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More "Drifting" Quotes from Famous Books



... was sitting on the wharf, watching the ebb of the tide. The current was swift, for there had been heavy rains within a few days; the river was full of drifting logs, bits of bark, odds and ends of various kinds; the water, usually so blue, looked brown and thick. It swirled round the great mossy piers, making eddies between them; from time to time the boy dropped bits of paper into these eddies, and saw ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards

... merely drifting now, and its strange visitor had alighted upon the water, rushing along a little way in front and leaving two long, milky paths of white foam behind. Both the pilot and the passenger were drenched by every wave. They watched the latter as he was taken off, and their eyes ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... These rivers and torrents swell with those rains of money and home and fame and happiness, and then fall and run almost dry, but the ocean of civilization has gathered up all these waters, and holds them in sparkling beauty for all subsequent use. Civilization is a fertile delta made by the drifting ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... bottom upwards, and there he was presently joined by Captain Burgoyne and several others of the crew. Then he beheld the vessel turn over and go down, stern first; the whole catastrophe being over in a few minutes. The launch was drifting a few yards off, and May called out to his comrades, "Jump, men! it is our last chance." May with three others succeeded in reaching the boat, in which fifteen of the remainder of the crew also found a refuge. It is uncertain whether poor Captain Burgoyne remained ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne

... chamber one day, he opened the window, and unfortunately a strong gust of wind carried several pages of MS. which were lying on his table into the street. A priest who happened to be passing the house examined one or two of the drifting poems, and, discovering that they were impious, denounced Petit to the authorities. His rooms furnished a large supply of similar work, and, as we have said, the poet paid the penalty for his rashness at ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... drifting American women one sees over here!' Miss Buckston ejaculated; to which Franklin cheerfully replied: 'Oh, we'll work them all in; they are of use to us in their own way, though they often don't know it. They ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... the fog shut down again denser than ever before. One could almost "stand on it." It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements. I lashed the helm, and my vessel held her course, and ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water; not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress or pain. The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... before all these arrangements had been made, and during the time so occupied, the ships lay idly side by side, drifting slowly before the wind, the sails having been lowered as soon as the struggle was over. Up to this time, the knights had been too busily engaged to think of food, but they were right glad when they were summoned to a meal ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty

... traders' camp-fire was curling up and drifting away into thin veils of film before the sun showed over the horizon hills. The bull-teams had taken up their steady forward push while the quails were still flying to ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... walk to Kensington Gardens a poisonous current had run at the back of his mind. Drifting on it, might he not escape? Was he not of too fine a porcelain to mingle with the coarse and common pottery of the ranks? Was it necessary to go into the thick of the coarse clay vessels, just to be shattered? It was easy for Phineas to proclaim that he found no derogation ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... an' drifting out on the ocean," answered the old tar, and then he continued: "You know how they tried to board us—after Carey, Bossermann, that skunk o' a Wingate, an' Ulligan went to 'em. Well, fust we kept 'em off with fireworks and with a shotgun. We didn't have much steam up, but Frank Norton—bless ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)

... deep water at once and swam— I swam beside him and held his mane— Till we touched the bank of the broken dam In shallow water—then off again, Swimming in darkness across the flood, Rank with the smell of the drifting mud. ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson

... I fulfilled your engagement in grand, tout ensemble style, but there is a sad bon jour look about the thirty-eight cents left in my vest pocket that would make a hired man weep. All day long the heavens wept, and the heavy, sombre clouds went drifting about over head, and the north wind howled in maniacal derision, and the hack drivers danced on the pavements in wild, fierce glee, for they knew too well what the stormy day betokened. The hack was to call for me at eight. At five minutes to eight ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... on, afternoon came, and I fell into a troubled sleep. The pain of my throat directed my wandering thoughts perhaps, and conjured up horrible visions. I was lashed to the wheel of the Aguila, and the schooner went drifting, drifting far away into an unknown sea. All was still around me, though I was not alone. Sailors walked the deck or huddled in the forecastle—sailors with skin of wrinkled parchment, with deep-set, burning yet ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens

... their bands to work them down to the low country and the camp tender stayed to help them with the crossing. Breed listened long to the droning undertone, the maddening blat of five thousand woollies on the bed ground, its querulous volume persisting through the sound of water and wind and drifting to him across a distance of five miles. Then he stretched forth his head ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... the enemy's deck before his own ship sank. Strange to say, the same thing happened to Robert of Namur, a Flemish friend of Edward's, whose vessel, grappled by a bigger enemy, was sinking under him as the two were drifting side by side, when Hanekin, an officer of Robert's, climbed into the Spanish vessel by some entangled rigging and cut the ropes which held the Spanish sails. Down came the sails with a run, flopping about the Spaniards' heads; and before the confusion could be put right Robert ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... direction, it is often extremely useful; but, when the product of such speculation is placed on a level with those generalisations of morphological truths which are represented by the definitions of natural groups, it tends to confuse fancy with fact and to create mere confusion. We are in danger of drifting into a new 'Natur-Philosophie' worse than the old, because there is less excuse for it. Boyle did great service to science by his 'Sceptical Chemist,' and I am inclined to think that, at the present day, a 'Sceptical Biologist' might exert an ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... in Khartoum. Shall we feel less for the servants of Christ who have given up home and country to suffer and it may be to die for Him? Some of us remember that when Missions were destroyed, when clouds were all around us, and the very ground drifting from under our feet, that we were made brave to work and wait for the salvation of God by the prayers which went up to God for us. When "prayers were made without ceasing of the Church unto God," the fast-closed ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple

... California ranches, my boyhood hustling newspapers on the streets of a healthy Western city, and my youth on the ozone-laden waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. I loved life in the open, and I toiled in the open, at the hardest kinds of work. Learning no trade, but drifting along from job to job, I looked on the world and called it good, every bit of it. Let me repeat, this optimism was because I was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor weaknesses, never turned down by the boss because I did not look ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... and his spirit madly drank in the illusive hope: 'Whither fliest thou, Aeneas? forsake not thy plighted bridal chamber. This hand shall give thee the land thou hast sought overseas.' So clamouring he pursues, and brandishes his drawn sword, and sees not that his rejoicing is drifting with the winds. The ship lay haply moored to a high ledge of rock, with ladders run out and gangway ready, wherein king Osinius sailed from the coasts of Clusium. Here the fluttering phantom of flying Aeneas darts and hides ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... We are drifting away from our old-fashioned homes; fathers have grown too busy, mothers have delegated their God-given work to others. We have lost instead of gained. Wherever the homes are full of weakness the government is in danger. ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been inclined, for I knew ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... snow had piled up fast. What promised to be a heavy storm had become a reality, and it was whirling and drifting dreadfully. You must remember that I had on my little thin ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney

... and methodically on his squared map paper, the smoke drifting fragrantly from his brier pipe, nodded in silence, glancing down now and then at the barometer and compass ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... sat on the sand, and hid her tearful eyes in her two trembling hands; then suddenly, struck by the silence, she looked up in terror. There in front of her she saw a boat drifting, and in the boat her boy, her little lad of eight years old, who was laughing right merrily, paddling as well as he could with one oar that he could hardly hold, and crying out, "I am going to see what there is behind the mist, and I will ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... enemy.' During the forenoon the ship was within seven or eight miles of the high bold coast-line to the south of Cape Adare, but later she had to be turned outwards [Page 46] so that the heavy stream of pack-ice drifting along the land could be avoided. By the morning of the 11th she was well clear of the land, but the various peaks and headlands which Sir James Ross had named could be distinctly seen, and gave everyone plenty to talk and think about. Progress, however, was ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... cloud, Fountain head and Source of rivers... Dew cloth, dream drapery— Drifting meadow ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... Wife?" and "The Strange Gentleman." Trifles light as air though these effusions might be, the radiant bubbles showed even then, as by a casual freak which way with him the breeze in his leisure hours was drifting. A dozen years or more after this came the private theatricals at Tavistock House. Beginning simply, first of all, with his direction of his children's frolics in the enacting of a burletta, of a Cracker Bonbon for Christmas, and ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... by a perennial drifting polar icepack that averages about 3 meters in thickness, although pressure ridges may be three times that size; clockwise drift pattern in the Beaufort Gyral Stream, but nearly straight line movement from the New Siberian Islands (Russia) ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... white ribbon in their buttonholes, were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless discontent, their bitterness at the grind of circumstances. This prodigal country ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... at once and looked at his friend, but could not clearly see his face, for the moon was still behind thick drifting clouds. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne

... in the shadow of the shed, watched him. A vague fear beset him,—of the vast, white cold,—the glowering mountains,—of himself; he clung to the familiar face, like a man drifting out into an unknown sea, clutching some relic of the shore. When Lamar fell asleep, he wandered uncertainly towards the tents. The world had grown new, strange; was he Ben, picking cotton in the swamp-edge?—plunging his fingers with a shudder in the icy drifts. Down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... No longer slowly drifting, for they had spread out their sails to the new and cool breeze, and cracked on all ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... resolved never to part with him. Since then we have had great years together. We have been hungry and happy together, and together we have played by the cabin, faced danger in the wilds, slept peacefully among the flowers, followed the trails by starlight, and cuddled down in winter's drifting snow. ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... light. His eyes were almost closed by the swelling of his forehead. Soon after he discovered a castle high up on the banks on one side of the river, the inhabitants of which he stirred up by a blast on his bugle as he was drifting helplessly. A boat shot away from shore and picked him up. The boat contained an Austrian officer and two soldiers. The officer informed him that the castle to which he was being conveyed, was the fortress Komorn. His wounds were quickly ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... is full of grief Or when my heart is merry; Come with the falling of the leaf Or with the redd'ning cherry. Come when the year's first blossom blows, Come when the summer gleams and glows, Come with the winter's drifting snows, And ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... probably above the average in intelligence; and yet the speed with which he had succeeded in monopolising Leonetta's attention made him feel in his gratified vanity, so immensely grateful to the girl, that willy-nilly, he found himself drifting all too pleasantly along that warm and intoxicating stream that the nineteenth century called "Love," without feeling either the obligation or even the desire to realise calmly and dispassionately what had ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... for yards. As his mad eyes softened and filmed, he saw once more, perhaps,—or so the heavy-hearted keeper who had slain him would have us believe,—the shadowy plains unrolling under the wild sky, and the hosts of his vanished kindred drifting ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... bad as could be, with the drifting of the smoke, and the flare of fire, and the pelting of bullets, and of grapnel from coehorns, and the screams of Frenchmen exulting vastly, with scarcely any Englishmen to stop them. It seemed as if they were to do as they pleased, level the bulwarks of English rights, and cover themselves ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... March winds were blowing, Not so very long ago, And it still kept snowing, snowing, Piling, drifting, Heaping, sifting, Snow on snow, Faithless Fanny said, "Spring never Will be here; 'twill snow forever; And I don't believe I ever ...
— The Nursery, June 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various

... branches. Up and up she sailed, but paling as she rose from red to orange, from orange to the yellow of hay; and at yellow she remained, when the last branch had dropped past her face of light, and she was drifting in the height ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... vitality; but none had struck upon the really characteristically French note. They lacked form, and those fine qualities of strength and clarity which form alone can give. Their sentences were indeterminate—long, complex, drifting, and connected together by conjunctions into a loose aggregate. The 'Precious' writers had dimly realized the importance of form, but they had not realized at all the importance of simplicity. This was Pascal's great discovery. His sentences are clear, straightforward, and distinct; and they ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... of population, and not by the lapse of time. [Page: 136] The first permanent white settler came to Chicago precisely one hundred years ago, and the city has a population at present of about two and a quarter millions. It is here not a question of slow historic development but of the rapid drifting towards a certain point, of a population from all quarters of the globe, and the ethnological standpoint therefore becomes of ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... of the noblest family in all the land," sighed old Gretel. "His grandfather was a fine man." I contrived to subdue my rage and disappointment and somewhat loudly returned to the topic from which we were drifting. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... croziers and white-robed acolytes in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the cathedral door to mingle with the odours of the fruits and flowers in the market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter egg across to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... Hendrik, who having been in their midst could tell what way they were drifting, "they came down upon us from a northerly direction. When we headed our horses homewards, we soon galloped out from them, and they did not appear to fly after us; I am sure they were ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid

... stars, then, are either drifting past our solar system, which alone remains fixed; or, the fixed stars are all actually at rest, and our sun is drifting through them; or, our solar system and the so-called fixed stars are both in motion. One or ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them I was born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was another house, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from the chimney now, and drifting rosily against the first flush ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... stars. They were not still and changeless and winking, as they appeared from the moon. These stars seemed to stir uneasily, to shift ever so slightly among themselves, like flecks of bright color drifting on a breeze. ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... the direction, and after a few moments caught sight of an immense hay barge bearing down upon him. The hay barge had been towed by a steam tug, but the rope had parted, and the barge was now drifting at the mercy ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield

... said the captain; "I have; but your life is as valuable as mine, and I would hold you at no disadvantage. The fact is, we are becalmed, and there is no prospect of any wind reaching us here till night, when we shan't know which way we are drifting, and may as well give up all hope. There is wind overhead, I know, and it is going straight for France. If we could get up another thousand feet or so, we should catch the current and be over land in ten minutes. But all the ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... deadwater were several floating platforms; the men called them "headworks." On the platforms were capstans. The headworks were anchored far in advance of the drifting logs, around which were thrown pocket booms; men trod in weary procession, circling the capstans, pushing against long ashen bars, and the dripping tow warp hastened the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... of ocean currents in drifting vessels out of their course, and in sweeping away great bodies of ice, is very great; although, from the fact that there is no land to enable the eye to mark the flow, such drifts are not perceptible. One of the most celebrated drifts of modern times, and the most ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... he come from?" continued the baron, drifting innocently farther and farther away from the ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday

... beside the Ocstall River Where trailing mists went drifting softly by; And waterfalls in thunderous voices calling, Their vaporous breath raised to ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren

... City of Nan-king Memories with the Dusk Return An Emperor's Love On the Banks of Jo-yeh Thoughts in a Tranquil Night The Guild of Good-fellowship Under the Moon Drifting ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng

... now, sitting thus in total unconsciousness of his scrutiny, Hampton made no attempt to analyze the depth of his interest for this waif who had come drifting into his life. He did not in the least comprehend why she should have touched his heart with generous impulses, nor did he greatly care. The fact was far the more important, and that fact he no longer questioned. He had been a lonely, unhappy, discontented man for many ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... upon principles that are just, enduring, as old as the nation itself, yet ever young, vigorous, and progressive, because there is ever work for them to do. Our party was not founded for a single mission, which accomplished, left it drifting with no fixed star of principle to guide it. It was born and has lived to uphold great truths of government that need always to be enforced. The influence of the past speaks to us in the voice of the present. Jefferson and Jackson still lead ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... thought restrained him from that blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It—and, oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key to a paradise of the mud-honey that he craved. The fairy doll had waved a wand with her rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces with shining foot-rests and magic ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... Snowdrop, various attempts were made by the Tamarisk and two trawlers and a tug to tow the Cassin. An eleven-inch towing hawser from the Tamarisk parted. All ships, except her, lost the Cassin during the night. The Cassin was drifting rapidly on a lee shore, and had it not been for the Tamarisk getting out a line in the early morning, the vessel would have undoubtedly grounded on Hook Point, as it is extremely doubtful if her anchors would ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various

... clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness in such an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer's private constitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact is. We can guess with some confidence now that it must have been drifting about in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from a little note to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia, we have the soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,—the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells

... during the months of July, August and September, cannot be told fully here, because it is long and intricate, nor summarized, because the fairness of any summary not supported by citations would be disputed. There are, however, some phenomena in the process of drifting towards war which may ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... The engines are working, yet we do not appear to be making any headway. So far as I can judge we seem to be simply drifting bodily to the westward and more toward the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... into Latin to induce the learned to read them; native poets composed their verses in Latin, and all lectures at the universities were delivered in that tongue. The work of Luther was undone: ambitious princes and quarrelsome divines continued the rulers of Germany, and everything seemed drifting back into the Middle Ages. Then came the Thirty Years' War (1618- 1648), with all its disastrous consequences. At the close of that war the public mind was somewhat awakened, literary societies were organized, and literature was fostered; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... Vague drifting thoughts like this followed Kit's shiver of repulsion at that Indian joy song over the promise of a veritable live Judas. On him they could wreak a personal vengeance, and go honestly to confession in some future day, with the conviction ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan

... during Shirley's two weeks' visit she and David were together, sometimes, through Mrs. Jim's contrivance, with others and often, by grace of their own ingenuity, alone, drifting carelessly down the most traveled stream of life. If Mrs. Jim's warning had awakened any doubts in Shirley's mind—and it had—the doubts were quickly laid by David's presence. She let herself drift; this in spite of certain very definite and very different plans which she had made for ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... useful and honourable life, which he might have hoped to close in a quiet haven, he was launched suddenly upon stormy waters, to which he was too brave to yield, which he was too timid to contend against; and the frail vessel drifting where the waves drove it, was soon piteously ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... reef, when the wind and current carried it, as near as might be, directly towards the crater. He was calling to Mark to come to his assistance, to help get the raft into a sort of bay, ahead of him, where it might be lodged; else would there be the danger of its drifting past the Reef, after all his pains. Our young man saw, at once, what was wanted, got a line, succeeded in throwing it to Bob, and by hauling upon it brought the whole mass ashore in the very spot Betts wished to see ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper

... not long until the sculptor was drifting down toward Memphis under a starry sky—the shadowy temples of Thebes hidden by the sudden closing-in of the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... up into mountains; the distracting details scatter the attention and break up thinking, while the mere problem of exercising power crowds out speculation about what to do with it. Personal jealousies interrupt co-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient little store of platitudes—misunderstanding and distortion dry up the imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of publicity requires ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... over-excitement of the strong and active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and looked full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice. They had a boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful hours on the lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been, dreaming of ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... am as stubborn as you are, dear girl; I will not live on my wife's money—you will not live in my mother's house—and we are drifting apart. It is not that I care less for you dear, or at all for anyone else, but ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... sat intently watching the canoe. It seemed an age to him before he saw a hand emerge from the bushes and take hold of the head-rope. The motion given to the canoe was so slight as to be almost imperceptible; it seemed as if it was only drifting gently before the slight breeze which was creeping over the surface of the lake. Half its length had disappeared from the open space, when an Indian appeared by the edge of the water. He looked at the canoe, looked over ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty

... state of anarchy and incipient violence, Mirabeau, whose power in the Assembly was still unimpaired, wished to halt. He foresaw the future. No man in France had such clear insight and sagacity as he. He saw the State drifting into dissolution, and put forth his hand and raised his voice to arrest the catastrophe which he lamented. "The mob of Paris," said he, "will scourge the corpses of the King and Queen." It was then that he gave but feeble ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... She lay tugging at her anchor, with her stern toward the reef, and the waves washing over her; she looked like an old horse kicking out viciously at some obstacle with its hind legs. The anchor was not holding, and she was drifting backward on to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... red sun hiding behind the drifting powder cloud. The ever-deepening roar of ceaseless contest had moved westward down the valley, when an aide wheeled his smoking horse in front of the Colonel, spoke a dozen hasty words, pointed impetuously to ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish

... face there passes the shadow of a deadly thought. He rises from the fire; he takes the wood back to the boat. His iron strength is shaken, but it still holds out. They are drifting nearer and nearer to the open sea. He can launch the boat without help; he can take the food and the fuel with him. The sleeper on the iceberg is the man who has robbed him of Clara—who has wrecked the hope and the happiness of his life. Leave ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins

... a mess!" said his father; but, without more words, he unhitched the oxen and drove them up the bank. The rest of the party hastily picked up the articles that were drifting about, or were lodged in the mud of the creek. It was a sorry sight, and the boys forgot, in the excitement of the moment, the discomforts and annoyances of their previous experiences. This was a ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks

... December of the eighteenth century. All night a fierce northeast snow-storm had been hissing and drifting through the frozen air, pelting angrily at the shuttered and curtained windows of the rich, and shrieking with scornful laughter as it forced its way through the ill-fitting casements and loose doors of the poor, clutching at them with icy fingers as they cowered over their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... fog-bank as a snake is drawn from the hole; They bellow one to the other, the frightened ship-bells toll, For day is a drifting terror till I raise the shroud with my breath, And they see strange bows above them and the two ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... as possible to where the iceboat was drifting in a sheet of open water—a spot where some days before a farmer had been cutting ice. To the craft Coulter was clinging and still ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield

... embodiment of the tender sky and the wistful soil. What a loss, I said, to the coming generations of dwellers in the country — no bluebird in the spring! What will the farm-boy date from? But the fear was groundless: the birds are regaining their lost ground; broods of young blue-coats are again seen drifting from stake to stake or from mullen-stalk to mullen-stalk about the fields in summer, and our April air will doubtless again be warmed and thrilled by this lovely harbinger of spring. — JOHN ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... direction that the Indians had taken. The savages were overtaken and a parley ensued. The leader's thoughts were now in two places at once, and he was not far enough from the shore not to be able to cast a glance towards the Aimable, and to say to his lieutenants, as he saw the vessel drifting near shoal water, "If she keeps on in that course, she will soon be aground." Still, no time was to be lost. The parley with the Indians did not hinder them long, and soon they were on the way towards the village whither ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... spirit of disloyalty toward Ferdinand VII himself. Under circumstances like these, when the junta and its successor, the council of regency, refused to make substantial concessions to the colonies, both parties were inevitably drifting toward independence. In the phrase of Manuel Belgrano, one of the great leaders in the viceroyalty of La Plata, "our old King or none" became the watchword that gradually shaped the ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... a long silence. She was absorbed in the drawing, and I in my own thoughts, as I stared through the upper pane, as directed, at the grey, drifting, hurrying November clouds. Had I descried a quoit there about to descend upon me I should have been rather pleased than not. At last I became conscious of an intolerable ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... souls, incline to this dark coast, Where all too long, too faithlessly, we dream. Stoop to the world's dark pool, its crags and scars, Its yellow sands, its rosy harbour-bars, And soft green wastes that gleam But with some glorious drifting god-like ghost Of cloud, some vaguely passionate crimson stain: Rend the blue waves of heaven, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... westward in enormous billows. The silver surfaces of several lakes gleamed here and there like whitecaps on the rolling waves. Far off upon the verge of the horizon, fifty miles away, three snow-capped, sharply pointed mountains looked like a group of icebergs drifting from the Polar Sea. They did not move, however, nor will they move while this old earth shall last. They antedate by ages the Pyramids which they resemble. They will be standing thus, in majesty, when Egypt's royal sepulchres shall have returned to dust. Forever anchored there, those ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... the crowd of men of inferior rank and share in the affairs of their country; content to see their names once so exclusively glorious, set on a par with those of plebeians, to lead the modernized peoples into the new paths whither they are rapidly drifting. Nay, so low have the mighty fallen, that even dethroned kings and princes sometimes ask to be admitted as simple citizens in the countries which they or their ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at the interior of a rough shack built of pine boards, with bunks constructed in tiers on both sides. There were figures in them—Western cowboys, perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that the voice drifting from the outside was strangely familiar. Back at Bannister College, where he remembered he had gone in the dim and dusty past, he had often heard that same fog-horn voice, roaring songs of a less blood-curdling character, and accompanied by ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... was stricken with brain fever, which intervened as a mercy between her and the great sorrow that was overshadowing her young life. Tears would fill the servants' eyes as they saw the dear child drifting from them like a lovely vision, too bright for earth's dull cares and ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... was now drifting to its close. His health had for some time given him cause for alarm, and in August 1588, he left his Kenilworth home to seek relief by taking baths and drinking healing waters; and from Rycott he wrote the last of his many ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... there shall be no drifting whatever. I shall marry, if ever, one whom I have learned to love according to Nature's simple laws—one to whom I can go without effort or calculation. I could give my heart, and be made rich indeed by the gift. I ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... mounted the locomotive, and especially as he pulled the starting-bar, all other functions seemed insignificant. Every day I contemplated him; often I dreamed of him; saw him in my mind's eye dashing through the dark night, through the rain and hail, through drifting snow, through perils of "wash- outs'' and "snake-heads,'' and no child in the middle ages ever thought with more awe of a crusading knight leading his troops to the Holy City than did I think of this hero standing at his post in all weathers, conducting his train to its destination ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... of smoke drifting and floating through the air, but it caused less inconvenience and annoyance than it did when they fled to ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis

... she and Peter Coleman had their evening at the Chutes, and a wonderful evening it was; then came a theater trip, and a Sunday afternoon that they spent in idly drifting about Golden Gate Park, enjoying the spring sunshine, and the holiday crowd, feeding the animals and eating peanuts. Susan bowed to Thorny and the faithful Wally on this last occasion and was teased by Thorny about Peter Coleman the next day, to her secret pleasure. She liked anything ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... feelings for her were not as yet definite, expressed, or grasped; they were rather the atmosphere in which all things occurred and were felt and judged. From an amusing pastime she had come to be a companion and thought-mate; and now, beyond this, insensibly they were drifting to a silenter, mightier mingling of souls. But drifting, merely—not arrived; going gently, irresistibly, but not yet at the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... our fire blew wide across leagues of shallow, sparkling water, or, when the wind veered, whirled back into our faces across the reef, curling and eddying among the standing mangroves like fog drifting. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... now, that nothing could have served as so fit an accompaniment to it as the shouting of those pines. They sang like heroes, and in their swaying gave me fleeting glimpses of the stars, unbelievably brilliant in the dusky purple sky, and half-obscured now and then by drifting clouds. ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie

... brought Jasper to the side of the object in question: it was the other canoe, empty and bottom upwards. No sooner did the young man ascertain this fact, than he began to search for the swimmers, and, to his great joy, Cap was soon discovered drifting down with the current; the old seaman preferring the chances of drowning to those of landing among savages. He was hauled into the canoe, though not without difficulty, and then the search ended; for Jasper was persuaded that the Pathfinder ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... their feet above the half-submerged planks. Down the glimmering lake there are miles of silence and still waters and green shores, overhung with a multitudinous and scattered fleet of purple and golden clouds, now furling their idle sails and drifting away into the vast harbor of the South. Voices of birds, hushed first by noon and then by possibilities of tempest, cautiously begin once more, leading on the infinite melodies of the June afternoon. As the freshened air invites them forth, so the smooth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... marked by a broad belt of fine sand, the grains of which are all globular. Along its upper margin is a rank growth of reeds and salt grass. Swarms of tiny flies cover the surface of every half-evaporated pool, and a few white sea-gulls are drifting on the swells. Nowhere is there a sign of refreshing verdure except on the distant mountainsides, where patches of green grass glow in the sunlight among the vast fields ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... to impress their importance on a scoffing world. No girl should become a teacher because she does not know how else to gain her living. The profession is lamentably overstocked with mediocrities, lacking enthusiasm and vigour, drifting more and more hopelessly from one post to another. But there is plenty of room for keen and competent women, eager to learn and to teach, and this is true of all branches of the profession. No work can well be more thankless, more full of drudgery and of ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley

... Drifting along, or rather flung and battered about on the current, they passed within near sight of the lighthouse, and they might have thanked God that they passed no nearer, for to have passed nearer would have been certain death. The white waves ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... been out in the water for days and nights. All alone. Tossed about. Days and nights. She! who'd never hurt a soul. Couldn't. She was always laughing and happy. Drifting about. All alone. Quite ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... no great principles, begot no far-reaching consequences. It was not inspired by the "holy glee" with which in Wordsworth's sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been attained within a few ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... situated about half-way across. Bering Straits are never completely closed, for even in midwinter floes are ever on the move, which, with broad and shifting "leads" of open water, render a trip on foot extremely hazardous. Our subsequent experience on nearly seven miles of drifting ice, across which we were compelled to walk in order to land on American soil, inspired me with no desire to repeat ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... silent as the grave and steadfast as a wall. Presently the substitutes in the Languedoc battalion could not endure the strain any longer. They fired without orders and could not be stopped. At the same time Montcalm saw that his five little bodies of men were drifting apart. When the Canadian regulars had moved off, they had left the French flanks quite open. In consequence, the French battalions nearest the flanks kept edging outwards, the ones on the right towards ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood

... there is competition for food, for life, within the species, human and other. But that competition is not usual; it arises out of unusual and special conditions. There are instances of hunger-maddened mothers tearing away food from their children; men drifting at sea have fought for water and food as beasts fight, but these are not normal conditions of life. "Happily enough," says Kropotkin again, "competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods.... Better conditions are created ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... the head of Marat. His restless spirit was reaching out for expression, and we find him drifting to London for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... "Legends of Vancouver," "Flint and Feather," and the present volume, "Shagganappi," all tell of the spirit that tells them. Love of the blessed life of blue air without gold-lust is felt in the line and the interline, with joy in the beauty of beaver stream, tamarac swamp, shad-bush and drifting cloud, and faith in the creed of her fathers, that saw the Great Spirit in all things and that reverenced Him at all times, and over and above it all the sad note that tells of a proud race, conscious that it has been crushed by numbers, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... the floe drifted faster out to sea, and Annatock was observed running anxiously towards the land; but before he reached the edge of the ice-raft on which he stood, the increasing distance and the drifting clouds of snow hid him from view. Then his companions, fearful for their own safety, hastened back to the camp with the ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... or jest above thar, about sunset of a pleasant day, that we came drifting along with our flat-boat, or broad horn, as they were called in them days, when Captain Paul said he thought it would be a snug place just behind the pint, to tie up to them same big trees yet standin' ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... than the present ignoble attitude of the Nation toward its own laws and its own ideals—without courage to enforce them, without conscience to change them, the United States presents the spectacle of a Nation drifting aimlessly, so far as this vital, National problem is concerned, upon the sea of irresolution, toward ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... put a new heart into our semi-barbarian theology, politics, manners, literature, and law. And especially do I rejoice, that having defrauded the feminine element of its due share in practical affairs for so many ages, and found ourselves, as a natural consequence, drifting toward barbarism with all our wealth and wisdom, we are compelled at last to learn that justice to woman is simply mercy ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... beach-plums, and then lay down on their beds of boughs in the little enclosure. They could see the moon shining over the water, the big dory hauled up in front of their shelter, and they all felt very glad that they were not drifting out ...
— A Little Maid of Province Town • Alice Turner Curtis

... up his life to the independence and unity of his country, who had known how to be as enthusiastic in his generosity as the youngest of those who fell for that very cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away disregarded after a naval victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... days we tossed there helpless. The seventh some sail was got on her, but she was an unwieldy vessel at the best, and we made little but leeway. All the time, indeed, we had been drifting to the south and west, and during the tempest must have driven in that direction with unheard-of violence. The ninth dawn was cold and black, with a great sea running, and every mark of foul weather. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of this battle. It commenced at daybreak and lasted little over an hour, and when Jack, with hundreds of other officers and soldiers, reached points from which a view of the plain could be commanded, a thick cloud of smoke was drifting across it, through which nothing could be seen until the heavy masses of Russians were observed making their way back covered by their cavalry, and the dying away of the cannonade told that the battle ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty

... with the horses at six next morning. By seven o'clock we were well on the road, which for the first ten miles or so led by the sea-shore, through dense thickets of brushwood, alternating with patches of loose drifting sand. I was agreeably disappointed in the ponies; for though it was deep, heavy going, they stepped out well and freely. The clear sunshine, keen air, and lovely scenery seemed to have the same inspiriting effect on ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt

... Arthur and his Emma, for the lucky youth who held that drifting nymph seemed most unhappy in his pride. The girl was talking amiably, but the man was grim and furtive and as careless of his steering as a ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... fourteenth night came and we were drifting about in the Adriatic Sea, the sailors about midnight thought that they were nearing land. So they took soundings and found one hundred and twenty feet of water; and when they had gone a little farther they found ninety feet. Fearing that we might be wrecked on the rocks, they threw ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman

... youthful passion, and leave untold those years of the real burthen of manhood, and still more the tranquil brightness when toil has been overlived, and the setting sun gilds the clouds that are drifting away. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in one corner of the veranda of the Royal Poinciana. The veranda looked strangely deserted that night, the dance being at its height in the ballroom within, and it being still a little early for the inevitable drifting of couples from the heat of the ballroom to the cool ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr

... their professions and circumstances are, and then, getting into conversation, find out how near the truth their surmises have been. Therefore, dear reader, if you find yourself in a few months' time drifting into conversation with a good-looking, bronzed stranger, this side of fifty, who puts rather pointed questions to you, after having studied your thumbs, boots, and whiskers intently, take special delight in leading him harmlessly ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... unabated for another hour; but at that time the greater part of the enemy's ships ceased to fire; some of the lighter vessels were adrift, and the carnage on board their ships was dreadful the crews having been continually re-enforced. Soon after this, the Danish commodore's ship took fire, and drifting in flames before the wind, spread terror and dismay throughout their line. The ships a-head, however, with the crown-batteries, as well as the prizes made by the British, still continued to lire, and Nelson, humane ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... plank of drift-wood Tossed on the watery main, Another plank encountered, Meets—touches—parts again; So tossed, and drifting ever, On life's unresting sea, Men meet, and ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... Derec crumpled from the pistol bolt. There was thick, strangling smoke. Hoddan disappeared. When the thickest smoke drifted away there was nothing to be seen but Derec, lying on the ground, and thinner smoke drifting ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster

... Deringham saw at first sight, but he realized that it was very beautiful, and then commenced to note details with observant eyes. There was a sawmill beside the river, for he could faintly hear a strident scream and see the blue smoke drifting in gauzy wisps across the hill. The square log-house which stood some little distance from the lake looked well built and substantial, and the road that wound through the green oblong had been ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... showed little or no sign of breaking up, except at a great distance from land, where the heaving of the waves had cracked it up into large fields. These were gradually parting from the main body, and drifting away with surface-currents to southern waters, there to be liquefied and ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... now in Rome; living together in Alsace, drifting to Paris; and, when the Revolution drove them from the French capital, seeking refuge in London, where we find the uncrowned Queen of England chatting amicably with the "usurper" George in the Royal box at the opera—always inseparable, and ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... introduced a note of gaiety by wearing a flannel shirt and a check suit of remarkable virulence. Every day Mr. Polly looked round to mark how many of the familiar faces had gone, and the deepening anxiety (reflecting his own) on the faces that remained, and every day some new type joined the drifting shoal. He realised how small a chance his poor letter from Easewood ran against this hungry cluster of competitors at ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... proboscidiform mouth, and above with an obliquely vertical crest, the whole of a rich blue colour with white lines and dots, the soft parts conceal a transparent cartilaginous framework. The crest acts as a tiny sail (hence the name) and communicates to the animal a slow rotatory movement while drifting before the wind. Two kinds of Janthinae (J. globosa and J. exigua) molluscs with a fragile, snail-like shell, and a vesicular float, were drifting about, and, together with a very active, silvery-blue Idotea, half an inch long, prayed upon the Velellae. At another time, among many other pelagic ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... broken-down that she was obliged to go to bed and remain there for several days. On January 29th the unfortunate lady had risen, and was sitting near the window which overlooked the deserted rue des Menetriers, where clouds of snow were drifting before the wind. Who can guess the sad thoughts which may have possessed her?—all around dark, cold, and silent, tending to produce painful depression and involuntary dread. To escape the gloomy ideas which ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... thoughts. Here he was, in the crowd and not of it, greatly moved and yet not as the others were, because he did not understand. And though the voice and the answering enthusiasm went on for a long time, and still he did not understand, he was not tired but exhilarated only. The moon, the drifting clouds, the dramatic voice playing upon the hearts of the multitude, their hot responses, all this gave him a sense of augmented life and the feel of his own past youth. Suddenly he fancied Madame Beattie's ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... of the hour; it looked like morning, smelt like morning, there was the distinct, clean, pure, inspiring feel of morning. The skies were an even turquoise with little filmy, fleecy shreds of clouds drifting across; the air was elixir; and the blue waters, capped here and there with white, ran joyously to meet the green sloping shores, where the haze still lingered. Ahead, an island glowed like ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... in the afternoon, sort them and bunch them up, and then stand them in water right up to their heads, and keep them there over night. A basin is the best thing to put the flowers in, unless the stalks are very long, and a jam-pot or two in the water will help to keep them from tumbling over and drifting about. Be very careful that the blooms do not touch the water. Keep the flowers in water until you are ready to pack them. Tin boxes are best to send flowers away in; but generally one has to use cardboard ones. Choose the strongest you can ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... path pursue The crux ansata wearers knew Who sleep with folded hands, Where, like a naked, lidless eye, The staring Nile rolls wandering by Those mountain slopes that climb the sky Above the drifting sands? ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... embarked once more. The wind increased, and the waves tossed furiously. Nothing saved them but the skill and courage of Mestigoit. At length they could see the rock of Quebec towering through the gloom, but piles of ice lined the shore, while floating masses were drifting down on the angry current. The Indian watched his moment, shot his canoe through them, gained the fixed ice, leaped out, and shouted to his companions to follow. Pierre scrambled up, but the ice was six feet out of the water, and Le Jeune's agility failed him. He saved himself ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a drifting mast. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... I tell you. On my word, it is as well, though, that you have had it out with me here in the meadows. Listen: there is no harm in the drifting hither. ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler

... Germans were huddled in groups. And away behind the South Loamshires, on the shell-pocked ground that now boiled and heaved like some monstrous sulphur spring, with thick black and yellow fumes drifting slowly across it, there lay the first fruits of the harvest: a few of the gaps in the ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... wrapping the horrible idol in his pilgrim's mantle, had placed it on a marble altar in the midst of perfumes and holy incense. Already the children were clenching idle hands and drinking in a bitter cup the poisoned brewage of doubt. Already things were drifting toward the abyss, when the jackals suddenly emerged from the earth. A deathly and infected literature, which had no form but that of ugliness, began to sprinkle with fetid blood all the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... together up the old porch-steps, halting a moment where the grape-vines clustered thickest about the shingled wall. The house was silent; even the village slept in the moonlight: no sound of life in the great sweep of dusky hill and valley, save the wreaths of mist over the watercourses, foaming and drifting together silently: before morning they would stretch from base to base of the hills like a Dead Sea, ashy and motionless. They stood silent a moment, until the chirp of some robin, frightened by their steps in its nest overhead, had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... three past dreary years, remembered what a weary blank they were, thought, with a heavy sigh, what a shipwreck his life had been, and how he was now floating about without rudder or compass or anchor, merely a drifting wreck. And as he sits there in the sunshine which streams through the wide, high old window, we will see him ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord

... art and beauty, found scattered almost at random over so many pages, and in so many different tongues, have been brought together, and, closely linked in logical sequences, placed in such connections that they now mutually illustrate and corroborate one another. No longer drifting apart in the bewildering chaos of multitudinous pages, they now revolve round a common centre, the heart of all artistic beauty, through whose manifestations alone it gains its power to charm the human soul: viz., 'the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Dan; but I do not suppose that we are very many miles away from shore. The mast and oars prevent our drifting fast, and I don't think we are further off now than we were when we left that ship yesterday. But even if we were four or five times as far as that, we should not take very long in sailing back again when the wind drops, and as we have got ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty

... with, and presently I made her stay with me. And of course I soon saw there was a history. She possessed jewels, laces, little personal belongings of various kinds, that wanted explaining. So I laid traps for her; I let her also perceive whither my own plans were drifting. She did not wait to let me force her hand. She made up her mind. One day I found, left carelessly on the drawing-room table, a volume of Saint-Simon, beautifully bound in old French morocco, with something thrust between the leaves. I opened it. On the fly-leaf ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... texture—upper, inner and lower voices—and we are carried vigorously onward by the daring modulations. Just at the close of the Development we see Mozart's constructive skill in the fusion of this part with the subsequent Recapitulation. A series of drifting chromatic chords in the flutes and oboes, like light fleecy clouds, keeps us in a state of suspended wonder when quietly there emerges the first theme and the return home has begun. It is one of the truly poetic touches in musical ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... lonesome—lend me your light!' she raised her dark eyes for a moment and looked at my face through the dusk. 'I have come to the river,' she said, 'to float my lamp on the stream when the daylight wanes in the west.' I stood alone among tall grasses and watched the timid flame of her lamp uselessly drifting in the tide. ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore

... but were quickly brought down as Otah's drifting rear-guard deployed to their assignments. It became evident early that Otah's tribe was more ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse

... of squat square buildings their ship passed, decreasing speed and drifting lower with every moment. The lofty structures that were the nucleus of the strange city loomed closer. Now they were soaring slowly down a wide thoroughfare; and now, at last, they hovered above a great open square that ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst

... describe the methods by which Germany has endeavoured to intimidate France at various stages of the African question. The trouble arose out of a Moroccan Agreement between England and France, which was the first definite proof that these two Powers were drifting into relations closer than that of ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History

... like fun!" cried Jack presently. "I can't see as well as I'd like, though, on account of the sea fog that keeps drifting along in patches like clouds. I really believe they'll get up before she founders. Now the crew have started putting off boats to make sure of saving the passengers if the ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach

... In her fate and in her fortune, in her power to establish and maintain a settled government, we have a far deeper interest, socially, commercially, and politically, than any other nation. She is now a wreck upon the ocean, drifting about as she is impelled by different factions. As a good neighbor, shall we not extend to her a helping hand to save her? If we do not, it would not be surprising should some other nation undertake the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson

... a feeling of revulsion had seized Frank Merriwell. Of a sudden he had perceived whither he was drifting. He realized what false steps he had already taken, and he was ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish

... courageous beyond the measure of human valour. Thus the prosperity of mankind is wont ever to be incomplete. Then all these warriors embraced the service of King Hakon, the mightiest of the rovers, like remnants of the war drifting to him. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... out of the crowded garden down upon the Quai. It was a superb night, and the moon and its golden beams were mirrored in the lake. Little waves came running tranquilly across the shivering silver sheet and tossing themselves gently up against the stone-sheathed bank; some merry boat-loads were drifting out among the shadows, listening to the music from the shore and sending a silver echo of laughter ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner

... saw at first sight, but he realized that it was very beautiful, and then commenced to note details with observant eyes. There was a sawmill beside the river, for he could faintly hear a strident scream and see the blue smoke drifting in gauzy wisps across the hill. The square log-house which stood some little distance from the lake looked well built and substantial, and the road that wound through the green oblong had been skilfully laid with rounded strips sawn off the great fir-trunks. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... his own body—the same sparks were drifting in about him, edging his arms, thighs, chest. He pushed back into the bushes while the sparks still flitted, but they no longer gathered in strength enough to light his presence. Now he could see they drifted about the vegetation, about the log where the man sat, about rocks and reeds. Only they ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... taken. The savages were overtaken and a parley ensued. The leader's thoughts were now in two places at once, and he was not far enough from the shore not to be able to cast a glance towards the Aimable, and to say to his lieutenants, as he saw the vessel drifting near shoal water, "If she keeps on in that course, she will soon be aground." Still, no time was to be lost. The parley with the Indians did not hinder them long, and soon they were on the way towards the village whither the captive had been taken. Just as they entered its precincts and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... channel had widened; the tang of salt came on the wind; and when I ventured to raise my head a little, I saw the point at the mouth of the river looming purple-black. Then, as we began to round it, we came suddenly on a canoe, drifting broadside, with a single salmon hunter crouching in it, ready with his spear. It flashed over me that he was one of the two Indians who had tracked me to the Duckabush; the taller one who had tried to drink at the rill; then he made his throw ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson

... away under a little stone bridge. He planted the pond with rainbow trout, and on the margin a rampart of Lombardy poplars, which grew and grew until they threatened to reach up and tear ragged holes in the drifting clouds. Their slender shadows lay, like gigantic fingers, far up the bluff when the sun sank low in ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... Barnaby True became aware that there was another boat coming down the river toward where they lay, now drifting with the strong tide out into the harbor again, and he knew that it was because of the approach of that boat that the other had called upon his ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle

... elaborate bonnet this Easter morning, and whether her dress is a mass of pleats and puffs and marvellous trimmings, which, when profusely extravagant upon the form of an elder woman, always remind me of signals of distress hung out upon a craft that is drifting far away from the enchanted isles of youth. Is it the instinctive effort to prolong the brilliancy of youth that induces the advancing woman to decorate herself so brightly? Is it the involuntary hope that she will really seem ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... were all cut away. The vessel was now little better than a raft, and was drifting at the mercy of the ocean currents. For my part I did not much care. I had no desire to go to Manilla or any where else; and the love of life which is usually so strong did not exist. I should have preferred to have been ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... occasion, on a hand-car. He was as young as everybody else in that young country, utterly fearless, and, it seemed, utterly tireless. He rode out into the night careless alike of blinding sleet and drifting snow. At grilling speed he rode until his horse stood with heaving sides and nose drooping; then, at some ranch, he changed to another and rode on. Over a course of a hundred miles or more he would ride relays at a speed that seemed incredible, and at the end of ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... and there a smoking fire around which groups warmed themselves. From the thin line came irregularly spurts of smoke, and the spattering of rifle shots. It reminded me of an old picture of the field of Antietam, spiritless in itself, but here made alive by the movement, the noise, the drifting smoke, and the gray monotone. I watched it while the captain explained tomorrow's work; then, glad that today had not fallen to our lot, we marched on, taking up our route step in the soft sand ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French

... cheek. At last the moon rose; the whole party, regardless of wet slippers, sauntered with Mr. Raleigh to the shore, where the little Arrow hung balancing on her restraining cord. Mrs. Laudersdale stepped in, Mr. Raleigh followed, took up an oar, and pushed out, both standing, and drifting slowly for a few rods' distance; then Mr. Raleigh made the shore again, assisted her out, and shot impatiently away alone. The waters shone like white fire in the wake he cut, great shadows fall through them where island ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... little vessel had taken refuge with many others from an intensely violent gale and drifting snow in Yarmouth Roads, they saw lights disappear, as vessel after vessel foundered. My father, after having done all that was possible for the safety of the ship, went to bed. His cabin door did not shut closely, from the rolling of the ship, and the man who was sentry ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... and like so many shadows moved cautiously forward, with a motion more like drifting than walking, their ears alert, their eyes strained, their hearts ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall

... another hour, but the land was as far away as ever. She was in the main grip of the current; the canoe was too large; the paddle was too inadequate; and too much of her time and strength was wasted in bailing. Besides, she was very weak and growing weaker. Despite her efforts, the canoe was drifting off to the westward. ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London

... and is running well, but the weather has been cold and stormy, with snow drifting in from the hills. I took Mme. Derfelden and her husband to Kajura to-day. Now that I have the car everyone wants me to work with them. The difficulty of transport is indescribable. Without a car is like being without a leg. One simply can't get about. In order to get a seat on ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... For Shelley still remains before the world misconceived because misdescribed; and if society is gradually clearing its ideas of the man, it is not only because the preconceptions of that multitudinous authority are themselves gradually drifting away, but also because substantial facts are slowly coming into view. Their development has been hindered by obstacles which will be understood when I have proceeded a little farther, and even within the compass of this brief sketch I hope that I shall be able to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... golden rules regarding concentration; but we must not suppose that because we have to be on our guard against idle drifting there is to be no such thing as repose; on the contrary it is during periods of repose that we accumulate strength for action; but repose does not mean a state of purposelessness. As pure spirit the subjective mind never rests: it is only the objective ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... sleds. There were four mules for each sleigh, so not much attention was paid to the great depth of snow. Both horses knew when we got to the bridge and gave Bryant trouble. Every bit of the trail out had been obliterated by drifting snow, and I still wonder how these animals recognized the precise spot when the snow ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... of a man-of-war? One vital way would be to increase the size and number of its guns. To strengthen your memory, increase both the number and the force of your mental impressions by attending to them intensely. Loose, skimming reading, and drifting habits of reading destroy memory power. However, as most books and newspapers do not warrant any other kind of attention, it will not do altogether to condemn this method of reading; but avoid it when you are trying ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... attentive to keep the long canoe in the greatest strength of the current. Jim bowed his head, and our last talk seemed to flicker out for good. He was seeing me off as far as the mouth of the river. The schooner had left the day before, working down and drifting on the ebb, while I had prolonged my stay overnight. And now ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... night or in the freshness of early morning, regardless of the hours, unfretted by the tyrannous remembrances of appointed times. Milestones passed slowly, like things drifting, which ask no attention, and hardly perceived in the moment of their disappearance, serve only to enrich and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It was a joy to lie drowsily back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and looking out upon ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... away from Lola. His triweekly visits to the Golden Cloud dropped off a bit. He took to drifting about from saloon to saloon, to being less pronounced in his frequenting of one or ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe

... themselves; peopled by a nation of aliens; endless in the variety of their life; abounding in weird and beautiful pictures which even the landsman can appreciate. Alban rarely tired of that panorama of swirling waters and drifting hulks and the majestic shapes of resting ships. And upon such a day as this which had made an idler of him, their interest increased tenfold; and to this there was added a wonder which had never come into his life before. For surely, ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... seated himself with his back to the stem. The position was a precarious one, and after a time he gained the wooden carved work above, and obtained a seat there just below the bowsprit, and hidden from the sight of those on deck a few feet above him. As he knew the vessels were drifting to leeward towards the shoals, he hoped to remain hidden until the vessel struck, and then to gain ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty

... to seek to know what is right for myself, I attribute more largely to my natural hereditary mental bent, than to any particular merit of my own. I trust this book will help us all to realize the danger of drifting with traditionary religion, and thus defeating the revealed truth of Jesus Christ, and the need of searching the truth for ourselves that thus we may be used of God to advance his kingdom of unity and truth. Christian civilization would make much more rapid strides if we ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... and the others boosted Gif upward as far as they could. Then he mounted from branch to branch, and the others waited below as patiently as possible for what he might have to report. In the meantime a few flakes of snow came drifting downward, and ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)

... strangely to a state of perfect relaxation—a state not pleasing to Joan, and rather puzzling to David Martin, who postponed a proposed trip to the West until he felt sure of Doris's health. It seemed that, having dropped the old life, Doris was not merely willing to step into a new one—she was drifting in. Without resistance she floated. She would lie for a whole afternoon on the porch watching the play of colour on The Rock. She smiled, recalling, rather vaguely to be sure, the superstitions concerning ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... and the baskets lay in vermilion patches on the sun-smitten green, like gouts of arterial blood. White vapors round the mountain peaks rose tortuously toward the blue; while seaward, rain still filled the air as with black sand drifting down aslant, through gaps in which we could descry far off a steel-bright strip of fair weather that joined sea and sky, cutting under a fairy island so that it seemed suspended ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... ease. "It even makes one doubt a little the people one believes in most: take you and me, for instance. In my sane moments I know nothing could get between us; but sometimes I get to imagining—times like the last few days when I am—raw—that we're gradually drifting apart. A little difference of opinion comes up and imagination magnifies until it becomes a mountain and—I know I'm preposterous, Elice, and there's nothing really to it, but the thing's been on my mind and I wanted to tell you and get it out of my system." ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... To whom could she turn in her trouble? The thought of her father was both a reproach and a humiliation. He was drifting hopelessly, and almost unresistingly, towards final wreck, and, so far from seeking to restrain, she had added to the evil impetus. She shrank from the very idea of confiding in her garrulous, superficial mother. ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... scrutinizing the household gear that was to come under the hammer, glad at last to know what the house walls had really held; or they visited with their neighbors in little groups. But this was a day of fall sunshine and drifting leaves. Miss Letty, standing at an upper window looking out on her pear tree, the leaves leathery brown, felt a twitching of the lips. She gazed farther over her domain, and it seemed to her that it had never been so pleasant before, so mellowed ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... colonization has not removed the 450,000 free persons of color from our country. They remain as a floating body in our midst, drifting, as the census tables show, hither and thither, as the effects of climate at the north, or foreign emigration at the east, or prejudice at the south, repel it from those points. It is an interesting subject of investigation to watch the movements of the colored population, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... holy matrimony." He went on through the beautiful service, while the light streamed in, bearing its fairy freight of colour and gold, and the swift patter of the Little People of the Forest rustled through the drifting leaves. ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... pretense to a town between our ranch and Red Gap—a post-office, three general stores, a score of dwellings, and a low drinking place known as The Swede's. The news had not come to us; so the veterinary obliged. A dozen Indians, drifting into the valley for the haying about to begin, had tarried near Kulanche and bought whiskey of the Swede. The selling of this was a lawless proceeding and the consumption of it by the purchasers had been hazardous in the extreme. Briefly, the result had been ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... drowning mouths, of men and women, of little children and the very beasts: "Brother! We hold!" But the black flood rolled over and on. There, down in its dark tumult, beneath its cruel tumult, I saw men still with arms linked; women on their knees, clinging to earth; little children drifting—dead, all dead; and the beasts dead. And their eyes were still open facing that death. And above them the savage water roared. But clear and high I heard the Voice call: "Brothers! Hold! Death ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... revived the spirit of patriotism, has restored the national unity, and has reenforced the principle of civic service. We can see under the revealing searchlight of the war the anarchy towards which we have been drifting during the past ten ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... broader, but still magnificent under the cotton gown; her arms full of flowers and ferns, was escorted by two more children, sturdy little boys, who doubled and redoubled on their tracks like puppies. The tiny barefoot girl, in her father's arms, was only a tangle of blue gingham and drifting strands of silky hair; but the boys were splendidly alert little lads, and their high voices loitered in the air after the radiant, chattering little caravan ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... other matters, and to be miserable. The honest village logicians could make no stand against him, especially as he was seconded by his proselytes; when, to their great joy, Master Simon and the general came drifting down into the field of action. I saw that Master Simon was for making off, as soon as he found himself in the neighbourhood of this fire-ship; but the general was too loyal to suffer such talk in his hearing, and thought, no doubt, that a look and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... across hills holding to their final flare of color, where leaves were drifting down from trees of yellow and crimson. He threaded alder thickets and passed through groves of silver birches that shivered fastidiously in the breeze. Wild apple trees raised gnarled branches under which ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... said, was mixed sand hill and links; links being a Scottish name for sand which has ceased drifting and become more or less solidly covered with turf. The pavilion stood on an even space: a little behind it, the wood began in a hedge of elders huddled together by the wind; in front, a few tumbled sand hills stood between it and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... a wall. Presently the substitutes in the Languedoc battalion could not endure the strain any longer. They fired without orders and could not be stopped. At the same time Montcalm saw that his five little bodies of men were drifting apart. When the Canadian regulars had moved off, they had left the French flanks quite open. In consequence, the French battalions nearest the flanks kept edging outwards, the ones on the right towards their own right ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood

... Harriet. "See! The rowboat is drifting ashore. You stay on board. I'm going after it. I'm not tired. Keep the houseboat away from ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge

... through the woods. Hester sat erect, her slender body adjusting itself with unconscious grace to the quiet movements of the horse, which Meynell was leading. Overhead the October day was beginning to darken, and the yellow leaves shaken by occasional gusts were drifting mistily down on Hester's hair and dress, and on the glossy flanks of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... that ship; and in its depths concealed Lies all the wealth of this vast universe— Yea, lies some part of God's omnipotence The legacy divine of every soul. Thy will, O man, thy will is that great ship, And yet behold it drifting here and there— One moment lying motionless in port, Then on high seas ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... wonderful that the time can pass so quickly as it does. For one thing we are in better spirits, knowing that we are drifting steadily north. A rough estimate of to-day's observation gives 79 deg. 50' north latitude. That is not much since Monday; but then yesterday and to-day there has been almost no wind at all, and the other days it has been very light—only ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... music he was carried out and away beyond the boundaries of time and space, and there he found that rest for his soul, without which he would have sunk to earth and been covered by the kindly, drifting leaves of oblivion. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... not far from the roof already," said I, pointing to a corner of the ceiling through which, even as we spoke, flakes of snow were drifting ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed

... grave the east winds blow, And from the marsh-lands drifting slow The sea-fog comes, with evermore The wave-wash of a lonely shore, And sea-bird's melancholy cry, As Nature fain would typify The sadness of a closing scene, The loss of that which should have been. But, where thy native mountains bare ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... came from the shore just then, and the officers were in a state of uncertainty in regard to the situation which allowed them to do nothing. They waited for half an hour, when the leadsman reported that the water was shoaling, which indicated that the Teaser was drifting towards the island. ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... seriously, a fault which does not tend to impress their importance on a scoffing world. No girl should become a teacher because she does not know how else to gain her living. The profession is lamentably overstocked with mediocrities, lacking enthusiasm and vigour, drifting more and more hopelessly from one post to another. But there is plenty of room for keen and competent women, eager to learn and to teach, and this is true of all branches of the profession. No work can well be more thankless, more full of drudgery ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley

... on the horn of the saddle he slipped over the edge, but although he let down to the full reach of his arms his feet did not touch bottom and he drew himself aboard again. The boat was moving very slowly, drifting lazily across a bit of slack water that had backed into the mouth of a wide coulee. Fifty yards away, at the head of the little bay formed by the backwater, the Texan saw a bit of level, grass-covered beach. Glancing helplessly ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... of the river the Germans were at work. Barelegged, and armed with long poles, they waded carefully through the flooded fields towards the river to catch the drifting logs. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... who having been in their midst could tell what way they were drifting, "they came down upon us from a northerly direction. When we headed our horses homewards, we soon galloped out from them, and they did not appear to fly after us; I am sure they were ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... And then went down to the gates of death for father and brother and friend. Deeper and deeper into the sea, ready of heart and head, Hauling them home through the blinding foam, and raising them from the dead. There's many of you to-morrow who, but for a woman's hand, Would be drifting about with the shore lights out and ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... came upon her by degrees. In what way would her husband receive Hepworth Closs? How would he accept the position the two persons out yonder were drifting into? Would he consent to a union which even her partiality admitted as unsuitable, or would he, in his cold, calm way, plant his foot upon their hearts and crush her fond desire out ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens

... to face hard truths and take strong steps, but we have not done so. Instead we have drifted, and that drifting has eroded our resources, fractured our economy, and shaken our confidence. Though our challenges are fearsome, so are our strengths. Americans have ever been a restless, questing, hopeful people, and we must bring to our task today the vision ...
— Inaugural Presidential Address • William Jefferson Clinton

