|
|
|
More "Erratic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that it wasn't a boy to whom he was talking, but a little and grave old man. And suddenly the desire seized him to hear more of that low, direct voice; the impulse came to him and Caleb, whose whole life had been as free from erratic snap-judgments as his broad face was of craft, found joy in acting upon it forthwith, before it ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... were numerous and often remarkable. Here are the ones that the Nautilus's nets most frequently hauled on board: rays, including spotted rays that were oval in shape and brick red in color, their bodies strewn with erratic blue speckles and identifiable by their jagged double stings, silver-backed skates, common stingrays with stippled tails, butterfly rays that looked like huge two-meter cloaks flapping at middepth, toothless ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... sympathy, too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions rather than of the perfect adherence to the ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... de Rhodes, a young noble of Dauphiny, wounded mortally in the head, with blood streaming over his face and blinding his sight, was utterly unable to control his horse, who gallopped hither and thither at his own caprice, misleading many troopers who followed in his erratic career. A cavalier, armed in proof, and wearing the famous snow-white plume, after a hand-to-hand struggle with a veteran of Count Bossu's regiment, was seen to fall dead by the side of the bannerman: The ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Lady Ingleby in the mood of a typical April day, sunshine and showers rapidly alternating; whimsical smiles, succeeded by ready tears; then, with lashes still wet, gay laughter at some mistake of her own, or at incongruous behaviour on the part of her devoted but erratic household; speedily followed by pathetic anxiety over her own supposed short-comings in view of Lord Ingleby's requirements ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... inhabit exposed cold countries turning white in winter, and in the mottled skin of the Galeopithicus, which is hardly discernible from the rough bark of the tree to which it clings. I have hardly ever noticed such varied hues in any wild animals, although the Viverridae are somewhat erratic in colouring, as in the Indian squirrels, and it is doubtful whether several recorded species are not so nearly allied as to be in fact properly but one and the same. There is much in common in at least five ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... quick and hasty temper as they now did, the boys were not unprepared for anything that might happen. Gritting their teeth they marched bravely on even though they felt that at any moment the erratic man behind them might send a bullet into their backs. They resolved, however, to show ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... phases of honor and generosity—that the arrogance or coldness of a bank-officer may have a rational foundation—that feelings as intense are awakened in common business pursuits as in the most dramatic and erratic lives. In this just treatment of character,—this avoiding of the old saint and angel system of depicting men,—KIMBALL is truly pre-eminent, and under it even the casual SOL DOWNER strikes us with an individuality ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... reflecting that the glories of the future depended in part upon the activity of her typewriter, she bobbed her head, and hurried back to the seclusion of her little room, from which immediately issued sounds of enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... boat drawn towards some unknown peril, held off the shelf of rocks out of reach of the current. A sudden flash of fire, as from a flourished brand, burst out above them, and floating downwards through the darkness, in erratic circles, came an atom of burning wood. Surely no one but a hunted man would lurk ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Spellings are sometimes erratic. A few obvious misprints have been corrected, but in general the original spelling has been retained. Accents in the French phrases are inconsistent, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... looked quite alarmed—"Sir John cannot bear erratic people, he tells me so from morning to night. I am afraid you have managed to displease him very seriously, my dear. When you spilt your tea in the garden this evening, he acknowledged, when I pressed him on the subject, that it gave him quite ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... themselves expelled from the white churches, and finally driven from the city in 1858.[1] Other white men and women were teaching colored children during these years. The most prominent of these were Thomas Tabbs, an erratic philanthropist, Mr. Nutall, an Englishman; Mr. Talbot, a successful tutor stationed near the present site of the Franklin School; and Mrs. George Ford, a Virginian, conducting a school on New Jersey Avenue between K and L Streets.[2] ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... be supported. Still the idea was beautiful, and I dwelt upon it with pleasure. I have before observed, and indeed the reader must have gathered from my narative, that Melchior was no common personage. Every day did I become more partial to him, and more pleased with our erratic life. What scruples I had at first, gradually wore away; the time passed quickly, and although I would occasionally call to mind the original object of my setting forth, I would satisfy myself by the reflection, that there was yet sufficient time. Little Fleta was now my constant ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... that when the unfortunate Black first became clearly conscious of anything again, he heard the gurgle of sliding water close beside his head, and, opening his eyes, caught sight of a smoky lamp that reeled to and fro, in very erratic fashion. Moisture dripped from the beams above him, and there was a sickly smell which seemed familiar. Black, who had been to sea before, decided that he caught the aroma of bilge water. Rows of wooden shelves tenanted by recumbent figures, became ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... And as you can't write a bit of verse, you dear, lovely old Ben, nor a story, I do not believe our tastes will clash. Why shouldn't we agree just as well when we are married as we do now? Even that tremendous, gloomy, erratic Edgar Allan Poe adored not only his wife, but his mother-in-law. To be sure, there was Milton and Byron, and Mrs. Hemans and Bulwer, and a host of them; but Mr. and Mrs. Browning are going on serenely. And 'The Scarlet Letter' hasn't made trouble in Hawthorne's ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... large a charge simply rekindles the original vortex—still larger—in its original crater. And the activity that must be matched varies so tremendously, in magnitude, maxima, and minima, and the cycle is so erratic—ranging from seconds to hours without discoverable rhyme or reason—that all attempts to do so at any predetermined instant have failed completely. Why, even Kinnison and Cardynge and the Conference of Scientists couldn't solve it, any more than they could work out a tractor beam ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... in this erratic strain, he suddenly heard the voice of some human being at the back of the rocks, giving vent to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... never known Robert so excited and erratic in his movements as he has been today," he said at last. "I hope he will not engage in a vulgar quarrel with this Mr. Trenholme, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... a pretty swift ball, I admit," returned Gif. "But your delivery is rather erratic. You put them over the catcher's head several times. If you did that when the bases were full, it would mean just so many runs coming in." And after that Brassy said no ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... unfortunate druggist reached the last outpost of Russian power in North-Eastern Asia, and was set at liberty, he made his way to the little log church, entered the belfry, and proceeded to jangle the church bells in a sort of wild, erratic chime. When the people of the town ran to the belfry in alarm and inquired what was the matter, Schiller replied, with dignity, that he wished the whole population to know that 'by the Grace of God, Herman Schiller, after long and perilous wanderings, had reached, in ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and indifference about the people who attended the church. There was also a good deal of opposition in the parish, some old sullen seceders who went to a neighbouring proprietary chapel, many more of erratic tastes haunted the places of worship of the numerous sects, who swarmed in the town, and many more were living in ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... probationary preparations for the hardships which accompany it in populations so remote as the Australian and the American of the prairie. I say of the prairie, because we shall find that in the proportion as the agricultural state replaces the erratic habits of the hunter, ceremonies of the sort in question decrease both in number and peculiarity ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... of them suffering from a bad attack of yaws) propelled the craft from her forward part in erratic zig-zags; amidships sat Captain Kettle in a Madeira chair under a green-lined white umbrella; and behind him squatted his personal attendant, a Krooboy, bearing the fine old Coast name of Brass Pan. The crushed marigold smell from the river closed them in, and ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... who both loved and respected his niece, to defer his remarks to another time: and Katherine, springing from her chair with childish eagerness, flew to the side of her cousin, who was directing a servant that had announced the arrival of one of those erratic venders of small articles, who supply, in remote districts of the country, the places of more regular traders, to show the lad into the dining-parlor. The repast was so far ended as to render this interruption less objectionable; and as all felt the ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... whatever might be the erratic actions of a few of its freakish individuals, my faith in my country and its people is my faith in my God. I was old fashioned enough to believe every man his brother's keeper. There was nothing more for me ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... year 1704, just over a decade since Dr. Blair had obtained the charter for his College, the erratic and able Governor of Virginia, Francis Nicholson, was recalled. For all that he was a wild talker, he had on the whole done well for Virginia. He was, as far as is known, the first person actually to propose a federation or union of all those English-speaking political divisions, royal provinces, ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... The noble gnome went along in front of them, when suddenly he began walking right up, in the water. When the others came up to the same place, to their surprise, they found themselves doing the same thing. They couldn't possibly stay on the ground. 'I don't want to go up,' said erratic Cricket, kicking, and shamefaced Will called to the sparkling gnome, to know what was the matter. 'Nothing at all,' he called back, cheerfully, 'only gravity doesn't happen to act just there. Sometimes it doesn't and then you're just as likely to ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... continued. They all came from the same direction, from the woods across the river, somewhere just above their camp. It was Indian firing. Its character was unmistakable. It was erratic, and many of the shots failed hopelessly to reach the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the African race; but Chloe was a trained and methodical one, who moved in an orderly domestic harness, while Dinah was a self-taught genius, and, like geniuses in general, was positive, opinionated and erratic, to the ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... from this lake. There are five creeks that fall into it, formed by innumerable streamlets oozing from the clay-beds at the bases of the hills, that consist of an accumulation of sand, gravel, and clay, intermixed with erratic fragments; being a more prominent portion of the great erratic deposit previously described, and which here is known by the name of 'Hauteurs des Terres'— heights ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... winding that he speedily disappeared from sight. The boy, who was compelled to sit still and await his return, at perhaps the most dangerous portion of the road, felt anything but comfortable over the erratic proceeding of his friend. But, fortunately, the latter had been gone but a short time when he reappeared, hurrying forward as if somebody was at ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... two of sleep, which seemed to turn, as sleep sometimes will, the erratic currents of his mind back into the old channels, from which it had been forced by this earthquake stress of life, he experienced ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of thought, and there are more angles. Thief though he be, he has fair language,—not florid or rhetorical, but terse and very much to the point. If bred as a divine, he would have held his place among the "brilliants" of the time, and been as original, erratic, or outr as any. What a fortune lost! It is part of the fatality for the man not to know it, at least in time. Even villany would have put him into his proper place, but for that film over the mental vision. "If rogues," said ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... The Avenger was erratic and uncertain in her voyages. She evidently sailed to the principal islands of the South Seas, and did business with them all. From one of these voyages, Henry, her captain, returned with a wife—a dark-haired, dark-eyed, ladylike ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... became known, Agnes's wish to place herself in the wrong, beyond sympathy, or hope of pardon, was freely gratified. No criticism seemed too harsh for her conduct. No voice was lifted in mitigation of her offence. Rennes was excused, because he was an artist, erratic and passionate, and she was unfortunately beautiful. The poor old Bishop, however, rallied under the shock, preached more vigorously than ever, and showed a proud countenance to his daughter's adversaries. When he was able to announce to his friends—after ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... probably attempt the libretto of a comic opera. He legged it on the newspaper for a while and then re-deserted, the same as most of the others, and went to Springfield to resume his studies. This was his first erratic move. If he had been a true journalist there wouldn't have been anything more for him to learn. Then he published The Thirteenth District. Many of his old friends bought it expecting to get something on the order of refined vaudeville, but ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... low clouds of smoke were drifting overhead like a broken veil. The erratic foothill wind, which a few minutes before had been coming down the valley, was now blowing back up again. Even while they took in the situation they could feel the hot breath of the distant ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... thing. You and I are one. Whatever is mine is yours. I don't swear to make you a regular, unfailing allowance worthy of the new position you're going to have, because you see I do business with several countries, and my income's erratic; I'm never sure to the day when it will come or how much it will be. But there's nothing you want which you can't buy; remember that. And when we begin life in London, you shall have a standing account at as ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... changeable, how helplessly associative, is the "beauty sense." That which gives us a peculiar feeling of deep pleasure, received through various senses, we call "beautiful," whether it be color of form, sound, scent, or touch; but no sensation is more erratic. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... authorities, Elie de Beaumont and Leopold von Buch, who contended that the mountains had sprung up like veritable jacks-in-the-box. Von Buch, whom his friend and fellow-pupil Von Humboldt considered the foremost geologist of the time, died in 1853, still firm in his early faith that the erratic bowlders found high on the Jura had been hurled there, like cannon-balls, across the valley of Geneva by the sudden upheaval of a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Dill, none too well pleased. The last thing he desired was co-operation from the Rabbit-Hutch and association with the band of erratic, happy-go-lucky Bohemians that peopled it. "You're laying out a good deal of work for yourself," he remarked coldly, dismissing ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... a qualm of conscience. The child really was too simple to be made game of. Besides, he felt sure that she had spoken the truth, so far as she herself was concerned. She didn't know where her erratic aunt had gone; and any further questioning would only frighten her without winning him the knowledge he sought. He therefore took the parcel back, said some soothing words and made his way across the walk to his taxi. But the ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... boats. Ivanoff was a deft and powerful oarsman, and the boat shot forward across the water like a living thing. Sometimes the oars touched reeds or low-hanging branches which for a long while after such contact trembled above the deep, dark stream. Sanine steered with so much erratic energy that the water foamed and gurgled round the rudder. They reached a narrow backwater where it was shady and cool. So transparent was the stream that one could see the bottom covered with yellow pebbles, where shoals of little pink fish ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Delhi pandies, who are artillerymen trained by ourselves; here you will see the real genuine native product; and as the manufacture of shell is in its infancy, and as the shot seldom fits the gun within half an inch, or even an inch, you will see something erratic. They may knock holes in the wall, but it will take them a long time to cut enough holes near each other to make a breach. There, do you see? there are another lot of elephants and troops coming from the left. We shall have the whole countryside ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... his illness, and treated him like a brother, Etheridge, with the impulsive confidence of his simple nature, poured out his thanks and told his history, and eagerly accepted Lawson's suggestion to try his hand at trading, instead of continuing his erratic wanderings—wanderings which could only end in his "going broke" at Tahiti or Honolulu, Fifteen miles or so away, Lawson said, there was a village with a good opening for a trader. How much could he put into it? Well, he had ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... saw, too, that the Assembly had established so complete a mastery over the Government, that even men of far greater ability and force of character would have been impotent for good. Her whole dependence was on Mirabeau; and his course at this time was so capricious and erratic that it often caused her more perplexity and alarm than pleasure or confidence. He regarded himself as having a very difficult part to play. He could not conceal from himself that he was no longer able to lead the Assembly as he had done at first, except when he was urging ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... bird forsakes the treetop, flutters over the youth's head and flies further. Siegfried interprets this as an invitation. "Thus is the way shown me. Wherever you fly, I follow your flight!" We see him going hither and thither in his attempt to follow the erratic flight of a bird. His guide after a moment bends in a definite direction and Siegfried disappears ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... the river was extremely erratic, zigzagging through the riven, rocky barrier which formed the ancient dam at the foot of the lake; and one minute they were swept to right, the next to left, while at every angle there was a whirlpool which ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... we found the idea amusing, therefore our payment. One of our editors will work your manuscript into less-erratic typescript ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... wherefore of things. Why had Harold Beecham (who was a sort of young sultan who could throw the handkerchief where he liked) chosen me of all women? I had no charms to recommend me—none of the virtues which men demand of the woman they wish to make their wife. To begin with, I was small, I was erratic and unorthodox, I was nothing but a tomboy—and, cardinal disqualification, I was ugly. Why, then, had he proposed matrimony to me? Was it merely a whim? Was ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... placid temper was again ruffled, and he might have said nasty things about Fate had not that erratic dame suddenly thought, fit to alter his fortunes. As the street narrowed between lofty buildings, so did the blaring thunder of the music increase. The mob closed in on the soldiers' heels; the whole roadway was packed with moving men. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... assured himself with some complacency that Elizabeth would expect no conversation with him until next morning. But he was a little mistaken. In her quality of mistress, she had chosen to send everyone else to bed: the household was so well accustomed to Percival's erratic comings and goings, that nobody attached any importance to his visits; and even old Mr. Heron appeared only for a few minutes to gossip with his son while he ate a comfortable supper, retiring at last, with a nod to his niece which ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... gone into those thickets for purposes quite other than the discovery of the right thing to do, for quite other motives than our high intellectual desire. There are ugly rebels and born rascals, cheats by instinct, and liars to women, swinish unbelievers who would compromise us with their erratic pursuit of a miscellaneous collection of strange fancies and betray us callously at last. Because a man does not find the law pure justice, that is no reason why he should fake his gold to a thieves' ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... even the elaborate cult of the hawk and of the other omen-birds is to be explained on these lines. If we think of the hawk's erratic behaviour, how he will come suddenly rushing down out of the remotest blue of the sky to hover overhead, and then perhaps to circle hither and thither in an apparently aimless manner, or will keep flying on ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... person, eighteen years old, whose mother had been the old lady's companion for many years. And to Magsie, as they all called her, young Mr. Hoyt had paid some decided attention not many months before. Mrs. Frothingham had seen fit to disapprove these advances then, but she was an extraordinarily erratic and cross-grained old lady, and her silence now had forced her nephew uncomfortably to suspect that she might have changed ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... for its author, and the welfare of man for its object. It is a system so uniform, exalted and pure, that the loftiest intellects have acknowledged its influence, and acquiesced in the justness of its claims. Genius has bent from his erratic course to gather fire from her altars, and pathos from the agony of Gethsemane and the sufferings of Calvary. Philosophy and science have paused amid their speculative researches and wondrous revelations to gain wisdom from her teachings and knowledge from ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Harlin pleased himself much by believing that he could handle Nick Ellhorn better than any other man in the county, except Emerson Mead, and he liked to have the opportunity to try his hand, just as he liked to drive a nervous, mettlesome, erratic horse. He could drive the horse, but he could not manage Nick Ellhorn. The tall Texan had learned not to batter words against the judge's determination, which was as big and bulky as his figure. He simply ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... envisaged her as growing into this self-possessed woman, whose most noticeable quality, had it not been for her aloofness, would have been a certain worldliness. He felt his dreams of the old time rudely upset. Killigrew's erratic defection, the altered feeling of Judy, which made him uncertain even whether to call her by her Christian name as of old or not, the presence of this oddly-attired girl with the mouth, were all so different from what he had been expecting. He told himself that when Killigrew did arrive he also ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... on the 23rd of September. The only consequence was fatal delay; not knowing what to do with their prisoner, the Government shipped him to Caprera. Personally he was perfectly free; no conditions were imposed; but nine men-of-war were despatched to the island to sweep the seas of erratic heroes. In spite of which, Garibaldi escaped in a canoe ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... again," said he, and this time led the voices all in unison. Such a storm was in Gilian's mind that he could not for a little listen to hear what he expected. He had forgotten his awkwardness, he had forgotten his shame; his erratic and fleet-winged fancy had sent him back to the den of the Jean, and he was in the dusk of the ship's interior listening to a girl's song, moved more profoundly than when he had been actually there by some message in the notes, some soothing passionate melancholy without relation to the words ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... writing, or at least of printing, poetry, and devote himself more to out-door occupation. The great difficulty in carrying eat this plan was to find regular employment of a nature suited to his bodily strength, and his somewhat erratic habits. After much pondering on the subject, Clare resolved to try a little farming on his own account, with the help of his friends, and on a very limited scale. A visit to Milton Park settled the matter. The two head servants of Earl Fitzwilliam, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... the most treacherous and aggressive rivers in the universe. It seems to be actuated by a spirit of unrest and a desire for change, so much so that the center of the river bed frequently moves to the right or left so rapidly as to wipe out of existence prosperous farms and homes. Sometimes this erratic procedure threatens the very existence of cities and bridges, and tens of thousands of dollars have been spent from time to time in day and night work to check the aggression of the stream and to compel it to confine itself to ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... mouth to scream imprecations, but thought better of it. Tim had a long memory, and an uncomfortable way of exacting penalties for any such indignity. She soothed her outraged feelings somewhat by throwing a stone after the little, limping figure, her erratic aim saving ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... thought a few moments. "No," he decided. "Cantwell may be erratic, and he certainly has a treacherous temper, and some mean ways. But this was hardly the sort of trick ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... strait, stretching right across the land here, and making an island of the Chelyuskin Peninsula. But probably it was only a river, which widened out near its mouth into a broad lake, as several of the Siberian rivers do. All about the clay plains I was tramping over, enormous erratic blocks, of various formations, lay scattered. They can only have been brought here by the great glaciers of the Ice Age. There was not much life to be seen. Besides reindeer there were just a few ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... fashion. At any rate, there is a kind of wild, out-of-door, subdued harmony in the rock-tints upon the exterior slopes of the famed Garden of the Gods, quite in keeping with the spirit of the decorative red-man. Within that garden color and form run riot, and Manitou is the restful outpost of this erratic wilderness. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Divine Comedy, in which at one time I took the greatest delight, in order to become acquainted with the broken speech, and yet more broken songs, of certain houseless wanderers whom I had met at a horse fair. Such an erratic course was certainly by no means in consonance with the sober and unvarying routine of college study. And my father, who was a man of excellent common sense, displayed it, in not pressing me to adopt a profession which required qualities of mind which he ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... congratulated him upon his evident success, and slipped away. But I was burning with a desire to see Enriquez and know all. He was imaginative but not untruthful. Unfortunately, I learned that he was just then following one of his erratic impulses, and had gone to a rodeo at his cousin's, in the foothills, where he was alternately exercising his horsemanship in catching and breaking wild cattle and delighting his relatives with his incomparable grasp of the American language and customs, and of the airs ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... of mule; and had I possessed a juicy cabbage, would have pressed it upon him, with thanks for his excellent example. The historical mule was a melo-dramatic quadruped, prone to startling humanity by erratic leaps, and wild plunges, much shaking of his stubborn head, and lashing out of his vicious heels; now and then falling flat and apparently dying a la Forrest: a gasp—a squirm—a flop, and so on, till the street was well ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... chosen hour; for then, With pensive pleasure mingling o'er the scene, Th' erratic mind treads over life again, And gazes on the past ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... sat near the chimney-corner smoking his pipe, and making severe mental comments upon the conduct of Parliament, then in session, of whose erratic proceedings he was reading an account in a small but highly seasoned newspaper. Sammy shook his head ominously over the peppery reports, but feeling it as well to reserve his opinions for a select audience at The Crown, allowed Mrs. Craddock to ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... handicaps you, because you do not see things in their right relation, and your judgment is, therefore, liable to be erratic ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... almost complete fog. The merit of the modern inquirer (of Mr. Langdon, for instance) is that he acknowledges the fog, and does not pretend to guide us out of it by haphazard hypotheses propounded with pontifical gravity and assurance—which was the way of that erratic genius, the Rev. R. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... need not think I am much amiss, for I go out every pleasant day, to ride, and some days can take quite a walk. The trouble is that when the pain returns, as it does several times a day, it knocks my strength out of me. I hope when all parts of my frame have been visited by this erratic sprite, it may find it worth while to beat a retreat. Only to think, we are going to move to No. 70 East Twenty-seventh street, and you have all been and gone away! The rent is enormous, $1,000 having ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... shared the programme with nobody else was above the accidents of earthly existence and magically protected against colds, coughs, influenza, orange peel, automobiles, and all the other enemies of mankind. But, of course, Musa was peculiar, erratic and unpredictable beyond even the wide range granted by society to genius. And yet of late he had been behaving himself in a marvellous manner. He had never bothered her. On the voyage back to France he had not bothered her. They had separated ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... accept lunar influence, and believed that the physiological cycle is made up of definite fractions and multiples of a period of seven days, especially a unit of three and a half days. Albrecht, a somewhat erratic zooelogist, put forth the view a few years ago that there are menstrual periods in men, giving the following reasons: (1) males are rudimentary females, (2) in all males of mammals, a rudimentary masculine ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... shipwreck. Fortunately, their muscles were sound, and their heads clear, so that in every instance they recovered the advantage almost lost. When the foot of the cataract was reached nothing of a serious nature had happened, though all of the boys who had taken part in the labor of fighting the erratic current of the river were ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... done with a genius so unstable, so erratic? Nothing, apparently, but to let him qualify for orders, and for this he is too young. Thereupon ensues a sort of 'Martin's summer' in his changing life,—a disengaged, delightful time when 'Master Noll' wanders irresponsibly from house to house, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... still holding the rope, went the immaculate Perkins, to be dragged hither and thither by her erratic movements, while he ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... not hear a word he was saying, after those first jerky sentences. He stood looking past Bill at a drunken Irishman who was making erratic progress up the street; and he was no more conscious of the Irishman than he was of Bill's scorching condemnation of the town ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... erratic!' said Miss Kennedy, drawing a long breath. 'I hope he will confine all new-fangled notions ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... was one of the most junior of the prefect caste, but by no means the least well- known, and outside the masters' common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any rate admiration. At football he was too erratic to be a really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure, and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt were eagerly treasured by those who ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... to say. Pixie was Pixie. As well try to move a mountain from its place, as persuade that sweet, loving, most loyal of creatures to draw back from a solemn pledge. Something might be done with Stanor perhaps, or, failing Stanor, through that erratic person, his uncle. She must consult with Geoffrey and Bridgie, together they might insist upon a period of waiting and separation before a definite engagement was announced. Pixie was still under age. Until her twenty-first birthday her guardians might safely demand ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... skaters, each bearing a lighted lamp at his waist-belt, emerged from the crowd, and shot under the bridge on to the Serpentine, and commenced quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... uneasy. His opponents were many, his difficulties were great, and, to add to all, his health was failing. 'My position,' was his own confession, 'is not that of gratified ambition.' His Administration only lasted five months, for at the end of that period death cut short the brilliant though erratic and disappointed career of a statesman of courage and capacity, who entered public life as a follower of Pitt, and refused in after years to pin his faith blindly to either political party, and so incurred the suspicions alike of ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... imaginings of Gustave only served his father and mother with food for laughter; and his erratic absurdities in making ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... the geographer; Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat; Lorenzo Dow, the eccentric preacher; several young naval officers from the Tripolitan War; and John Randolph of Roanoke. I wonder if it was from this old tavern that that brilliant but erratic statesman went out across the Chain Bridge to fight his duel with Henry Clay? It is recorded by a marker, just at the end of the bridge on the Virginia side, and reads thus: "Near here Henry Clay and John Randolph of Roanoke fought ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... if I can keep any place!" said Michael, whose movements were truly so erratic and uncertain that Winthrop's mood of thoughtfulness was more than once run down by them. — "The trunk's too weighty for me, yer honour, — it will have its own way and me after it — here we go! — Och, it wouldn't turn out if it was for an angel ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... that is the best and most serious thing in the way of friendship, protection and guardianship that I have had during my life. That butterfly acted as my godmother. Do you wonder now at the zigzags, the erratic flights of my mind? Lucky for me that ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... gains the Power to control others. Concentration makes the will and intellect act in unison. Why some people are not magnetic. When a powerful personal influence is generated. How to become influential. The cause of spasmodic, erratic concentration. How to centralize your attention. A quick way to develop concentration. The development of physical and mental concentration. How to learn a valuable lesson. One of the best ways to influence another. A good exercise. The real benefit of physical culture usually lost sight ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... of the vessel behind. Another whizzing rocket, carrying its line with it, went hurtling through or close to the crowd clustered on the top-gallant forecastle, where they cowered before creeping out on to the bowsprit. No harm was done by the erratic flight of the rockets, but the wrecked sailors naturally preferred to go ashore in the lifeboat to being dragged through the breakers in the cradle of the rocket-apparatus, and declining to use it, they ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... Cheever's self-imposed tasks was the care of cranks. Though somewhat peculiar himself he had no use for odd fish—queer folk and the like—and kept a sharp look-out for erratic strangers. Of these there was a constant succession coming to the Farm; reformers of everything under the sun; fanatics demanding the instant adoption of—their nebulous theories; mental aliens not quite crazy but pretty near it; egotists, wild to be noticed, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the racket, roused himself and sprang from his own tent. Observing the erratic actions of the tent in which the boys had been sleeping, he instantly concluded that ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... for employment, it