glass was constantly tumbling out, and as search for it was preternaturally deliberate, it played an appreciable part in ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... them to judge of what they do not know, and not to judge of what they do know. They, as St. Jude declares, blaspheme in what they know not, and corrupt themselves in what they know.[2] They are blind to what passes in their own homes, but preternaturally clear-sighted to all happening in the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... got beyond the nervous point, and had come round to perfect coolness and composure again, but preternaturally vigilant and keen. I was ready for any disclosures; not a sound was heard. In a few moments the trees alongshore were faintly visible. Every object put on the shape of a gigantic deer. A large rock looked just ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... and was very angry at David, heaved the bur-oak outside and passionately demanded his reason for fetching "sic a muckle rail like that instead o' a switch? Do ye ca' that a switch? I have a gude mind to thrash you insteed o' John." David, with demure, downcast eyes, looked preternaturally righteous, but as usual prudently answered never ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... this young girl, who had promised such great things, seemed further than at the beginning from that holiness which is not of the earth, and which delights only in the contemplation of heavenly things. She could see it now with what painful clearness! for her eyes in such matters were preternaturally sharp, like those of a sailor who has followed the sea all his life with regard to atmospheric changes; no sooner would the lesson begin than all brightness would fade from that too expressive countenance, and the girl would listen with manifest effort, striving ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... morning, and he told me he had come round to Bunner's view, that it was a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So there's the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! What an ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he's being preternaturally clever!" He seized the bulky envelop from the table, and stuffed it into the heart of the fire. "There's for you, old friend! For want of you the world's course will not fail. But look here! It's getting late—nearly seven, and Cupples and I have ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... desire to make his young heroes either preternaturally brilliant or possessed of too precocious brains. They are normal, healthy American boys fond of travel and adventure and naturally are meeting experiences such as come to men doing what they were doing in certain parts of our country. Self-reliance, determination, ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... threshold, and was immediately on his road home. He had not been gone more than a few minutes when he heard a sharp footstep on the crisp snow behind him. Turning round, he saw the dark tall peak of the stranger's hat, looking tenfold darker, almost preternaturally black, on the white background, as he approached. Mike felt his hair bristling through terror. His knees, usually bent somewhat inwards, now fairly smote together, so that he could not accelerate his pace, and the stranger was quickly at ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... young lawyer, Eugene Fort, was saying preternaturally bright things to Tiny, who lifted her sweet orbs at intervals and remarked: "How dreadfully clever you are, Mr. Fort; I am so afraid of you!" or "How sweet of you to think I am worth all those real epigrams! You ought to keep them for a great law-book." ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... looking preternaturally solemn, and his lips were moving softly in unison with Mr. Chester's. If Eleanor could have heard those inaudible responses she would have been startled by the words: "I, Quinby, take thee, Eleanor." But she only observed that he was lost in a day-dream, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... might have been about thirteen years of age, became preternaturally grave all of a sudden, and, looking up earnestly in his questioner's face, said, "Really, Henry, you are becoming unreasonable in your old age, to ask me to give you a reasonable account of a thing, and at the same time to ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... creation of those weird forms which the terror of a nightmare is wont to bring in its train, seem to point to the past action of waking fancy. To imagine one's self flying when looking at a bird is probably a common action with all persons, at least in their earlier years, and images of preternaturally horrible beings are apt to be supplied to most of us some time during life by ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... small, loving, boar-like eyes upon her as a preternaturally innocent and trusting companion of Ulysses might have regarded the transforming Circe. Rosey turned away with the faintest sigh. The habitual look of abstraction returned to her eyes as if she had once more taken refuge in her own ideal world. Unfortunately ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... breakable. Mr Bostock looked uneasily first at Adam Tellwright, tall, spick and span, self-confident, clever, shining, with his indubitable virtues mainly on the outside. If ever any man of thirty-two in all this world was eligible, Adam Tellwright was. Decidedly he had a reputation for preternaturally keen smartness in trade, but in trade that cannot be called a defect; on the contrary, if a man has virtues, you cannot precisely quarrel with him because they happen to be on the outside; the principal thing is to have virtues. And then Mr Bostock looked uneasily at Ralph Martin, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... that I could not go to sleep, but that I could not even close my eyes. I