... understood, felt and knew and resolved all in one. The moon shone, and the clouds went flitting like ice-floe about the sky, now gray in distance, now near the moon and white, now in her very presence and adorned with her favour on their bosoms, now drifting again into the gray; and still the two, Ginevra and Gibbie, stood motionless—Gibbie with the tears in his eyes, and Ginevra weeping as if her heart would break; and behind the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... deal of smoke drifting and floating through the air, but it caused less inconvenience and annoyance than it did when they fled to the ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis

... opened on us one arter another, the 'Beaucenture,' the 'San Nicholas,' and the 'Redoutable' swept and battered us wi' their murderous broadsides; the air seemed full o' smoke and flame, and the old 'Bully-Sawyer' in the thick o' it. But still we could see the 'Victory' through the drifting smoke ahead o' us wi' the signal flying, 'Engage the enemy more closely,' and still we waited and waited very patient, and crept down on the enemy nearer ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... very difficult, the dangers of the Channel being aggravated by the strength of the current and bad weather. The Captain, Vesuvius, and Royal William were aground for some time, but were ultimately got off again without much damage; and the Terrible, which was drifting and in great danger, was only brought up by means of an anchor constructed for the occasion by lashing one of the quarter-deck guns to two small anchors. When her large anchors were hauled up they were found to be broken; and so great was the loss of these articles that Lord ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... minds of its members. 'Tis a strange fancy of nature, however, gradually to forget many of the associations and circumstances of sombre hue as the silver linings appear in our respective clouds of life in greater radiance as each day finds us drifting farther from ties of ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman

... and the current increasing dashed this against the buildings, which at length gave way and all went floating down across the points—ice, log houses with dogs and cats frantic on their roofs. One eye-witness says: "The most singular spectacle was a house in flames, drifting along in the night, its one half immersed in water and ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce

... waist, dashed again and again into that awful surging to snatch victims from death,—clutching at passing hands, heads, garments, in the cataract-sweep of the seas,—saving, aiding, cheering, though blinded by spray and battered by drifting wreck, until his strength failed in the unequal struggle at last, and his men drew him aboard senseless, with some beautiful half-drowned girl safe in his arms. But well-nigh twoscore souls had been rescued by him; and the Star ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... coughing at the foot of the stairs, while all Peterhoff hummed like a hive. Red Lancers came in, and the head Chaprassi who speaks English came in, and mace-bearers came in, and ladies ran downstairs screaming, 'Fire'; for the smoke was drifting through the house and oozing out of the windows, and bellying along the verandahs, and wreathing and writhing across the gardens. No one could enter the room where Mellish was lecturing on his Fumigatory till that unspeakable powder had ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling

... on the bleak sea-beach A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair Lashed close to a drifting mast. ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... stopped, but the sky was heavy and the clouds hung low. Twice Anton had to jerk on the tow-rope to jolt Ross awake, for, unnoticing, he was heading for deep water. Even near the shore the torrent was full of floating debris. The bodies of horses and cattle drifting down the stream told of many impoverished farms and the flotsam was eloquent of wrecked and demolished houses and ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... third person; therefore his faults and delusions interest him equally with his successes. Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man; whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only interested in a low success. This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahrheit, and directs the selection of the incidents; and nowise the external importance of events, the rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of course, the book affords ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves Where life and its ventures are laid, The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves May see us in sunshine or shade; Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark, We'll trim ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... had been about forty days out from Palos, the ship ran into what is marked upon your maps as the Sargasso Sea. This is a vast meadow of floating seaweed and seagrass in the middle of the Atlantic; it is kept drifting about in the same place by the two great sea currents that flow past it but ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks

... away in the listless trees; A mother wept on her beaded knees For sons gone out to the long war's end; But more than mother or man wept I Who had no son in the world to send. The hour lagged by, and drifting high Came the fitful hum Of the little drum, And faint, but still with an ardent flow, The pibroch, call ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... it being now three and thirty years since he first took a part in public affairs among the Achaeans, having in that time been the chief man in credit and power of all Greece; but he was now deserted on all hands, helpless and overpowered, drifting about amidst the waves and danger on the shattered hulk of his native city. For the Aetolians, affected whom he applied to, declined to assist him in his distress, and the Athenians, who were well affected to ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... he was, drifting in from the northern spaces, he had evidently lost the pack-horse that bore his troubles. Suddenly, out of the wall of dusk that edged the strip of road loomed a horse's head, and then another. The lead horse bore a pack. ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... started drifting, at a sudden current or breeze sent the tail before the wind. The rear of the hydroplane was forced ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood

... tremendous fire from Fort Constantine and other batteries. Now flames were seen to burst forth from the Queen, when, a steamer taking her in tow, she stood off to extinguish them. Some time afterwards the Albion was seen to be on fire, fearfully mauled and unable to fire a shot, with the risk of drifting on shore. She also stood off, helped ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... their wont of drifting, put off all decisive action, and let things slip and slide, for the Germans to put in order. There were no Russians, therefore, at the Conference, and there lies no obligation on any political group or party in the anarchist Slav state to hold to the Allies. But it would be an error ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... Claim No. 30, Eldorado, on the Klondyke, started drifting on his claim with four men. The men agreed to work the claim on shares, the agreement being that they should work on shares by each receiving half of what they could get out. The five together took out $95,000.00 in twenty-eight ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue

... stood outside the cabin, with the moon high in the sky, a gentle wind sweeping up the canyon and loose masses of clouds drifting in front of the orb of night. Here and there a light twinkled from a shanty and the hum of voices sounded faintly in their ears. Further off, at the extreme end of the settlement, stood the Heavenly Bower, with the yellow rays streaming from its two windows. They could picture the group gathered ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... He awoke abruptly, to find himself twirling the sharp-ribbed stem of his empty glass. Abstractedly he stared into this, as though seeking there a clue to what they had been talking about. Hazily he understood that they had been drifting close upon the perilous shoals of intimate personalities. What had he told her? What ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... now opposite the sheriff, and still drifting with the current, though held back by the turning ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... her mind drifting back to that crazy notion of an evil spirit wandering to seek a home; as the hermit-crab, dispossessed of one shell, goes in search of another. After a lull which had looked for a moment like coming sleep, she said with an astonishing calmness:—"But ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... the 3rd of June north of Tsalal Island...Still there...Captain William Guy and five of the men of the Jane—the piece of ice I am on is drifting across the iceberg...food will soon fail me...Since the 13th of June...my last resources exhausted...to-day...16th of June . . . I am ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne

... the wind, close reefed, and straining at their anchors. There were days when the steamers had to steam full speed ahead in order to keep at their berths; and then the big sailing ships would drag their anchors and come drifting, drifting helplessly towards the shore, and have to fly before the gale if they could, or take their chance of stranding if the water were low, or being battered to bits against the cliffs if the tide were in. Many a time ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... light air filled the upper canvas, and just gave us command of the ship. The mountains of Corsica, with Monte Christo and Elba, had all been sunk some hours, and we were on the yards, keeping a look-out for a land-fall on the Roman coast. A low, thick bank of drifting fog lay along the sea, in-shore of us, which all believed to be the sweat of the land, and thought no more of; though none wished to enter it, for that is a coast where foul airs rise, and through which the gulls and land-birds ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... doctrine of a particular providence, taught in every leaf of the Bible. Now, Armytage, look back calmly over your past life, and forward, whither you were drifting, and see if the very kindest thing that could be done for you by an all-wise and all-loving God was not to bring you up suddenly, and lay you aside, and force you to think. Beware of trying to ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... there was no foliage on the trees, except tiny leaflets bursting into life. Night advanced and the moon shone effulgent, but her rays were obscured by the divergent limbs of the forest, when we sometimes plunged into its depths. The gloom was intensified by drifting clouds, hanging low; but these momentarily lifted, briefly restoring the cheery moonbeams and silver roadway. Many tree-trunks were white, contrasting with the darkness within the dense woods, glistening like spectres, as the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights, And chalk'd in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you; How he follow'd with them and tack'd with them three days and would not give it up, How he saved the drifting company at last, How the lank loose-gown'd women look'd when boated from the side of their prepared graves, How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp'd unshaved men; All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... possibly occurred to Beatrice that, considering the exceeding brevity of their acquaintance, they were drifting into somewhat confidential conversation. At any rate, she ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... by this time was checked, and it was drifting with the current. The two young men had no desire for a nearer approach to ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis

... anything but the howling wind and the driving spray, and he himself, Logotheti, gripping a spar, one of those long booms the fishermen carry for running, half-drowned again and again, but gripping still, and drifting with the storm past the awful death of sharp black rocks and pounding seas, into the ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... mother tells me you wrote Grace, that you went to a theatre and that you did not go to a Methodist church last Sunday, as you promised. You remember what Pastor told you about the danger to young men of drifting from church to church in a large city like Baltimore, ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump

... danger of rain; Castle Island lay in the misted water, faint and grey, reminding me of what a splendid burial I might have if the law did not intervene to prevent me. And as we followed the straggling grey Irish road, with scant meagre fields on either side—fields that seemed to be on the point of drifting into marsh land—past the houses of the poor people, I tried to devise a scheme for the safeguarding of the vase. But Rameses the Second had not succeeded in securing his body against violation; it had been unswathed; I had seen his photograph in the Strand, and where he failed, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... and I guessed that the fog had blurred for him the distance as well as the direction of the sound. Very quietly I heaved myself over the stern and into the boat, which swung broadside to the current and so was borne up and beyond danger from him. But the mischief was, we were drifting up the main channel which ended in the Lostwithiel marshes and must pretty certainly lead us into the enemy's hands, unless before striking the moors below the town we could by some means push across to the farther bank. We leaned over, dipped our arms in the water, and with the least possible noise ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... a day in September of drifting clouds and unbroken rain that Stella spoke at length of a resolution that had been gradually forming in her mind. She found no difficulty in speaking; in fact it seemed the natural thing to do. And she felt even as she gave utterance to the words ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... the vicinity of St. Robert's Cave. Clarke and Aram, he said, went over the hedge and advanced toward the cave, and Aram struck Clarke several times upon the breast and head, and so killed him. It was a dark night, and in the middle of winter, but the moon was shining through drifting clouds, and Houseman said he could see the movement of Aram's hand but not the weapon that it held. He was about twelve yards from the spot of the murder. He testified that the body of Clarke was buried in the cave. The presiding justice charged against the prisoner ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... association on board the Star of the North after his rescue from the drifting boat, in which he greatly exaggerated the help I was able to render him, Colonel Vereker was kind enough to notice me much more than my subordinate position on board would have seemed to warrant; ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson

... her gaze uncertainly to the gleaming bay. Abreast of them the fleet of fishing-boats were drifting with the tide; in the distance others were dotted, clear away to where the opal ocean lay. A tug was passing, and she saw the sun flash from the cargo in its tow, while the faint echo of a song came wafting to her ears. She stood so for a long ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... their sudden ending: the degradation and drudgery of the life he was to return to on the morrow: all rose up in tumultuous conflict. A feeling of anguish that was elemental and not of the moment filled him. Drifting and vacillating nature—he saw himself as in a boat borne along by currents that carried him, now near isles of beauty, and then whirled him away from their vanishing glory into gloomy gulfs and cataracts that ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... central surface covered by a perennial drifting polar icepack that averages about 3 meters in thickness, although pressure ridges may be three times that size; clockwise drift pattern in the Beaufort Gyral Stream, but nearly straight-line movement from the New Siberian Islands (Russia) to Denmark Strait (between ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... boat was close now and drifting alongside. Arthur Miles and Tilda stared down upon the faces of the rowers. They were eight or ten, and young for the most part—young men of healthy brown complexions and maidens in sun-bonnets; and they laughed, with upturned eyes, as they fell to their oars again to keep pace ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... gave a great bound at the remembrance. He permitted himself no speculation as to where he was drifting. He just sat there thrilling in every limb and every sense and every quality of ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn

... "Over the foam we glide," in and out through the other dancers, the violins weaving that story of love never ending. "What though the world be wide"—Nellie's head was just below his face—"Love's golden star will guide." Nellie's hand was in his as they floated on the rainbow-sea. "Drifting along, glad is our song"—her hair blew against his cheek as they swept past the open door. What did he care what his mother would say. He was Egbert now. Edythe was in his arms. "While we are side by side" the ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung

... never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it gave that undefinable sense of shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially appeals to the imagination by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... much as both of them admired Handel I cannot see that they allowed his music to influence theirs. Handel even in his own lifetime was more or less of a survival and protest; he saw the rocks on to which music was drifting and steered his own good ship wide of them; as for his musical parentage, he grew out of the early Italians and out ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... heart-ache. I can hardly bear to talk of it even now, and it will be two years this August. But come up to my room. By Jove, I am glad to see you! How is it you are in Geneva? I was thinking about you yesterday, and wondering whether you were drifting down the Nile in a dahabeeah, or crossing the desert on a dromedary. Of course you have hunted tigers and elephants: ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... "This is good enough. And if we stay here and have a nice luncheon perhaps the fog will go away. What's the sense in drifting ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford

... shooting gallery and his familiar. They arise, roll up and stow away their mattresses. Mr. George, having shaved himself before a looking-glass of minute proportions, then marches out, bare-headed and bare-chested, to the pump in the little yard and anon comes back shining with yellow soap, friction, drifting rain, and exceedingly cold water. As he rubs himself upon a large jack-towel, blowing like a military sort of diver just come up, his hair curling tighter and tighter on his sunburnt temples the more he rubs it so that it looks as if it never could be loosened by any less ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... among it, the champion fishers of the world, who spent their spare time in drifting past the English boats and hurling salty wit—at which pastime they ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... was gathering the sweet-smelling tangle in her lap into some more portable arrangement. And afterward, when they were drifting slowly homeward in the lengthening shadows, a ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... was just to breathe the air! Never had her step been so light, or her daily walk to the dingy office—dingy no longer—so bracing. And the out-of-doors—the sky and drifting clouds; the low hills, bleak in the winter's gloom—what changes had come over them? Was it the first blush of the coming spring that had softened their lines, or had her eyes been blind to all their beauty? Oh! Marvellous elixir that makes hopes ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith

... a sample of the travel and exposures of the year of labor, on which Brother Frink had entered. Amid the drifting snows of winter, and the copious rains of summer, he was compelled to traverse the dreary, and almost unbroken forests of his field, and on more than one occasion he found the night around his camp-fire ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller

... the following morning, the wind having changed in the night, the breakers were heard very distinctly. The lead gave no bottom at 140 fathoms, but at daybreak the reef was not a mile away, and they found themselves in a dead calm, rapidly drifting with the current towards the breakers. The yawl and long-boat were got out, the pinnace being under repair, and the sweeps were used from the gun-room ports. By six o'clock she was heading north ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... drifted with the stream, I pondering the issue of my affair; and the drifting ceased not till I came to the place where it disappeared beneath the mountain. I rowed my conveyance into the place which was intensely dark; and the current carried the raft with it down the underground channel.[FN79] The thin stream bore me ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... fell very unpleasantly upon Blanche's cars. She was utterly unconscious of her mother's schemes and hopes. She had not as yet recognized that she was drifting into love with Lionel Beauchamp, but she did know that his confidential intimacy with Sylla Chipchase was very distasteful to her. What was this present she had made him? and what was this commission she had given ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart

... the other clan leader had tendered. The Terrans were aware that Koros mining was a dangerous business but they had not known that the stock of available stones was so very small. Within ten minutes the last of the serious bargaining was concluded and the clansmen were drifting away from the burned over space about ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... the red and gold leaves were slowly drifting to the ground as Betsy and Uncle Henry drove back from the station after seeing Aunt Frances off. They were not silent this time, as when they had gone to meet her. They were talking cheerfully together, laying their plans for the winter which was so near. "I must begin to bank the house ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield

... possibility in the slow current of events. But he was constantly possessed with a large dim sense of something that lay beyond, waiting for him; something toward which the tide of things was with certainty drifting him, but with which he had nothing more to do than wait. He did not see that to do the things given him to do was the only preparation for whatever, in the dim under-world of the future, might be preparing for him; but he did feel ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... unite in some sort of federation and declare themselves independent of Great Britain. It was with regret that he had come to this conclusion, and he was very slow in proclaiming it, but after 1768 he kept it distinctly before his mind. He saw clearly the end toward which public opinion was gradually drifting, and because of his great influence over the Boston town-meeting and the Massachusetts assembly, this clearness of purpose made him for the next seven years the most formidable of the ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske

... with the Boer scouts at Acton Homes and Besters Station, these being the voortrekkers of the Orange Free State force. On the 18th also a detachment was reported from Hadders Spruit, seven miles north of Glencoe Camp. The cloud was drifting up, and it could not be long before ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... After drifting an hour or two in the lower woods, I set out for the summit of a hill 900 feet high, with a view to getting as near the heart of the storm as possible. In order to reach it I had to cross Dry Creek, a tributary of the Yuba that goes crawling along the base ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... greater foe to intemperance than John B. Gough. No words of this great leader have left a more lasting impression than those which he used in his striking picture of the young men drifting in a boat on the Niagara river. Happily, it adapts itself to the requirements ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold

... She could scarcely believe that she had ever left Limasito; the climacteric weeks in New York, the trip to Topaz Gulch and the later scene in Jim Baggott's hotel had alike faded into a vague, nebulous shadow without substance or coherence, and she herself seemed drifting. . ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... human habitation, the few settlers being located on the banks of inlets or lakes some distance from the shores of the main river. We met only one vessel during the whole of the time, and this did not come within hail, as it was drifting down in the middle of the current in a broad part of the river, two miles from the bank along which we were laboriously warping our ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... themselves. Truths which one has found out for himself always mean more than matter that is dogmatically forced upon him. The pupil who has watched the bees sucking honey from clover blossoms and then going with pollen-laden feet to another blossom, or one who has observed the drifting pollen from orchard or corn field, is better able to understand the fertilization of plants than he would be from any mere ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... preexisting in the atmosphere, through reduction of temperature; we show how they assumed the form they present. We assign optical reasons for the brightness or blackness of the cloud; we explain, on mechanical principles, its drifting before the wind; for its disappearance we account on the principles of chemistry. It never occurs to us to invoke the interposition of the Almighty in the production and fashioning of this fugitive form. We explain ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... Her lips were dry, her eyes wide, her bosom heaving. Boundaries hitherto unchangeable, were suddenly submerged. Desperately, as if for her life, she sought to cling to such floating landmarks as Duty, Conscience, Virtue—but they were drifting madly ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... now praetor, warmly supported Metellus. To him, if to no one else, it was clear as the sun at noonday, that unless some better government could be provided than could be furnished by five hundred such gentlemen as the Roman senators, the State was drifting on to destruction. Resolutions to be submitted to the people were generally first drawn in writing, and were read from the Rostra. When Metellus produced his proposal, Cato, who was a tribune also, sprang to his side, ordered him to be silent, and snatched the scroll out of his hands. Metellus ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... and other foreign countries, and ship-lines are projected from its western seaports to foreign countries. Railroad-building is also being greatly stimulated by private enterprise. A vast amount of capital is drifting into the Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast regions from Eastern cities, and a great empire is being built up there which will be a source of wealth to those who obtain possession of land, timber, minerals and manufacturing facilities before the general enhancement of values takes place. ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various

... overcast with dark clouds, and for several hours the snow fell unceasingly, and now the darkness of night was added to the gloomy scene. As the night set in, the snow continued to fall in a thick shower, and a strong easterly wind arose, which filled the air with one blinding cloud of drifting snow; and the lights in the scattered habitations in the then primitive settlement of D. could scarcely be distinguished amid the thick darkness. It was a fearful night to be abroad upon that lonely and almost impassable road; and Mrs. W. fully realized the peril to which ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell









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