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More "Flutter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nose and mouth burrowed eagerly down into the expectant draught. But the cup did not fill.—Yet scented deep in his curved, empty, balsam-scented fingers lurked—somehow—somewhere—the dregs of a wonderful dream: Boyhood, with the hot, sweet flutter of summer woods, and the pillowing warmth of the soft, sunbaked earth, and the crackle of a twig, and the call of a bird, and the drone of a bee, and the great blue, blue mystery of the sky glinting down ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... had been a boy, and I own I am glad you were not—a man wants a daughter—I should have been quite willing to allow you your flutter on Wall Street, or your try at anything you felt you would like to handle. It would have interested me to look on and see what you were made of, what you wanted, and how you set about trying to get it. It's a new kind of deal you have undertaken. It's more romantic than Wall ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rose in the midst, at first of the palest bluish tint possible, by degrees obtained more consistency, when its nature began to undergo a sudden change, assuming the semblance of a luminous mist. Wagner's heart seemed to flutter and leap in his breast, as if with a presentiment of coming joy; for the luminous mist became a glorious halo, surrounding the beauteous and holy form of a protecting angel, clad in white and shining garments, and with snowy wings drooping slowly ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... east the Dead Sea lay, a stretch of silk. At its edge was the flutter of ospreys feasting on the barbels and breams of the Jordan, which as they enter, die. Beyond was a glitter of white and gold, the scarp of Moriah and its breast of stone, the Tyrian bevel of Solomon, the porphyry of Nehemiah, the marble that Herod gave; ascending terraces, engulfing ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... flutter of emotion my heart responded to his sweet assurances, and, as a weary child confidingly rests upon its mother's breast, so did my tired soul trustingly repose in the safe haven of his manly love, and cast its anchor there! ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... His keen sapphire eyes considered her steadily a moment from under his level black brows. "It might have been worse," he said, with a significance which brought a tinge of colour to her cheeks and a flutter to ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... goes about unattended, or with other unchaperoned girls, on social occasions. A girl must have an unusual measure of native dignity, as well as native innocence, always to escape the disagreeable infliction of either "fresh" or blase impertinence, if she has no mother's wing to flutter under. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... I," he answered. "But a few days after you got hurt they quit us cold with no explanation. When we fell down on that first big order of albacore, Winfield & Camby lost interest and I haven't been able to get a flutter out of them since. The other dealers seem to be afraid of us for some reason. They come down and look us ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... finger-tips, and bowing low Offer the handle to her. Now is seen The soft and delicate playing of the muscles In the white hand upon its work intent. The graces that around the lady stoop Clothe themselves in new forms, and from her fingers Sportively flying, flutter to the tips Of her unconscious rosy knuckles, thence To dip into the hollows of the dimples That Love ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... things as splendor, profusion, and dissipation: we will have some cows, and you shall be queen of the dairy; in a morning, while I look after my garden, you shall take a basket on your arm, and sally forth to feed your poultry; and as they flutter round you in token of humble gratitude, your father shall smoke his pipe in a woodbine alcove, and viewing the serenity of your countenance, feel such real pleasure dilate his own heart, as shall make him forget he had ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... her, with her great heart, her passionate frankness, her triumphant reason. And she was always present with him; he did not believe that he could exist where she was not; he had need of her breath; of the flutter of her skirts near him; of her thoughtfulness and affection, by which he felt himself constantly surrounded; of her looks; of her smile; of her whole daily woman's life, which she had given him, which she would not have ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... grey, And all the body's lovely line In wrinkled meanness slipped astray; The limbs so round and ripe and fine Shrivelled and withered; quenched the shine That made your eyes as bright as day: So, ladies, hear these words of mine, Love, ere love flutter ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... through the air, we hear a dull vibration, a continual murmur, a hum of insects, filling, if we may use the expression, all the lower strata of the air. Nothing is better fitted to make man feel the extent and power of organic life. Myriads of insects creep upon the soil, and flutter round the plants parched by the heat of the sun. A confused noise issues from every bush, from the decayed trunks of trees, from the clefts of the rocks, and from the ground undermined by lizards, millepedes, and cecilias. These are so many voices proclaiming to us that all nature breathes; ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... against her death. Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade, And waft her into immortality. Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter That whispered its deep secret to my blade! For, just because her bosom fluttered still, It told me more than many rifled graves; Because I spoke too soon, she answered me, Her vain life ripened to this bud of death As the whole plant is forced into one flower, All her ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... put up with—and it was only when, each evening, with a thump and swish, the bag, sweeping out of the darkness, sped across her floor—it was only then that Katharine's heart ceased from pulsing with a flutter. All the while the letters were out of her own hands she moved on tiptoe, as if she were a hunter intent on surprising a coy quarry. Nevertheless, it was impossible for her to believe that this was a dangerous game; it was impossible to believe that the heavy, unsuspicious ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... Sound. The autumn silence, which is the only perfect silence in all the world, was restful, yet full of significance, suggestion, provocation. From the spongy lowland back of them came the pleading sweetness of a meadow-lark's cry. Nearer they could even hear an occasional leaf flutter and waver down. The quick thud of a falling nut was almost loud enough to earn its echo. Now and then they saw a lightning flash of vivid turquoise and ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... subjected to the Hurculean rigors of bearing the spear, thanks to the gratuities of the open-handed Van Cleft, Senior. She pleaded to remain out of the white lights, meaning it as she spoke. But Shirley wisely felt that the butterfly would emerge from the chrysalis, shortly, to flutter into certain gardens where he would fain cull rare blossoms! Pat Cleary deputized a "shadow" to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... because she liked Emily and knew it would please her to hear that her husband went to the length of dwelling on her charms in his conversation with other people, partly because it entertained her to see the large creature's eyelids flutter and a big blush sweep ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... reception of the bride when she has come to be married: "But there comes an urgent telegram. The bride and her mother are expected and information is given to the bridegroom's father. In all haste preparations are made to give her a grand and suitable reception. Oh, the flutter among the girls assembled in the house of the bridegroom from all quarters. Every one is dressed in her best and is trying to be the foremost in welcoming the new bride, the Goddess Lakshmi. The numerous ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... and counterbalance it. It has been an old complaint, that the coxcomb carries it with them before the man of sense. When we see a fellow loud and talkative, full of insipid life and laughter, we may venture to pronounce him a female favourite: Noise and flutter are such accomplishments as they cannot withstand. To be short, the passion of an ordinary woman for a man is nothing else but self-love diverted upon another object: She would have the lover a woman in every thing but the sex. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... of the water, dispels the nocturnal vapours. The eastern sky is becoming tinged with bright yellow streaks, mixed with the purple of the aurora, which proclaims the approach of the rising sun. His coming is saluted by the voices of myriads of bright birds that flutter among the ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... the bulwarks when this torrent of abuse descended upon him; and it rose inch by inch as the shower continued: blank amazement, bewilderment, rage, and injured pride chasing each other across it till he saw his superior officer's left eyelid flutter on the cheek twice. Then he fled to the engine-room, and wiping his brow with a handful of cotton-waste, ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... myself a stick, and set off beyond the town-gates. I thought I would walk off my sorrow. It was a lovely day, bright and not too hot, a fresh sportive breeze roved over the earth with temperate rustle and frolic, setting all things a-flutter and harassing nothing. I wandered a long while over hills and through woods; I had not felt happy, I had left home with the intention of giving myself up to melancholy, but youth, the exquisite weather, the fresh air, the pleasure of rapid motion, the sweetness of repose, lying ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... even as a bazaar. Surely thou shouldst have been with me. Across the narrow streets the gay lanterns of paper flutter like large butterflies. When the wind blows over the roofs they rise and fall as painted bubbles do. In front of their booths sit the merchants on silken carpets. They have straight black beards, and their turbans are covered ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... twelve-hour cannonade of Fort Sumter's hundred and forty guns echoing over the sea, and saw the Stars and Bars flutter above the walls of the old fort. He saw Generals Bee and Johnson come back from Manassas, folded in the battle flag for which they had given their lives, to lie in state in the City Hall at the marble feet of Calhoun, the great political leader whom they had followed ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... re-appeared, And said, 'He's come.'—Mahmoud said not a word, But rose and took four slaves each with a sword, And went with the vext man. They reach the place, And hear a voice and see a female face, That to the window flutter'd in affright. 'Go in,' said Mahmoud, 'and put out the light; But tell the females first to leave the room; And when the drunkard ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... that he held his peace so long, and again had doubted the language of his looks, but now those doubts were set at rest, and their next interview was anticipated with a strange flutter of the heart, a longing for, yet half shrinking from the words ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... my melancholy record,—you at least will understand me. Does not your heart throb, in the presence of budding or blooming womanhood, sometimes as if it "were ready to crack" with its own excess of strain? What if instead of throbbing it should falter, flutter, and stop as if never to beat again? You, young woman, who with ready belief and tender sympathy will look upon these pages, if they are ever spread before you, know what it is when your breast heaves with uncontrollable ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... glade and bower, and serpents whose bite was death basked in the sun or crept among the rocks. All was as it had always been; the red men, living in the midst of nature, were a part of nature themselves; nothing was changed by their presence; they altered not the flutter of a leaf or the posture of a stone, but stole in and out noiseless and lithe, and left behind them no trace of their passage. It is not so with the white man: before him, nature flies and perishes; he clothes the earth in the thoughts of his own mind, cast in forms of matter, and ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... occasioned some flutter also in Manchester Square. It could not make much difference personally to old Mr. Wharton. He was, in fact, as old as the baronet, and did not pay much regard to his own chance of succession. But the position was one which would suit his ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... still kept up the fight, however, on the further side of the plateau. The cheering Gordons, the Manchesters and the Devons now flung themselves at the remnant of the foe. Suddenly a white flag was seen to flutter defeat from a kopje beyond the laager. On the instant the soldiers paused at the surprising notes of the "Cease fire," followed by the "Retire." For a moment they wavered between discipline and dismay. At that instant from a ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... Saxon woodcock in the springe, But he begins to flutter. As I think He was thine host in England when ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... glad to get, aware, as I was, of the hospitable meaning of my uncle's invitation and his sensitiveness in respect to its reception. So I got the ill-seeming black bottle from the locker, the tray and glasses and little brown jug from the pantry, the napkin from Agatha, in a flutter in the kitchen, and having returned to the best room, where the tutor awaited the event in some apparent trepidation, I poured my uncle's dram, and measured an hospitable glass for Cather, but with less ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... Dr. Masham, really agitated, roused his brother magistrate, and communicated to his worship the important discovery. The Squire fell into a solemn flutter. 'We must be regular, brother Masham; we must proceed by rule; we are a bench in ourselves. Would that my clerk were here! We must send for Signsealer forthwith. I will not decide without the statutes. The law must be consulted, and it must ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... begun, natur' had used the blendin' brush so delicate. Her eyes were screw augurs, I tell you; they bored right into your heart, and kinder agitated you, and made your breath come and go, and your pulse flutter. I never felt nothin' like 'em. When lit up, they sparkled like lamp reflectors; and at other tunes, they was as soft, and mild, and clear as dew-drops that hang on the bushes at sun-rise. When she loved, she loved; and when she hated, she hated ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Pareta—nor any other girl of the port, Portygee or Yankee—had ever made Tunis Latham's heart flutter. He was not impervious to the blandishments of all feminine beauty. As Cap'n Ira Ball would have said, Tunis was "a general admirer of the sect." And as the young man passed the languishing Eunez with a cheerful nod and smile there flashed into his ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... feel who do the work of the gods; and so when I have brought her circling from round my shoulders to my waist and thence, with her masts all sloping inwards, to my knees, and lower still and downwards till her topmast pennants flutter against my ankles, then I, Nooz Wana, Whelmer of Ships, lift up my feet and trample her beams asunder, and there go up again to the surface of the Straits only a few broken timbers and the memories of the sailors ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... is a perfect miniature of a primitive seafaring town; the saltest, roughest, most piratical little place that ever was seen. Great rusty iron rings and mooring-chains, capstans, and fragments of old masts and spars, choke up the way; hardy rough-weather boats, and seamen's clothing, flutter in the little harbour or are drawn out on the sunny stones to dry; on the parapet of the rude pier, a few amphibious-looking fellows lie asleep, with their legs dangling over the wall, as though earth or water were all one to ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... more than once, and caught her by the remnant of her poor tail. This used to spoil Tilly's morning amusement, and send her sorrowful into the house. But what did that matter to Jacky? He sometimes broke out worse than usual, and set the whole brood into an agitated flutter, which rather damaged the happiness of the family. But what did that ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... but silent movement another girl, who had been sitting patiently on a low stool near by, rose and put herself in the way of the sunbeam. But too late: already long lashes were a-flutter upon the delicately modelled cheeks of ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... a bait at which House usually jumps; always ready to be amused, or interested with scandal about Queen ELIZABETH and other persons. These things usually promised by personal explanation. To-day no flutter of excitement moved crowded House. JEMMY, approaching table with most judicial air, received with mocking laughter, and ironical cheers. Some difficulty in quite making out what he was at. Evidently something to do with SQUIRE of MALWOOD; but SQUIRE so inextricably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... replied my husband. "That's my wife's little flutter. Dare say the poor fool has had to promise her priest to make me ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... a good many years, and always "found him the same." At last, the month of February came, and the long expected letter from Mr. Prigg. Bumpkin and Joe were to be in London on the following day, for it was expected they would be in the paper. What a flutter of preparation there was at the farm! Bumpkin was eager, Mrs. Bumpkin anxious. She had never liked the lawsuit, but had never once murmured; now she seemed to have a presentiment which she was too wise to express. And ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... curiously when at last they met. Jeanne's eyes were sparkling and her cheeks burning, and her whole little person in a flutter of joyful excitement, and yet she couldn't speak. Now that the little cousin was there, actually standing before her, she could not speak. How was it? He was not quite what she had expected; he looked paler and quieter than any boys she had seen, and—was he not glad to see her?—glad to ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... one darts its long bayonet-like beak into the water, invariably drawing it out with a fish between the mandibles; this, after a short convulsive struggle, and a flutter or two of its tail fins, disappearing ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... in spring sunshine. It glitters in the soft darkness of her hair. It touches the diamonds, the opals, the pearls, that cling to her arms, and neck, and fingers. They flash back again, and the gorgeous silks glisten, and the light laces flutter, until the stately Aurelia seems to me, in tremulous radiance, ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... fetched a bladder of beaver-fat and anointed his hands, her own trembling a little. Azoka was husband-high, and had been conscious for some weeks of a bird in her breast, which stirred and began to flutter whenever she and Netawis drew close. At first, when he had been fit for little but to make kites for the children, she had despised him and wondered at her father's liking. But Netawis did not seem to care whether folks despised him or not; and this piqued her. Whatever had ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the usual shrill, shrewd, and laughing line—the trade seems to induce high mirth—and as such no bait for the old merchant by ordinary; but just now the sun and breeze together made a bright patch of them, set them at a provoking flutter. Baldassare, prickly with dust, found them like their own cool linen hung out to dance itself dry in the wind. Most of all he noticed Vanna, whom he knew well enough, because when she knelt upright she was taller ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... thoughtfully. "I notice that all the staff-officers are showing it; that is," she added on second thought, quite literally, as she regarded him for an instant of silence, "all except you. You remain the same, calm and decisive." There she looked away with a flutter of her lashes, as if she were shamed at having allowed herself to be caught in open admiration of him. "Look! The last effulgence of rose!" she went on hurriedly about the sunset. "Why shouldn't we think of the sky as heaven, as Nirvana? What better immortality ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... which filled the house after the minister sat down was broken by the sounding of the trombones: then from beneath the trees Leonhard saw the beautiful procession again following the bier; and as he watched the flutter of garments between the dark-green cedar walls, it had been no difficult thing to see in that company not a company of mourners, but the ransomed sons and daughters of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... her, holding her two hands imprisoned. "Oh, Daphne!" he mocked softly. "I've caught you—I've caught you! Here in your own bower with no one to look on! No, you can't even flutter your wings now. You've got to stay still ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... evidently had a struggle for it; but a sense of duty decided her, and as Ney doggedly held back to cover the retreating forces on the march from Moscow, so did she resolutely lurk behind till the last flutter of the last petticoat assured her that the fugitives were safe. Then did she hesitate for a moment what course to take; but as I assumed my chair beside her, she composedly sat down, and crossing her hands before her, waited for an ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... eyes at the little figure which stood with its back turned towards them, in an attitude of rigid stillness. There was something pathetic about that stillness, with just the flutter of the tell-tale handkerchief, to hint at the quivering face that was hidden from view. The hearts of Peggy's companions were very tender over her at that moment; but even as they planned words of comfort and cheer, she wheeled round suddenly and ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... castellated outworks of the 'Devil's City.' The city itself lies in a hollow, and I have not yet reached it. The mule-path fortunately leads in the right direction. On my way multitudes of very dark, almost black, butterflies flutter up from the short turf, which is flecked with the gold of yellow everlastings. Here and there a solitary round-headed allium nods from the top of its long leafless stem. I walk over the shining dark ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... a little flutter, I suppose?" she remarked. "It is so hot in town we had to get away somewhere. Are you alone ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nearly midnight when a friend came to inform Robert that the king's men had procured a warrant against him for resisting his majesty's officers, and he must fly for his life. There was a flutter of hushed excitement. Everybody was awakened. Robert hurriedly gathered up his effects, which were taken to a brigantine ready to sail for Virginia. There was a silent, tearful farewell with Ester; vows were renewed, and he swore when the clouds had rolled ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... apparition in white, scamper off with a clatter, scattering the dead leaves. In such narrow quarters, birds are under restraint, and show anxiety and apprehension. There is no sport or play. They drink quickly and with faculties strained, and flutter off excitedly on the least alarm. Well may they be suspicious, for is not the cool spot attractive to the sly enemy, the green snake, which conceals its presence by faithful resemblance to the creepers ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... text; of whom one ridicules his errors with airy petulance, suitable enough to the levity of the controversy; the other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... must not have heard. For Tom, hurrying along, his face crimson, saw the bird rise once more and flutter over the brink—and then, over the same brink, ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... has long wrought within my soul, What is art? and what can it do? Here, perhaps, these yearnings for the ideal will meet their satisfaction. The ascent to the picture gallery tends to produce a flutter of excitement and expectation. Magnificent staircases, dim perspectives of frescoes and carvings, the glorious hall of Apollo, rooms with mosaic pavements, antique vases, countless spoils of art, dazzle the eye of the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... turkeys suspected danger; they erected their tall brown and grey necks, and looked about them like alarmed sentinels. "They're off!" cried we — but just as they were preparing to run, which they do with great rapidity, one of them was seen to flutter his wings and tumble over, whilst the crack of the rifle proclaimed the triumph of Migo. We rushed through the brush-wood, elated as schoolboys who have shot their first throstle with a horse-pistol, and found the bustard flapping out its last breath in the hands ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... his mind the distant sound of chanting, the jingle of the silver bit of his roan horse stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing with braying of trumpets and flutter of crimson damask into conquered towns, of court ladies dancing and the noise of pigeons in the eaves drew together like strings plucked in succession on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which his life was sucked away into this one ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... rank, and therefore he moves the indictment be quashed, unless a jury of ghosts be first had and obtained. To this it is replied, that although Fanny the Phantom had originally a right to a jury of ghosts, yet in taking upon her to knock, to flutter, and to scratch, she did, by condescending to operations proper to humanity, wave her privileges as a ghost, and must consent to be tried in the ordinary manner. It occurs to the Justice who tries the case, that there will be difficulty in impanelling a ...