was wide awake, and in a high fever. Every nerve in my body trembled—every one of my senses seemed to be preternaturally sharpened. I tossed and rolled, and tried every kind of position, and perseveringly sought out the cold corners of the bed, and all to no purpose. Now I thrust my arms over the clothes; now I poked them under the clothes; now I violently shot my legs straight out ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... come to the ass, the boy enfolded in his arms the creature's fuzzy head and gently stroked its preternaturally long ears. And the ass, for its part, responded to the caress by rubbing its head against the boy's breast and by most energetically twitching its scrag of a tail. Thus for a little time these friends manifested for each other their affection; ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... would place those who had it in a false and unsatisfactory state with regard to the world in which they lived. To see this we have only to picture to ourselves the condition of a man living in a savage, or only partially civilized state of society, with his mind preternaturally expanded to that of a Newton, and put into possession of the knowledge which he had on some of those subjects which the Bible touches on. How entirely out of harmony would he be with his fellow-men, and everything around him! and, how unable would he be even to pursue his studies for want of those ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... day. All the self-righteousness latent in human nature comes out, or used to, in her earlier days, in the evening revelations. Here is a specimen, taken at random from the first month's sheaf. She and the Imp had come to my room for their devotions, preternaturally pious, both of them, though quite unregenerate. It was the Elf's turn to begin. She settled herself circumspectly, sighed ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... ample glory of his ears. The only other visible article of his attire (except a brace of wrinkled cowskin boots, by which the word "polish" would have been considered the meaningless fragment of a lost language) was a tight-fitting black frock-coat, preternaturally long in the waist, the skirts of which fell about his heels, sopping up the dew. This he always wore snugly buttoned from the throat downward. In this attire he cut a tolerably spectral figure. His aspect was so conspicuously unnatural and inhuman that whenever he went into a ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Committee had dealt kindly with Lightmark's Academy picture. When it was passed in review before these veterans, after a long procession of inanely smiling portraits, laboured, wooden landscapes, and preternaturally developed heroes, the expression of satiated boredom and damnation of draughts, which variously pervaded the little row of arbitrators, was for a moment dissipated. There was a movement of chairs, followed by an exchange of complimentary murmurs; and ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... the scene. Around him stood Mr. Bouncer, Mr. Blades, Mr. Flexible Shanks, and Mr. Foote. Each held a drawn and gleaming sword; each wore aprons, scarves, or mantles; each was decorated with mystic masonic jewellery; each was silent and preternaturally serious. The room was large and was furnished with the greatest splendour, but its contents seemed strange and mysterious to our ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... was my only reason for entering upon a transaction which was now outside my interest, but which (as it chanced) repaid me fifty-fold in entertainment. Fowler and Sharpe were both preternaturally sharp; they did me the honour in the beginning to attribute to myself their proper vices; and before we were done had grown to regard me with an esteem akin to worship. This proud position I attained by no more recondite arts, than telling the mere truth and unaffectedly displaying my ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... thus abruptly uttered, actually thrust her face through the door; but she again drew back, and, all her senses preternaturally quickened at that name, while she held the door almost closed, listened with her whole soul in ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep. The world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through a morbid activity, and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This is the only method of getting rid of old delusions and avoiding new ones; of regenerating our race, ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... intimate friend,—had persisted in a correspondence with her brother against her father's wishes. And that, perhaps, was in his favor. At least, he had a good mouth and honest eyes. His neck, his hands, and his legs were preternaturally thin, and she wondered if the gap between his collar and his throat told a truthful story of South African fever. If so, the change had been appalling. However, neither bullets nor fever had ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... with grass-woven covers invited everywhere, and there was a grand piano, that played, I was sure, nothing more exciting than lullabies. Servants— Japanese maids in native costume—drifted around and about, noiselessly, like butterflies. Everything was preternaturally cool. Here was no blazing down of a tropic sun upon an unshrinking sea. It was too good to be true. But it was not real. It was a dream- dwelling. I knew, for I turned suddenly and caught the grand piano cavorting in a spacious ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... a pause. The ticking of the little Swiss clock, the joyous warble of the thrushes, the soft rustle of the trees sounding preternaturally loud. Beatrix Stuart sat white to the lips, with anger, mortification, amaze, disappointment. Then she covered her face with her hands, and burst into a vehement flood ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming |
