"Precariously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... face. The rock was unworn by the torrent, without recess or cavern. And that precipice, twice the pool's width, mounted sheer a hundred feet, the height of the cascade. The front was unbroken save by tiny rifts and narrow ledges, where dwarfed ground pines clung precariously. With a muttered curse, the old man turned from his vain contemplation of the cliff, and let his troubled eyes rest on the pool. Suddenly, he started. He remained motionless for a moment, then, with nervous haste threw off his shirt, and trousers. Marshal Stone, chancing to look that way, was astonished ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... of rending one another in vain dreams of barren empire achieved through blood and iron. Is it too much to hope that so level-headed a people as the Bulgarians will come to realize that in such a Balkan settlement their lasting interests will be far safer than in a Balkans precariously dominated by a Bulgarian minority holding down a majority of sullen and ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... the walnut a shattered branch had hung in a hair balance since the great storm had stricken it. High winds had more than once threatened to bring this dead wood down, yet it had remained there, out of reach and almost out of sight but still precariously lodged. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... surface much that was unsightly, yet full of potentialities for good, the spot was the same. The conditions and the environment looking at it in the large were not widely different, the ancient Anglo-Saxon freedom struggling ever for its foothold as the centuries lapse, now precariously uncertain as Privilege and Prerogative push hotly, now fixed and strong in great moments of triumph; and the end is not yet. In the earlier time the destinies of America were closely interlocked with England and came up no less for decision in the great arena at ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... and abandoned booths. But at the foot of it lay rows of one-masted sailing vessels loaded halfway up their masts with piles of fire-wood. In the background, beyond a small sheet of water crossed by a low iron bridge, rose abruptly the rocky walls of the South End, with funny old houses perched precariously along their edges. Keith stared so hard at all the new things that not a single question had a chance to escape him before they entered another street and stopped in front of a stone house that to him looked ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... he was jerking Lanier with him behind the looming earthen statue of the great worm god. Crouched there between the statue and the cave's wall they were hidden precariously from the view of those in the cavern. And now that cavern had become a scene of horror unthinkable as the centipede-machines pouring down into it blasted the frantically crawling worm monsters with ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... it, Job!" suggested the barkeeper, settling his large frame precariously on the top of a small, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... the dispossessors; of what stamp Were they we dispossessed?—of us I speak, Who to Messenia with thy husband came; I speak not now of Argos, where his brother, Not now of Sparta, where his nephews reign'd.— What we found here were tribes of fame obscure, Much turbulence, and little constancy, Precariously ruled by foreign lords From the AEolian stock of Neleus sprung, A house once great, now dwindling in its sons. Such were the conquer'd, such the conquerors; who Had most thy husband's confidence? Consult His acts! the wife he chose was—full of virtues— But an Arcadian princess, more ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... an imagination) drew out all the sweetness that there was for it in that idea. Then it occurred to her sound, prosaic commonsense that a reputation is still a reputation, all the more precious if somewhat precariously acquired; that, though you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, hanging is very poor fun when for years you have seen nothing of sheep or lamb either; that, in short, she must take steps to ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... moved with a complexity which would have surprised her had she been capable of remarking upon it. Plot and counterplot! She wove webs horrid as a spider's. She became, without knowing it, a mistress of psychology. She dissected motions and motives. She builded theories precariously upon an eyelash. She pondered and weighed the turning of a head, the handing of a sugar-bowl. She read treason in a laugh, assignations in a song, villainy in a new dress. Deeper and darker things! Profound and vicious depths plunging ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... rashly pushed forward from Ancona to Rimini; which he held precariously and to the danger of Ancona. The first act of Belisarius after the raising of the siege of the City was to despatch troops post haste to Rimini. He sent Ildiger and Martin with a thousand horse to fight their way if necessary to Rimini to withdraw John and his two thousand horse. ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... of its transportation service through almost every city of Earth and the hamlets and roads and bus and railroad and airlines between—and even to the few far ports where mankind had found a toehold in space. But its existence was precariously balanced on ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... derisory stipend. It was all that a University education (a second in Moderations and a third in Literae Humaniores) had enabled me to win, and I stuck to it because I possessed no patrimony and had no 'prospects' save one, which stood precariously on the favour of an uncle—my mother's brother, Major-General Allan Mclntosh, C.B. Now the General could not be called an indulgent man. He had retired from active service to concentrate upon his kinsfolk those military ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Henry VIII, is a case of normal growth by minor changes and modifications, but its subsequent history has been one of revolutions, six or seven having occurred in the last four hundred years; the scheme which now holds, though precariously, is the result of the great democratic revolution accomplished during the reign of Queen Victoria. The free monarchies of Europe which began to take form during the long period of the Dark Ages and pursued ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... motion-picture experts and would know a cowboy when they saw one. Wide-eyed, they followed the perilous antics of Dexter as he issued from the alley gate, and they screamed with childish delight when the spurs had recalled to his memory that far-off dreadful day with the busy bees. They now balanced precariously on the alley fence, the better to trace Merton's flight through the dust cloud. "Merton's in a runaway, Merton's in a runaway, Merton's in a runaway!" they shrieked, but with none of the sympathy that would have become them. They ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... his words and flung a laugh defiantly. Vance darted a glance over his shoulder to her, and her smile was witchery. Her cap, perched precariously, was sliding off, while her flying hair, aglint in the sunshine, framed her face as he had seen it ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... his first expedition, and was now to make the passage again, to examine its geological and geographical features more in detail. Meanwhile, as recorded in the last chapter, Lieutenant Wheeler had made an effort, apparently to forestall this examination, and had precariously succeeded in reaching Diamond Creek, which is just at the south end of the Shewits Plateau, lower left-hand corner of the map facing page 41. Powell and Thompson arrived at our camp at the mouth of the Paria on the 13th of August (1872) accompanied by Mrs. Thompson, who had been ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... that if it is only right for a man to spend money on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine applies with equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man who has amassed many thousands as well as to the youth precariously beginning life. And it may be asked, Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not the best of company? But the principle was this: that which a man has not fairly earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part of mankind's treasure which he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hazel, roosting precariously on the very summit of the world. On both sides the mountain pitched away sharply in rugged folds. Distance smoothed out the harsh declivities, blurred over the tremendous canons. Looking eastward, she saw an ample basin, which gave promise of level ground on its floor. True, it ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to frighten their pursuers into desisting. Then the car gathered momentum, and was soon out of range. Presently Frank, who had been driving the flivver as fast as it would go, with the result that they were all tossed about while the car lurched precariously over the rutted road, slowed down to a ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... roof of "The Dove," or "The Crab," as the collegians called it when it skidded sideways, perched precariously that well-known, beloved youth, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr. He clutched his pestersome banjo and was vigorously strumming the strings and apparently howling a ballad, lost in the unearthly turmoil. As the jitney-bus stopped, the grinning Hicks arose, and from his lofty, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... aside under the bare branches of the grove, and, walking resolutely forward for some time, came to a steepish hollow or den, that had now drifted a quarter full of snow. On the verge a great beech-tree hung, precariously rooted; and here the old outlaw, pulling aside some bushy underwood, bodily ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Frances lingered, looking around at the circle of hilarious children, each with a mug, more or less precariously clasped, each stuffing big plummy buns; looked at the older people so anxiously attending to them. Yes, it was very different, very English, ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... the top of a fence rail and, her feet hooked around the next bar, was placidly, if precariously, watching Richard Gilbert tinkering with a cultivator that had developed a ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... two young men sat down under an oak for their noon hour, with a bucket of buttermilk standing precariously in the grass beside them, John said again, anxiously, "It was too hot for her; I hope ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... lumberjacks, furnished the comic relief. They frightened the horses allotted them, to begin with; threw the saddles aboard in a mess which it was necessary to untangle; finally clambered on awkwardly and rode precariously amid the yells and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... himself in a precarious case under the arbitrary and irresponsible authority of an alien master working through an alien master class. The doubt which presents itself is as to whether this common man would be more precariously placed, or would come in for a larger and surer sum