inevitably follows that it is the fit and efficient who find employment. The skilled worker holds his place by virtue of his skill and efficiency. Were he less skilled, or were he unreliable or erratic, he would be swiftly replaced by a stronger competitor. The skilled and steady employments are not cumbered with clowns and idiots. A man finds his place according to his ability and the needs of the system, and those without ability, or ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... his shortness of leg that made it impossible to kick his erratic companion under the table. But a chorus of approval greeted this promising opening, and Hood continued relating with much detail the manner in which he had once been incarcerated in company with a pickpocket whose accomplishments and engaging personality he described ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... relationship extending over twelve years, including the trying period of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, these extraordinary personalities disclose the aspects of their diverse natures which are best worth the remembrance of posterity. However her passionate and erratic youth may have captivated our grandfathers, George Sand in the mellow autumn of her life is for us at her most attractive phase. The storms and anguish and hazardous adventures that attended the defiant unfolding of her spirit are over. In her final retreat at Nohant, surrounded ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Em'ly's distracted outcry. It steadily sounded, without perceptible pause for breath, and marked her erratic journey back and forth through stables, lanes, and corrals. The shrill disturbance brought all of us out to see her, and in the hen-house I discovered the new ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... admitted. According to her lights the coming of Colonel Osborne, after all that had been said, would be like the coming of Lucifer himself. The Colonel was, to her imagination, a horrible roaring lion. She had no idea that the erratic manoeuvres of such a beast might be milder and more innocent than the wooing of any turtle-dove. She would have asked whether the roaring lion had gone away again, and, if so, whether he had taken his prey with him, were it not that she was too much frightened at the ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... village clockmaker about watches. We were discussing what a difficulty it was sometimes to get a watch to go right. I said I had heard that watches sometimes got magnetised, and went on in the most erratic manner until the magnetism was counteracted. Ah yes, he said, he recollected a case in the shop where he learnt his trade; they had a watch brought to them which had got magnetised, and he believed the influence was at ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Massachusetts Colony. Was the founder and first commander of the early Artillery Company of Boston, the oldest military organization of the United States, and died at Boston, leaving a large estate and a very remarkable will, of which he made Governor Winslow an "overseer." He was an erratic,—but ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... eloquent address, setting forth the details of the plans and the purposes of the new temple of art. The undertaking was now fairly inaugurated. The erratic King of Bavaria had from the first been Wagner's steadfast friend and munificent patron; but not to him alone belongs the credit of the colossal project and its remarkable success. When Wagner first made known ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression of the way, in Rome itself, on evenings ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... He sleeps calmly now in that silent nook, and the air around his grave is filled with sighs from those who mourn that the bright, erratic star should have been blotted out ere it reached the zenith of its mounting fame. I plucked a leaf from the fragrant bay, as a token of his fame, and a sprig of cypress from the bough that bent lowest over his grave; and passing between tombs shaded with blooming roses or covered with unwithered ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... hand so affectionately that he shrank back lest she should kiss him, "before everybody"—the erratic and inconsiderate conduct of women in kissing boys was one of his trials. However, she was more judicious. She went on: "I knew I could trust you to be just, Oscar. Only you must remember that Ned isn't impulsive like ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... yielded to an erratic but harmless impulse in driving off recklessly with the priest; her nature, so long restrained by residence in a dull, circumscribed village instead of a lively town, needed some such prank to reanimate ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... apparatus. Some would begin very well, but rush back when half-way over, so as to destroy the print already made, and in most cases the calmest, steadiest, tamest of beasts became utterly wild, erratic, and unmanageable when ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... you're right," said the minister. "She's a good woman if a little erratic, and a sovereign means a large part of her ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... knees and while that awkward hush was yet upon them the room was filled with the soft sound of singing, started by the minister, perhaps, or was it his wife? It was unaccompanied, "Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide!" Even Laurie joined an erratic high tenor humming in on the last verse, and Opal shuddered as the words were sung, "Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, Shine through the dark and point me to the skies." Death was a horrible thing to her. She never wanted to be reminded ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... the very root from which the Christian apologetic sprang, and the former philosophic methods had themselves fallen in disrepute, that the necessity of accommodating the remedy to the disease began to be recognized here and there, and of framing an argument that would appeal to the perverse and erratic mind of the day, rather than to an abstract and perfectly normal mind, which, if it existed, would "need no repentance." That a given medicine is the best, avails nothing if it be not also one which the patient is willing to take. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Chad has been an eagerly sought objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... excellencies in design and finish that had brought him fame. Francois, the younger son, was not forgotten though, and the father bethought him of some useful industry at which he might earn a living, and decided on clockmaking as the most suitable. Now mark the erratic workings of fate. The eldest son, from whom so much was expected, proved a comparative failure, inasmuch as that, instead of progressing, his work was distinctly inferior to that of his father.[1] Francois, on the other hand, became tired of clockmaking after eight years' ill-remunerated ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... a dim, little-used path leading in among the trees, and following its erratic curves we were soon before the cabin, which grew ever more uninviting as we drew near. As I paused a moment before the closed door, in order that I might listen for any possible sound within, I could hear her quick breathing, as though the terror of the moment had driven ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... light in Joy's mind on Gail. Nobody took her seriously. She was just a reckless, erratic creature who said and did as she pleased, and paid the penalty. Joy never felt so in awe ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... dragoons, who had been pushed forward, had found the bridges destroyed. He first attempted to repair that at Rain, but the fire of the artillery and musketry was so heavy that he was forced to abandon the idea. He then made a careful reconnaissance of the river, whose course was winding and erratic. ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... remarkable. Possessed of wonderful energy and nerve, he was a confirmed teetotaller, and his prominent eyes, beaming with intelligence, seemed almost to be starting from his head as, intent upon some project, he darted about the office, ever and anon checking his erratic movements to give further directions to his subordinates, when he had a funny habit of placing his hand on his mouth and blowing his moustache through his fingers, much to the amusement of his listeners, and to my astonishment, as I stood modestly in a corner of the editorial ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... stand out in clear relief, as if painted on a fresco. The imagery is so lucid that we are able to follow with effortless pleasure the intricate windings of a plot which at Beckford's whim twists and turns through scenes of wonderful variety. Amid his wild, erratic excursions he never loses sight of the end in view; the story, with all its vagaries, is perfectly coherent. This we should expect from one who "loved to bark a tough understanding."[72] It is the intellectual strength and exuberant vitality ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... "it would really be a good thing that we should all go over the house together and make certain that this rather erratic burglar did not, after all, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Cypriot economy is prosperous but highly susceptible to external shocks. The service sector, mainly tourism and financial services, dominates the economy; erratic growth rates over the past decade reflect the economy's reliance on tourism, which often fluctuates with political instability in the region and economic conditions in Western Europe. Economic policy is focused on meeting the criteria to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM2) within the ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... shall always be ready.' And this blissful and transforming thought, this vehement purpose, allayed somewhat the misgivings which she had long had about Millicent, and which her recent glimpses into the factitious and erratic world of the theatre ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... accumulation of national power; but since power is the most dangerous of gifts until men have learned to control it, these changes seem at first to have no specific aim or direction. Henry V—whose erratic yet vigorous life, as depicted by Shakespeare, was typical of the life of his times—first let Europe feel the might of the new national spirit. To divert that growing and unruly spirit from rebellion at home, Henry led his army abroad, in the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... hungry lion which has just had a long expected dinner suddenly snatched away from it; but the worse he became the louder M'Allister shrieked with laughter. The latter was now simply rolling about the room—for it could not be termed walking, it was so erratic—holding his sides and laughing, whilst the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. He kept trying to speak, but had no sooner stuttered out the words, "Heh, mon! heh, mon!" than he was off again into another wild paroxysm of laughter, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... will prove this to you, and at the same time keep your indiscretion in countenance, by telling you something I ought not to tell you. It is this. I am not here as an invalid or a chance tourist. I am here to investigate the miracle. The Cardinal, a shrewd and somewhat erratic man, selected mine from all the long heads at his disposal to come down here, and find out the truth of Father Hickey's story. Would he have entrusted such a task to a ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... gag, and that added a little more blood to the blood already choking him. Then the Medecin Major did a very skilful operation. He trephined the skull, extracted the bullet that had lodged beneath it, and bound back in place that erratic eye. After which the man was sent over to the ward, while the surgeon returned hungrily to ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... mad an adventure. She knew that he wished her to be serious and subdued and proper, like the ladies whom she met, while an evil destiny seemed to dog her footsteps and precipitate her into all sorts of erratic mishaps and "scenes." However, this adventure was likely soon to have an end. She could go no farther. Whatever had become of Bras, it was in vain for her to think of pursuing him. When she at length reached a broad and smooth road ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... to hold that erratic genius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in line and direct his efforts, which of itself was a feat worthy of record. He made a fortune for Rossetti, who was a child in this world's affairs, and he also made a fortune for himself and every ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Lambert—a pugnacious seafaring diplomatist, known for his love of the yard-arm law. The Commodore would hold a parley with the Rajah; the Rajah, whose dignity was first to be consulted, was too slow in preparing his palace. The Commodore, erratic of temper, was at times accustomed to growl for his own amusement; he now growled for the amusement of his countrymen. The result was natural. In the littleness of his vanity did the Rajah imagine himself a very great ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... over the rock's long shoulder. Though it was a dark night, the stars were clear. She took no heed of the French camp fires in the gorge and along the bank. The French commander there had followed the erratic motions of English boats until they ceased to alarm him. It was flood tide. The prison ship sat on ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... schools. Wilhelm Grimm, the less didactic of the two famous brothers, said that the ballad says nothing unnecessary or unreal, and despises external adornment. Ferdinand Wolf, the great critic of the Homeric question, said the ballad must be naive, objective, not sentimental, lively and erratic in its narrative, without ornamentation, ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... arm in arm, sat next to each other at tea, and wrote each other private little notes. St. Elgiva's smiled again, but the girls by this time were accustomed to Marjorie's very impulsive and rather erratic ways, and did not take her infatuations ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... company that was scarcely important enough to figure as a rival to the Vesuvius. The movements of the Karlsefin were dependent upon the state of the market. Sometimes she would ply steadily between the Spanish Main and New Orleans in the regular transport of fruit; next she would be making erratic trips to Mobile or Charleston, or even as far north as New York, according to the distribution of ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... friend. And we must understand that at this time Liszt had a world-wide reputation as a composer himself, and was the foremost pianist of his time. And Wagner—Wagner was only an obscure dreamer, with a penchant for erratic music! ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... him severely for every breach of discipline. The study was a cool dark room, with one window looking north, and that window barred. Here he locked up the erratic youth for hours at a time, upon ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... hard to keep right; and if I am not as full as I can hold of one-sided and erratic opinions, I think it some praise. . . . I do strive to keep in my mind a whole rounded circle of truth and opinion. It would be pleasant to let every mental tendency run its length; but I could not do so. It may be pride or narrowness; but I must keep on some terms with ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... sky above the clearing. His hair was white, his figure a little bent, and there was an anxious look upon his face, a permanent expression rather than one caused by any tardy arrival this evening. The man he waited for was too erratic in his goings and comings to make a few hours', or even a day's, delay a cause ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... industry. This sector, mostly on the strength of diamonds, has gone from generating 25% of GDP in 1980 to over 50% in 1989. No other sector has experienced such growth, especially not agriculture, which is plagued by erratic rainfall and poor soils. The unemployment rate remains a problem ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... proud land-holders to fury. They hated Gracchus with a bitter hatred, and began to plot secretly for his overthrow. About this time Attalus, king of Pergamus, moved by some erratic whim, left his estates by will to the city of Rome. Those who had been deprived of their lands claimed these estates, to repay them for their outlays in improvement. Gracchus opposed this, and proposed to divide this property among the plebeians, that they might buy cattle and ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Independency upon it was toward the curtailment of form and the granting of absolute liberty to every preacher to conduct worship in whatever way seemed good to himself. It was the swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme from the enforced order of Laud's Liturgy. It is doubtful if this erratic period would have left any permanent effect upon the religious life and worship of Scotland, had it not been for the formation of a party in sympathy with the political principles of the Protector. This party, being ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... criticisms from their scientific crews. Fathers went rowing to and fro with argosies of pretty children, who gave them gay good morrows. Sometimes they met fanciful nutshells manned by merry girls, who made for shore at sight of them with most erratic movements and novel commands included in their Art of Navigation. Now and then some poet or philosopher went musing by, fishing for facts or fictions, where other ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... beforehand to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity that happened to have been directed towards authorship. Its importance was that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism which nourishes it. Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a visit than the majority of her neighbours, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... the threshold, listening and looking up at the sky above the clearing. His hair was white, his figure a little bent, and there was an anxious look upon his face, a permanent expression rather than one caused by any tardy arrival this evening. The man he waited for was too erratic in his goings and comings to make a few hours', or even a day's, ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... commemorative of this visitation from the wandering spirit of the erratic Giles. Death has indeed parted them. Giles is cold, but still his love is warm! He loved and won her in life—he hints at a right of possession in death; and this very forgetfulness of what he was, and what he is, is the best essence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... extent of their guilt amounted to two or three kisses, the world already chose to believe the worst of both. Mme. de Bargeton paid the penalty of her sovereignty. Among the various eccentricities of society, have you never noticed its erratic judgments and the unaccountable differences in the standard it requires of this or that man or woman? There are some persons who may do anything; they may behave totally irrationally, anything becomes them, and it is who shall be first to justify their conduct; then, on ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... wildly all about the shed; Bab rattled the cups into her dish-pan with dangerous haste, and Betty raised a cloud of dust "sweeping-up;" while mother seemed to be everywhere at once. Even Sanch, feeling that his fate was at stake, endeavored to help in his own somewhat erratic way,—now frisking about Ben at the risk of getting his tail chopped off, then trotting away to poke his inquisitive nose into every closet and room whither he followed Mrs. Moss in her "flying round" evolutions; next dragging off the mat so Betty could brush the door-steps, ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... bobbing swiftly, its white legs twinkling brightly for a moment. How neat it was in its build, so compact, with pieces of white on its wings. There were several of them. They were so pretty—but they crept like swift, erratic mice, running here ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... good times. And as you can't write a bit of verse, you dear, lovely old Ben, nor a story, I do not believe our tastes will clash. Why shouldn't we agree just as well when we are married as we do now? Even that tremendous, gloomy, erratic Edgar Allan Poe adored not only his wife, but his mother-in-law. To be sure, there was Milton and Byron, and Mrs. Hemans and Bulwer, and a host of them; but Mr. and Mrs. Browning are going on serenely. And 'The Scarlet Letter' hasn't made trouble in Hawthorne's family ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... years. And to Magsie, as they all called her, young Mr. Hoyt had paid some decided attention not many months before. Mrs. Frothingham had seen fit to disapprove these advances then, but she was an extraordinarily erratic and cross-grained old lady, and her silence now had forced her nephew uncomfortably to suspect that she might ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... whizzed by again, in the other direction, but lower and slower. It made a gigantic but erratic circle beyond the sheds and swooped back. It looked nothing like a helicopter. It looked like a Hallowe'en decoration of a woman on a broomstick. As it came nearer, Hanson saw that it was a woman on a broomstick, flying erratically. She straightened ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... confusion were the denizens of this underground colony; their six little legs carrying their curious globular bodies backward and forward over the disturbed area from which the stone had been removed. At first the movements of the ants were extremely erratic and purposeless. Panic and alarm appeared to be the order of the day during the few minutes which elapsed after removal of the stone. But soon the eye could discern movements of purposive kind on ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... than to do so." Probably they knew too much of his past history and his character to think of him as a husband. Both were soon after this time married to men more likely to make them happy than the erratic poet. When they turned a deaf ear to his addresses, he wrote: "My rhetoric seems to have lost all its effect on the lovely half of mankind; I have seen the day, but that is a tale of other years. In my conscience, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... arguments that upon the lips of a man of position and distinction are convincing lose their persuasive power when spoken by an erratic or eccentric, even though they may be exactly as logical, because the element of faith ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... condition of the hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than once he bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled up its far side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard distance (a distance that was widening at every second) made the sharpshooters' task anything ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... or as the case may be, analyses, are usually made of every sample and their average taken. In the case of erratic differences a ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... archangels, well nigh forgotten; a man who, by pandering to human passions and setting wide as virtue's avenue the flower-tricked gates of vice; should thus, like Lucifer before him, in a comet-like career of victory, sweep the startled firmament of earth, and drag to his erratic orbit the stars of heaven ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the messages that Liszt was constantly sending to his exiled friend. And we must understand that at this time Liszt had a world-wide reputation as a composer himself, and was the foremost pianist of his time. And Wagner—Wagner was only an obscure dreamer, with a penchant for erratic music! ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... the fact that he was to share the amusements of the Seven at Lake Aubergine—the Lake of the Mad Apple. To get hold of these seven men of repute and position, to be admitted into this good presence!—He had a pious exaltation, but whether it was because he might gather into the fold erratic and agnostical sheep like Charley Steele, or because it pleased his social ambitions, he had occasion to answer in the future. He gaily prepared to go to the Lake of the Mad Apple, where he was fated to eat of the tree ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Qualities in War," Major C.A.L. Yate, of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, dealt with the "intensity" of the war strain, of which he himself had acute experience. "Under such conditions," he wrote, "marksmen may achieve no more than the most erratic shots; the smartest corps may quickly degenerate into a rabble; the easiest tasks will often appear impossible. An army can weather trials such as those just depicted only if it be collectively considered in that healthy ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... came very low, and somewhat piping, too, and broken—an eery sort of voice it was, of brittle and erratic timbre and undulant inflection. Yet it was beautiful. It had the ring of childhood in it, though the ring was not pure golden, and at times fell echoless. The SPIRIT of its utterance was always clear and pure and crisp and cheery as the twitter ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... literary career of Bernard Barton. If it have not left behind it the brilliant track of other poetical comets, it has been less erratic in its course; and if it have not been irradiated by the full blaze of a noonday sun, it has nevertheless been illumined by the silver lustre of the queen of night; and his Parnassian vespers may be said to possess all the mild and soothing beauties ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... elliptical in shape and walled with rough limestone. Moss grew in the crevices of the masonry and about it had been a sod of velvet grass. Black beetles slipped in and out among the stones; dragon-flies hung over the surface of the water and large ants made erratic journeys about the rough bark of the naked palms. Whoever came dipped his goblet deep, for there the water was cold. If he gazed through to the bottom he detected a convection in the sand below. This was not a reservoir, but ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... gravels, and clays, often more or less regularly stratified, but containing erratic blocks, often of large size, and with their edges unworn, derived from considerable distances from the place where they are now found. In these beds it is not at all uncommon to find fossil shells; and these, though of existing species, are generally of an Arctic character, comprising a greater ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... "mob" is worth attention. I saw it at many angles. I followed its first erratic flights through the streets when Salandra resigned and a gaping void opened before the nation. I waited for the poet's arrival at the Roman station, for hours, while the dense throng of men and women pressed ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... from his adventures, leaned against the companion, and with much dramatic gesture began his story. As it proceeded the mate's breath came thick and fast, his color rose, and he became erratic in his steering. Flattered by these symptoms of concern, ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... difference consists in degree. Increase what is commonly called talent in the direction of its manifestation and it would develop into genius. Genius is commonly thought of as something abnormal, in the sense that it is essentially eccentric. A genius is generally spoken of as an eccentric, erratic, unbalanced, person. The eccentricity is then taken as constituting the substance of the quality of genius. This is undoubtedly a mistake. Because some geniuses have been erratic, the popular imagination has formed its picture of all genius as unbalanced. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... had gone upstairs, she went into the dimly lighted sitting-room and sat down at the piano, touching softly and lightly the notes of a minor melody, an erratic little air rising and falling in a succession ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... character, in comparison with the latitude, I suspected that these islands had been partly stocked by ice-borne seeds during the Glacial epoch. At my request Sir C. Lyell wrote to M. Hartung to inquire whether he had observed erratic boulders on these islands, and he answered that he had found large fragments of granite and other rocks, which do not occur in the archipelago. Hence we may safely infer that icebergs formerly landed their rocky burdens on the shores of these mid-ocean islands, and ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... and not return perhaps for days. His comings and goings were very erratic, and Dick tried to think that if the man were there he would have lent him ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... hearing Em'ly's distracted outcry. It steadily sounded, without perceptible pause for breath, and marked her erratic journey back and forth through stables, lanes, and corrals. The shrill disturbance brought all of us out to see her, and in the hen-house I discovered the new brood making its ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... no father," she answered softly. A plan had sprung full-born from her quick brain. She would win this erratic father back to memory of his former life and her place in it—somewhat as did one Lucy Manette, a favorite heroine of Split's that Sissy had read about and told her of. That would be a fine thing to do—almost as fine, and requiring the center of the stage as much, as ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... longer an individual. He belongs to a class of minds which we are bound to be patient with if their Maker sees fit to indulge them with existence. We must accept the conjuring ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist, the erratic spiritualist, the fantastic homoeopathist, as not unworthy of philosophic study; not more unworthy of it than the squarers of the circle and the inventors of perpetual motion, and the other whimsical visionaries to whom De Morgan has devoted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... [Asterism] This truly amiable, erratic genius is a portrait of Dickens's own father, "David Copperfield" being Dickens, and "Mrs. Nickleby" (one can hardly believe it) is said to be ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... dear erratic master has managed for years and years to cultivate the farm of La Haye and to bring up my godson in the fear of the Lord and the practice of land surveying is a proof that the late Mr. Matthew Arnold was hopelessly wrong in his categorical ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... has been the mining industry. This sector, mostly on the strength of diamonds, has gone from generating 25% of GDP in 1980 to over 50% in 1989. No other sector has experienced such growth, especially not agriculture, which is plagued by erratic rainfall and poor soils. The unemployment rate remains a problem at 25%. Although diamond production remained level in FY91, substantial gains in coal output and manufacturing helped boost the economy ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... (noun) Humble Scream Agree Conspicuous Indifferent Shrewd Anger Cringe Misfortune Shudder Attempt Difficult Obey Skill Big Disconnect Object (noun) Soft Brute Erratic Object (verb) Splash Business Flash Obligation Success Careless Fragrant Occupied Sweet Climb Gain Oppose Trick Collect Generous Persist Wash Commanding Grim Revise ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... was given him. "That is a very good book," said he; "I assure you it is a very good book." Then all at once addressing Abbe Boileau, "Doctor, do you think that St. Augustin was as clever as Rabelais?" He was ill, however, and began to turn towards eternity his dreamy and erratic thoughts. He had set about composing pious hymns. "The best of thy friends has not a fortnight to live," he wrote to Maucroix; "for two months I have not been out, unless to go to the Academy for amusement. Yesterday, as I was returning, I was seized in the middle of Rue du Chantre with a fit of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 1858. The whole is too long to quote, but the pith is contained in one paragraph. "There is a considerable body of geological evidence that during the Glacial epoch the whole world was colder; I inferred that,... from erratic boulder phenomena carefully observed by me on both the east and west coast of South America. Now I am so bold as to believe that at the height of the Glacial epoch, AND WHEN ALL TROPICAL PRODUCTIONS MUST HAVE BEEN CONSIDERABLY ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... actor finally triumphed over the erratic dispositions of the man so far as to secure for him a call to that theatrical holy of holies, the stage of the Comedie Francaise. He made his debut at the theatre in the Rue Richelieu in Fredegonde et Brunehaut. The frigid array of respectable and scholarly old men who sit in solemn ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... a sort of young sultan who could throw the handkerchief where he liked) chosen me of all women? I had no charms to recommend me—none of the virtues which men demand of the woman they wish to make their wife. To begin with, I was small, I was erratic and unorthodox, I was nothing but a tomboy—and, cardinal disqualification, I was ugly. Why, then, had he proposed matrimony to me? Was it merely a whim? Was he ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... has had an erratic development. Within the past seven years, however, there has been a rapid increase in new societies until today it is estimated that there are about three thousand with a membership of half a million. In number of societies New York is far behind most of its sister states. ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... with a man like that!" and she had carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who appeared to her to exist in innumerable reflections of himself. The next day when she had seen Stephen approaching her in the Square, she had obeyed the same erratic impulse, half in jest and half from the gambler's instinct to grasp at reluctant opportunity. After all, had not experience taught her that one must venture in order to win, that nothing came to those who dared not stake the whole of life on the next turn of fortune? She had ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... had lingered near the house ever since he had parted from Mr. Sherwood, so anxious was he to hear the decision of his erratic "warbler," and he was much relieved when he saw the sleigh drive up to the door at a much earlier hour than ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... the sheaf of papers rather fascinated the watcher outside the window—somehow Jack conceived the idea that there before him was spread all the incriminating evidence needful to bring the erratic career of this amazing man to an abrupt end—to put a stop to the mammoth illegal operations he had so long conducted in secret and by which he had impudently flaunted all the powers in Washington, just as though he had ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... they stepped along beneath the gloom of the trees, which even when not in leaf cast dense shadows around them. It was in truth a weird spot: owls hooted dismally about them, bats flitted here and there in their erratic flight, and sometimes almost brushed the faces of the boys with their clammy wings. The strange noises always to be heard in a wood at night assailed their ears, and mingled with the quick beating ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... at the articles he had dropped, and came prancing (no other word describes his erratic run) ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... thin kid. Harry's warning had been phrased conventionally enough, but the hints his words conveyed had expanded in her mind—fear not only of Clara's laughter, that such a jewel had come from a junk shop, but of her wonder, her questions, her ability of getting out the story of the whole erratic proceeding, even to the strange pantomime between Harry and the blue-eyed Chinaman. Clara ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... made with regard to the administration of justice. The kings in those days seldom resided long in one place, and their courts followed their persons. This erratic justice must have been productive of infinite inconvenience to the litigants. It was now provided that civil suits, called Common Pleas, should be fixed to some certain place. Thus one branch of jurisdiction was separated from the king's court, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... fingers it sang like a bird and growled like a beast. When the piano was done growling Lancelot usually started. He paced up and down the room, swearing audibly. Then he would sit down at the table and cover ruled paper with hieroglyphics for hours together. His movements were erratic to the verge of mystery. He had no fixed hours for anything; to Mary Ann he was hopeless. At any given moment he might be playing on the piano, or writing on the curiously ruled paper, or stamping about the room, or sitting limp with despair in the one easy-chair, or drinking whisky and water, ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... woman of genius has sate either on the Scotch or English throne since, except Cromwell, to whom, however, the term 'genius,' in its common sense, seems ludicrously inadequate. James V. had some of the erratic qualities of the poetic tribe, but his claim to the songs—such as the 'Gaberlunzie Man'—which go under his name, is exceedingly doubtful. James VI. was a pedant, without being a scholar—a rhymester, not a poet. Of the rest we need not speak. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... shorely come their turn. But timid, feverish, locoed people, whose jedgment is bad an' who's prone to feel themse'fs in peril; they're the kind who kills. For myse'f I shuns all sech. I won't say them erratic, quick-to-kill sports don't have courage; only it strikes me—an' I've rode up on a heap of 'em—it's more like a fear-bit f'rocity ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... In the mean time, she has done all in her power to induce her lover to go and fight the battles of his country; so far unsuccessfully, since Mr. John G—— deems it his duty to stay at home and keep things steady, especially billiards, which, as we all know, is an erratic game, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pupil; and though for the first ten minutes or so the course of the ship was a trifle erratic, and steering in a straight line proved to be not quite so simple and easy a matter as she had deemed it, Miss Sibylla soon caught the knack, and at the end of half an hour the Flying Cloud was making as straight a wake again as though the best helmsman ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... artillery, Colonel Williamson, and a private soldier whose name has not been preserved. The accurate Knox himself was not far off, and this is the account given him by Browne that same evening, and seems worthy to hold the field against the innumerable claims that have been set up in the erratic ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... the habits of his erratic life; the traditions of his fathers and his passion for the chase are still alive within him. The wild enjoyments which formerly animated him in the woods painfully excite his troubled imagination; and his former privations appear to be less keen, his ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... get glimpses of the gardens in Faubourg Ste.-Marie standing in silent wretchedness, so many tearful Lucretias, tattered victims of the storm. Short remnants of the wind now and then came down the narrow street in erratic puffs, heavily laden with odors of broken boughs and torn flowers, skimmed the little pools of rain-water in the deep ruts of the unpaved street, and suddenly went away to nothing, like a juggler's butterflies or a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... grunted a melancholy sigh at every rut. The morning drives were silent; but in the evening, coming home, Jean-Pierre, tipsy, was viciously muttering, and growled at the confounded woman who could not rear children that were like anybody else's. Susan, holding on against the erratic swayings of the cart, pretended not to hear. Once, as they were driving through Ploumar, some obscure and drunken impulse caused him to pull up sharply opposite the church. The moon swam amongst light white clouds. The tombstones gleamed pale under ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... sight until she entered the house. Then he turned and walked like a madman through the hissing rain—walked he knew not whither—his being a mere erratic chaos, a symbol of Nature's prime impulse whirling ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... snobs, or even if I had been one, I should have taken her to Taylor's, and have spent all the money I had on such a luncheon as neither of us had ever eaten before. Whatever else I am, I am not a snob of that sort. I show my colors. I led her into a little cross-street which I had noticed in our erratic morning pilgrimage. We stopped at a German baker's. I bade her sit down at the neat marble table, and I bought two rolls. She declined lager, which I offered her in fun. We took water instead, and we had dined, and had paid two ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... than in that of Ivan. Nathalie carried back with her into the gray Petersburg Institute such a host of flagrant dreams as kept a dozen chums about her through the long twilights of as many afternoons. For the damsel was an erratic priestess of Eros; and, at this dream-age, she and her comrades gave to the technique of forthcoming flirtation a patient analysis that promised adequate devastation among the courtier army ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of the Sentinel commands all the map-like detail of Pun-nul Bay, with its labyrinthian creeks among a flat density of mangroves, like lustrous, uncertain byways in a sombre field, erratic of shape, magnificent of proportion. Beyond are many islets—dark blue on a lighter plain. In the distance, on the other hand, islands and islets trail away until lost in the vague blending of sea and sky; and for a background is ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... flame was over. New suns and new worlds drifted calmly, with only a few erratic meteors and some settling dust-clouds left to tell of the explosion ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... of the others, I fear they did not prevent me feeling an almost equal tide of affection towards the sleepy acumen and ingrained sense of humour of Ida, the second girl and book-reader for the family: or Violet, a veritably delightful child, with a temper as formless and erratic as her tempest ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he confesses later ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... just had a long expected dinner suddenly snatched away from it; but the worse he became the louder M'Allister shrieked with laughter. The latter was now simply rolling about the room—for it could not be termed walking, it was so erratic—holding his sides and laughing, whilst the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. He kept trying to speak, but had no sooner stuttered out the words, "Heh, mon! heh, mon!" than he was off again into another wild paroxysm of laughter, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... knew Ike Webb was thinking of what Vogel had told him. Vogel was a gifted but admittedly erratic genius from the metropolis who had come upon us as angels sometimes do—unawares—two weeks before, with cinders in his ears and the grime of a dusty right-of-way upon his collar. He had worked for the sheet two weeks and then, on a Saturday night, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... and O. steamship Rome, as she was detained by one of the numerous "blocks" in the canal, but finally embarked on her for Malta and Gibraltar. The Rome is a five thousand-ton ship, and the favorite of this company's extensive fleet. Four days' sail, covering about a thousand miles, over the erratic waters of the Mediterranean, now calm and now enraged, brought us in sight of Malta. The city of Valetta lies immediately on the shore; and when we dropped anchor in the snug little harbor, we were surrounded by lofty forts, frowning batteries, and high ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... space of uneven ground crossed and recrossed by the narrow-gauge tracks upon which the sand and grit trucks ran, avoiding one or two localities where steam shot upward from the ground in a witch-like and erratic manner, with short angry hisses and chopping sounds that suggested danger, and finally stood before the door designated "OFFICE" in plain lettering. Joyce looked around at her companion with a perplexed ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... discovery that aroused his curiosity a little. There was a queer sort of light flickering beyond him. He quickly realized that some person must be walking the same way as he was, and carrying one of those useful little hand-electric torches, which he seemed to be moving this way and that in an erratic fashion. ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... such terms. There is no small difference between random and fugitive desires and those more fundamental desires that express truly the nature of a man. Desires organized and harmonized gain great strength, and are enabled to overcome and expel from the mind erratic impulses, the obedience to which may easily be followed by regret. Action taken without a clear foresight of consequences, with an imperfect conception of the relation of means to ends, is blind and ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... reluctance that was itself the expression of the deep love I bore her, "Miss Dodan, I may for some time yet be engaged in this now imperative work. I cannot, you know, now leave it. It is the most marvellous thing the world has ever known. It means so much to me, indeed to us all. These messages are erratic—fitful. I have now waited for weeks for a renewal of these strange communications and there is nothing. But in the midst of this, a distracting love for you seems to unnerve and torment me. I beg you to wait until ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Darry answered. "It's also what none of us have done. We haven't thanked our very pleasant, even if slightly erratic, host for his entertainment." ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... man, an author, a poet. He had been my dearest friend, when we were boys; and, though I lost sight of him for years,—he led an erratic life,—we were friends when he died. Poor, poor fellow! Well, he ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and George Sand—were on the whole cordial. He had trouble with Sainte-Beuve, however, and often felt that his brother-writers begrudged his success. His constant attacks on contemporary journalists, and his egotistic and erratic manners naturally prejudiced the critics, so that even the marvelous romance entitled 'La Peau de chagrin' (The Magic Skin: 1831),—a work of superb genius,—speedily followed as it was by 'Eugenie Grandet' and 'Le Pere ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... came from the same direction, from the woods across the river, somewhere just above their camp. It was Indian firing. Its character was unmistakable. It was erratic, and many of the shots failed hopelessly to reach the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... sixteen players for the other five positions, and picking them was only guesswork. It seemed to Ken that some of the players showed streaks of fast playing at times, and then as soon as they were opposed to one another in the practice game they became erratic. His own progress was slow. One thing he could do that brought warm praise from the coach—he could line the ball home from deep outfield with wonderful speed ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... no peculiar hardship to our erratic friend, who knew he could spend the time merrily and profitably among his numerous kinsfolk in the groves. To tell the truth, he was not sorry to get away from the court pageantry, as all such ceremonial and pomp of circumstance was an abomination to him, and had ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... verdant and untrampled pastures of ingenious bees; but those are more like the mange of lecherous boars and he-goats. And though a voluptuous temper of mind be naturally erratic and precipitate, yet never any yet sacrificed an ox for joy that he had gained his will of his mistress; nor did any ever wish to die immediately, might he but once satiate himself with the costly ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... agreed with those of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to save his reputation for orthodoxy by calling the comet ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... mistake of attacking the animal. My friend Mr. Ernest Gibson, of Buenos Ayres, in a communication to the Ibis, describes an encounter he actually witnessed between a carancho and a skunk. Riding home one afternoon, he spied a skunk "shuffling along in the erratic manner usual to that odoriferous quadruped;" following it at a very short distance was an eagle-vulture, evidently bent on mischief. Every time the bird came near the bushy tail rose menacingly; then the carancho would fall behind, and, after a few moments' hesitation, follow ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... son, which would all be blasted if the precocious youth adopted the new religion. The struggles of young William Penn with his ambitious father, were long and bitter. He was beaten and turned out of doors by his angry parent, then taken back by the erratic but kind-hearted father and sent to France to be lured with gayety and dazzled with promises of wealth and distinction; but William Penn had the courage of his convictions and yielded not one whit of his religious ideas. Conscious of being right, he was ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... tastes, the ambitions of a child, and he should be allowed to remain a child. The ends in view are right habits, right ideals, and knowledge facts. In the secondary school the student is an adolescent, with the mind of an adolescent, having peculiar and erratic tastes, changing ambitions, and conflicting emotions. He is neither child nor adult, but passing thru the most dangerous and critical period of his entire life. The ends in view are no longer merely habits, ideals, and knowledge facts, but, added to these, and now more important for emphasis ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... Fred was saying. "The correlation is erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, there are ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... seemed like a beautiful dream. That Poppy Tyrell should be sitting in his cabin and looking to him as her only friend seemed almost incredible. A sudden remembrance of Flower subdued at once the ardour of his gaze, and he sat wondering vaguely as to the whereabouts of that erratic mariner until his meditations were broken by the entrance of the boy with the steaming coffee, followed by Bill bearing a couple ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... eyes upon the best parlor curtains, when Barnes mounted to the box, as robust a stage-driver as ever extricated a coach from a quagmire. The team, playful through long confinement, tugged at the reins, and Sandy, who was at the bits, occasionally shot through space like an erratic meteor. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the silent river, at this time of the year looking so cold and treacherous in its rippleless flow. The wet grass was stiffening with frost, and the only sounds disturbing the chillier purity of advancing night were the erratic bell at the bridge and the far-off rumble of a train on the mountain-side. Man still afforded the discordant note, and the only heat in the surroundings was that in the burning young heart that raged by ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Spanish naval preparations had been pushed with great vigor. A powerful squadron under Admiral Cervera, which had assembled at the Cape Verde Islands before the outbreak of hostilities, had crossed the ocean, and by its erratic movements in the Caribbean Sea delayed our military plans while baffling the pursuit of our fleets. For a time fears were felt lest the Oregon and Marietta, then nearing home after their long voyage from San Francisco of over 15,000 miles, might be surprised by Admiral Cervera's ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... a large, old-fashioned theatre, on Broadway, between Houston and Bleecker streets. It is devoted to pantomime, and is famous as the headquarters of the erratic genius who calls himself ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... "is something that can be objectively checked by another person than the patient. Lesions, swellings, inflammations, erratic heartbeat, and so on. A symptom is a subjective feeling of the patient, like aches, pains, nausea, dizziness, ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to ancient streams of lava congealed by the cold, an opinion which has not been generally received. Other astronomers have seen in these inexplicable rays a kind of moraines, ranges of erratic blocks thrown out at the epoch of the ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... England to some town in South Wales, it was very awkward to have to leave your train on the banks of the Severn and make a voyage of more than two miles in a slow ferry-boat before you could take another train on the opposite shore. The Severn tides, too, were so erratic that there was never any knowing when the ferry-boat would be able to start. But that was what people had to put up with forty years ago. So the Great Western Railway Company, in 1871, decided to go under the fickle waters, as they found it so troublesome to ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... me scurvily had she reduced me to such absurd oracles. The phenomena seem so rare and so irregular, the vast majority of mankind having to go through life only afraid of ghosts, but never seeing them, that no general law of posthumous existence could be based on these obscure and erratic accidents. There may be only a survival of the fittest. It is not in the aberrations, but in the constant factors of human life that we must seek for light, and the attitude of these smellers after immortality is precisely that of the mediaevals who sought ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... all," said he, "I can't trust them. Patricia is too erratic and too used to having her own way. Jack will try to break off with her now, of course; but Jack, where women are concerned, is as weak as water. It is not a nice thing to do, but—well! one ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the second person are derived from the Arte (68). Throughout this section the accent marks are quite erratic. In several places, for example, Collado has snata ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... your thoughts from this ball of earth to all those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and situation of the planets, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those (miscalled ERRATIC) globes once known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe. How ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions rather than of the perfect ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... its own way. We have the whole menagerie within us—the tiger, the ape, the peacock, the ass, the goose, the sheep the hyena, and all the rest. And we have been letting these animals rule us. Even our Intellect is erratic, unstable, and like the quicksilver to which the ancient occultists compared it, shifting and uncertain. If you will look around you you will see that those men and women in the world who have really accomplished anything worth while have trained their minds to obedience. They have asserted ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... all-powerful. As has already been seen, he had been able to prevent Judge Folger taking the presidency of the convention, and for a few days he had everything his own way. But he soon proved so erratic a leader that his influence was completely lost, and after a few sessions there was hardly any member with less real power to influence the judgments of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the Irishman turned to the right, and followed the stream into the rocks. The course was so winding that he speedily disappeared from sight. The boy, who was compelled to sit still and await his return, at perhaps the most dangerous portion of the road, felt anything but comfortable over the erratic proceeding of his friend. But, fortunately, the latter had been gone but a short time when he reappeared, hurrying forward as if somebody was at ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... legends, bring individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is menial, cheerless, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and, because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement, is more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, and vice versa, that the present distinction between work and play will vanish, the transition will be less tragic and the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the New York legislature, as head of the metropolitan police force, as federal civil service commissioner under President Harrison, as assistant secretary of the navy under President McKinley, and as governor of the Empire state. Political managers of the old school spoke of him as "brilliant but erratic"; they soon found him equal to the shrewdest