— Trial of Duncan Terig, alias Clerk, and Alexander Bane Macdonald • Sir Walter Scott
... stroke your feet decline to stay anywhere but on top; and when, after an exciting tussle with your refractory pedal extremities, you again get them beneath the surface, your hands fly out with the splash and splutter of a half-dozen flutter wheels. If, on account of your brains being heavier than your heels, you chance to turn a somersault, and your head goes under, your heels will pop up like a pair of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... axis are, we find, still more obvious than even the idea of the vortices. It does at first seem natural enough to suppose, that if the earth's surface be speeding eastwards at the rate of several hundred miles in the hour (a thousand miles at the equator), the birds which flutter over it should be somewhat in danger of being left behind; and that atoms and down flakes floating in the atmosphere in a time of calm, instead of appearing, as they often do, either in a state of rest, or moving with equal ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... week of May there came to Frankfort three youths whose rank and personal character created a flutter in the Goethe household. Two of them were the brothers of the Countess Stolberg,[218] with whom Goethe had been carrying on his platonic correspondence during the previous months, and were on their way to ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... is a pageantry about war, which makes even the meanest heart to beat with a deeper throb and thus feel a loftier courage than is its wont. There are the uniforms in which the soldiers are clad, the gleaming swords and rifles which they carry, the brilliant flags which flutter over their heads, the crashing music which marks the time for their marching feet. Everywhere, in camp, on the march, on the battlefield, there is color, glitter, glory, beauty of sight and sound, the whole ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... said in a serious manner, there were few of us whose hearts did not flutter responsively to this surmise, for the danger became every minute more imminent, and we knew what a terrific surf there must be then running on the shingle beach. But we now rapidly approached the shore; we were near to the floating light, and in the roadstead not a vessel remained; all ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... was back in the igloo with a can of condensed cream, a pan, and the alcohol lamp. His fingers trembled so that he had difficulty in lighting the wick, and as he cut open the can with his knife he saw the child's eyes flutter wide for an instant and ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... all of a flutter. "Oh, you love me? Do you—do you?" She clasped her hands and he took them and drew ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... had made no secret of his intentions with regard to Miss Dunbar, so that when it was known that his sisters and the rich American Mees would at last meet at the Countess von Amte's there was a flutter of curiosity in the exclusive circle of Munich. The countess herself called twice on Clara that day, so great was her triumph that this social event would occur ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... his own delectable bone, from under the tomb of Mistress Jean Grant, and nearly wagged his tail off with pleasure. Mistress Jeanie was set in a proud flutter when the Grand Leddy rang at the lodge kitchen and asked if she and Bobby could have their tea there with the old couple by the ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... led him to revisit Calcutta, where his last unheard-of experience had overwhelmed his whole being, just eight days previously to his encounter with Doctor Bataille. He had found the Palladists of that city in a flutter of feverish excitement because they had succeeded in obtaining from China the skulls of three martyred missionaries. These treasures were indispensable to the successful operation of a new magical rite composed by ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... of the blind man quite melted Lucille; never had she been so strongly affected. She felt a strange flutter at the heart, a secret and earnest sympathy, that attracted her at once towards him. She wished that Heaven had suffered her to be ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to opera singers who happen to be young, beautiful, and rich, which is my sad case. The ways of the people who flutter round a theatre are not my ways. I was brought up simply, as you were in your Devonshire home. I hate to spend my life as if it was one long diplomatic ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... good conversationist has dexterity to pass! Quarterings of the uncertain moon, the lights that glance blue, silver, yellow, and green from the shifting angles of the gems that move with their wearers, or the confused motions of some of our inferior fellow-creatures that flutter from side to side of the road as intimidating objects fail on the eyes planted on opposite sides of their heads, feebly symbolize these human displays of unstable equilibrium. We must adapt our method to circumstances; but the apostolic rule, of "All things to all men," should not touch, as in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... me I respect The virtue, equal to the stiffest crux, Which thus forbids your costume to deflect Into the primrose path of straw and ducks; I praise that fine regard for red-hot tape Which calmly and without an eyelid's flutter Suffers the maddening noon to melt your nape ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... her one weak point, the shortness of her legs, was not noticeable when she was sitting down. He also wondered how he could ever have thought her mouth hard. It moved with a little tender, sensitive twitch, like the flutter of her eyelids, and he conceived that she was drawn to him and held trembling by ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... help you," said Mrs. Cat-Bird. "Here, Flitter and Flutter, you carry the satchel for Uncle Wiggily, and we'll take him to ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... hung the kettle over the fire, and, when the water was warmed, carried it to her mother to wash and lave Sprigg's wounds? Little Bertha. Who, with pretty, young hopes and fears, all in a bird-like flutter, hovered around till the latest grown-up bedtime, wishing and wishing that she might do something to make Sprigg open his eyes and smile—part his lips and speak? Little Bertha. Who, with pretty, young feet, so willing and nimble, ran to the gate next morning, and every morning thereafter for ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... in a flutter of delight; not so much with the idea of working as with the glamour of the work she might be allowed ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... (a living Fowle of the same kind you would take) and cross pricking your Rods, one into, and another against the Wind sloping, a foot distant one from the other, pin down your Stale, some distance from them, tying some small string to him, to pull and make him flutter to allure the Fowle down. If any be caught, do not run presently upon them, their fluttering will encrease your Game. A well taught Spaniel is not amiss to retake those that are entangled, and yet flutter away. Thus likewise for the Water, consult the Rivers depth, ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... was called, and the greatest of excitement prevailed from one end of the city to the other, for there were few men as popular there as Hubert Varrick. The spacious room was crowded to overflowing. There was a great flutter of excitement when the handsome prisoner was led into the court-room. Those who had known him from childhood were touched with the deepest pity for him. They ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... her; took leave of Brandes with the faintest flutter of one eyelid, as though he understood Brandes' game. Which he did not; ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... as I sauntered slowly along the garden walks—a breath of wind scarce strong enough to flutter the leaves, yet it had a salt savor in it that was refreshing after the tropical heat of the past night. I was at that time absorbed in the study of Plato, and as I walked, my mind occupied itself with ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... a week after their piece of good luck, a maid brought a letter for Miss Lydia to her room. The postmark showed that it was from New York. Not knowing any one there, Miss Lydia, in a mild flutter of wonder, sat down by her table and opened the letter with her scissors. This was ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... likes to be of consequence to the belle of the room. If one girl is more admired than another, he likes to flutter about her, and seem to be on intimate terms with her. That is his way, and I have not noticed anything beyond that in ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... seldom, indeed, that the Advertiser aroused interest enough to cause any one to assemble round the Office. Ezra's heart gave a quick flutter at the sight, and he gathered himself together like a runner who sees his goal in view. Throwing away his cigar, he hurried on ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his way, bless him! He likes a red rag to go at, the old John Bull that he is; but if another begins to flutter somewhere else, he forgets number one and goes ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... Continental nobleman; but the announcement that the Baron Rudolph von Blitzenberg had been appointed attache to the German embassy at the Court of St. James was unquestionably received with a certain flutter of excitement. That his estates were as vast as an average English county, and his ancestry among the noblest in Europe, would not alone perhaps have arrested the attention of the paragraphists, since acres and ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... him, who could fly over a hundred tree-tops before a man could climb to one, it was hard to swing outside a ship, and to watch other birds use their wings, when his, which quivered to fly homewards, could only flutter against the bars. As he thought, a roll of the ship threw him forward, the wind shook the wires of the cage, and loosened the fastening; and, when the vessel righted, the ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... on their blood. These Missions are a Godsend not only to the sailor, but to the nation. No other agency has done the work they are doing. The Church is apt, to gather its robes round a cantish respectability, and call out "Save the people," and the flutter falls flat on the seats. These missions owe any success they have had to going to ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... each bridesmaid pins on to the coat of each bridegroomsman a wedding favour, which he returns by pinning one also on her shoulder. Every "favour" is carefully furnished with two pins for this purpose; and it is amazing to see the flutter, the coquettish smiling, and the frequent pricking of fingers, which the performance of this piquant and pleasant duty of the wedding bachelors and ladies ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... Cole to linger. He was reluctant to admit it was wasted. In a few minutes he heard something fall to the ground, he knew not what it was, but with eager steps pressed towards the place, and when near it a slight flutter and rustling of wings led him to discover the partridge, uninjured except that one leg was broken; that by faintness or inability to hold its perch with one foot it had fallen to the ground. The darkness and rain of that night then closing around them were rendered less dark and disagreeable ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... through the door, his arms full of dry spruce wood. He stood smiling down at the face framed snugly in the fox fur; then he dropped his burden and knelt before the stove. In a moment there came a promising crackle, followed quickly by an agreeable flutter which grew into a roar as the stove ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... whole house violently shaken, trembling, and thrilling in the presence of a medium—not a professional, but a young lady amateur. Here, of course, we greatly desire the evidence of Robert Chambers. Spirits came to Swedenborg with a wind, but it was only strong enough to flutter papers; 'the cause of which,' as he remarks with naivete, 'I do not yet understand'. If Swedenborg had gone into a Medicine Lodge, no doubt, in that 'close place,' the phenomena would have been very much more remarkable. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... of their life from the fiery sunbeams. Upon the burning banks of broken rock—gray wastes sprinkled with small spurges and tufts of the fragrant southernwood, now opening its mean little flowers—multitudes of flying grasshoppers flutter, most of them with scarlet wings, and one marvels how they can keep themselves from being baked quite dry where every stone is hot. The lizards, which spend most of their time in the grasshoppers' company, appear equally capable of resisting fire. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... of the Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance of the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitutional stamina, which renders the flesh no match for the spirit. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... morning, rather late, he found, however, that it had attached itself to a very different object. His vision was filled with the brightness of the delightful fact itself, which seemed to impregnate the sweet morning air and to flutter in the light, fresh breeze that came through his open window from the sea. He saw a great patch of the sea between a couple of red-tiled roofs; it was bluer than any sea had ever been before. He had not slept long—only three or four hours; ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... managed. It's time we had a flutter of some sort. I'll see. What about you, Graham? You game to try the hospital? You'll have to get to know the ropes of ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... powder, perhaps the yellow glove, or the oblique flutter of the eyelids—told him that he was making what he would have called "a blooming error," unless he wished for company, which had not been in his thoughts. But her sob affected ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... fit of apprehension, until presently he saw a light leap up to three windows, and her figure appeared. There was a flutter of a white handkerchief, and the blinds were drawn. Malcolm Hay drove to Maida Vale, feeling that the age of romance was not ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... to the "Life," some of those individuals who approached closest to perfection of old times are mentioned. One of those was Sir George Hewitt, on whom Etheridge, the comic writer, sketched his Sir Fopling Flutter. This beau found a place in poetry as well as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... hills. It was all new and delightful after the bare, primeval grandeur of the mountains. Besides, and Wade laughed softly to himself, when all was said and done, he really wanted to meet her. The prospect brought a flutter to his heart and a pleasant excitement to his mind. He would probably fall in love with her again, but there was no harm in that since he would be off before the disease could ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... decorated with whirligigs of coloured paper; ancient hats, among which were some of the quaintly-shaped chimney-pots of a past generation; old coats and waistcoats and trousers, and rags of all colours to flutter in the wind; and these objects were usually considered a sufficient protection. Some of the birds, wiser than their fellows, were not to be kept back by such simple means; but so long as they came not in battalions, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Base Ball Basket Quilt Block Album Brickwork Quilt Carpenter's Rule Carpenter's Square Churn Dash Cog Wheel Compass Crossed Canoes Diagonal Log Chain Domino Double Wrench Flutter Wheel Fan Fan Patch Fan and Rainbow Ferris Wheel Flower Pot Hour Glass Ice Cream Bowl Log Patch Log Cabin Necktie Needle Book New Album Pincushion and Burr Paving Blocks Pickle Dish Rolling Pinwheel Rolling ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... men, moving about with violent gesticulations and loud exclamations, employ themselves in their well-known and allotted tasks. By degrees graceful forms arise, and richly-tinted pavilions, with gilded summits, glitter in the sunbeams, while gaudy banners flutter in the air. Long lines of canvas sheets appear, and spacious enclosures formed of kanauts secure the utmost privacy to the dwellers of the populous camp; while the elephants, who have trodden out the ground, and smoothed it for the ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... that declaration? That all men possess these rights—whether they are six feet five inches high, or three feet two and a half—whether they weigh three hundred or one hundred pounds—whether they parade in broadcloth or flutter in rags—whether their skins are jet black or lily white—whether their hair is straight or woolly, auburn or red, black or gray—does it not? We, who are present, differ from each other in our looks, in our color, in height, and in bulk; we ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... safe and warm, but there doesn't seem to be much breath to rock me," said Do, who lay nearest the little bosom that very slowly rose and fell with the feeble flutter of ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... to Welsh, and then added, with a flutter of caution, "I haven't made up my mind yet. There are drawbacks, ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... whirring, A little piping of leaf-hid birds; A flutter of wings, a fitful stirring, A cloud to the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... as the hollow foundations subside, and walls on which the paint is still almost fresh are shored up with dusty beams lest they should fall and crush the few paupers who dwell within. Filthy, half-washed clothes of beggars hang down from the windows, drying in the sun as they flap and flutter against pretentious moulded masks of empty plaster. Miserable children loiter in the high-arched gates, under which smart carriages were meant to drive, and gnaw their dirty fingers, or fight for a cold boiled chestnut one of them has saved. Squalor, misery, ruin and vile stucco, with ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... were the 'messengers' of the sea-nymph Galatea? A Pompeian picture illustrates the point, by representing a little Love riding up to the shore on the back of a dolphin, with a letter in his hand for Polyphemus. Greek art in Egypt suffered from an Egyptian plague of Loves. Loves flutter through the Pompeian pictures as they do through the poems of Moschus and Bion. They are carried about in cages, for sale, like birds. They are caught in bird-traps. They don the lion-skin of Heracles. They ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he was better; and the day after, when I came up from my office, I found Kate laughing over the news that he was to try a bit of melon. The house-keeper had just telephoned her—all Wrenfield was in a flutter. The doctor himself had picked out the melon, one of the little French ones that are hardly bigger than a large tomato—and the patient was to eat it at his breakfast ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... and kissed, not the hand, but the wrist where the marks of his fingers still remained faintly. He squared himself, and gazed long and steadfastly into her eyes. In that moment he seemed to her positively handsome; and there was a flutter in her heart that she was unable to define. On his part he realized the sooner he was gone the better; there was a limit to his self-control.... He gained the street somehow. There he stopped and turned. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... o'er the gay greenwood, The greenwood o'er the mossy stream, That roll'd in rapture's wildest mood, And flutter'd in the fairy beam. Through light clouds flash'd the fitful gleam O'er hill and dell,—all Nature lay Wrapp'd in enchantment, like the dream Of her ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... When she flutters across to the yellow settee under the grape-vine and balances herself lightly with expectation, I have but to request that she favor me with a little singing, and soon the air is vocal with every note of the village songsters. After this, Mrs. Walters usually begins to flutter in a motherly way around ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... it is difficult to see why the nerves should be affected more easily through the medium of the ears than the eyes. I may here mention that, when the sportsman has a damaged heart, the roar of a wounded tiger, at least if the shooter is on foot in the jungle, is apt to produce a slight flutter of that organ, though that, too, like the effect alluded to by Colonel Peyton, is momentary. Having had for some years a rather damaged heart, I was interested in experimenting as regards the effects of tigers on its action, ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... heather, but, even so, my way was marked by a disturbance of the birds and animals of the wild. A grouse ran with a flutter and took wing with a cry, half in protest at being wakened from its sleep, half in alarm at my presence. A rabbit rushed from a sheltering hole in such a hurry that, as I could tell by its clatter among the bracken, it ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... fall on you, 245 For the rays he darts around him Are the power of his enchantment, Are the arrows that he uses.' "Many years, in peace and quiet, On the peaceful Star of Evening 250 Dwelt Osseo with his father; Many years, in song and flutter, At the doorway of the wigwam, Hung the cage with rods of silver, And fair Oweenee, the faithful, 255 Bore a son unto Osseo, With the beauty of his mother, With the courage of his father. "And the boy grew up and prospered, And Osseo, to delight ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... shut, and his arms folded, appearing to be wrapped in contemplations of a nature deeper than those arising out of the scene before him. But, notwithstanding his seeming abstraction and absence of mind, there was a flutter of vanity in Sir Piercie's very handsome countenance, an occasional change of posture from one striking attitude (or what he conceived to be such) to another, and an occasional stolen glance at the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... is too excited to eat. Once in a while she tastes a little something, when Cousin Marija pinches her elbow and reminds her; but, for the most part, she sits gazing with the same fearful eyes of wonder. Teta Elzbieta is all in a flutter, like a hummingbird; her sisters, too, keep running up behind her, whispering, breathless. But Ona seems scarcely to hear them—the music keeps calling, and the far-off look comes back, and she sits with her hands pressed together over her heart. Then the tears begin to ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... reaper, cracking his whip over the horses, and mowing down the thick, waving grass, as a war hero mows down his enemies. And as he stepped into the office he seemed to hear the clicking noise of the reaper, the soft swish of falling grass and the shrill chirp and light flutter of ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... huckster. reventar to burst, wear out. reverberante reverberating, reflecting. reverberar to reverberate, reflect. reverencia reverence. revestir to dress, clothe, cover. revolotear to flutter. revolver to turn upside down. rey king. rezar to pay, tell. rezo prayer. rico rich. riesgo risk. riguroso rigorous. rincon m. corner. rio river. riqueza riches. risa laughter. risueno smiling. rizar to curl. robar to rob, steal, plunder. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... thickly set with hairy calices, looks as if it might be placed in a glass cup and make an excellent penwiper. If the cultivated human eye (and stomach) revolt at magenta, it is ever a favorite shade with butterflies. They flutter in ecstasy over the gay flowers; indeed, they are the principal visitors and benefactors, for the erect corollas, exposed organs, and level-topped heads are well ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... see nothing but the line of burnished copper stretching across his path and flashing the light back in his eyes. Behind this, a moment later, he made out the dark and gloomy mass of the black safe. Then he looked deeper, with what was still again a flutter of enigmatical fear about his heart, for that twin and ghostlike glow which had filled him ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... in such a state of repentance and flutter that he could not let me take a decent farewell. The sound of the others' horses had long died away down the hill when he began to tell me what he ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... And glossy-throated grace, Isolt the Queen. And when she heard the feet of Tristram grind The spiring stone that scaled about her tower, Flush'd, started, met him at the doors, and there Belted his body with her white embrace, Crying aloud, "Not Mark—not Mark, my soul! The footstep flutter'd me at first: not he: Catlike thro' his own castle steals my Mark, But warrior-wise thou stridest through his halls Who hates thee, as I him—ev'n to the death. My soul, I felt my hatred for my Mark Quicken within me, and knew that thou wert nigh." To whom Sir Tristram smiling, ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... and marching on to Muntabure, he laid siege to the castle, restoring all his men as soon as they were wounded by a mere touch of his magic ring. Alberich, whom none but he could see, was allowed to lead the van and bear the banner, which seemed to flutter aloft in a fantastic way. The dwarf took advantage of this invisibility to scale the walls of the fortress unseen, and hurled down the ponderous machines used to throw stones, arrows, boiling pitch, and oil. Thus he greatly helped Ortnit, who, in the mean while, ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... silken hawk, came not to flutter your nest of doves, senor. I came but for a little hour to meet a man who—Ah, he is coming now. Sheriff Paul, I have that to ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... wink may allow a familiar form to pass unseen. If we can use a small telescope, the field of view is much enlarged. Now and then we recognise the flight of some particular species,—the swinging loop of a woodpecker or goldfinch, or the flutter of a sandpiper. ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... ready to gather. There they stand, swaying to and fro, and dancing lightly on their slender feet which are connected with the ground, each by a tiny green stem; their dresses of pink, or blue, or white—for their dresses grow with them—flutter in the air. Just about the prettiest sight in the world, is the bed of wax dolls in the garden of the Christmas ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... to flutter with fear. She dared not tell the sad truth at once, but she walked after Tom in trembling silence as he went out, thinking how she could tell him the news so as to soften at once his sorrow and his anger; for Maggie dreaded ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... wild flutter. The contesting aircraft came nearer and nearer. Finally Hiram could make out the Aegis fully a mile in the lead, the wings set for a drop ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... fill of them. That pictured face on the wall is lovely, but lovelier still may the wife of thy bosom be when she meets thee on the resurrection morn! Those baby cherubs in the old Italian painting—how gracefully they flutter and sport among the soft clouds, full of rich young life and baby joy! Yes, beautiful indeed, but just such a one at this very moment is that once pining, deformed child of thine, over whose death-cradle thou wast weeping a month ago; now a child-angel, whom thou shalt ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... from her the mass of newspapers and lay with upturned face, hands crossed beneath her head, staring out of her blue eyes at the dusty ceiling, dreaming of triumphs to be, social heights to surmount, a flutter of engagement cards winging their way like a flight of geese to the little Acacia Street house; dreaming of men and women—and somewhere at the end of the long vista she saw a very gorgeous procession, herself at the head, with a long veil and ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... he hunted in vain, then the sunlight showed a golden sheen among some stones. Maynard gave a grunt of relief, but as his hand closed round it a tiny flutter passed through the fingerling; it gave a final gasp and was still. Knitting his brows in almost comical vexation, he hastened to restore it to the stream, holding it by the tail and striving to impart a life-like wriggle ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... sound of the high- pitched, nasal voice. The fairy princess vanished, and in her place sat a flesh-and-blood damsel, composed, complacent, and matter-of-fact. Guest felt again the intrusion of a jarring note. He would have liked Cornelia to welcome him with a flutter of embarrassment, to have seen her eyes droop before his, and hear a quiver in her voice. He wanted to realise that he was the natural head and protector, and she the woman, the weak, clinging creature, whose happy destiny it was to be the helpmeet ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... nectar and pleasant ambrosia, that grievous hunger might not assail his knees, and then herself was gone to the firm house of her mighty father. Then the Achaians poured forth from the swift ships. As when thick snowflakes flutter down from Zeus, chill beneath the blast of Boreas born in the upper air, so thick from the ships streamed forth bright glittering helms and bossy shields, strong-plaited cuirasses and ashen spears. And the sheen thereof went up to heaven and all the earth around laughed in the flash of ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... his triumphal tour through the Rhenish provinces, where the Union had struck widest root. Town after town sent its whole population to greet him. Roaring thousands met him at the railway stations, and he passed under triumphal arches and through streets a-flutter with flags, where working-girls welcomed him with showers of roses. "Such scenes as these," he wrote to the Countess, "must have attended the foundation of new religions." And, indeed, as weeping working-men fought to draw his ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... grandest parts of the Park. A death-like silence generally pervades this cool, dark region, where few kinds of animal life find a congenial abode. Occasionally the stillness is disturbed by the Douglas squirrel, busily gnawing off the fir cones for his winter's supply, or by the gentle flutter of the coy wren, darting to and fro among the old, fallen logs. The higher forms of vegetable life are also restricted to a few odd varieties. The most common of these are such saprophytes as pterospora andromedea, ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... and sudden now she issues from the flower-bedecked house; As onward alone she speeds, she startles the birds perched in the trees, by the pavilion; to which as she draws nigh, her shadow flits by the verandah! Her fairy clothes now flutter in the wind! a fragrant perfume like unto musk or olea is wafted in the air; Her apparel lotus-like is sudden wont to move; and the jingle of her ornaments strikes the ear. Her dimpled cheeks resemble, as they smile, a vernal peach; her kingfisher coiffure ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... secret none can utter? Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown? Still on the spire the pigeons flutter; Still by the gateway flits the gown; Still on the street, from corbel and gutter, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... chameleon, quicksilver, shifting sands, weathercock, harlequin, Cynthia of the minute, April showers[obs3]; wheel of Fortune; transientness &c. 111[obs3]. V. fluctuate, vary, waver, flounder, flicker, flitter, flit, flutter, shift, shuffle, shake, totter, tremble, vacillate, wamble[obs3], turn and turn about, ring the changes; sway to and fro, shift to and fro; change and change about; waffle, blow with the wind (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c. 314; vibrate ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Journalists flutter like bats about newspaper offices. The bats haunt the same eaves, but the journalist drifts from city to city, from county to county, busying himself with ideas that were not his yesterday, and will not be his to-morrow. An interview with a statesman is followed by a review of a ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... midnight when a friend came to inform Robert that the king's men had procured a warrant against him for resisting his majesty's officers, and he must fly for his life. There was a flutter of hushed excitement. Everybody was awakened. Robert hurriedly gathered up his effects, which were taken to a brigantine ready to sail for Virginia. There was a silent, tearful farewell with Ester; vows were renewed, and he swore when the clouds had rolled away to come and make ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... that time moved not with its usual swiftness,—that the old year lingered with a sad regret, as if loath to pass away and let the new come in. Even now the midnight clock is striking,—eleven,—twelve;—the last flutter of the old year's robe is out of sight, and the new year glides in with noiseless feet, like one who enters the chamber of the dead. These are but melancholy fancies;—because I am sad myself must I put all the world in mourning? The old year did not linger;—it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... model of continuance. His note will soon change. He will become hoarse and only half-articulate. He will cease to be the flying echo of the mystery of skies and wood at dawn and in the still evening. The disreputable bat, whose little wings flutter half visibly like waves of heat rising above ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... realized. When hooked, he invariably turns golden. The idea of the series of leaps is to rid himself of the hook, and the man who has made the strike must be of iron or decadent if his heart does not beat with an extra flutter when he beholds such gorgeous fish, glittering in golden mail and shaking itself like a stallion in each mid-air leap. 'Ware slack! If you don't, on one of those leaps the hook will be flung out and twenty feet away. No slack, and away he will ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... swagger—or, worse, they strut—in its lighter verse, from its first year to its last. Swinburne's anapaests are far too delicate for swagger or strut; but for all their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their flutter, we are compelled to perceive that, as it were, they perform. I love to see English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but chiefly with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... to a lawyer," she said severely: "his legal mind takes such cut-and-dried views. Granted that it is a speculation, it seems a promising one; and nothing venture, nothing have. I don't know how you feel, Die, but I am quite willing to do my share." Then Dinah, who was in quite a flutter of excitement and pleasure, looked at her adviser in a timid, ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... move. He stood looking down upon the poor woman before him, a world of pity expressed in his deep-set eyes. Through the absolute silence around there came the sound as of a gentle flutter, the current of cold air, mayhap, sighing through the ill-fitting shutters, or the soft, weird soughing made by unseen things. The man's heart was full of pity, and it seemed as if the Angel of Compassion had come ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... such things as splendor, profusion, and dissipation: we will have some cows, and you shall be queen of the dairy; in a morning, while I look after my garden, you shall take a basket on your arm, and sally forth to feed your poultry; and as they flutter round you in token of humble gratitude, your father shall smoke his pipe in a woodbine alcove, and viewing the serenity of your countenance, feel such real pleasure dilate his own heart, as shall make him forget he ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... song circle, and et ceteras, and a great flutter in a row of white dresses, and many colored ribbons to my left. 'The Graduates,' Bell whispered, and the business of the day began. There were eight in all to read essays—nice looking girls, and much like the Lasells and Wellesleys we used to ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... more death the more millions. The more horror and devastation the heavier will be our coffers. The more the people groan the more we will shout. The more they die the more we will live. The more the flag is torn the more our damask curtains will flutter. The more liberty perishes and withers from the earth the more we shall plant ourselves and flourish and rule and reign over a nation that we have destroyed and a people whom we have enslaved. If Mr. Clews ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... the Marmora, and the sun sinks with a golden glow below the horizon, the spirit moves one of the Mecca pilgrims to climb on top of a chicken coop and shout "Allah-il!" for several minutes; the dangling ends of his turban flutter in the fresh evening breeze, streaming out behind him as he faces the east, and flapping in his swarthy face as he turns round facing to the opposite point of the compass. His supplications seem to be addressed to the dancing, white-capped waves, but the old Osmanlis mutter ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... A little piping of leaf-hid birds; A flutter of wings, a fitful stirring, A cloud to ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... month earlier, but it was doing a very passable business. At the close of the season the gay butterflies of the social community have a habit of hovering for a day or two in the big hotels before they flutter away to castle and country-house, meadow and moor, lake and stream. The great basket-chairs in the portico were well filled by old and middle-aged gentlemen engaged in enjoying the varied delights of liqueurs, cigars, and the full moon which floated so serenely above the Thames. ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... let his paper flutter to his knee, and said, meaningly: "I hope yon chap, sir, don't think he's still firing on ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like a seat vacant and marked 'engaged.' No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the heart—not a flutter. That doesn't make me feel as if there was a man present. In a sense it's more dead than death, for these doctors tell me that even the hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the hair will ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the creaking of new shoes, the silken rustle of the trains, the jingling of rich bracelets pushed up the arm while gloves are being buttoned. All these people seem excited, nervous, pale beneath their paint, and under the skilfully prepared satin-like surface of the shoulders, tremors flutter like shadows. Dry-mouthed, they speak little. The least nervous, while affecting to smile, have in their eyes and voice the hesitation that marks an absent mind—that apprehension of the battle behind the foot-lights which is ever one of the most ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... understand, naturally," said the second swallow. "First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... needn't argue; I've no intention—" Once more he paused. The same shadow had flitted across the dark space outside, this time with a distinct flutter of a white dress. He could only think it was some one getting help together; and while he went on to finish his sentence in words, all his subconscious faculties were at work, seeking an escape from the trap in which ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... intense morality and importance, as the Mayor asked him how he did and expressed his gratification at seeing the honored name of Pickles—a power in the commercial world—enrolled among the friends of reform. The appearance of General Divvy put the Mayor in quite a flutter, and when the General told him that he positively must consent to run again, and that he was the only hope of the Reformers, the ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... wrong," put in the Doctor. "I think my look-out worse than yours. Sold my practice seven years ago to flutter on the Stock Exchange. Lost my money in seven minutes, and have never had a patient since. I went to West Slocum (my old home) the other day, and found the place occupied by three Doctors, and the local Undertaker told me there was not room enough ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various
... the two sat watching the flutter of her white dress among the flower-beds. She piled her little apron as full as possible, and came back panting and delighted. Beulah looked down at the beautiful beaming face, and, twining one of the silky curls over her finger, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... outlined lips, and strong, finely moulded jaw and chin, all spoke the old Roman vigor and energy, while the flexible delicacy of all the muscles of his face and figure gave an inexpressible fascination to his appearance. Every emotion and changing thought seemed to flutter and tremble over his countenance as the shadow of leaves over sunny water. His eye had a wonderful dilating power, and when he was excited seemed to shower sparks; and his voice possessed a surprising scale of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... blow had subsided, made a lunge at Mr. Brougham, and glanced an eye at Mr. Canning; mystified Mr. Coleridge, and stultified Lord Liverpool in his place—in the Gallery. It was rare sport to see him, "like an eagle in a dovecote, flutter the Volscians in Corioli." He has found out the secret of attracting by repelling. Those whom he is likely to attack are curious to hear what he says of them: they go again, to show that they do not mind it. It is ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the market, Brigaut, lying in wait, was able to get near her. Though he saw her tremble and turn pale, like an autumn leaf about to flutter down, he did not lose his head, but quietly bought fruit of the market-woman with whom Sylvie was bargaining. He found his chance of slipping a note to Pierrette, all the while joking the woman with the ease ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... all about the shock and nervousness the next moment, as I saw the flutter of approaching wings, and directly after my gun rang out with two reports, while as the smoke floated away, Pete triumphantly ran to where a couple of the orange birds ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... in front of the Venezia, and Uncle Dan looked up to a certain high balcony, whence his coming was hailed by a lively flutter of handkerchiefs. ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... were thus, in open sea, enclosed in a vast garden with trees, flowers, statues, and fountains. About this garden of Armida, thus radiant upon the waves, were a multitude of boats, under sail or propelled by oars, moving about, and their lights resembled the swarms of fireflies that in summer flutter above the fields of Lombardy. The mild temperature favored this joyous festival. The whole city, all the buildings, every vessel, were ablaze with a thousand lights, and the glassy sea reflected numberless flames. The darkness of night gave the signal for the illuminations. ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... released from the homely comfort of a prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things—the flutter of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... whistle, waited a moment, and repeated it, twice, thrice. At the first call there was a fluttering in the branches overhead. At the second call one saw the silhouettes of tiny bodies dropping from branch to branch ever nearer to the boy below. At the third, there was a flutter, a rush of wings, and a flock of dear little birds came flying to John's shoulder, to his out-stretched arms, to his head; so that presently he looked like a green bush which they ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... here safe and warm, but there doesn't seem to be much breath to rock me," said Do, who lay nearest the little bosom that very slowly rose and fell with the feeble flutter of ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... stood close to her, tantalizingly close. She was smiling. Her lips parted redly over white, even teeth, and as Thompson bent that moody somber gaze on her, her breath seemed to come suddenly a little faster, making her round breast flutter—and a faint tinge of pink stole up to color the soft whiteness of her neck, up into the ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of timber From distant flats and fells, The pealing of the anvils As clear as little bells, The rattle of the cradle, The clack of windlass-boles, The flutter of the crimson ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... mischief. Well, there was to be a grand inshpection by a tremenjus brass-hat, one o' thim soort all over ribbons that rides wid a shtiff back. 'Twas the mornin' before the great day whin the O.C. comes to me all of a flutter, an' says he, 'Sergint, ye've a chanct now to do me a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... he is visibly stronger, and his nurse brings people into the room to see him. They look at him with wonder and admiration, while the good lady is all in a flutter of delight. He hears himself spoken of always as the "lieutenant," and hesitates to ask an explanation. The physician comes but seldom, the lady explaining that all the doctors in town are busy in the hospitals. The truth flashed upon him one morning, when his ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... said which, Nedda felt unhappy; her Dad was not old! "No, miss; but I'll find out. It'll be in the walnut wing!" But with a little flutter at the thought of thus setting people to run about wings, Nedda murmured: "Oh! thanks, no; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his young Lord's eyes by this so easy consent to oblige. It was easy because the presence before him was from moment to moment, referring itself back to some recent observation or memory; something caught somewhere, within a few weeks or months, as he had moved about, and that seemed to flutter forth at this stir of the folded leaves of his recent experience very much as a gathered, faded flower, placed there for "pressing," might drop from between the pages of ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... low, humming song, I made the attempt to put our psychic to sleep. In a few minutes her hands became cold and began to flutter. At last she threw my fingers away as if she found them scorching hot. Miller's hand was similarly repulsed. She then seemed to pass into quiet sleep, and I said: "Withdraw a little, Miller, but keep ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... admitted the Tin Owl. "For my part, I'll have to give up the notion of marrying Nimmie Amee, but I'll try not to let that make me unhappy. If it's my duty, I'd like to do my duty, but if magic prevents my getting married I'll flutter along all by myself and be just ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... was run up—the established signal that the nation was in need. Instantly on every summit near and far was seen the flutter of an answering flag. Quickly followed the signal that commanded the ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... most animals of the deer tribe, by their fluttering; and, in want of a sufficient force of men, passes may be closed by this contrivance. The Swedes use "lappar," viz. Pieces of canvas, of half the height of a man, painted in glaring colours and left to flutter from a line. ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... long before Soames's determination to build went the round of the family, and created the flutter that any decision connected with property should ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... good Duchess tells me thrice daily that Elsa is timid. Princess Heinrich has made no sign yet; when she frowns I must kiss. So stands the matter. I must go hence to pray her to walk in the woods with me. She will flush and flutter, but, poor child, she will come. What I ask she will not and must not refuse. But, deuce take it, I ask so little! There's the rub! I hear your upbraiding voice, 'Pooh, man, catch her up and kiss her!' Ah, my dear Varvilliers, you suffer under a confusion. She is a duty; ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... like swimming in ink. Rick kept his hands out in case of unexpected underwater objects, but forged ahead at a good speed. He kept track of his own rate of progress through the water by timing the number of flutter kicks per minute. At the count of fifty he turned to the left, heading directly into the creek's mouth. He could hear the steady beat of Orvil's motor. When he estimated he had covered the proper distance, he stopped and let Scotty ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... cynically. "I, the silken hawk, came not to flutter your nest of doves, senor. I came but for a little hour to meet a man who—Ah, he is coming now. Sheriff Paul, I have that to tell ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... a dish face and no figure, at whose admiration she could afford to smile; but for all that, the consciousness of his gaze (which was really fixed on Torrance and his mittens) kept her in something of a flutter till the word Amen. Even then, she was far too well-bred to gratify her curiosity with any impatience. She resumed her seat languidly - this was a Glasgow touch - she composed her dress, rearranged her nosegay of primroses, looked first in front, then behind upon the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man—bent down and, picking it up, returned it to her, with a glance of admiring scrutiny which made her more excited than ever. She scarcely had the presence of mind to thank him, but rushed past him and out into the night in a passionate flutter of pain and sudden childish anger, ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with what Air, he approach'd the Fair, And how she could with Patience bear, All he did and utter'd; He still address'd, Still caress'd, Kiss'd and press'd, Sung, Prattl'd, Laugh'd, and Flutter'd: Well receiv'd in all, like ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... only because He intends hereafter to give you your fill of them. That pictured face on the wall is lovely, but lovelier still may the wife of thy bosom be when she meets thee on the resurrection morn! Those baby cherubs in the old Italian painting—how gracefully they flutter and sport among the soft clouds, full of rich young life and baby joy! Yes, beautiful indeed, but just such a one at this very moment is that once pining, deformed child of thine, over whose death-cradle thou wast weeping a month ago; now a child-angel, whom thou ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... Honeyman is delighted with the chantress and her mamma. He dashes the fair hair from his brow: he sits down to the piano, and plays one or two of them, warbling a faint vocal accompaniment, and looking as if he would be lifted off the screw music-stool, and flutter up to the ceiling. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... listening to his cousin with astonishment and at the same time looking at Argensola who, with a flutter of his eyes, seemed to be saying to him, "He is mad! These Germans are simply mad ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... sat down and watched him, and looked off between whiles to the wonderful green walls of the glen. The summer blue was very clear overhead; the stillness of the place very deep; insects, birds, a flutter of leaves, and the grating of Dr. Sandford's boot upon a stone, all the sounds ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... led Nan out on the broad veranda of the second floor, she was in a flutter of excitement over the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... replied Cosmo, "a little hope was beginning to flutter, that, perhaps I was called from somewhere in the unseen—like Samuel, you know; but I was too glad to see you to be much disappointed. I do sometimes wonder though, that, if there is such a world beyond as we sometime talk about, there should be so little communication ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... place such sights and sounds are most charming, but more especially are they so when one awakens to them, for the first time, in a novel and romantic situation, with the soft sweet air of a tropical climate mingling with the fresh smell of the sea, and stirring the strange leaves that flutter overhead and around one, or ruffling the plumage of the stranger birds that fly inquiringly around, as if to demand what business we have to intrude uninvited on their domains. When I awoke on the morning after the shipwreck, I found myself in this most delightful condition; and as I lay on ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... Suddenly he began betting in gold, ten dollars for each card he drew. The others were out of that hand. Andy, breathless, for he had an ace down, saw a three and a two fall—took the long chance, and, with the luck behind him, watched a five-spot flutter down to join his draw. Yet Larry, taking the same draw, was not busted. He had a pair of deuces and a four. There he stuck, and it stood to reason that he could not win. Yet he bet recklessly, raising Andy twice, until the latter had no more money on the table to call ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... Spring? Who heard her footfall, swift and light As fairy-dancing in the night? Who guessed what happy dawn would bring The flutter of her bluebird's wing, The blossom of her mayflower-face To brighten every shady place? One morning, down the village street, "Oh, here am I," we heard her sing,— And none had been awake to greet The coming of the ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and then appears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter of scales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight falls on a scull of seagulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now in the air, thick as midges over some forest-brook in an evening ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a flutter'd bird, came flying from far away: "Spanish ships of war at sea! ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... she answered, and her fine hands had come to Wycherley, as white birds flutter homeward. But even then she had to deliberate the matter—since the habits of many years are not put aside like outworn gloves,—and for innumerable centuries, it seemed to him, her foot ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... Haven: it's so quiet here; Only the scratch of pen, the candle's flutter; Shabby and bare and small, but O how dear! Mark you—my table with my work a-clutter, My shelf of tattered books along the wall, My bed, my broken chair—that's ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... moisture is delightfully fresh and green. Palms and other trees, festooned with brilliant flowering creepers, flourish along its course; all kinds of monkeys chatter and jabber in the shade overhead as they swing themselves from branch to branch, while birds of the most gorgeous plumage flutter about, giving a very tropical aspect to the scene. On the other hand, if one is tempted to stray away from the river, be it only for a few yards, one comes immediately into the parched, thorny wilderness of stunted, leafless ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... an extraordinary feeling it is—this being hit every few minutes with the recollection that you're worth half a million. It's like being struck over the head. It knocks you down. There are such thousands of things to do—you dance about, all of a flutter. You don't know ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... during the narrative, because (so his kind friend supposed) he was jealous of the honour paid to the dictator. But his natural simplicity prevailed. He ran to Johnson, and exclaimed in 'a kind of flutter,' "Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should have done, for I should have bowed and stammered through ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... calming frayed nerves, somebody suggested that they should all adjourn for a flutter at lansquenet, then ousting ecarte. The proposal was accepted; and, the revellers having settled down, Saint-Agnan, having the best-lined wallet, took ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love, Socrates, is not as you imagine, the love of the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... great shower of them at the creatures, and at that I had a momentary clear vision of many white, hideous faces stretched out towards me, and brown, champing mandibles which had the upper beak shutting into the lower; and the clumped, wriggling tentacles were all a-flutter. Then the gloom came again; but immediately, I switched another and yet another shower of the burning embers towards them, and so, directly, I saw them give back, and then they were gone. At this, all about the edges of the hilltop, I saw the ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... a live pigeon out of his bournous, he allowed it to flutter in the air for a moment, at the end of a string. A moment was sufficient; the clear round eye had caught sight of the flutter of wings, and soon came back, sailing past, high ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... relating to his disappearance; how their joy was moderated by the old man's absence and by the misfortunes of Florence; how they released Diogenes, whom the Captain had decoyed upstairs some time before, lest he should bark again; the Captain, though he was in one continual flutter, and made many more short plunges into the shop, fully comprehended. But he no more dreamed that Walter looked on Florence, as it were, from a new and far-off place; that while his eyes often sought the lovely face, they seldom met its open glance of sisterly affection, but withdrew themselves ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... heart Dick Prescott presented himself at the hotel that evening, and sent up his card to Mrs. Bentley and the girls. Greg was with his chum, of course, but Greg was not in a flutter. He was to escort Belle Meade—-an arrangement of chumship, for Belle wore the engagement ring of Dave Darrin, one of Greg's ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... was a dead body. The flutter of that heart was not the strong beating of the normal organ; the hands were cold; even the body was chilled; yet ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... had the kitchen floor, a pool of water; and the rain had put out my fires already, as effectually as if it had been an overturned broth-pot. That I never took off my clothes that night I need not say, though of what was happening in the glen I could only guess. A flutter against my window now and again, when the rain had abated, told me of another bird that had flown there to die; and with Waster Lunny, I kept up communication by waving a light, to which he replied in a similar ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... reached the first crossing of the railway line, and if he was going back to North Farthing he should turn here. He could easily make an excuse—no man really wanted to eat two Christmas dinners—but his flutter was gone, and he found an attraction in the communal meal to which she was inviting him. He would like to see the old folk at their feast, the old folk who had been born on the Marsh, who had grown wrinkled with its sun and reddened with its wind and bent with their labours ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... No man could leap it. He cast about for another way. There was none. He must run across. He scowled. Disinclination increased. He snarled: "Green ice!" He crossed then like a cat—on tiptoe and swiftly; and he came to the other side with his heart in a flutter. "Whew!" ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... absorbed in her task, she did not look up when some one came down the steps behind her. It was an adoring little freshman, who had caught the glimmer of her pink dress behind the tree. The special-delivery letter she carried was her excuse for following. She had been in a flutter of delight when Madame Chartley put it in her hand, asking her to find Elizabeth Lewis and give it to her. But now that she stood in the charmed presence, actually watching a poem in the process of construction, she paused, overwhelmed ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... breath our snowy fields of cotton melted over night brought no terror for King Cotton no longer reigns supreme. The king is dead but the people rejoice as the scepter falls from his nerveless hand and a new monarch ascends the throne. Millions of royal banners flutter in the breeze glistening green with promise for the future and hope is high, and the hearts of the people light as they gather to pay homage to the new monarch, Her Imperial Majesty the Paper ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... he would speak to me in English," said the woman, "and the thought of that horrid English puts me into such a flutter; you know I can't speak a word ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Love who had dwelt with the lovers in the court yard since first they had come there, sensing the flutter of the intruder's wings, took to his heels and slid between the bars of the great bronze ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... will see. At any rate, from my acquaintance with them, I shall not go to battle against them armed only with a broom-stick. But here we are in Melrose. Don't, for love's sake, talk of war. My heart's in a flutter. Cupid's conflict is worse than ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... Pleasant Valley could look gloomier than old Mr. Crow. And when he hinted darkly, in his hoarse way, that there was trouble ahead for the Robin family, he threw Jolly Robin's wife into a flutter. ...
— The Tale of Grunty Pig - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... fill the Cup and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-Garment of Repentance fling. The bird of time has but a little way to flutter And the bird is ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the thrift Of the borders. Just a plate of current fashion, Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. Not a softness anywhere about me, Only whalebone and brocade. And I sink on a seat in the shade Of a lime tree. For my passion Wars against the stiff brocade. The daffodils and squills Flutter in the breeze As they please. And I weep; For the lime-tree is in blossom And one small flower has dropped upon ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... Italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song (and with it also the art of melody) reached its elevation. In Germany, however (until quite recently when a kind of platform eloquence began shyly and awkwardly enough to flutter its young wings), there was properly speaking only one kind of public and APPROXIMATELY artistical discourse—that delivered from the pulpit. The preacher was the only one in Germany who knew the weight of a syllable or ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... primitive seafaring town; the saltest, roughest, most piratical little place that ever was seen. Great rusty iron rings and mooring-chains, capstans, and fragments of old masts and spars, choke up the way; hardy rough-weather boats, and seamen's clothing, flutter in the little harbour or are drawn out on the sunny stones to dry; on the parapet of the rude pier, a few amphibious-looking fellows lie asleep, with their legs dangling over the wall, as though earth or water were all one ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... much upon the way; for Oliver was in a flutter of agitation and uncertainty which deprived him of the power of collecting his thoughts, and almost of speech, and appeared to have scarcely less effect on his companions, who shared it, in at least an equal degree. He and the two ladies had been very carefully made acquainted ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... be they could not tell—there came a sound of a key turning in a lock. The door opened, and a yellow ray from a lantern streamed into the church, making the owl in its corner flutter wildly. Billy's face showed in a frame of dull gold, as ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... him to send for the horses. His father heard this announcement with no sign of surprise, and forgot in an unmannerly way to show regret at losing him. Instead of doing so, he flew into a great flutter at the recollection of some important business ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... There was a flutter and a scream, and Mr. Bobolink flew away, and soared high into the air, and soon joined his travelling companions on their ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... principles. Perhaps we may go on with them to principles, but we shall find them unable to get established in those along with us. Or if we may get so established along with them, we shall find them unable to weigh occurring events along with us.' CHAP. XXX. 1. How the flowers of the aspen-plum flutter and turn! Do I not think of you? But your house is distant. 2. The Master said, 'It is the want of thought about it. How ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... an old one uncomfortable to no purpose. If it were my business to sit in judgment on my neighbors, I would try to be courteous, at least, to those who had done any good service, but, above all, I would handle tenderly those young authors who are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or early appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright already. Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina's book of verses, I wish you ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I've done very wrong," she began, with a nervous little flutter of her pretty hands; "but I'm ready now to 'fess up, as the ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... woman had gone, a cock with red feathers would sometimes fly up to the window sill and looking into the room with his round inquisitive eye, would begin to crow loudly. Occasionally, too, a few hens would flutter as far as the foot of the bed, seeking crumbs on the floor. Toine's friends soon deserted the drinking room to come and chat every afternoon beside the invalid's bed. Helpless though he was, the jovial Toine still provided them with amusement. He would have ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... These fine warm afternoons. And so We went whither my soul was drawn; And her light-hearted ignorance Of interest in our discourse Fill'd me with love, and seem'd to enhance Her beauty with pathetic force, As, through the flowery mazes sweet, Fronting the wind that flutter'd blythe, And loved her shape, and kiss'd her feet, Shown to their insteps proud and lithe, She approach'd, all mildness and young trust, And ever her chaste and noble air Gave to love's feast its choicest gust, A vague, ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... slipped past the end table unseen on their way out into the big atrium with its many columns—the hall in which players go out to cool themselves, or collect their determination for a final flutter—Mademoiselle had just won the maximum upon the number four, as well as the column, and the croupier was in the act of pushing towards her a big pile of counters each representing ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... into the outer air; I rushed through, and stared in the growing twilight down the black furrow of the flume. Far in the distance, and going like a streak, I spied the glittering glass windows of the little craft. Once I made out the flutter of a ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... else he could say!" and the innocence of her inquiring face proved his evil imagining a perjury. He caught his breath in a flutter of sheer heart's-ease. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... long the sun showered its gold, sprinkling the deep shade with flowers and blossoms of light, where there was no wind but only the sighing of the woods, no sound but the whisper of the leaves or the rare flutter of a bird's wings, no thoughts but joyful thoughts filling ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... "And the little birds flutter in the sun, and eat my crumbs and the great music swells out while you ask the garcon for another bock. Do you remember, father dear, the day that she found ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... some great, some little, as we see, To show some great, some small, in glory be.[17] Their flying diversely, as we behold, Do show saints' joys will there be manifold; Some glide, some mount, some flutter, and some do, In a mix'd way of flying, glory too. And all to show each saint, to his content, Shall roll ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... ideals. There was little in the lads she had met thus far to awaken her fancy, for it habitually fed on better meat. Huldah's school-girl romances, with their wealth of commonplace detail, were not the stuff her dreams were made of, when dreams did flutter across the sensitive plate of ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... local and household deity president over all Ruegen, called Rugevit. I can quite imagine a couple of Czech householders, law-abiding and good church-goers, conspiring to get away from the family for a bit and take a trip to Ruegen, just for a flutter with the old gods. What with the secrecy required, as both Ruler and Church forbade the practice of worshipping Slavonic deities, the practice must have been quite as exciting ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... bungled it, there was a chance that they might escape when the pirates made their landing on the coast to refresh themselves and refit the ship. The mate on watch greeted them good-humoredly enough and bade them enter the cabin where the captain awaited them. Jack was all a-flutter again but he managed to imitate ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... a flutter at the heart, "surely nothing will satisfy the craving of my soul save to be with thee forever. ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... of thine! Doves wing frighted from the ground At a step's too sudden sound, And her passion is a dove, Frighted by too bold a love. Mute as marble Hermes wait By the blooming hawthorn-gate. Thou shalt see her wings expand, She shall flutter to thy hand. On thy forehead thou shalt know Something like a breath of snow, Or of pinions pure that beat In a whirl of whiteness sweet. And the dove, grown venturesome, Shall upon thy shoulder come, And its rosy beak shall sip From the nectar ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... river. Its contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway against the semi-gelid current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheelbuckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm small lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan, and only getting ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... and agreements or disagreements, one with another, has been, I suppose, the ill use of words. It is impossible that men should ever truly seek or certainly discover the agreement or disagreement of ideas themselves, whilst their thoughts flutter about, or stick only in sounds of doubtful and uncertain significations. Mathematicians abstracting their thoughts from names, and accustoming themselves to set before their minds the ideas themselves that they would consider, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... as he studied me with eyes that were so quiet and kind I could feel a flutter of ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... that I separate myself from it; and the proof that I do not despise it," said the captain, filling his glass, "is that I am going to take an adieu of it. To your health, chevalier; you may boast of having good wine. Hum! And now, n—o, no, that is all. I shall take to water till I see the ribbon flutter from your window. Try to let it be as soon as possible, for water is a liquid that does not suit ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... continued very high; but there was a flutter in them which prevented their giving much pleasure to her sister, and this agitation increased as the evening drew on. She could scarcely eat any dinner, and when they afterwards returned to the drawing room, seemed anxiously listening to the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... off somewhere on a false track. Not an easy trade! Besides that, I have one more line—that's false eyes and teeth. But it ain't a profitable line. I want to drop it. And besides I'm thinking of leaving all this business. I understand, it's all right for a young man, in the bloom of his powers, to flutter around like a moth, but once you have a wife, and may be a whole family even ..." he playfully patted the woman on the knee, from which she became scarlet and looked uncommonly better. "For the Lord has blessed us Jews with ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... "upstairs" is one that is heard every week-day of the year except summer Saturdays. At 26 Broadway, just before eleven o'clock each morning, there is a flutter in the offices of all the leading heads of departments from Henry H. Rogers down, for going "upstairs" to the eleven o'clock meeting is in the mind of each "Standard Oil" man the one all-important event of every ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the partial Peacock saves his egg, No sheep e'er snaps if I attempt to touch her, Lambs like it when I lead them to the butcher! Each morn I milk my rams beneath the shed, While rabbits flutter twittering round my head, And, as befits a dairy-farmer's daughter, What milk I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... horse to a slow trot and, without turning his head, searched with a sidewise glance the yard and veranda of the adobe house. When he saw a flutter of pink inside a window he stopped at the gate and called ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder. It was as though they had sprung out of the ground. I accosted them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and requested to be told the names of all manner of hills and woods and places ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... questions of the Senora's were like nothing in life so much as like that stage in a spider's processes when, withdrawing a little way from a half-entangled victim, which still supposes himself free, it rests from its weaving, and watches the victim flutter. Subtle questions like these, assuming, taking for granted as settled, much which had never been settled at all, were among the best weapons in the Senora's armory. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... dangers it had dared. Back of the house the land climbed into a little ridge, with great, gray rocks here and there, spots of cool, restful color amid the lavish green and gold and purple of nature's carpeting. To the north swept hills clothed with the deep, rich green of hemlock, the faint green flutter of birch, the dense foliage of sugar maples. To the east, in the valley, a singing silver brook flashed in and out among somber boulders, the land ascending to sunny hilltop pastures beyond. But toward the south ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... had received that very morning a letter from Mrs. Fordyce of Bellairs Crescent—a letter which had put her all in a flutter. It was a letter of warning, counsel, and reproof concerning Miss Peck's duty towards her young charge, and laying a strong injunction upon her to be exceedingly judicious in her treatment of the eccentric guests whom Gladys had again invited to Bourhill. It was not a wise epistle at all, ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... so often intermixed; but these were succeeded by strange grotesque combinations, confused, and void of outline and regularity. The source of ornament was now sought in the orders and members of Grecian architecture; but the eyes which had been accustomed to the Gothic flutter of parts, were not prepared to relish the simplicity of line which is essential to the beauty of the Greek style. Columns of a small size, inaccurately and coarsely executed, with arcades and grotesque caryatids, formed the ornaments of porches and frontispieces,—as at Browseholme-house in Yorkshire, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... blooming, innocent, English loveliness. I watched her (I could not help it, when my interest was once awakened) through the whole scene. I marked her increased agitation: I saw her cheeks flush, her eyes glisten, her bosom flutter, as if with sighs I could not overhear, till at length, overpowered with emotion, she turned away her head, and covered her eyes with her hand. Mothers!—English mothers! who bring your daughters abroad to finish their education—do you well to expose them to scenes like these, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... FLUTTER.—Propeller "flutter," or vibration, may be due to faulty pitch angle, balance, camber, surface area, or to bad mounting. It causes a condition sometimes mistaken for engine trouble, and one which may easily lead to the collapse ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... those girls on the beach," laughed Walter. "Those are the lassies who have the white canoe." So saying he waved his own cap and a flutter of handkerchiefs from the beach came back ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... of the address, and I am going to criticise Paleontological doctrines in general in a way that will flutter ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... "have watched him catch a butterfly and, holding it uncrushed, walk into a wood, and have seen a woodthrush flutter down to him, take the butterfly from his fingers, speed away with it to feed its young and presently return to his empty hand, as if expecting another insect, perch on his hand, peck at it and remain some time; and there is no song-bird more fearful of mankind, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... in colour, and soft and almost woolly to the touch. They hang in clusters from the hazel twigs, and in the strong March wind which blows to-day, they shake and flutter like the tails of lambs at play. Some of them leave a dusty powder on our fingers when we handle them; that is the pollen of ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... himself. He drew his feet up, his head sank between his shoulders, his arms hugged his sides. Under the high and enormous tree soaring superbly out of the mist in a vigorous spread of lofty boughs, with a restless and eager flutter of its innumerable leaves in the clear sunshine, he remained motionless, huddled up on ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... got into evil company and trouble. He sinned and repented and sinned again. We find him writing to his father, "As for this world, I despair of ever making a figure in it. I am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I shall never again be capable of entering into such scenes." Burns knew himself to be a man of faults. The knowledge of his own weakness, perhaps, made him kindly to other. In one of ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... now would be his surest signals. He could not see deep in the thickets, but he could hear any movement in the underbrush a hundred yards away. So far there was nothing but the hopping of a rabbit. The bird over his head sang on. There was no wind among the branches, not even the flutter of leaves to distract his attention from anything that might come ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had set all the court in a flutter: everybody was ordered to put his or her best clothes on: the footmen had their gala liveries; the Lord Chancellor his new wig; the Guards their last new tunics; and Countess Gruffanuff, you may be sure, ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to leave us, dear little bird?" said she, softly. "Why dost thou wish to be gone, dear comforter of our sadness? Sing gayly to-day; father is well again, and life is once more a pleasure. What is it makes thee flutter about so wildly and pant in thy cage? Ah! is it not hard, dear little one, to be captive when we know there are joy and freedom in the open air?—when we are born in the fields and woods?—when we know ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... can say with all truth, that when I asked your grandmother's hand I did not demean myself as if I were chief mourner at a funeral. She will bear me out that I walked up to her with a smile upon my face, though mayhap there was a little flutter at my heart, and I took her hand and I said—but, lack-a-day, whither have I wandered? What has all this to do with Taunton town and the rising ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shrubbery marked the water line. A long swell of wind swung down the valley, whirling the snow in eddies before it. As the doctor's eye followed them, he suddenly noted a red scarf lift above the tallest clumps of bushes and flutter out to its full length, then drop again ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... precisely what he had intended to do from the very first, but now his plan had apparently fructified, he felt a vague horror at the result of his handiwork. He opened Cumshaw's shirt and put his hand over the man's heart. He could not detect even the faintest flutter. ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... night, Singapore and Jane and I. It does not appear to be customary for superintendents of orphan asylums to bring with them personal maids and Chinese chows. The night watchman and housekeeper, who had waited up to receive me, were thrown into an awful flutter. They had never seen the like of Sing, and thought that I was introducing a wolf into the fold. I reassured them as to his dogginess, and the watchman, after studying his black tongue, ventured a witticism. He wanted to know if I fed him ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... at last, Joe's eyelids began to flutter, and his eyes opened a very little, to close again immediately; even the subdued light we had let into the room being too much for him to bear after so long a darkness; but in that brief glance he had ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... Fit, suitable, appropriate, proper. Flame, blaze, flare, glare, glow. Flat, level, even, plane, smooth, horizontal. Flatter, blandish, beguile, compliment, praise. Flexible, pliable, pliant, supple, limber, lithe, lissom. Flit, flutter, flicker, hover. Flock, herd, bevy, covey, drove, pack, brood, litter, school. Flow, pour, stream, gush, spout. Follow, pursue, chase. Follower, adherent, disciple, partisan, henchman. Fond, loving, doting, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... time slipped by and no Harry made his appearance, while plenty of indications showed that evening was fast closing in: moths began to flutter about the different leaves; every now and then, too, came the low evening drowsy hum of the cockchafer, while Fred gave a regular jump when a gigantic stag-beetle stuck him right in the cheek and then fell crawling about in ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... steps are led aright, but the Pacific zones are too broad for even winged wanderers. The fish that swarm on our coast do not seem to find home life or sporting places in this enormous sea. Only the flying fish disturb the silky scene and flutter with silver wings over the sparkling laces that glisten where the winds blow gently, and woo the billows to cast aside the terrors of other climes and match the sky of blue and gold in beauty; but, unlike the stars, the waves ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... to eat bird seed, broken corn, or any kind of grain, and enjoy that kind of food much better than bread-crumbs. They need fresh water to drink, and will bathe now and then, like a canary, if they have a bath dish large enough to flutter in. ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... wood-turkeys. Stealing up noiselessly within ten yards, the Bushman throws his club with great force, and rarely misses his aim. If not killed at once, the game is certain to be stunned, and is much more easily secured than if wounded with an arrow, for with an arrow in its wing a large bird will flutter along the ground, and perhaps creep into sedges or ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... the ears of the multitude a great shout is given. Men wave their hats; women flutter their vari-colored shawls, which serve them as headgear; the sense of righteousness is ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... leave you to do so, while I give you the occasion of the flutter I mentioned at the beginning of this letter; in the conclusion of which you will find the obligation I have consented to lay myself under, to refer this important point once more to your discussion, before I give, in your name, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... A flutter of interest passed through the closely packed benches as a woman in petticoat and bodice was led in by two nurses. A red woolen shawl was draped over her head and round her neck. The face which looked out from it was that of a woman in the prime ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... over her shoulder. "He walked up with me—he wants to see you both. But"—her voice dropped to an intense whisper—"he has asked to see Miss Walton first—wants to speak to her alone! What does he mean?" Anne was in a tremendous flutter, and it was plain that wild ideas were coursing through her. "You are my chaperone, of course, but what can he want to ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... higher it rises on the side of happiness, the further it returns on the side of disaster. And with me, who cannot take your arm for a promenade along the pavement without a tightness in the neck and a flutter of my heart, who may not go upstairs quicker than a step a minute, disaster has only one shape. It arrives and I am extinguished! It is for that reason that I fear a persistence of good luck. Of late, the luck that dogs ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... tapping of Miss Thorne's fan underwent a change. There was a flutter of gaiety in her voice the while the ivory fan ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... off her young. Between us we had the kitchen floor, a pool of water; and the rain had put out my fires already, as effectually as if it had been an overturned broth-pot. That I never took off my clothes that night I need not say, though of what was happening in the glen I could only guess. A flutter against my window now and again, when the rain had abated, told me of another bird that had flown there to die; and with Waster Lunny, I kept up communication by waving a light, to which he replied in a similar manner. Before morning, however, he ceased to answer my signals, and I feared some ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... the prolonged quiet, flies from the open window to the back of Miss Penelope's chair, and settles there with an indignant flutter and a suppressed but angry note. This small suggestion of a living world destroyes the spell that for the last few minutes has been connecting the brain with a ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... could dimly see, a game that might prove exceedingly dangerous to play, and the Count had spoiled it all, anyway. And a curious flutter in her heart, as she watched the Boy take his punishment with as good grace as possible, pled for his pardon until she finally desisted and bade ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... strabismus—that is, the Cast in your eye. Artificial flies, like artificial flowers, never should follow nature. Manufacturers of both articles perfectly understand this; and hence the superiority of their productions to the mere realities that flutter and bloom for their brief hour, and then die. There is nothing in entomology so beautiful as a well-busked trout or salmon fly. And then it is comparatively indestructible. Take a natural May Fly and squeeze it in your hand. It is reduced to a pulp. Try the same experiment ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... landlord still further. He began to flutter about the room aimlessly, bill in hand. He presented it to Charles and he presented it to Nell, who would have none of it; while at intervals he called loudly for ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... have a sort of lady-in-waiting in Mme. de Bargeton, a dependent who would sing her praises, a treasure even more scarce among Parisian women than a staunch and loyal critic among the literary tribe. The flutter of curiosity in the house was too marked to be ignored, however, and Mme. d'Espard politely endeavored to turn her cousin's mind from ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that long array of awed, pallid faces that at this moment I can recall them distinctly. There were strange little touches of mingled pathos and humor. Meadow-larks were hemmed in on every side, too frightened to fly far beyond the rude alarms. They would flutter up into the sulphurous air with plaintive cries, then drop again into the open spaces between the troops. At one time, while we were standing at our horses' heads, a startled rabbit ran to us for cover. The poor little creature meant a dinner to the fortunate captor on a ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... bewildered. He leaned a little further across the table. He found himself watching the faint blue veins of her delicate fingers, noticing the curious perfume of roses that seemed to come to him from the flutter of the ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... At least each syllable he said should be chiselled from the rock of his sincerity. So he cut here and there an adjective, here and there a phrase, baring the heart of his thought, leaving no ribbon or flower of rhetoric to flutter in the eyes of those with whom he would be utterly honest. And when he had done he read the speech and dropped it from his hand to the floor and stared again from the window. It was the best he could do, and it was a failure. So, with the pang of the ...
— The Perfect Tribute • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... of torn cloth, a flutter in the air—the flutter as of a bird on the wing—an upturned point was caught in a tangle of white linen, and through the tangle Blaise rammed his sword-blade almost to the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... that I used to have when I opened a prize pop-corn box. My little brother and I used to save all our pennies for them when we were little tots back in Kansas. We didn't eat the pop-corn, that is I didn't. It was the flutter and thrill I wanted, that comes when you've almost reached the bottom of the box, and know the next grab will bring the prize into your fingers. I was always hoping I might find one of those little rings with a red setting that I could pretend was a real garnet. ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Spaniard, Yankee, Heathen Chinee; Modern Roman and modern Greek; Frenchman and Prussian, Turk and Russian, Foes that have been, or foes to be: Through miles on miles Of spacious aisles, 'Mid the wealth of the world in gorgeous piles, Loiter and flutter the endless files! ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... who flutter for a time. And struggle with captivity in vain; But by-and-by they rest, they smooth their plumes. And to NEW MASTERS sing their former notes. [Footnote: Agis, a tragedy, by ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... then, not a quarter of a mile in front of me, I beheld the Union Jack flutter in the air ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... though to strike him. Then I saw a sudden change in his face. I looked toward the door. Almost as I did so I heard the faint flutter of moving draperies. Felicia stood there looking in upon us, her hands uplifted, her ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Eve. She was all in a flutter, and hesitated between two dresses, and by some blessed inspiration decided for the plainest; but her principal anxiety was, not about herself, but about David's deportment before the Queen of Fashion, for such ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... with longing, but they never can fly wing to wing. Through the bars of the cage they look, and vain is their wish to know each other. They flutter their wings in yearning, and sing, "Come closer, my love!" The free bird cries, "It cannot be, I fear the closed doors of the cage." The cage bird whispers, "Alas, my ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... on deck, and her music was growing louder every minute. Inch by inch the America gained upon her, until they were bow and bow. The crowd below grew wilder, cheers went up from both steamers, the decks were white with the flutter of handkerchiefs. Suddenly the band below struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner." Sandy gave one triumphant glance at the Stars and Stripes floating overhead, and in that moment became naturalized. He leaped to his feet in the boat, ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... cemetery. The priest intoned the first words of the Service for the Dead, walking at the head of the procession with his black biretta on his head; he had thrown a thick fur cloak over his surplice; the wind made the ends of his stole flutter; the words of the Latin hymn fell from his lips at intervals, dully, as though they had been frozen; he looked bored and impatient, and let his eyes wander into the distance. The wind tugged at the black banner, and the pictures of heaven and hell on it wobbled and fluttered to and fro, as though ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... market, Brigaut, lying in wait, was able to get near her. Though he saw her tremble and turn pale, like an autumn leaf about to flutter down, he did not lose his head, but quietly bought fruit of the market-woman with whom Sylvie was bargaining. He found his chance of slipping a note to Pierrette, all the while joking the woman with the ease of a man accustomed to such manoeuvres; ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Robin made a remark one day that threw both Rusty and his wife into a flutter of alarm. Jolly Robin had not meant to frighten them. But the news was out before he realized that it was far from welcome to his ...