of hard usage and scant living, under this projected order of things, than what he already is exposed to in his pecuniary relations with his well-to-do compatriots under the current system of law ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... own room. She opened her suitcase—new and smelling strongly of leather—and took out of it a book, dogeared and precariously held together, bound in faded blue cloth and bearing the inscription: The Universal Handbook. Herein was the sum of human knowledge ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... acquainted with each other. One of the men was a "drummer," a travelling man for a notion house; another was a cow-boy; the third was a big cattle-man; and I was the last. We soon found that the woman was a widow who had maintained herself and the children precariously since the death of her husband by sewing and other feminine odd jobs but had at last given up the unequal struggle and was going back to live with her mother, also a widow who had some ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... her back suddenly. And as he spoke, a stone from the high wall lost the balance it had precariously kept, and fell almost at her feet. "We will walk in the middle of the street," he said, and they went on again, she leaning lightly on the arm he offered her through the ways rough and often obstructed. It all seemed like nothing else that had ever been with them, or ever would ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... of some seven years, maybe, in company with a younger man, perhaps of five. He was hatless, coatless, waistcoatless, but he had a pair of trousers, short in the leg, precariously held by one brace. That is the fashion in Paradise Rents. I had come upon these two young men about Fulham as they were staring with absorbed interest into the undertaker's shop advantageously situated for custom at the corner of the Rents and the main street. Certainly it was a pleasant window. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... Of course according to the perversity of dreams there is no object near. I clutch empty air, and then I fall downward, and still downward, and in the midst of the fall I dissolve into the atmosphere upon which I have been floating so precariously. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... would have clear title as soon as they had paid heavy mortgages. His shares in the Commercial Wharf lay in the safes of a banking house, and the dollars he had raised on them were valiantly doing duty in holding at bay a pressing debt on precariously held waterfront equities. Talbot mentioned glibly sums that reduced even the most successful mining to a child's game. The richest strike we had heard rumoured never yielded the half of what our friend had tossed into a single ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... just below the shallow waters of the ford, two men were struggling, locked in each other's embrace. Hastily the girl drew back into the cover of the grove and watched with intense interest the two forms that weaved precariously above the deep pool formed by a sudden bend in the creek. The horses she recognized as Vil Holland's buckskin, and the big, blaze-faced bay ridden by Lord Clendenning. In the gathering dusk she could not make out ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... the pioneers of the flying-men in this country. He used to fly at country fairs in an old ramshackle bus of the Wright model—a thing of sticks and canvas and wires precariously hung together. But he flew it. And he ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to deepen the obscurity. And she wanted above all—and especially since her hour with Nelson Vanderlyn—to keep herself free, aloof, to retain her hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote to Strefford—and the letter was only a little less painful to write than the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that her own feelings were in any like measure engaged; but because, as the decision ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... in malodorous ooze. Each mounting the bare shoulders of a coolie, the two Europeans rode precariously to shore. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... studied the small figure at his side. It began in a wealth of loosely curling hair which shaded a delicate face, very pointed as to chin and monopolized by a pair of dark eyes, sad and deep and beautiful. A faded blue "jumper" was buttoned tightly across the narrow chest; frayed trousers were precariously attached to the "jumper," and impossible shoes and stockings supplemented the trousers. Glancing from boy to bottle, the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... Lastly, the very form of induction that has been used by logicians in the collection of their instances is a weak and useless thing. It is a mere enumeration of a few known facts, makes no use of exclusions or rejections, concludes precariously, and is always liable to be overthrown by a negative instance.[79] In radical opposition to this method the Baconian induction begins by supplying helps and guides to the senses, whose unassisted information could not be relied on. Notions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... cluster of watchful persons who hopefully had collected before the scrolled and ornamented wooden entrance of a tarpaulin structure larger than any of the rest. From beneath the red-and-gold portico of this edifice there issued a blocky man in a checkered suit, with a hard hat draped precariously over one ear and with a magnificent jewel gleaming out of the bosom of a collarless shirt. All things about this man stamped him as one having authority over the housed mysteries roundabout. Visibly he rayed that aura of proprietorship common to some monarchs and to practically all owners of ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... waiting for the reply, and it was then that he put his wheel back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice a week, to the Transcontinental for his five dollars, though it was only semi-occasionally that he elicited a reply. He did not know that the Transcontinental had been staggering along precariously for years, that it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing, with a crazy circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and partly on patriotic appealing, and with advertisements that were scarcely more than charitable donations. Nor did he know that the Transcontinental was the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... white tips to the greater and lesser coverts and some of the secondaries, and broad white tips to the outer tail feathers, which are black. This species is very abundant in some localities within our borders. Their nests are very frail platforms of twigs placed in trees or bushes or precariously suspended among tangled vines. Their two eggs are white or creamy white, and measure 1.15 ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... on the upper step of the long flight of stairs which lean precariously against the scarred face of the frame residence upon the second floor front of which the lares and penates of the Shane family are crowded ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at first, but now the time seemed ripe to reopen the door and drive the lynx out. He made a rush, but the angry creature turned and dashed at his legs so viciously that in a couple of seconds he, too, found himself perched precariously on the canopy of his own bed, with "prick-ears" spitting and snarling ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... Holland returned to his kingdom, bringing back to his subjects the solitary consolation that their national independence was precariously preserved, when the emperor, who was then travelling through Belgium, came in great pomp to visit the new departments which he had just taken from his weak neighbor. The Empress Marie-Louise, who accompanied him, was everywhere surprised at the ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... miraculous escape from the old mine, he left his place of exit open. In his impatience to get away from the scene of his sufferings, he had not even given another thought to the great stone slab that he had raised with such difficulty and precariously propped into position by a few fragments of rock. So the narrow passage leading down from the cavern into the ancient workings that had been so carefully concealed for centuries was at length open to the inspection of ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... so sacred and some so profane, was torn away. The whole of the choir was to be rearranged. But when the piers of the central tower were exposed by the removal of the screen, it was discovered that they were in a precariously rotten condition at the core. Other indications of weakness, which had been overlooked before, were now observed. Large and deep cracks and various earlier signs of apprehended weakness both in arches and piers were remarked. That the work now begun had given impetus to the fall has been denied ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... so ..." said Whitlow, slumping lower and lower in his chair as the general's massive form leaned precariously over him. "But—" ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey
... morning he set out for the mill, intending to confront "old Bob" and demand retraction. The road down the deep, wild ravine was rugged, and he jogged along slowly until at last he came within sight of the crazy, weather-beaten old building tottering precariously on the brink of the impetuous torrent which gashed the mountain side. Crags towered above it; vines and mosses clung to its walls; it was a dank, cool, shady place, but noisy enough with the turmoil of its primitive ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the West usurped by a perfidious barbarian. Arming a desperate troop of slaves and gladiators, he overpowered the feeble guard of the domestic tranquillity of Rome, received the homage of the senate, and assuming the title of Augustus, precariously reigned during a tumult of twenty-eight days. The march of some regular forces put an end to his ambitious hopes: the rebellion was extinguished in the blood of Nepotian, of his mother Eutropia, and of his adherents; and the proscription was extended to all ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... so sturdy and amusing a fellow should have to eke out his living so precariously. "I'll tell you what I'll do," I said. "I'll give you a note right now to my head gamekeeper and have him put you on as an assistant. Thirty shillings a week I think ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... not in love with her, and hardly pretended to be. She met him fairly on a friendly footing of business; he was the sinner in that, while what she offered was undoubtedly hers, what he proposed to give in return was only precariously his. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... he was precariously balanced. His ray-gun was in his bare left hand; his face-plate was locked partly open. He raised his fingers to the direction rod on the suit's breast, gazed straight at the guard on the nearest watch-platform and snapped the ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... mother in the drawing-room with the remains of afternoon tea still spread on a small table before her. I had just time to notice that two people had been drinking tea and that the second cup, balanced precariously on the arm of a chair, was half full. Then my mother crossed the room rapidly and kissed me three times. She may have done such a thing before. I think it likely that she did when I was a baby. She certainly never kissed me more than once ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... same feeling, although I had never defined it so nicely. One 'just sits on a chair'—precariously, yet with an odd sense of unhappy security, of having grown to and become part of that chair, as if one dreaded to fall off, yet strongly suspected that any real effort to get up and go away would bring the ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... world he wanted to stand high with Alexina...he had never taken more pains to bluff the street when things were at their worst than this girl who was the symbol of all he had aspired to and precariously achieved. He had longed for riches, not because she craved luxury and pomp, but because she would be forced to look up to him with admiration and a lively gratitude. He had, in this spirit, given her; in the most casual manner, handsome presents, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... else was there to be done? asked the field-cornet of himself. Were they to remain there all their lives, subsisting precariously on game and roots? Were his children to ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... water-drops was loudly audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge. Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even on this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a river on which Mr. Miller had trapped, and to which they gave his name; though, as before observed, we presume it to be the same called Bear River, which empties itself into Lake Bonneville. Up this river and its branches they kept for two or three days, supporting themselves precariously upon fish. They soon found that they were in a dangerous neighborhood. On the 12th of September, having encamped early, they sallied forth with their rods to angle for their supper. On returning, they beheld a number of Indians prowling about their camp, whom, to their infinite ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... movements caused him to work his body through the opening. That done, he started rolling down the steep eastern declivity, the speed of his flight increasing with every bound. Many cottages are perched precariously on this precipitous slope. Mrs. Armour, a resident of one of them, was sitting in a rear room near the window, sewing, when she was amazed to see a man flying through the sash close beside her. He came with so great violence that he tore through a thin partition into ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... the measure changes to one of longer irregular lines, hardly distinguishable from rhythmical prose, which Duhm therefore takes, precariously, as from ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... into his presence. He sprang to his feet to check her swift approach before she could be dashed against the wall or upon the heap of chairs in the corner. The deep roll of the vessel had ended so suddenly that she was thrown off her balance, at best precariously maintained in the hurricane that swept her along the deck. She was projected with considerable violence against the waiting figure of R. Schmidt, who had hastily braced himself for the impact of the slender ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Mr. Thayre amiably, "if he hungers for solitude I'm the last chap in the world to intrude on his meditations. I jolly well know myself what it means to hang precariously on the fringe of plutocracy with only a beastly whisper of an income—and by the Lord Harry I'm a bachelor." Several auditors nodded their sympathetic understanding, but a tall youth with viking blond hair and vacant eyes which seemed to proclaim, "I am ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... on. Merciless sunlight beat in through the slatted shutters of ward windows. At night, from the roof to which the nurses retired after prayers for a breath of air, lower surrounding roofs were seen to be covered with sleepers. Children dozed precariously on the edge of eternity; men and women sprawled in the grotesque postures ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... hardly any place more fantastic than a Bermuda shorefront in the moonlight. In these little eroded recesses, caves and grottoes one might expect to see crooked-legged gnomes, scampering to peer at the human intruder. Gnarled cedars, hanging precariously, might hide pixies and elves. A child's dream of fairyland, this reality of ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... wild appearance of its Tenngri mountaineers, Tosari, which is the best health resort in Java, might be readily mistaken for an Alpine village, for it has the same steep and straggling streets, the same weather-beaten chalets clinging precariously to the rocky hillsides, the same quaint shops, their windows filled with souvenirs and postcards, the same glorious view of green valleys and majestic peaks, the same crisp, cool air, as exhilarating as champagne. The Sanatarium ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... there, from the old men and women with whom he hobnobbed, antiquarian material of an invaluable kind, bits of local history, immemorial traditions and superstitions, and, above all, precious ballads which had been handed down for generations among the peasantry. These ballads, thus precariously transmitted, it was Scott's ambition to gather together and preserve, and he spared no pains or fatigue to come at any scrap of ballad literature of whose existence he had an inkling. Meanwhile, he was enriching heart and imagination for the work that was before him. So that here also, though in ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... morning dawned on an undiminished number of English, and at high tide they embarked in their boat and returned to Jamestown with their provisions so precariously won. ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... line, wet but safe. After this I did not attempt any more Roman reclining couch luxuries, but stowed all my loose gear under the bamboo staging, and spent the night on the top of the stage, dozing precariously with my head ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... priceless literary heritage has been waiting, precariously subjected to the vicissitudes of earthly circumstance. Like a lone great manuscript within the cloister of a mediaeval monk, Brann's work might have perished utterly soon after its creation, like a song of magic music held but fleetingly within ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... myself into a company of foragers, and broken into the good people's granaries. I do not know any position that admitted of as much adventure and variety. There was always enough danger to make my journeys precariously pleasant, and, when wearied of the saddle, my friends at Daker's and Michie's had a savory julep and a comfortable bed always prepared. I had more liberty than General McClellan, and a ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... dancing on the lid of the luncheon-filled chest, as she hung precariously over the back of the tonneau, and bawled her remarks at the unfortunate occupants of the auto behind them, which seemed to sink deeper and deeper in the mire with every effort ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Nannie, anyhow." The impulse to "tell" had become almost a physical necessity, and when he came into the room, the whole unhappy, hopeless business was hot on his lips. The mere unexpectedness of finding her here, alone, was like a touch against that precariously balanced sense of honor, which was his god, and had so far kept him, as he expressed it to himself, "square ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... credible that this sheer cut through the heart of a gigantic hill could continue for more than a few yards, nor that anything save a bird could find foothold on its steep sides. Yet the current flowed smoothly onwards, through a wealth of vegetation which clung precariously to every ledge and ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... firm, confident eyes, Mr. Prohack realised, perhaps for the first time, that the fruit of his loins was no common boy. The mere fact that as an out-of-work ex-officer, precariously making a bit in motor-bicycle deals, he had dared to go to Melchizidek's firm for clothes, and that he was now daring to affront Melchizidek,—this sole fact separated him from the ruck ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... reason regarded by the Parthians as a sort of second beginning of their independence. Hitherto their kingdom had existed precariously, and as it were by sufferance. It could not but be that the power from which they had revolted would one day seek to reclaim its lost territory; and, until the new monarchy had measured its strength against that of its former mistress, none could feel secure ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... good deal of the housewife. He was appalled. Obviously the house was small—he had known that from the outside—and the entire enterprise insignificant. This establishment was not in the King's Road, nor on the Marine Parade, nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed precariously in a vast town like Brighton. Widows, of course, were often in straits. And Janet had told him... Nevertheless he was appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... poetry, religion, and manners. Such traditions, however, would always be survivals or revivals rather than genuine expressions of life, because mind must either represent nature and the conditions of action or else be content to persist precariously and without a function, like ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... roof was only a foot over his head. He whirled around, squashed a dozen tiny creeping things, leaped to a disk that was now not more than a few inches broad. Stooping low, balancing himself precariously, he somehow managed to close the tiny switch. A haze of orange light enveloped him, there came a great vertigo and dizziness and pain, he felt himself ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... minutes later, the luggage precariously piled up on the box-seat beside the driver, they were ambling through the leafy Devon lanes at an unhurried pace apparently dictated by the somewhat ancient quadruped between the shafts. The driver swished his whip negligently above the animal's broad back, but presumably more with ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... lay a small cleared tract of land, where a pleasant greenness of young potato vines hid the sand. In the centre was a tumble-down cabin, with a mud chimney on the outside. The one window had no sash, and its rude shutter hung precariously by a single leathern hinge. The door was open, revealing that the interior was papered with newspapers. Three or four yelping curs seemed to be ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... the doll Mr. Jackson had brought, Rose tiptoed after Eli into the nursery and gradually turned on the light. The first object to meet their eyes was Hannah's stocking, hanging precariously to a pin driven into the mantel. Pinned to the wall were several messages, neatly printed in pencil, ...
— The Little Mixer • Lillian Nicholson Shearon |