in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions when duly veiled are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle, thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe, expressed himself with incisive and memorable ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... ancient saws which become almost original every time they are applied, and one of these sayings was "Everything is for the best." She believed in miracles, and had reason, for she received her weekly allowance from her erratic husband with monotonous regularity ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... you do come," said Elise cordially, "come right to our house and I know we can put you up. The Farringtons are erratic, but always hospitable; and I hereby invite this whole crowd to visit us in Paris, either jointly or severally, whenever the spirit ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... and a gamin? She remembered the old tale of the maiden wedded to the beautiful and strange elf-king. Was the legend symbolic of that mysterious thread—call it genius or what you will—that runs its erratic course through humanity's woof, marring yet illuminating the staid design, never straightened with its fellow-threads, never tied, and never to be followed to its source? With the feeling of having for an instant held in her hand the key to the riddle of his nature, Mary went to Stefan ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... for the opinion that every man has his 'moment de peur'. No man is equally firm on all occasions. There are moods of weakness and irresolution in every mind, which is not exactly a machine, which impair its energies, and make its course erratic and uncertain. The truth was known in earlier ages. The old poets ascribed it to supernatural influence. Envious deities interposed between valor and its victim, paralysing the soul of the one and strengthening that of the other. Thus we find even Hector, ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... was once a young man quite erratic Who lived all alone in an attic, He wrote magazine verse That made editors curse, But his friends ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... made an eloquent address, setting forth the details of the plans and the purposes of the new temple of art. The undertaking was now fairly inaugurated. The erratic King of Bavaria had from the first been Wagner's steadfast friend and munificent patron; but not to him alone belongs the credit of the colossal project and its remarkable success. When Wagner first made ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... falls is the well-known Cascade des Pelerins[91]) descends from behind the promontory h: its natural or proper course would be to dash straight forward down the line f g, and part of it does so; but erratic branches of it slide away round the promontory, in the lines of escape, k, l, &c. Each row of trees marks, therefore, an old torrent bed, for the torrent always throws heaps of stones up along its banks, on which the pines, growing higher ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... struggles came surging into the mind in quick succession: events of boyhood, of youth, and manhood; perils, travels, scenes, joys, and sorrows; loves and hates; friendships and indifferences. My mind followed the various and rapid transition of my life's passages; it drew the lengthy, erratic, sinuous lines of travel my footsteps had passed over. If I had drawn them on the sandy floor, what enigmatical problems they had been to those around me, and what plain, readable, intelligent histories ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Temperamental. That is, he got soused on about three, and, while snooted, would deride Victor Herbert, thus proving that he was Brilliant, though Erratic. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... beautiful, and I dwelt upon it with pleasure. I have before observed, and indeed the reader must have gathered from my narative, that Melchior was no common personage. Every day did I become more partial to him, and more pleased with our erratic life. What scruples I had at first, gradually wore away; the time passed quickly, and although I would occasionally call to mind the original object of my setting forth, I would satisfy myself by the reflection, that there was ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... at a word. Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath. They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had accepted the consolations of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in asterisks 'as she was now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,' sounds to us a roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere. Sitting ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... He died, as you may be aware, five years ago in reduced circumstances, because he preferred to remain honest. An odd erratic choice, was it not?" ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... consonant remained unaffected (e.g., do, food, move, fool). Whatever the upshot, we may be reasonably certain that when the "phonetic law" has run its course, the distribution of "long" and "short" vowels in the old oo-words will not seem quite as erratic as at the present transitional moment.[154] We learn, incidentally, the fundamental fact that phonetic laws do not work with spontaneous automatism, that they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... her waist; but Dick kept the engine going full speed and sat at the tiller with his eyes fixed upon the compass. It was not easy to steer by, because the lurching boat was short and the card span in erratic jerks when she began to yaw about, swerving off her course as she rose ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... his companion by the arm and, leaning forward, stared across the level garden into the shadows opposite. Something was moving there, under the trees; the men could see that it was white and formless, and that it pursued an erratic course. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still MacIan stood ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... of it—for his own; so, when he was constrained to make a choice, he settled himself in the wider, more fertile coulee, which he thereafter called the Flying U. While it is good policy to locate as near as possible to the source of those erratic little creeks which water certain garden spots of the northern range land, it is also well to choose land that will grow plenty of hay. J. G. Whitmore chose the hay land, and trusted that providence would insure the water supply. Through all these years Flying U creek had never ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... not in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely Golden family clock ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... of life and for the fulfilment of its obligations. They must know themselves and their own powers in order to exercise control and direction on the current of their lives. The complaint made of many women is that they are wanting in self-control, creatures of impulse, erratic, irresponsible, at the mercy of chance influences that assume control of their lives for the moment, subject to "nerves," carried away by emotional enthusiasm beyond all bounds, and using a blind tenacity of will ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... he is deprived of these insignia of opulence, to which he has attached the idea of happiness, finds himself just as unhappy as the needy wretch who has not wherewith to cover his nakedness. The civilized nations of the present day were in their origin savages composed of erratic tribes,—mere wanderers who were occupied with war; employed in, the chace; painfully obliged to seek precarious subsistence by hunting in those woods which the industry of their successors has cleared; which their labour has covered with yellow ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... heard the announcement—he sought to force his way up-stairs—they thrust him from the house, and nothing more of him was known till he arrived at his own door, an hour before Danvers and Maltravers came, in raging frenzy. Perhaps by one of the dim erratic gleams of light which always chequer the darkness of insanity, he retained some faint remembrance of his compact and assignation with Maltravers, which had happily guided his steps ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had at last loosed her hounds and they were hard on winter's traces. In fact, one belated train, after hours spent on the road, had succeeded in pushing through, an evidence that they all would soon be running with their accustomed, if rather erratic regularity, and there was naturally a tremendous excitement and jollification in the camp at this arrival of the first mail bearing news ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... over aquatic, Says he rows 'like a mangle'—what trash! That his swing and his time are erratic; That he puts in his oar with a splash. But these wonderful judges of rowing, If we win will be loud in applause; And declare 'the result was all owing To that excellent stroke, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... with animals now. Kipling's ocean liner has human interest—a soul. I need not tell you that a boat is human. Its every erratic quality of crankiness, its veritable heroism under stress, its temperament (if you like that word) makes it very human indeed. That is why a man will often let his boat rot rather than ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... "Eh, well, he'll turn up," he said comfortingly. "Jack's erratic, you may say, in his comings and goings. He means nothing by it.... I've known him do the same to me.... Any time, now; you're likely ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... royal family at this time. It was his last visit to England. His company, always earnestly coveted, especially by the Prince, was apt to be bestowed in an erratic fashion characteristic of the man. Some one of the royal children would unexpectedly announce, "Papa, do you know the Baron is in his room," which was the first news of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... relation with humanity; and by teaching us that law and order, and a definite scheme of development, regulate even the strangest and wildest manifestations of individual life, she prepares the student to look for a goal even amidst the erratic wanderings of mankind, and to believe that history offers something more than an entertaining chaos—a journal of ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... time, while the letter Yod appears regularly as j, which Milton must have sounded as y. On the whole, it is quite clear that Milton read his Hebrew with minute precision. To see how just this verdict is, let anyone compare Milton's exactness with the erratic and slovenly transliterations in Edmund Chidmead's English edition of Leon Modena's Riti Ebraici, which was published only two years later than ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning. "Was she happy in anything?" asks her sorrowing friend. The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, "Father Prout" of Fraser's Magazine, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a "bambina" for her needless fears. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... not travel so far or so long as had been his wont in days gone by. A wife and family, in the village of Salem, exercised an attractive influence, fastening him, as it were, to a fixed point, and converting his former erratic orbit into a circle which, with centripetal force, was always drawing ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... monument—the Lewknor. Near by is the beautiful West Dean Park. Mid-Lavant church is Early English but boasts a Norman window. The name of this village perpetuates a phenomenon which is becoming more rare each year. At one time erratic streams would make their appearance in the chalk combes in the head of the valley and combining, cause serious floods or "lavants." For some unknown reason the flow of water is gradually becoming smaller and of late years it ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... thy mind, "With groves, and dwellings of celestial gods, "And temples richly deck'd with offer'd gold, "Where thou shall pass. Far else;—thy journey lies, "Through ambushes, and savage monsters' forms. "Ev'n shouldst thou lucky not erratic stray, "Yet must thou pass the Bull's opposing horns; "The bow Haemonian, by the Centaur bent; "The Lion's countenance grim; the Scorpion's claws "Bent cruel in a circuit large; the Crab "In lesser compass curving. Hard the task "To rule ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... itself, in the apartments of his friend Cintio Aldobrandino, nephew of the new pope Clement the Eighth, where his hopes now seemed to be raised at once to their highest and most reasonable pitch; but fell ill, and was obliged to go back to Naples for the benefit of the air. A life so strangely erratic to the last (for mortal illness was approaching) is perhaps unique in the history of men of letters, and might be therefore worth recording even in that of a less man than Tasso; but when we recollect that this poet, in spite of all his weaknesses, and notwithstanding the enemies they provoked ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... themselves. This, as I shall explain in another essay, is, to my mind, the proper function of criticism. I shall never forget my first visits to the Caillebotte collection; and in the unforgettable thrill of those first visits M. Mauclair's bad science and erratic judgement counted for something—much perhaps. They put me into a mood of sympathetic expectation; and such a mood is, even for highly sensitive people, often an indispensable preliminary to aesthetic appreciation. There are those who have got to ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... to develop the necessary symbiosis and their growth takes off. On a bed of two-year-old seedlings, many individual trees are head and shoulders above the others. This is not due to superior genetics or erratic soil fertility. These are the individuals with a mycorrhizal ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... these things that everything is still very erratic, and that the men remain badly distributed. Nor is this all. The general command over the whole of the Legation area is now plainly modelled on the Chinese plan—that is, the officer commanding does not interfere with the others, excepting when he can do so with impunity to himself. As I have ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. It tilted again, and swept onward over the mountaintops, and then tilted once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... too well pleased. The last thing he desired was co-operation from the Rabbit-Hutch and association with the band of erratic, happy-go-lucky Bohemians that peopled it. "You're laying out a good deal of work for yourself," he remarked ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... everything sub specie oeternitatis, but to give a practical religious turn to his master's speculations. His teaching is closely in accordance with that of Tauler, whom he quotes as an authority, and whom he joins in denouncing the followers of the "false light," the erratic mystics of ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... from him. Herschel attributed their brilliancy to currents of lava congealed by the cold; an opinion, however, which has not been generally adopted. Other astronomers have seen in these inexplicable rays a kind of moraines, rows of erratic blocks, which had been thrown up at the ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... covered with ice. Great glaciers extended over the whole of Switzerland, and icebergs floated from the mountains of Berkshire in Massachusetts upon a sea which filled the valley of the Connecticut River, dropping erratic blocks of stone, taken from those mountains, in straight lines, parallel with each other, half way across the valley, where they still lie. Similar icebergs floated from Snowdon, in Wales, and Ben Lomond, in Scotland, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... "Allah's announcers,"[1] swirled in clouds from the arcades, mosques, and minarets surrounding the Haram, and from the Ka'aba itself, and began winging erratic courses all about the Forbidden City. Men, birds, and animals alike, all shared the terror of this unheard-of outrage when—according to ancient prophesy—the Great Devils of Feringistan should ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... only terrified but angered, and whirling about, he brought down his gun with spiteful violence on the writhing body. The reptile struck again, but it was already wounded to that extent that its blow was erratic, and, though it came near reaching the hand of Jack, it missed by ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... nieces were not so greatly dismayed at this experience as might have been expected. They had recently accompanied their erratic relative on a European trip and had learned to be ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... intimated, are women, were seen kneeling before the small chapel where rest the remains of Iturbide, first emperor of Mexico, whose tomb bears the simple legend: "The Liberator." None more appropriate could have been devised, for through him virtually was Mexican independence won, though his erratic career ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... of the country. The three ramifications mentioned, of which the Duthumi forms the first link, are separated by immense longitudinal plains. These elevated summits consist of rounded cones, between which the soil is bestrewn with erratic blocks of stone and gravelly bowlders. The most abrupt declivity of these mountains confronts the Zanzibar coast, but the western slopes are merely inclined planes. The depressions in the soil are covered with a black, rich loam, on which there is a vigorous vegetation. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... the last outpost of Russian power in North-Eastern Asia, and was set at liberty, he made his way to the little log church, entered the belfry, and proceeded to jangle the church bells in a sort of wild, erratic chime. When the people of the town ran to the belfry in alarm and inquired what was the matter, Schiller replied, with dignity, that he wished the whole population to know that 'by the Grace of God, Herman ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... established so complete a mastery over the Government, that even men of far greater ability and force of character would have been impotent for good. Her whole dependence was on Mirabeau; and his course at this time was so capricious and erratic that it often caused her more perplexity and alarm than pleasure or confidence. He regarded himself as having a very difficult part to play. He could not conceal from himself that he was no longer able to lead the Assembly as he had done at first, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... containing the charge. Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves. But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... avenues of young cocoanut-palms, saw a hornbill, followed it in its erratic flights to the high forest on the edge of the plantation, heard the cooing of wild pigeons and located them in the deeper woods, followed the fresh trail of a wild pig for a distance, circled back, ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... but Tom took the earliest possible opportunity to redress, and look back at his foe. A thrill ran through his entire being as he discovered that the other was in trouble. The Fokker was descending in erratic spirals, evidently out of control. Man or machine, perhaps both, had come within the deadly line of fire, ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... to human passions and setting wide as virtue's avenue the flower-tricked gates of vice; should thus, like Lucifer before him, in a comet-like career of victory, sweep the startled firmament of earth, and drag to his erratic orbit the stars ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... elderly gentleman, side-whiskered, precise and grey, disguising himself with mufflers and a squash hat, and stalking with sombre fortitude the erratic wanderings of a pair of young featherheads, is one which mirth may be pleased to linger upon. Such a spectacle was now to be observed in the semi-rural outskirts of Clontarf. Mr. MacMahon tracked his daughter with considerable stealth, adopting unconsciously the elongated and nervous stride of ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... taking their leave by this time. Angelica proceeded to deposit one of her erratic kisses somewhere on the old duke's head, with an emphasis which caused him to wince perceptibly. Then she went up to Father Ricardo, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... fear of abnormal changes in the schedule. It had been impressed upon every signalman that thirty-three was the road's most precious responsibility. It was the only solid Pullman train that passed over the division. This time of year it ran crowded and was erratic; more often than not, late. That fact created few difficulties on an ordinary night; but, combined with such uncertainty of schedule, it worried the entire division, undoubtedly, to have running, also on an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... speak of would-be authors—guerillas in literature—men and women of erratic ability, who adore inspiration and scorn work; for authorship, I am told, and believe, requires the hardest work of any calling ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... himself out for social successes; but he is a man who seems to know more of every subject than the men about him. I doubt if he will ever succeed at the Bar. He has so little perseverance or steadiness, and indulges in such an erratic, desultory mode of life; but he has made his mark in literature already, and I think he might become a great man if he chose. Whether he ever will choose is a ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... But even if this particular account is not accepted, all astronomers agree that the effect of a comet passing near the earth would be appalling. Worlds in Collision states that Mars, like the earth, was pulled out of its orbit by the comet's erratic passage. It may be that this near disaster to the earth and Mars is known on other solar planets, or remembered on Mars itself, if the ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... happened that when the unfortunate Black first became clearly conscious of anything again, he heard the gurgle of sliding water close beside his head, and, opening his eyes, caught sight of a smoky lamp that reeled to and fro, in very erratic fashion. Moisture dripped from the beams above him, and there was a sickly smell which seemed familiar. Black, who had been to sea before, decided that he caught the aroma of bilge water. Rows of wooden shelves tenanted by recumbent figures, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Poe have taken their place in literature; it is too late to attempt anything like a contemporaneous criticism, too early to anticipate the judgement of posterity. But whatever were the faults of this gifted and erratic genius, much that he has written has become a part of the thought and memory of the present generation of readers, and will doubtless go to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... roads, improving its ports, and repairing war damaged roads and bridges. Since the war ended, the government has maintained a firm grip on the economy, expanding the use of the military and party-owned businesses to complete Eritrea's development agenda. Erratic rainfall and the delayed demobilization of agriculturalists from the military kept cereal production well below normal, holding down growth in 2002-04. Eritrea's economic future depends upon its ability to master ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and the inferior tracking capacity of our dogs, we never got this panther. A lion dog is a specialist and must be so trained that no other track will divert him from his quest. These dogs were willing, but erratic. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... of wantonness and ease" is to find the regeneration of his life, the rebaptism of his soul? Of what avail thy meek prudent household virtues to one whom Fortune screens from rough trial; whose sorrows lie remote from thy ken; whose spirit, erratic and perturbed, now rising, now falling, needs a vision more subtle than thine to pursue, and a strength that can sustain the reason, when it droops, on the wings of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to follow a recognised profession. Owing to his easy-going schooling and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth. Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and social standing, his superiors in debate, and he, "the lean, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... spoken when what we most feared came to pass. One of the islanders, by accident or design, bumped into Blodgett,— always erratic, never to be relied on in a crisis,—who, turning without a thought of the consequences, struck the man with his fist a blow that floored him, and flashed out ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... the little grimy hand so affectionately that he shrank back lest she should kiss him, "before everybody"—the erratic and inconsiderate conduct of women in kissing boys was one of his trials. However, she was more judicious. She went on: "I knew I could trust you to be just, Oscar. Only you must remember that Ned isn't impulsive like ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... close rate in a modestly priced watch is the balance wheel. This wheel requires careful adjustment for temperature error and for poise. Of these two disturbing factors poise is the most annoying to the owner because lack of it makes the watch a very erratic timekeeper. A watch in which the parts are not poised is subject to a different rate for every position it is placed in. This position error, as it is called, can and often does cause a most erratic and unpredictable rate. Abraham-Louis Breguet, the celebrated ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison
... others were constantly changing their places, and as it were wandering about the sky. It is certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the "planets," and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering luminary, changing her place among the fixed ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... to our narrative to relate the erratic discourse that ensued. The old man eluded the annihilating blows of his adversary, as the light armed soldier is wont to escape the efforts of the more regular warrior, even while he annoys him most, and an hour passed away without bringing any of the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... childhood, the prince had learned strange tales of the ambition, the genius, and the career of his grandsire,—and secretly, perhaps influenced by ancestral example, in earlier youth he himself had followed science, not only through her legitimate course, but her antiquated and erratic windings. I have, indeed, been shown in Naples a little volume, blazoned with the arms of the Visconti, and ascribed to the nobleman I refer to, which treats of alchemy in ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not possible to follow and to trace, geographically, the erratic course of Cabeza de Vaca with any degree of certainty. His own tale, however authentic, is so confused[12] that it becomes utterly impossible to establish any details of location. We only know that, in the year A.D. 1536, he and his associates finally met with their own countrymen ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... It happened one day, many years after reading this, I chanced to be talking to a village clockmaker about watches. We were discussing what a difficulty it was sometimes to get a watch to go right. I said I had heard that watches sometimes got magnetised, and went on in the most erratic manner until the magnetism was counteracted. Ah yes, he said, he recollected a case in the shop where he learnt his trade; they had a watch brought to them which had got magnetised, and he believed the influence was at last removed by the use of onions. Instantly memory ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... leaves and flitting from leaf to leaf. Now began a series of wonderful manoeuvres on the spider's part, with the object of circumventing the imaginary fly, which seemed specially designed to meet this special case; for certainly no insect had ever before behaved in quite so erratic a manner. Each time the shadow flew past, the spider ran swiftly in the same direction, hiding itself under the leaves, always trying to get near without alarming its prey; and then the shadow would ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... and thus were remanded to their homes nearly a million of strong, vigorous men who had imbibed the somewhat erratic habits of the soldier; these were of every profession and trade in life, who, on regaining their homes, found their places occupied by others, that their friends and neighbors were different, and that they themselves ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... all my life," ejaculated Mrs. Griswold, "see anything like that. Now if some people"—she didn't say "we"—"should do anything like that, 'twould be dreadfully erratic and queer. But those Kings can do anything," ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... gone over when the sick man could no longer hold it, and the tug was beginning to whirl about in an erratic manner, when the major rang the bell to stop the engine. The captain was carried down to his room, and put into his berth, where one of the soldiers was detailed to act as ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... from the stranded machine was the work of an instant for the erratic professor, and he extended his hand to Peggy. With a supreme effort she pulled herself together and accepted his proffered help. But agitated as she: was, she did not fail to notice a surprising fact, and that ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became regular as the sun's instead of erratic ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... verge of tears. The labor of his entire life, the great victories won with don Ramon, that political power which had been so carefully built up and sustained over decades, was about to crumble to ruins; all because of a light-headed, erratic boy who had handed to the first skirt who came along everything that belonged to him and everything that belonged to ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... illustrate each other? Raise now your thoughts from this ball of earth to all those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and situation of the planets, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those (miscalled ERRATIC) globes once known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe. How vivid and radiant ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... Philadelphia, for a copy of which we are indebted to General Duncan S. Walker. The other letter of Wise—previously quoted—shows us his part and interest in the proposed conspiracy against Fremont; but the erratic Governor had, after the lapse of nearly two years, become an anti-Lecompton-Douglasite, and was ready to give confidential warning of designs with which he was only too familiar. As this was written nearly three weeks before Yancey's "Scarlet Letter," its concurrent testimony ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... this erratic strain, he suddenly heard the voice of some human being at the back of the rocks, giving ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... features, bright eyes, a great shock of gray hair standing out from his head, he was a marked personal figure. He was brave, but his bravery was of the excitable kind that made him unbalanced and nearly wild on the battle-field. His impulsiveness made him erratic in all performances of duty, and negligent of the system without which the business of an army cannot go on. This was shown in his furlough of a regiment whilst en route to reinforce Lightburn, who was supposed to be in desperate straits. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... that little knob of a sight, and when the smoke cleared away he saw it careering like a kite with too light a tail in the distance. Gould also missed twice, and then shot one the moment it was off the ground, before the erratic course commenced. ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... dipped his paddle and started pottering an erratic course in the general direction of the cluster of lights that marked the Makambo. But he was too feeble, panting and wheezing continually from the exertion and pausing to rest off strokes between strokes. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... of New England extraction. Her father, the eldest child of a simple unpretentious country family in Western Massachusetts, had been a brilliant but erratic throw-back to Mayflower traditions and Puritan intellectualism. He had married a girl with much the same ancestry as his own, but herself born and brought up in New York, and of a generation to which the assumption of prerogative was a natural rather than an ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... as to deviate greatly out of the common course of nature. From time to time the historic and philosophic gravity of the last six books of the Annals suffers great eclipses by his leaving aside weighty affairs of State to descend into petty descriptions of the erratic conduct of Messalina, with her extravagant lewdness (XI. 26-8), Nero, with his abominable pollutions (XVI. 37), and that Emperor's mother, Agrippina, with her monstrous incest (XIV. 2). These matters, even if true of the ancient Romans in the first century ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... You and I are one. Whatever is mine is yours. I don't swear to make you a regular, unfailing allowance worthy of the new position you're going to have, because you see I do business with several countries, and my income's erratic; I'm never sure to the day when it will come or how much it will be. But there's nothing you want which you can't buy; remember that. And when we begin life in London, you shall have a standing account at as ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... must and shalt believe". It is a crime against the highest and the holiest to be scientific.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} The "Flying Dutchman" preaches the sublime doctrine that woman can moor the most erratic soul, or to put it into Wagnerian terms "save" him. Here we venture to ask a question. Supposing that this were actually true, would it therefore be desirable?—What becomes of the "eternal Jew" whom a woman adores and enchains? He simply ceases ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... the days passed in study, writing, housework, and caring for old ladies three. Dante Gabriel, talented, lovable, erratic, had gotten into bad ways, as a man will who turns night into day and tries to get the start of God Almighty, thinking he has found a substitute for exercise and oxygen. Finally he was taken to Birchington, on the Isle of Thanet ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... bullets. The sand round Suvla Bay hid thousands of bullets and ammunition pouches, some flung away by wounded men, some belonging to the dead. As the bush-fires licked from the lower slopes of the Sari Bair towards Chocolate Hill this lost ammunition exploded, and it sounded like erratic rifle-fire. The fires glowed and spluttered all night, and went on smoking in the morning. I had to go up to Chocolate Hill about some sand-bags for our hospital dug-outs next day, and on the way up I noticed a human pelvis and a chunk of ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... Digby in various parts of the History show the interest—sometimes an amused interest—that Clarendon took in his strange and erratic character. 'The temper and composition of his mind was so admirable, that he was always more pleased and delighted that he had advanced so far, which he imputed to his virtue and conduct, than broken or dejected that his success was not answerable, which he still charged upon second causes, for ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... of the existing and predominant states of the mentality and physiology. As long as the constitution remains unimpaired, the eye is clear and bright, but becomes languid and soulless in proportion as the brain has been enfeebled. Wild, erratic persons have a half-crazed expression of eye, while calmness, benignancy, intelligence, purity, sweetness, love, lasciviousness, anger, and all the other mental affections, express themselves quite as distinctly by the eye as voice, ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... energy, we resumed our tense, unremitting round of toil. Now, however, it was vastly different. Every bucket of dirt meant money in our pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling paystreak—one day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. Perhaps this made it all the more exciting, and stimulated us unnaturally, and always we cursed that primitive ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... femininity was the race-track favourite of the season. Being feminine, she was erratic in her gaits, and there were a few heavy losers about town who had believed she could be true. The ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... course of my love of women was now a little erratic; normal connection began to lose fascination. As long ago I had formulated untutored the rationale of coitus, so now imagination, groping in the dark, conceived a fresh fillip for the appetite—cunnilinctus. But this, though for a while quite adequate, soon ceased to gratify. At ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... with the leaders of his craft—such as Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and George Sand—were on the whole cordial. He had trouble with Sainte-Beuve, however, and often felt that his brother-writers begrudged his success. His constant attacks on contemporary journalists, and his egotistic and erratic manners naturally prejudiced the critics, so that even the marvelous romance entitled 'La Peau de chagrin' (The Magic Skin: 1831),—a work of superb genius,—speedily followed as it was by 'Eugenie Grandet' and 'Le Pere Goriot,' did not win him cordial recognition. One or two of his friendships, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... to discuss the terms with me. They are unusual. The gentleman, I may say, is erratic. He believes that you have originality, and he is planning to educate you to become ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... fissure like an angry monster muttering his mighty wrath. Peal after peal follow each other in quick succession, the vigorous, newborn echoes of one peal seeming angrily to chase the receding voices of its predecessor from cliff to cliff, and from recess to projection, along its rocky, erratic course up the caon. Vivid flashes of forked lightning shoot athwart the heavy black cloud that seems to rest on either wall, roofing the caon with a ceiling of awful grandeur. Sheets of electric flame light up the dark, shadowy recesses of the towering rocks as they play along the ridges and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... stand back quietly and approvingly and see the negro fully invested with the powers denied to themselves. He had a remarkable memory, an unequalled quickness of repartee, a peculiar gift of improvising epigrams and, while erratic, was a brilliant and entertaining speaker. He was at this time about thirty-five, nearly six feet tall, a handsome brunette, with curling hair and flashing dark eyes, the picture of vigorous health. He was exquisitely neat in person and irreproachable in habits, and had a fine courtliness ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... successful. The most eloquent of his disciples, Fenelon, then Archbishop of Cambrai, seemed to him to have fallen into dangerous errors. He had adopted the mystic doctrine of Quietism, which had been made known to him first by an erratic woman, Madame Guyon. Bossuet determined that the eloquent archbishop must be compelled to recant. A number of works were published by him in support of his position, the most important one being his 'Relation on Quietism'; and he did not rest until the Pope had condemned his rival, and Fenelon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... or the fate of Bras, but by her being the heroine of so mad an adventure. She knew that he wished her to be serious and subdued and proper, like the ladies whom she met, while an evil destiny seemed to dog her footsteps and precipitate her into all sorts of erratic mishaps and "scenes." However, this adventure was likely soon to have an end. She could go no farther. Whatever had become of Bras, it was in vain for her to think of pursuing him. When she at length ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... Ovid turned at once to the right, leading Carmina to the aviaries, so that she might begin by seeing the birds. Miss Minerva, with Maria in dutiful attendance, followed them. Teresa kept at a little distance behind; and Zo took her own erratic course, now attaching herself to one member of the little party, and now ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... of the Texan struggle for independence and the events culminating in the capture of the erratic Santa Anna. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... truly amiable, erratic genius is a portrait of Dickens's own father, "David Copperfield" being Dickens, and "Mrs. Nickleby" (one can hardly believe it) is said to be ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... on the deportment of that young maiden, whose intellect at another day she would have despised, with envy and regret. Truer thoughts and feelings came to her as she listened to the innocent but fond dialogue between the unconscious pair. The hunter was pursuing an erratic life of enterprise and industry, then very common among the western youth. He had been down upon the Mississippi, seeking his fortune in such adventures as make border-life in our country something like the more civilized life of the middle ages. He had returned after a long absence, to claim ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... away a couple of points so as to cut her off. I'm thinking it wouldn't be a bad idea to speak her if it could be managed, and find out where we are. As we haven't been able to rig a log-ship and line, and as the steering has been, to say the least of it, erratic, our dead reckoning has been some of the roughest. Personally, I wouldn't bet upon our whereabouts to ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... were of widely different temperament. Henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. Henry would have worked ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... which the wild and erratic imagination of our ancestors manifested itself, was in the creation of a world of visionary beings of a less terrific character, but which did not fail to annoy their thoughts, and perplex their determinations, known by the name ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Rue du Canal, one could get glimpses of the gardens in Faubourg Ste.-Marie standing in silent wretchedness, so many tearful Lucretias, tattered victims of the storm. Short remnants of the wind now and then came down the narrow street in erratic puffs heavily laden with odors of broken boughs and torn flowers, skimmed the little pools of rain-water in the deep ruts of the unpaved street, and suddenly went away to nothing, like a juggler's butterflies or a ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... mountains. At that time the colossal glacier spread at its extremity like a fan, extending westward in the direction of Geneva and eastward towards Soleure.[51] The very minute and extensive investigations of Professor A. Guyot upon the erratic boulders of Switzerland have not only confirmed the statements of M. de Charpentier, but even shown that the northeastern boundary of the ancient glacier of the Rhone was more extensive than was at first supposed. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... from which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn; but it had stopped at the very moment it was so withdrawn; nor, despite all the skill of the watchmaker, has it ever gone since—that is, it will go in a strange erratic way for a few hours, and then comes to a dead ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... advent of Mrs. Besant, the society has been largely moulded by her erratic powers. She has not hesitated to use her ability and influence toward the creation and the development of a strong reactionary religious spirit throughout the land. She has bitterly denounced every tendency among the people toward Christianity. By her eloquence, which ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... the field at Westbury, Long Island, held their breaths as they watched James Dent take off in the wildest, most erratic flight that they had ever seen. Under lowering storm clouds, with the wind roaring half a hurricane behind him, Dent spiraled upward as if unconscious of the laws ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... curiously enough, the formula of a man whose judgment I profoundly distrusted, whose work as a journalist I disliked, and who as a man was to me exceedingly unsympathetic. It was that of Mr. Stead, the erratic Editor first of the Pall Mall and then of the Review of Reviews. The journalist, he declared, was "the watch-dog of society." Stead, though a man of honest intent and very great ability, was also ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... consequence was fatal delay; not knowing what to do with their prisoner, the Government shipped him to Caprera. Personally he was perfectly free; no conditions were imposed; but nine men-of-war were despatched to the island to sweep the seas of erratic heroes. In spite of which, Garibaldi escaped in a canoe on the 14th ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... time of Mr. Shamble's sermon (an erratic Anglican divine, hired for the season at places of English resort, and addicted to debts, drinking, and even to roulette, it was said), Pen, chafing under the persecution which his womankind inflicted upon him, had been meditating ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... These fellows are not like the Delhi pandies, who are artillerymen trained by ourselves; here you will see the real genuine native product; and as the manufacture of shell is in its infancy, and as the shot seldom fits the gun within half an inch, or even an inch, you will see something erratic. They may knock holes in the wall, but it will take them a long time to cut enough holes near each other to make a breach. There, do you see? there are another lot of elephants and troops coming from the left. We shall have the whole countryside here before long. Ah! that's just as we expected; ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... exhausted. Mr. Gladstone (then in office) was on a visit, and his solemn, grim countenance as he stood in the church quite frightened the poor man, inasmuch as he lost his head completely. The organ left off in the chants, persisted in playing in the prayers, and altogether acted in such an erratic manner, that it was no wonder that anger was depicted on one countenance, sorrow on another, and amusement on a few of the more youthful ones! The old institution had to give way to a new, however, and a repetition of such performances was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 1704, just over a decade since Dr. Blair had obtained the charter for his College, the erratic and able Governor of Virginia, Francis Nicholson, was recalled. For all that he was a wild talker, he had on the whole done well for Virginia. He was, as far as is known, the first person actually to propose a federation ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... on the rein-deer for subsistence,—a dependence which the erratic habits of these animals render extremely precarious. Should they happen to miss the deer on their passage through the country in autumn, they experience the most grievous inconvenience, and often privations, the ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... of gravitation that makes everything upon the earth tend to the centre? How does it reach out its invisible hands toward the erratic meteor-stones, arrest them in their swift course, and draw them down to the earth's bosom? It is a power. We know ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... is prosperous but highly susceptible to external shocks. Erratic growth rates over the past decade reflect the economy's vulnerability to swings in tourist arrivals, caused by political instability in the region and fluctuations in economic conditions in Western Europe. Economic policy is focused on ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... business to come before the House was also to be considered, and the policy to be pursued determined upon. Unfortunately in this case again Jeffersonian theory did not accord with Jeffersonian practice. Even erratic Randolph complained of the want of system at these cabinet meetings, where each was at liberty to do and say as he chose; a severe trial, this, to Gallatin. In 1845 Mr. Gallatin wrote to Edward Coles that it was "quite unusual to submit to the ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... been blown up from all directions, so it looked, by the counter-currents that set up in the lee of every obstacle. These mounds presented one and all the appearance of cones or pyramids of butter patted into shape by upward strokes made with a spoon. There were the sharp ridges, irregular and erratic, and there were the hollows running up their flanks—exactly as such a cone of butter will show them. And the whole field was dotted with them, as if there were so many ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... punished him severely for every breach of discipline. The study was a cool dark room, with one window looking north, and that window barred. Here he locked up the erratic youth for hours at a time, upon ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the substitution, Miss Alice. I understand that the boy is erratic and irresponsible. His father ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... comet as is now interesting the astronomical world, almost contemporaneously with our victory in Egypt, would have been looked upon as an omen of great portent, and it is a curious coincidence that the first glimpse Sir Garnet Wolseley had of this erratic luminary was when standing, on the eventful morning of September 13, 1882, watch in hand, before the intrenchments of Tel-el-Kebir, waiting to give the word to advance. As may be seen in our sketch, the comet is seen in Egypt ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... you would get up. The Glittering Lady (he still called her that) is coming here to have a talk with me which I should prefer to be private. Excuse me for disturbing you, but you have overslept yourself; indeed, I think it must be nine o'clock, so far as I can judge by the sun, for my watch is very erratic now, ever since Bickley tried to ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... latter's heart. He had long been searching for a fitting rider for the erratic and sensitive Dixie—whimsical and uncertain of taste as any woman—and though he could not bring himself to believe in Crimmins' eulogy of Garrison's riding ability, he was anxious to ascertain how far the trainer ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... colossal failure. But the prevailing opinion is that his raising of the new army has been good work but that he has failed with the task of procuring munitions. As for Churchill, he's too restless and erratic and dictatorial and fussy and he runs about too much. I talked with him at dinner last night at his mother's. He slips far down in his chair and swears and be-dams and by-Gods his assertions. But his energy does interest one. An ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... confidence her old affection for her chum revived. Once more they went about the school arm in arm, sat next to each other at tea, and wrote each other private little notes. St. Elgiva's smiled again, but the girls by this time were accustomed to Marjorie's very impulsive and rather erratic ways, and did not take ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... behind. Another whizzing rocket, carrying its line with it, went hurtling through or close to the crowd clustered on the top-gallant forecastle, where they cowered before creeping out on to the bowsprit. No harm was done by the erratic flight of the rockets, but the wrecked sailors naturally preferred to go ashore in the lifeboat to being dragged through the breakers in the cradle of the rocket-apparatus, and declining to use it, they again ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... Grimm, the less didactic of the two famous brothers, said that the ballad says nothing unnecessary or unreal, and despises external adornment. Ferdinand Wolf, the great critic of the Homeric question, said the ballad must be naive, objective, not sentimental, lively and erratic in its narrative, without ornamentation, yet with much ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... ordered the ship to be put over to a trawler in sight. With the seas so swift and ponderous I completely forgot the cold wind in watching the two lively ships being manoeuvred till they were within earshot. When the engines were stopped the steering had to be nicely calculated, or erratic waves brought them dangerously close, or else took them out of call. Our new friend had not seen "our lot," but had left a fleet with an unknown house-flag ten miles astern. We ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... the lot of Tom and his companions to take part in such a novel hunting scene as that in which they were now participating. With the airship moving quickly about, darting here and there under the guidance of the young inventor, the erratic movements hither and thither of the buffaloes could be followed exactly. Wherever the mass of the herd went ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... the doctrine which we have just outlined is not Scriptural, but represents the grossest perversion of Scripture. They say this doctrine originated in "the erratic brain of Luther." Luther "was not an exact thinker, and being unable to analyze an idea into its constituents, as is necessary for one who will apprehend it correctly, he failed to grasp questions which ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the bleak foothills came the faint echoes of a coyote's shrill "ki-yip-yapping"—again and again, as if endeavouring to convey some insidious message. George continued to stare at the pictures. Gad! what a strange fantastic mind the man must have! he mused—what rotten, erratic desecration to shove pictures indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of Cawnpore," Lottie Collins, scantily ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... fighting overhead. By the way, the Royal Naval triplanes had been sent over 'specially for this work, and they did great execution among the enemy planes. We pressed on till we caught up with our barrage. The German shell fire was very erratic, the guns seemed to be firing anywhere; on our right and left stretched long lines of smoke as the British advanced, but our flanks were not coming up fast enough, and we had to wait; meanwhile our barrage played ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... whose swart faces remind one that he is still in the neighborhood of the East. I had on one occasion, while a steamer was lying at Belgrade, time to observe the manners of the humbler sort of folk in a species of cabaret near the river-side and hard by the erratic structure known as the custom-house. There was a serious air upon the faces of the men which spoke well for their characters. Each one seemed independent, and to a certain extent careless, of his neighbor's opinion. It would have been impossible, without some knowledge of the history ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... an old man, but still seemed to have plenty of vigour in him. He evidently guessed how his wife and child had gone down, and he endeavoured to avoid the rope and to skip over it when it came near him. But the goat's movements were too erratic for him. His turn came, and he trod on the rope, and went down in the middle of the road, opposite his own door, with a thud that shook us all up against each other as we stood looking out of the carriage-window, and sat there and cursed the goat. Then ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... claiming God for its author, and the welfare of man for its object. It is a system so uniform, exalted and pure, that the loftiest intellects have acknowledged its influence, and acquiesced in the justness of its claims. Genius has bent from his erratic course to gather fire from her altars, and pathos from the agony of Gethsemane and the sufferings of Calvary. Philosophy and science have paused amid their speculative researches and wondrous revelations to gain wisdom from her teachings and ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... what is commonly called talent in the direction of its manifestation and it would develop into genius. Genius is commonly thought of as something abnormal, in the sense that it is essentially eccentric. A genius is generally spoken of as an eccentric, erratic, unbalanced, person. The eccentricity is then taken as constituting the substance of the quality of genius. This is undoubtedly a mistake. Because some geniuses have been erratic, the popular imagination has formed its picture of all genius as unbalanced. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... could, the English gentleman abroad, and incidentally exhibited no mean amount of public spirit. Conspicuous among these was Colonel Talbot, who had come to Upper Canada with Simcoe in 1793, and became there an erratic but energetic instrument of empire. "For sixteen years," says Mrs. Jameson, writing with a pardonably feminine thrill after a visit to the great man, "he saw scarce a human being, except a few boors and blacks employed in clearing and logging his land; he himself ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