— The Tale of Rusty Wren • Arthur Scott Bailey
... god of Love who had dwelt with the lovers in the court yard since first they had come there, sensing the flutter of the intruder's wings, took to his heels and slid between the bars of the great bronze ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... rowing with a will; and as the canoe drew near, with music playing and flags flying, the purple lake, dyed in the sunset and smooth as a mirror, gave back the picture. Every tawny figure at the oars, every flutter of the crimson and blue streamers, every fold of the green and yellow national flag at the prow, was as distinct below the surface as above it. The fairy boat, for so it looked floating between glowing sky and water, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... an umbrella, with a scooped-out place at one side as deep as the hollow in the palm of a man's hand. This was shaped exactly right for Peter's bathtub, and as luck would have it, it was filled to the brim with water. Such a cool splashing—once, twice, thrice, with a long delightful flutter; and then out into the warm sunshine, where the feathers could be puffed out and dried! These were the very first real feathers he had ever had, and he hadn't had them very long; and my, oh, my! but it was fun running his beak among ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... and sisters, and your schoolroom is reached by a spiral stair, and is somewhere up in the clouds. I have heard all about you many times from Nan." Then Molly laughed, and felt at home. She felt more than at home, for her heart gave a strange flutter, and then a curious sense of peace pervaded it. It was something like being near her mother, and yet it was something different. The magnetic influence of a good and great spirit ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... weeks passed—one week was left. It was Saturday evening after supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and bustle and shopping and larking, the streets were empty and desolate. Richards and his old wife sat apart in their little parlour—miserable and thinking. This was become their evening habit now: the life-long habit which had preceded it, of reading, knitting, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... better also. All seemed better that bright day, and from a group near came the expression, "Crops were good this year." While the wealthier and more cultured members of the congregation had kindly nods and smiles for all, they naturally drew together, and there seemed a little flutter of excitement over the renewal of the sewing society that had been discontinued during ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... soberest octogenarian shake his sides with the laughter of his youth. The encircling multitude of youngsters darted upon the thickly-scattered delicacies like a flock of birds upon a field of grain, with patter, twitter and flutter, and a tremor and treble of little short laughs; small, eager hands trying in vain to shut fast upon a large apple and several ginger-nuts at one grasp; slippings and trippings, tousling of tresses and crushing of dresses; boys and girls higgledy- piggledy; ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... so near her that she saw the regular quick flutter of the blue vein on his fair temples, and as the musical mastering voice so well remembered and once so fondly loved stole tenderly through the dark, lonely, dreary recesses of her desolate, aching heart, it waked for one instant a wild, maddening ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... cannonade of Fort Sumter's hundred and forty guns echoing over the sea, and saw the Stars and Bars flutter above the walls of the old fort. He saw Generals Bee and Johnson come back from Manassas, folded in the battle flag for which they had given their lives, to lie in state in the City Hall at the marble feet of Calhoun, the great political leader whom they had followed to the inevitable ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... as she had when she had shot the bull which threatened Ruth. Nothing seemed to flutter the Indian girl's pulse or to change her staid expression. Yet the girls noticed that Dakota Joe spurred his big horse to the white pony's side, and, unless they were mistaken, the man said something to Wonota ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... the fall of timber From distant flats and fells, The pealing of the anvils As clear as little bells, The rattle of the cradle, The clack of windlass-boles, The flutter of the crimson flags ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... the sport of landing so gamey a fish can be realized. When hooked, he invariably turns golden. The idea of the series of leaps is to rid himself of the hook, and the man who has made the strike must be of iron or decadent if his heart does not beat with an extra flutter when he beholds such gorgeous fish, glittering in golden mail and shaking itself like a stallion in each mid-air leap. 'Ware slack! If you don't, on one of those leaps the hook will be flung out and twenty feet away. No slack, and away he ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... had recovered his confusion; and from a certain flutter in Sybrandt, and hard breathing of Cornelis, aided by an indescribable consciousness, felt sure the pair he had to deal with were no heroes. He pretended to fumble for his money: then suddenly thrust his staff fiercely into Sybrandt's ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... turning to reach his supply of bait, chanced to see that line of creeping figures in khaki. The mingled expressions that crossed his face told what a flutter the sight must have brought to ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... background of one's consciousness—the steps overhead, the distant voices, the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog in the corner. Even the mice and the chimney-swallows had not come back, and I missed the scurrying in the walls and the flutter of wings in the chimney. The fire purred low, now and then the wind sighed gently about the corner of the "new part," and a loose door-latch clicked as the draught shook it. A branch drew back and forth across a window-pane with the faintest squeak. And little by little the old house opened ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... lifelong monotony. Strange things are happening constantly at this period. Travels, events in the Indies, the discovery of a world, the invention of printing: what romance there is everywhere! While all this goes on without, putting men's minds into a flutter, how, think you, can those within bear up against the oppressive sameness of monastic life—the irksomeness of its lengthy services, seasoned by nothing better than a sermon ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... 'twixt thy finger-tips, and bowing low Offer the handle to her. Now is seen The soft and delicate playing of the muscles In the white hand upon its work intent. The graces that around the lady stoop Clothe themselves in new forms, and from her fingers Sportively flying, flutter to the tips Of her unconscious rosy knuckles, thence To dip into the hollows of the dimples That Love beside ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... could cut off a bit of meat to roast over its flames, the soft ice began melting beneath it and the flames flickered out with a snapping flutter. ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... blame; and, where a great man is the subject, sometimes with advantage. With respect to the other objection, I know not how to excuse Mr. Wasianski for kneeling at the bed-side of his dying friend, to record, with the accuracy of a short-hand reporter, the last flutter of his pulse and the struggles of expiring nature, except by supposing that the idea of Kant, as a person belonging to all ages, in his mind transcended and extinguished the ordinary restraints of human sensibility, and that, under this impression, he gave that to his sense of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the same view of the situation, for while keeping necks craned and ears attentive to the intermittent voices, all were careful not to allow so much as the edge of a skirt to flutter out from behind the ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... imperative voice, flung him the reins, sprang from his seat, and assisted his companion to alight. She gave him her hand with an air of utter indifference, bestowed upon him neither smile nor thanks, and dropped to the ground with a light flutter like a bird. Turning instantly toward the tavern, she ascended the steps of the porch under a fusillade of glances of astonishment and admiration. Young and beautiful, dressed in a picturesque and brilliant Spanish costume, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... them. As we ply our way at a ten-knot speed through the blue waves of the Marmora, and the sun sinks with a golden glow below the horizon, the spirit moves one of the Mecca pilgrims to climb on top of a chicken coop and shout "Allah-il!" for several minutes; the dangling ends of his turban flutter in the fresh evening breeze, streaming out behind him as he faces the east, and flapping in his swarthy face as he turns round facing to the opposite point of the compass. His supplications seem to be addressed ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... See the mass of gay colors—red, gold, blue, yellow, with glitter of steel and flutter of flags, a black veil of smoke sweeping over. Wave, mothers and daughters, wives, sisters, sweethearts—wave, wave; ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... out several times later) Mentone on its left hand and Monte Carlo on its right. A long winding path led up through its garden of olives to the front door, and through the mimosa trees which flanked this door we could see already a flutter of white aprons. The staff was on the loggia waiting ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... concerted plan; perseverance brings the most difficult, when it is practicable, to a successful result. The flutter of haste is characteristic of a weak mind that has not the command of its thoughts; a strong mind, master of itself, possesses the clearness and prescience ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... afterwards Paragot wrote to Blanquette to join him in Paris, and when the flutter of her wet handkerchief from the railway carriage window became no longer visible, then indeed I felt myself to be a stranger in a ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Thou hast refus'd a great and noble prey, To get possession of my closet key. Lo! here it is, and, when within thy maw, May'st thou much comfort from the morsel draw!" The polish'd steel upon the deck she cast, And off the raven flutter'd ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... my tent and looking carelessly about, my attention was attracted by what I took to be a leaf flutter down close to the above-mentioned bamboo, and to my surprise disappear before it reached the ground. Wondering at this, I got up and approached the place, when from the aforementioned hole in the bamboo out darted a little bird; and looking in I saw a neat little nest of fibres placed ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... decorators; the aroma of all kinds of delicious things to eat was in the air. There was a constant tinkling of the piano and harp. Snatches of song, ripples of laughter, young voices calling through the house and garden, light footsteps going everywhere, the flutter of pink and blue and white dresses, the snowy ribbons and massed roses in every room, the exciting atmosphere of love and expectation—who could escape it? And who, when in the midst of it, was able to prevent or ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... them the appearance, if you look down on them from a ship, of being large white and brown butterflies, with their large wings outspread. Draw in your line a bit, Jonathan, and let the white stuff on the hook flutter about in the air; perhaps one of them will grab at it thinking it's something ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... expedients. He was not wholly unacquainted with novels of adventure, and he based his conduct, as much as possible, on what he could remember in these "authorities." For example, he first went in search of the man who had driven the cab which brought the mysterious Mr. Lithgow to flutter the Dovecot. So far, there was no difficulty. One of the cabdrivers who plied at the station perfectly remembered the gentleman in furs whom he had driven to the school After waiting at the school till the young lady was ready, he had conveyed them back again to the station, and they took ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... when the spectral sail was spread, That flutter'd to and fro; The hair would bristle on each head, Which awful fear did show. And when the moon-beam seem'd to kiss, That dreaded maiden's brow; Something each knew would go amiss, Nor judg'd such wrong, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... place, though it can hardly have been comfortable, it was so narrow. The He imp would alight on the rail, about ten feet in front of her, and pretend to be very sick, squawking feebly and drooping his black wings with a struggling flutter, as if it was all he could do to keep his perch. The cat, her narrow eyes opening very wide, would start to creep up to him. The She imp would then alight on the rail behind her and nip her sharply by the tail, and go ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... with a flutter at the heart, "surely nothing will satisfy the craving of my soul save to be with thee forever. Give to ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... the hansoms hover, With jewelled eyes, to catch the lover; The streets are full of lights and loves, Soft gowns, and flutter of soiled doves. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... and the only objects that rise very prominently above the rest, and catch the wandering eye, are a lofty "outlook," or scaffolding of wood, painted black, from which to watch for the arrival of the ship; and a flagstaff, from whose peak, on Sundays, the snowy folds of St. George's flag flutter in ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... sudden entrance, or from some other cause, I could not guess; but there was in her appearance a degree of flutter, which I had never before remarked, and which I knew could only be produced by unusual emotion. Yet she was calm in a moment; and such is the force of conscience, that I, who studied to surprise her, seemed myself the surprised, and ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... she said, making to pass on; but he heard by the flutter in her speech she'd been weeping, and in his slow way held her back while he thought it out. He was got to know her tolerable well by now, so he commanded her ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... scream and fly away from him on first sight; and then he bewitches them nearer, and they are filled with pain seemingly, and flutter and fly about as if in ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... being taken, and when once the sum is made up no further effort can change it. What are our lives or our labors, our fortunes or even our families, when compared with the life or death of the great mother of us all? We are but the leaves of the tree. What matter if we flutter down today or tomorrow, so long as the great trunk stands and the burrowing roots are firm. Happy the man who can die with the thought that in this greatest crisis of all he has served his country to the uttermost, but who ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... a word, he knew that he had them under his control, and he felt the great thrill of it. Physically he had the consciousness of a blaze of light, of a bare barn of an ungalleried place, of thickly-set row upon row of faces, and a vast confused flutter of beating hands. The applause subsided. He turned with his "Mr. Chairman, Your Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen," to the circle behind him, caught Miss Winwood, his dearest lady's smile, caught and held for a hundredth part of a second the deep blue eyes of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... do, and that he resolved upon before he closed his eyes in sleep in the faint dawning of the following day. He would not flutter as a poor moth where he could not be ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Such is the race of Man: And they that creep, and they that fly, Shall end where they began. Alike the busy and the gay But flutter thro' life's little day, In Fortune's varying colours drest: Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance, Or chill'd by Age, their airy dance They leave, in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... than clever: she was accomplished. She composed very dainty poems,—could arrange flowers exquisitely, perform tea-ceremonies faultlessly, embroider, make silk mosaic: in short, she was genteel. And her first public appearance made a flutter in the fast world of Kyoto. it was evident that she could make almost any conquest she pleased, and that ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... of a traveller on the lonely mountain-road, revived hopes which had begun to sink into listless despair. There was no sign of Saxon subjugation about the stranger. At a distance she could see the flutter of the belted-plaid that drooped in graceful folds behind him, and the plume that, placed in the bonnet, showed rank and gentle birth. He carried a gun over his shoulder, the claymore was swinging by his side with its usual appendages, the dirk, the pistol, and ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... with a little start of surprise, a little flutter of the bosom, and came forward with extended hands. He took them with a trembling grasp which might well have passed as ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... the difference of their years a close alliance with my mother. She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it high aloft, with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... a serious manner, there were few of us whose hearts did not flutter responsively to this surmise, for the danger became every minute more imminent, and we knew what a terrific surf there must be then running on the shingle beach. But we now rapidly approached the shore; ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... past the end table unseen on their way out into the big atrium with its many columns—the hall in which players go out to cool themselves, or collect their determination for a final flutter—Mademoiselle had just won the maximum upon the number four, as well as the column, and the croupier was in the act of pushing towards her a big pile of counters each representing ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... messenger in a novel, handed me a letter. It was from father. "Have everything in readiness to start to-morrow morning," he wrote. "I shall expect you at the house at six-thirty to-morrow night without fail." This letter threw me into a flutter of excitement. I was accustomed to short-notice orders from father, orders that carried no explanations; but they had always been sent through the mails. A messenger meant great need of haste. I recognized him as father's office-boy. Was my ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... anchor in the bay to coal, and the passengers took themselves off to the shore, Mlle. Trebizond in a wild flutter of excitement. This meant for her the nearest approach to Paris, I suppose, that was available. At least she was in great spirits, and talked with the officers. As we entered the harbour we heard the sound of music pouring from the saloon, ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... circumstance which did not escape the notice of the group, and confirmed all their suspicions, Mr. Avenel, with a serious, thoughtful air, and a slow step, approached the group. Nor did the great Roman general more nervously "flutter the dove-cotes in Corioli," than did the advance of the supposed X. Y. agitate the bosoms of Lord Spendquick and his sympathizing friends. Pocket-book in hand, and apparently feeling for something formidable within its mystic recesses, step by step came Dick Avenel towards ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Crofts, promptly; "about as bad as it could be. He had one lucky flutter, and it would have been the ruin of him if he had lived. He backed his luck for more than it was worth, and his luck deserted him on the spot. Yes, poor old devil!" sighed the sympathetic Crofts: "he thought he was going to make his pile out of hand, but in another week he would ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... rock, loosened in my descent, plunge into the dimly-rolling waters. Now, hear me: my resolve is taken, and no earthly influence or persuasion shall stay me. 1 was bewildered, yet flattered by your follies: foolish and thoughtless enough to frolic and flutter on the very brink of a precipice. I was dazzled by the glittering but dangerous excitement. Conscience spoke, but I durst not listen. My course of life hitherto has been through scenes of gentleness and peace, and I could not look on your bustle and dissipation without alarm. Yet was I persuaded ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore. Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door, Perched ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... and these qualifications, no wonder that our hero attracted the notice and affections of the young Delias in town, whose hearts had just begun to flutter for they knew not what. Inquiries were made concerning his condition; and no sooner were his expectations known, than he was invited and caressed by all the parents, while the daughters vied with each other in treating him with particular complacency. He inspired love and emulation ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... my darling! is this really you? Really, really you, and no dream?" cried Marah Rocke, all in a flutter of excitement, as she ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... sat a woman, reading what Dick took for a newspaper. As he drew nearer she rose, and picked up a tin wash-basin full of corn; and to the "Coop, coop, coop," of her melancholy voice came clucking and scrambling chickens and hens in grand flutter of greed. ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... rot, Harry," said Ranald, and sat down again to his desk. Harry went out in a state of dazed astonishment. Alone Ranald sat in his office writing steadily except that now and then he paused to let a smile flutter across his stern, set face, as a gleam of sunshine over a rugged rock on a cloudy day. He was listening to his heart, whose every beat kept singing the refrain, "I love her, I love her; she will ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... her to me, but she seemed to flutter uncertainly in my clasp, just as a bird flutters wildly without aim at the limit of its tethering cord, and when I released her she sank into the wire chair at our side with a look of exhaustion stamped ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... men were dismissed, and as Claude and Charles were about to leave the house they looked stealthily round the hall. But no flutter of skirts nor any trace of woman's occupation rewarded them. Roberval noticed their glances, and as he bade them farewell he said, somewhat roughly: "St Malo is a dangerous place for women. I have left my niece at Court. If our great undertaking is to succeed, nothing ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... early portrait of a family group composed of Duke Boris and his morganatic wife and children. There had been two of the latter, a boy and a girl, and Diana suddenly realised, with an irrepressible little flutter of tender excitement, that if the fantastic story hinted at in Tattle of the Town, were true, then the boy whom, years ago, she had seen pictured in the photograph must have ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... down the stairs, as fast as possible. Evidently a crisis had occurred below. All the girls in their white dresses and pink or blue sashes, all the boys in their white collars of ceremony, were grouped about on the lawn, around the base of a big shade tree. Pink hair bows were a-flutter with excitement. The patent leather pumps of the boys trod upon the white slippers of the little girls in their efforts to see what ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... die away, and come again, banging the doors of the empty rooms, and setting timbers all strangely to creaking as under sudden trampling feet; then lift into the air with a rustling sound like the stir of garments and the flutter of wings, calling out weirdly in the great voids of the ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... around, and spring around and lilacs around and a moon and music and joy around,—what is more natural in all this world than that in the fire struck by the simple joy of youth there should be the flutter of unseen wings around, and when the two had finished singing, with something passing between their hearts not in the words, what is more natural than that the girl, half frightened at the thrill in ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... destruction, as a child With giants huge, or giants with a Jove. The statesman's arts to conjure up a peace, Or military phantoms void of force, But scare away the vultures for an hour; The scent cadaverous (for, oh! how rank The stench of profligates!) soon lures them back On the proud flutter of a Gallic wing Soon they return; soon make their full descent; Soon glut their rage, and riot in our ruin; Their idols grac'd and gorgeous with our spoils, Of universal empire sure presage! Till ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... authoress and politician. She patronizes Roulette, and at every turn of the wheel her money passes on the board. She is a good gambler—smirking when she wins, and smirking when she loses. She dresses as splendidly as any of the dames of Paris. The other night she excited a flutter among the ladies assembled in the salons of the "Conversation" by appearing in a robe flaming red with an exaggerated train which dragged its slow length along the floor. But the greatest of the feminine players is the Leonie Leblanc. When she is at the Rouge et Noir table a larger crowd ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Terriss was still under thirty, but doing the best work of his life. He never did anything finer than Squire Thornhill, although he was clever as Henry VIII. His gravity as Flutter in "The Belle's Stratagem" was very fetching; as Bucklaw in "Ravenswood" he looked magnificent, and, of course, as the sailor hero in Adelphi melodrama he was as good as could be. But it is as Thornhill that I like best to ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... kite, will scare most animals of the deer tribe, by their fluttering; and, in want of a sufficient force of men, passes may be closed by this contrivance. The Swedes use "lappar," viz. Pieces of canvas, of half the height of a man, painted in glaring colours and left to flutter from a line. ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... very best effect; and there was, people said, such a nobleness about him (his cleverness was undisputed) that when he rose to propose or reply to a toast, there was not a lady at the table who was not in a flutter of inward admiration. With his social advantages he could not, of course, fail to be in a position of considerable influence in the town, which again heightened his welcome ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... as the French head of the great historic ferry between England and the Continent, and as the seat of sundry thriving factories, it is both a busy and prosperous town. I found its streets swarming with people and its houses a flutter of flags and banners, when I came to it on June 3, 1889, to see the 'inauguration,' by President Carnot, of the works on which the French Government has been spending millions of francs during the past decade, with an eye to deepening and enlarging ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... one is sleeping, the thunder rolls and the storm bursts, it often happens that the sleep is not troubled; then suddenly, at a certain moment, the imperceptible flutter of a passing ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... draw curved lines from them to the opposite point, Fig. 4; and I have a reptilian or dragon's wing, which would, with some ramification of the supporting ribs, become a bat's or moth's; that is to say, an extension of membrane between the ribs (as in an umbrella), which will catch the wind, and flutter upon it, like a leaf; but cannot strike it to any purpose. The flying squirrel drifts like a falling leaf; the bat flits like a black rag torn at the edge. To give power, we must have plumes that ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... among the figures that lined the deck rail behind a flutter of handkerchiefs, he went to the smoking-lounge where for two hours he busied himself with his author's ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... is the matter of a few moments, then he hurries up-stairs. The tower door is open, and there is no one to be seen. He keeps on and on until he catches a flutter of a white dress. Cecil is running around the observatory, and his heart beats as he glances at the dazzling little sprite, with her sparkling eyes and her hair a golden mist about her face. He could watch forever, but it is a ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... as transient guests of spring and autumn in the Middle States, are in their summer home and breeding-place. Warblers, named for the magnolia and the myrtle, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, blue-backed, and black-throated, flutter and creep along the branches with simple lisping music. Kinglets, ruby-crowned and golden-crowned, tiny, brilliant sparks of life, twitter among the trees, breaking occasionally into clearer, sweeter songs. Companies of redpolls and crossbills pass chirping ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... and there was blood on the sacks and on the stony floor. It oozed from her side, and her hand was cold as the rocks, and there was no flutter at ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... attempt, turned aside, as if not to see Dick's movements—a circumstance which did not escape the notice of the group, and confirmed all their suspicions, Mr. Avenel, with a serious, thoughtful air, and a slow step, approached the group. Nor did the great Roman general more nervously "flutter the dove-cotes in Corioli," than did the advance of the supposed X. Y. agitate the bosoms of Lord Spendquick and his sympathizing friends. Pocket-book in hand, and apparently feeling for something formidable within its mystic recesses, step by step came Dick Avenel towards ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Saturday evening, a fortnight after that disastrous one, and Miss Quincey was taking the air in Primrose Hill Park. She was walking to keep herself warm, for the breeze was brisk and cool. There was a little stir and flutter in the trees and a little stir and flutter in her heart, for she had caught sight of Dr. Cautley in the distance. He was coming round the corner of one of the intersecting walks, coming at a frantic pace, with the tails of his frock-coat waving ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... sheep look into the mouth of the empty cannon on a dismantled fort. These are the days for revery, and your thoughts fly forth, gliding without friction over this smooth expanse; or, rather, they are like yonder pair of white butterflies that will flutter for an hour just above the glassy surface, traversing miles of distance ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... visibly stronger, and his nurse brings people into the room to see him. They look at him with wonder and admiration, while the good lady is all in a flutter of delight. He hears himself spoken of always as the "lieutenant," and hesitates to ask an explanation. The physician comes but seldom, the lady explaining that all the doctors in town are busy in the hospitals. The truth flashed ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... does not wear so much as the lightest shawl. She is clad only in spring sunshine. It glitters in the soft darkness of her hair. It touches the diamonds, the opals, the pearls, that cling to her arms, and neck, and fingers. They flash back again, and the gorgeous silks glisten, and the light laces flutter, until the stately Aurelia seems to me, ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... bearing the spear, thanks to the gratuities of the open-handed Van Cleft, Senior. She pleaded to remain out of the white lights, meaning it as she spoke. But Shirley wisely felt that the butterfly would emerge from the chrysalis, shortly, to flutter into certain gardens where he would fain cull rare blossoms! Pat Cleary deputized a "shadow" to diarize her ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Amidst all the flutter and emotion which this promise of pleasure, for such I conceived it, stirred up in me, I preserved so much of the woman, as to feign just reluctance enough to make some merit, of sacrificing it to the influence of my patroness, whom I likewise, still ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... good-byes had become nothing but a flutter of white handkerchiefs from deck to shore, and shore to deck, William ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... stockings; his coat was 'some kind of a lightish colour—or betwixt that and dark'; and he wore a 'mole- skin weskit.' As if this were not enough, he presently haled me from my breakfast in a prodigious flutter, and showed me an honest and rather venerable citizen passing ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a seat halfway between door and pulpit. By some miscalculation of Unity's they were very early, a fact which presently brought a whispered ejaculation of annoyance from Miss Dandridge. "I love a flutter when I come in and the knowledge that I've turned every head—and here we've entered an empty church! Heigho! Nothing to do for ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... freshness, chafers whirring, A little piping of leaf-hid birds; A flutter of wings, a fitful stirring, A cloud to ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... an end to his criticism, and looking round at us all. "Make your own flies. It's impossible for a fellow in the Strand to put a fly together which would suit fishermen like you. Observe the flies and insects of the country as they flutter under your nose, and imitate them the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... red-painted reaper, cracking his whip over the horses, and mowing down the thick, waving grass, as a war hero mows down his enemies. And as he stepped into the office he seemed to hear the clicking noise of the reaper, the soft swish of falling grass and the shrill chirp and light flutter of ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... then I, who had, according to custom, stood up on the announcement being made, and felt quite faint with astonishment, was told to go by the back stairs and get a clean frill on, before I repaired to the dining-room. These orders I obeyed, in such a flutter and hurry of my young spirits as I had never known before; and when I got to the parlour door, and the thought came into my head that it might be my mother—I had only thought of Mr. or Miss Murdstone until then—I drew back my hand ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... evening came; and the children, ready dressed for their parts, were in a tremendous flutter. Even the little wee ones were to do something. They were stationed at the parlor door with baskets, and charged not to let a soul come in, unless the pair of mittens were paid into one of the baskets. ...
— The Two Story Mittens and the Little Play Mittens - Being the Fourth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... eyes and beard, And shaken voice, the suitor re-appeared, And said, 'He's come.'—Mahmoud said not a word, But rose and took four slaves each with a sword, And went with the vext man. They reach the place, And hear a voice and see a female face, That to the window flutter'd in affright. 'Go in,' said Mahmoud, 'and put out the light; But tell the females first to leave the room; And when the drunkard ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... to marry, and who was not a viscount's widow, as it turned out, but a brewer's relict at Southampton, with a couple of thousand pounds to her fortune: for honest Tom's heart was under such excellent control, that Venus herself without a portion would never have caused it to flutter. So he rode away on his heavy-paced gelding to pursue his jog-trot loves, leaving Esmond to the society of his dear mistress and her daughter, and with his young lord for a companion, who was charmed, not only to see an old friend, but to have ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway against the semi-gelid current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheelbuckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm small lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan, and only getting hotter at ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... it hurt me just as much," persisted the maid. "And they've no business, 'aven't the young gentlemen, to play pranks like this. You never know what you'll be let in for next. I shall be in a heverlasting flutter now. It's worse than living ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... herself lightly with expectation, I have but to request that she favor me with a little singing, and soon the air is vocal with every note of the village songsters. After this, Mrs. Walters usually begins to flutter in a motherly way around the subject of ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... convinced yourself that there is not a mosquito in the inclosure, and so blown out the candle and prepared to sleep, it requires a mind of singular equanimity forthwith to hear without emotion the too familiar whiz. At Bordighera the mosquitoes, disdaining strategic movements, openly flutter round the lamps on the dinner-table, and ladies sit at meat with blue gauze veils obscuring their charms. Half measures were evidently of no use in these circumstances, and I tried a whole one. Having shut the windows of the bedroom, I smoked several cigars, tobacco ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... serious manner, there were few of us whose hearts did not flutter responsively to this surmise, for the danger became every minute more imminent, and we knew what a terrific surf there must be then running on the shingle beach. But we now rapidly approached the shore; we were near to the floating light, and in the roadstead not ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... wings of Love. For he said, 'It becomes thee not to approach men's eyes as with the noise of chariots, and the rushing of a swift courser, but in placid and merciful flight, as upon the wings of a swallow—nay! with not so much as the flutter of the dove.' Besides all this, that he might be yet pleasanter to men, he committed to him also a multitude of blissful dreams, according to every man's desire. One watched his favourite actor; another listened to the flute, or guided ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... Bordeaux to join Louis XVIII. in Paris, was received in every town through which he passed with ovations inspired by the enthusiasm felt throughout old France at the return of the Bourbons. Touraine was aroused for its legitimate princes; the town itself was in a flutter, every window decorated, the inhabitants in their Sunday clothes, a festival in preparation, and that nameless excitement in the air which intoxicates, and which gave me a strong desire to be present at ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... perhaps, may be remembered in the next; while of the creations which were honoured with the diploma of immortality a very much smaller proportion as a rule survive. Only some fifty per cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the goal; and often even upon their brows there flutter but a few stray leaves of the bay. A single poem, a solitary drama—nay, perhaps one isolated figure, poetic or dramatic—avails, and but barely avails, to keep the immortal from putting on mortality. Hence we need think it no disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... Tuileries gardens, each afternoon, A little old man comes walking along: Now watch what happens! for just as soon As they see him, the birds begin their song, And flutter about his hands and head, And perch on his shoulder quite at their ease, For he fills his pockets with crumbs of bread To feed his friends who live in the trees, And well they know he loves them so That into his ...
— Abroad • Various
... answered, and her fine hands had come to Wycherley, as white birds flutter homeward. But even then she had to deliberate the matter—since the habits of many years are not put aside like outworn gloves,—and for innumerable centuries, it seemed to him, her foot tapped ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the street were in the windows; the little maidservant flew to the wicket-gate; the Mesdames Clapp looked out from the casement of the ornamented kitchen; Emmy, in a great flutter, was in the passage among the hats and coats; and old Sedley in the parlour inside, shaking all over. Jos descended from the post-chaise and down the creaking swaying steps in awful state, supported ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and make use of their bill as a third foot, climbing and ascending with ridiculous caution. All the gallinae parade and walk gracefully, and run nimbly; but fly with difficulty, with an impetuous whirring, and in a straight line. Magpies and jays flutter with powerless wings, and make no dispatch; herons seem incumbered with too much sail for their light bodies; but these vast hollow wings are necessary in carrying burdens, such as large fishes, and the like; pigeons, and particularly the sort called smiters, have a way of clashing their ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... rush to the flame, and flutter round every luminous idea only to perish miserably at the last. We imagine that the idea is the expression of the world's will, whereas it is nothing but the consuming ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... decks. The screen showed a race of boats which melted without warning to a mass of white uniforms packed about the raised square of a roped-in Platform below guns and a turret clouded with men. Two tanned giants in wrestling tights scrambled under the ropes. There was a flutter of caps. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... near her that she saw the regular quick flutter of the blue vein on his fair temples, and as the musical mastering voice so well remembered and once so fondly loved stole tenderly through the dark, lonely, dreary recesses of her desolate, aching heart, it waked for one instant a wild, maddening temptation, an intense longing to ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Prescott presented himself at the hotel that evening, and sent up his card to Mrs. Bentley and the girls. Greg was with his chum, of course, but Greg was not in a flutter. He was to escort Belle Meade—-an arrangement of chumship, for Belle wore the engagement ring of Dave Darrin, one of Greg's old ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... gray, like scalp-locks and feathers upon Indian heads. Near them were the gayly-painted vans, in which I at once observed a difference from the more substantial-looking old-country vardo. The whole scene was so English that I felt a flutter at the heart: it was a bit from over the sea; it seemed as if hedge-rows should have been round, and an old Gothic steeple looking over the trees. I thought of the last gypsy camp I had seen near Henley-on-Thames, and ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... hours passed up to luncheon time Dorothy never afterward realized, her foolish little heart was in such a flutter of excitement. ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... be done thinking of the young ladies. It put my heart in a flutter when I looked back at the castle from the wood's edge and saw one of them waving her handkerchief in a window. I lifted my hat, and put my spurs to the flank with such a pang in me I dared not look again. ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... penetrates them with his burning splendor, illuminates them with a marvelous radiance, and crowns them with glory. But the Sun is generous. Having showered benefits upon these gorgeous celestial butterflies that flutter round him as round some altar of the gods, he grants them liberty to visit other ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the flutter! And good riddance! I just abhor school—notice how I have improved? Last ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... get on with the evening. Octavia and I wanted to see everything, gambling saloons, dance halls, fights, whatever was going, and as Lola has done it all before, she said she would stay with the girls, and have a little mild flutter in the saloon of the hotel at roulette while our stalwart cavaliers escorted us "around." Gaston, too, remained behind with them; the Senator manoeuvred this, because he said, it was not wise to be with people who were quarrelsome, ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... almost sure that land was not far off: the sea grew shallower, and early every morning flocks of land birds began to flutter around them, and these all left the ship in the evening, as if to roost on shore. One of the vessels had picked up a cane newly cut, and another a branch covered with fresh red berries; and the air blew softer and warmer, and the wind began ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... Druid bards and the firm belief in reincarnation which sent the Celtic warrior laughing to his death; but in the traditions of the peasantry, abounding with nature myths, sorcerers still haunt their mountain caves, fairies and May maidens still flutter about their crystal streams. ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... the box the rustles will escape, whether you are wearing a silk dress or not," said the man, seriously. Then he picked up another box. "In this," he continued, "are many assorted flutters. They are invaluable to make flags flutter on a still day, when there is no wind. You, sir," turning to the Wizard, "ought to have this assortment. Once you have tried my goods I am sure you will never be ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... people who have homes on Central Park West, to the frail winged moths who flutter up and down Broadway, this section does not exist. Its poor are not the picturesque poor of the city's Latin quarter, its criminals seldom win to the notoriety of a front page and inch-high headlines; it almost never produces ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... time!" So saying, Robin laughed and led the way out into the sunny green. And here, surrounded by a ring of merry forest rogues, they beheld a knight right gallantly mounted and equipped, his armour blazing in the sun, his gaudy bannerole a-flutter from long lance, his shield gaudy and brave with new paint; beholding which, Robin chuckled ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... which the six couples were presently posed by the clergyman, in front of us and himself. That done to everybody's satisfaction, the Colonel stationed to give away the brides—an arrangement that caused a visible flutter of delight among them—and as many lookers-on accommodated within the building as could crowd in, the ceremony was proceeded with, the clergyman using an abbreviated form of the Episcopal service, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man he had assisted on the previous night, and he knew that no one could afford him more precise information than his brisk landlady, to whom was known all the gossip of the neighbourhood. His first word made Miss Greeb flutter back to the table like a dove to ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... his friends as they stood together in the shelter of the dell. The green bank at the entrance hid the road and the world, and now, as in spring, they could see nothing but snow-white ramparts and the evergreen foliage of the firs. Only from time to time would a beech leaf flutter in from the woods above, to comment on the waning year, and the warmth and radiance of the sun would ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... only change owners subject to the payment of 'fines' and to the feudal consent of a 'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor. Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolized the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society Secretary's dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real achievement. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... their way to the parlor, where a great handshaking took place. Mrs. Stanhope and Dora were there, and also Grace and Nellie with Mrs. Laning. The latter was not used to traveling and was in quite a flutter. ...
— The Rover Boys on the River - The Search for the Missing Houseboat • Arthur Winfield
... making her appearance, she observed that there was an unusual flutter among the wilder members of the league, and that she at once became the ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... whisk of her skirts, and a footfall on the gravel path, she was gone. He stood dumbfounded, poor comedian, having come to play the chief role, but to find the scene taken out of his hands. Then catching the flutter of her wrap, as she disappeared into the darkness of the veranda, he cried in a ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... and looking about in a flutter, till she discovers her husband: "Good gracious, Edward! Is that our train? I ran all the way from the station door as fast as I could run, and I'm perfectly out of breath. Did you ever hear of anything like my meeting Amy on the very instant? She was getting out of her ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... engine company in Seamont! He made a stir generally in the old place, starting a gymnasium and organizing a "reading circle," and putting things generally in a whirl. He had a "voice," and he had a guitar, so that his "serenades" were famous; and he set Aunt Stanshy's heart all in a flutter one night when, awaking about twelve, she heard his well-known voice leading off in a serenade, while he twanged his guitar to the tune, "O dearest love, do you remember?" Will Somers was popular ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... moved nearer the fireplace. Watching narrowly Roger noticed the big man put out his hand towards the blazing logs, then saw a small scrap of something flimsy and white—it might have been paper, or perhaps a tiny piece of the medical gauze he had been using—flutter into the flames. The gesture was so negligent that in the ordinary way one would not have given it a second thought, yet now, because of Esther's unintelligible reference to a bandage, it awoke in Roger a vague uneasiness. Again the incredible suspicion ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... because he was in such a hurry for it to go by. But Friday night came at last; and, as he counted the stars for the seventh time, the little flutter of excitement in his veins made them seem to dance ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... evil company and trouble. He sinned and repented and sinned again. We find him writing to his father, "As for this world, I despair of ever making a figure in it. I am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I shall never again be capable of entering into such scenes." Burns knew himself to be a man of faults. The knowledge of his own weakness, perhaps, made him kindly to other. In one ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... below them. The black embers fly, and rolling into one body, they thicken, and take a form, and assume heat and life from the flames. Their own lightness gives them wings; and first, like birds, {and} then real birds, they flutter with their wings. At once innumerable sisters are fluttering, whose natal origin is the same. And thrice do they go around the pile, and thrice does their clamour rise in concert into the air. In the fourth flight they separate their company. Then ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... came to them would banish any such tendency in people less kindly than the Cliffords; but their home-life meant so much to them all that they were naturally solicitous concerning one who must, from the intimate relations she would sustain, take from or add much to it. Therefore it was with a flutter of no ordinary expectancy that they waited for her appearance. The only one indifferent was Leonard's youngest boy, who, astride his grandpa's cane, was trotting quietly about, unrestricted in his gambols. Alfred had thawed out since his return from the station, and was eager ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... unexpected incident. But, when I went upstairs to my own room, I surprised myself by beginning to laugh about it and then surprised myself still more by beginning to cry about it. In short, I was in a flutter for a little while and felt as if an old chord had been more coarsely touched than it ever had been since the days of the dear old doll, long buried ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... her person. She possessed the indefinable property of charm. Such women, he knew, stirred life profoundly, reanimating it with extraordinary efforts and desires. Their mere passage, the pressure of their fingers, were more imperative than the life service of others; the flutter of their breath could be more tyrannical that the most poignant memories ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... had been sought after and displayed. The air was a-flutter with party-colored streamers. Garlands rioted over colossus, peristyle, obelisk and sphinx without conserving pattern or moderation. The dromos, or avenue of sphinxes, was carpeted with palm and nelumbo leaves, and copper censers as large as caldrons had been set at equidistance ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... And now, above the roaring undertone of the cars, from far ahead floated back the treble bell-notes of the locomotive; there came a gritting vibration of brakes; slowly, more slowly the cars glided to a creaking standstill beside a sun-scorched platform gay with the bright flutter of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... each leaning on his stick, walked down a path lined by clipped yews, shaded by cypresses, and almost overgrown with crocus, anemone, and violet. Suddenly from the bushes there came a flutter of wings, followed by the scream of a bird, and in a moment the Pope's cat had leapt on to a marble which stood in the midst of the jungle. It was an ancient sarcophagus, placed there as a fountain, but the spring that had fed it was dry, and in its moss-grown mouth ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... running to meet me in a flutter of excitement and Mistress Aileen followed more demurely down the path, though there was a Highland welcome in her frank face not to be denied. I slid from the horse and kissed Cloe. Miss ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... past. Its late painters, whose human figures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kept a sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept the angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make a flock of birds flutter up. ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... amongst them, and the usual peeping and spying, and eyeing of the 'creatures.' 'What impudence!' 'Well, I think!' ''Pon my word!' 'What next!'—exclamations that were pretty well lost upon the fair objects of them amid the noise and flutter and confusion of the scene. But ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... What a flutter you have put me into: now get away do, Master Percy. You ought not to kiss me ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... man," he began again, "see how three or four strokes of the brush and a thin glaze of blue let in the free air to play about the head of the poor Saint, who must have felt stifled and oppressed by the close atmosphere! See how the drapery begins to flutter; you feel that it is lifted by the breeze! A moment ago it hung as heavily and stiffly as if it were held out by pins. Do you see how the satin sheen that I have just given to the breast rends the pliant, silken softness of a young girl's skin, and how the brown-red, blended with ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... involuntary. If I had my way, I never would cause a single flutter in any body's breast—not I. But you see how it is, I can't help it, and therefore it is not my fault. These fish do not bite well. There is one, he will weigh four pounds, that has been playing round and round the hook, but won't touch it. Haven't you got some kind ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... state of repentance and flutter that he could not let me take a decent farewell. The sound of the others' horses had long died away down the hill when he began to tell me what he ought ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and gave me a high satisfaction. We are once more transported into Faust's study, where Mephistopheles finds all just as he had left it. He takes from the hook Faust's old study-gown, and a thousand moths and insects flutter out from it. By the directions of Mephistopheles as to where these are to settle down, the locality is brought very clearly before our eyes. He puts on the gown, while Faust lies behind a curtain in a state of paralysis, intending to play the doctor's part once more. He pulls the bell, which gives ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was beating slowly, calmly, even faintly. He caught her wrist, pressing his fingers on her pulse—there was not the suspicion of a flutter. He let her go then. She stood before him; her eyes were ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... of far more costly fabrics; her hat, perked up with puffs of grenadine (how all these things do rhyme and repeat their little Frenchy tags of endings!) put you in mind of lace and feathers, and a general float and flutter of gay millinery; her step and expression, as she came airily into this second-rate old car, put on for the "journeymen" train, brought up a notion, almost, of some ball-room advent, flushed and ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... free and unchecked man; so utterly to Mr Pinch's wonder and confusion, that like the wretched captive who recovered his liberty in his old age, he could make but little use of his enlargement, and fell into a strange kind of flutter for want of some kind hand to scrape his bread, and cut him off in the article of sugar with a lump, and pay him those other little attentions to which he was accustomed. There was something almost awful, too, about the self-possession of the new pupil; who 'troubled' ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... The soft flutter of her dress disappeared, and he was left to pace up and down the loggia in alternations of hope and despair. He, too, felt with Eleanor that these days were fatal. If he lost her now, he lost her for ever. She was of those natures ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... land's sake!" screamed Mrs. Higbee, "why, that's my 'Liza!" She was in a flutter of surprise and delight, and so absorbed was Tilly in getting her and her unwieldy luggage into the car, that Jane's daughter forgot to kiss ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... dance upon the line, And flutter to and fro: My faithful clothes-pins hold them fast, And will ...
— The Nursery, July 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 1 • Various
... crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted about a throat like a turkey gobbler's; altogether, his appearance set people wondering whether this outlandish ghost belonged to the audacious race of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard Italien. What devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring passions had darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... occasioned in her a little flutter of joy, a little exaltation of the senses, and she walked on without speaking, deep in her pleasure, and as the sensation died she became aware that she was very happy. The quiet silence of the Spring morning corresponded to her mood, and the rustle of last year's leaves communicated ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... work and yet he has it very deeply; he has it even better than the man who works in it or owns it. Then for natures that like to feel emotion without the trouble of having any suffering, it is very nice to get the swelling in the throat, and the fullness, and the heart beats, and all the flutter of excitement that comes as one watches the people come and go, and hears the engine pound and give a long drawn whistle. For a child watching through a hole in the fence above the yard, it is a wonder world of mystery and movement. The child ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... them clearly, every bird well defined against the sunny heavens. I watched them eagerly. Suddenly one turned over; a cloud of feathers streamed off down the wind; and then, before the sound of the first shot had reached my ears, a second pitched a few yards upward, and, after a heavy flutter, followed its hapless comrade. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... little remaining modesty, which was nearly all the good which her unhappy education had left her, prevented her, until she found that she had no time beyond the present instant left for satisfying her curiosity on so important a point, when, in a considerable flutter of spirits, she whispered to Ellen, but in a voice sufficiently articulate to be heard by others—"Pray what did your papa say ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... learning vain, Beholds the fop with deep disdain: The fop, with spirit as discerning, Looks down upon the man of learning. The Spanish Don—a solemn strutter— Despises Gallic airs and flutter: Whilst the Gaul ridicules the Don, And John Bull looks with like disdain On manners both of France and Spain: They hold, indeed, a deed tripartite To see each other in a tart light. 'Tis thus the bard is scorned by those ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... Such a flutter as we are in! The whole house is being cleaned and all the curtains washed. I am driving to the Corners this morning to get some new oilcloth for the entry, and two cans of brown floor paint for the hall and ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... times. Louder and stronger sang Mr. Quaver. Miss Gamut cleared her throat, with the determination to sing as she never sang before, and to show the people what a great difference there was between her voice and Azalia Adams's. But the excitement of the moment set her heart in a flutter when she came to the duet, which ran up out of the scale. She aimed at high G, but instead of striking it in a round full tone, as she intended and expected, she only made a faint squeak on F, which sounded so funny that the people down stairs smiled in spite of their ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... bearing the royal emblem of Oogaboo, and this flag Files flew upon its staff every night, to show that the country they were in had been conquered by the Queen of Oogaboo. So far, no one but themselves had seen the flag, but Ann was pleased to see it flutter in the breeze and considered herself ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... in the bay to coal, and the passengers took themselves off to the shore, Mlle. Trebizond in a wild flutter of excitement. This meant for her the nearest approach to Paris, I suppose, that was available. At least she was in great spirits, and talked with the officers. As we entered the harbour we heard the sound of music pouring from the saloon, which had never yet been used by the party, and on that the ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... set eyes on)—"your ordinarily handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing. You grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the cei—, pardon me, as I THOUGHT you did, when I fell down in a fit in your chambers"; and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble; I did not care to offend the man—I did not DARE to offend the man. I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking refuge in Day and Martin's Blacking Warehouse; of ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the hospitable meaning of my uncle's invitation and his sensitiveness in respect to its reception. So I got the ill-seeming black bottle from the locker, the tray and glasses and little brown jug from the pantry, the napkin from Agatha, in a flutter in the kitchen, and having returned to the best room, where the tutor awaited the event in some apparent trepidation, I poured my uncle's dram, and measured an hospitable glass for Cather, but with less generous hand, not knowing his capacity, but shrewdly suspecting its inferiority. The glasses ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... strain upon the best of nerves. Dick and his friend Davis rode out of the valley to meet the Santa Fe stage with a very sensible relief. For a few days, anyhow, they would be back where they could see the old Stars and Stripes flutter, where feudal retainers and sprouts of Spanish aristocracy were not lying in wait with fiery zeal to ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... and followed a path, deep in leaves, which led from the west wing of the house to the outside kitchen beyond a paved square at the back. Half intelligible words floated to him as he approached, and from an old pear-tree near the door there was a flutter of wings where a brood of white turkeys settled to roost. Beyond the bole of the tree a small negro in short skirts was "shooin'" a large rooster into the henhouse, but at the muffled fall of Gay's horse's hoofs on the dead leaves, she turned with a ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... went out and the acceptances came in. The English were flattered. Count Malagaski was buoyed by new hopes and the daughters were in a day-and-night flutter, for neither of them had ever come within speaking distance of the real young ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... me, madam." And he rose and proceeded to flutter about the room, counterfeiting Otto both in voice and gesture not unhappily. "What is there to-day, Herr von Gondremark? Ah, Herr Cancellarius, a new wig! You cannot deceive me; I know every wig in Gruenewald; I have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his situation; so also at the first abashed and confounded, we remain on the mesh we are urged upon, ignorant, as yet, of the toils around us, and the sly, dark, immitigable foe that lieth in yonder nook, already feasting her imagination upon our destruction. Presently we revive, we stir, we flutter; and Fate, that foe—the old arch-spider, that hath no moderation in her maw—now fixeth one of her many eyes upon us, and giveth us a partial glimpse of her laidly and grim aspect. We pause in mute terror; we gaze upon the ugly spectre, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pausing for half a second (during which he was calling on himself to be cool) he pulled the trigger. To his inexpressible satisfaction the bird stopped in mid-air and came down with a thump on the heather, where it gave but one flutter and then lay still. He turned to see what his companions had done, with their brisk fusillade. But he could not make out. They were still watching the setter, that was again being encouraged to go on, lest a stray bird or two might still be in hiding. However, the quest was fruitless. The ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... government of the Regent and of Dubois, it was a little scared at the liberties taken by Voltaire with the Catholic church. He was required to make excisions in order to get permission to print the poem; the author was here, there, and everywhere, in a great flutter and preoccupied with his literary, financial, and fashionable affairs. In receipt of a pension from the queen, and received as a visitor at La Source, near Orleans, by Lord Bolingbroke in his exile, every day becoming more brilliant and more courted, he was augmenting his fortune by profitable ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... the crowns and fills the air with pollen; a part of it fulfils its destination and creates new life, a part sinks to the ground and dies. What is a handful of pollen more or less in the inexhaustible store-house of nature! The fertilised blossom casts off its delicate petals which flutter to the ground and wither; they decay in the rain and are ground to dust, to rise again through the sap and re-appear as blossoms, and this time, perhaps, to become fruit. But now the struggle begins: those which a kind fate has placed on the sunny side, thrive and prosper; the ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... knows when there is danger near her—she does not know how, exactly, but ''pears like my heart go flutter, flutter, and den dey may say "Peace, Peace," as much as dey likes, I know its gwine to be war!' She is very firm on this point, and ascribes to this her great impunity, in spite of the lethargy before ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... forbidden to teach them other truths before they be baptized? This text as fairly denieth to the unbaptized believer heaven and glory. Nay, our author, in the midst of all his flutter about this 28th of Matthew, dare venture to gather no more therefrom, but that it may be strongly supposed. Behold therefore, gentle reader, the ground on which these brethren lay the stress of their separation ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... down the road from early morning onward, filled with flannel-coated or befrilled holiday makers or laden with farmers and farmers' wives and farmers' children. Janet and Mrs. Brown, the one an excited flutter of white organdie skirts, the other a ponderous rustle of tight brown taffeta, departed at ten o'clock and by one the great house was empty of all save ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... has found out the loss of the paper?" he thought. "He must have discovered it, and that's why he is in such a flutter. If it's spoilt his chances, so much the better. I owe him a grudge, and, if I've put a spoke in his wheel, I ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... conventions of acting. The player in the "apron" of a Queen Anne stage resembled a drawing-room entertainer rather than a platform orator. Fine gentlemen and ladies in the boxes that lined the "apron" applauded the witticisms of Sir Courtly Nice or Sir Fopling Flutter, as if they themselves were partakers in the conversation. Actors like Colley Cibber acquired a great reputation for their natural representment of ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... men. It is beautiful how the chrysalis governing-soul, shaking off its dusty slough and prison, starts forth winged, a true royal soul! Our new Abbot has a right honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... giggled Delia. Gypsy, all in a flutter at having her name read right out in school, and divided between her horror lest the kitten she had tied to a spool of thread at recess, had been discovered, and an awful suspicion that Mr. Jonathan Jones saw her run ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... plainly a great house, and my uncle lived there in style. The fame of it rose as we approached, like a chain of mountains; at Bedford they touched their caps, but in Dunstable they crawled upon their bellies. I thought the landlady would have kissed me; such a flutter of cordiality, such smiles, such affectionate attentions were called forth, and the good lady bustled on my service in such a pother of ringlets and with such a jingling of keys. "You're probably expected, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough', he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... startled by my first approach. Occasionally, without any cause which I could detect from my present position—certainly in no way connected with my presence—a small swarm of the butterflies would rise in a flutter above the bush, as though actuated by a common whim—a brief winged tangle in which a beautiful sprite of velvety black hovering in a globular halo, shot through with two white semicircular arcs, was always a ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... boy who had been the general pet and plaything in early years, much as his own "Tilly Ann" was now; the dashing soldier, whose occasional visits to his native place in all the glories of uniform had caused on each occasion a flutter of excitement which had endured long after his own departure; the hero of romance, whose sudden appearance with a beautiful bride, wedded secretly somewhere up the country, had made more than one pretty ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... young ass," said one boy, whom the child, even in his flutter and misery, recognised as the boy who had accosted them at the door of Westover's that morning, "can't you answer without blubbering like that? Nobody's going ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... but his ears now would be his surest signals. He could not see deep in the thickets, but he could hear any movement in the underbrush a hundred yards away. So far there was nothing but the hopping of a rabbit. The bird over his head sang on. There was no wind among the branches, not even the flutter of leaves to distract his attention from anything that might come on ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... provinces, where the Union had struck widest root. Town after town sent its whole population to greet him. Roaring thousands met him at the railway stations, and he passed under triumphal arches and through streets a-flutter with flags, where working-girls welcomed him with showers of roses. "Such scenes as these," he wrote to the Countess, "must have attended the foundation of new religions." And, indeed, as weeping working-men fought to draw his carriage, and as he looked ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... brushing and ironing to restore its pristine brilliance; carried neither name nor initials on its lining; and lacked every least hint as to its ownership—or so it seemed until the prying fingers of P. Sybarite turned down the leather and permitted a visiting card concealed therein to flutter ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... Here was some one who knew Dick as well as she did—should she say a partisan or an accomplice? A dim jealousy stirred beneath Mrs. Peyton's other emotions: she was undergoing the agony which the mother feels at the first intrusion on her privilege of judging her child; and her voice had a flutter ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... some want of affinity upon the little grey hood which lay on the chair in the corner. Still she listened and responded as became her, though for the most part with eyes that did not venture from home. The little hood itself could never have kept its place with less presumption, nor with less flutter of self-distrust. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... Amid a flutter of flags and the cheers of onlookers, the 'ocean policeman,' H.M.S. Speedy, first took to the water on May 18th, 1893. Its birthplace was the banks of the Thames at Chiswick, but hardly had it settled itself on the smooth surface of the river when ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... sailor hat in one hand and swung her whip with the other. "I think not," she cried, and disappeared with a flutter of skirts and a scurry ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... blue violets flutter on the hill, but who would change for these who would change for these one root of the ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... of affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their disinterestedness and frugality."[9] Perhaps there is a flutter of self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was his neighbour and his friend.[10] On the whole, however, and so far as we know, Rousseau ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... me think, Billy!" she pleaded, in a flutter of joy and amazement. "Go away, boy dear!—Go away for a little and let me think! I'm not an emotional woman, but I'm on the verge of hysterics now, for—for several reasons. Go in to breakfast, Billy! I—I want to be alone. You've made me ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... arrival of the little troupe of peculiar passengers on the Hamburg in mid-ocean produced a flutter of excitement in both captain and crew. It was a feeling of mingled solemnity and gaiety. For the benefit now of the captain, now of the boatswain, or the first mate, or the cook, or the engineer, the physicians had to repeat again and again the account of how they had been sighted ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... a great flutter of excitement over the Queen's Fancy Dress Ball, which took place in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace on 12th May. Its leading feature was the assembling and meeting of the two Courts of Anne of Bretagne (the Duchess of Cambridge) and Edward III. and Queen Phillipa (The ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... her already, or had he not? She knew she would be able to guess the truth by his voice and manner the moment he answered her. No man can hide that secret from a woman who loves him. Yet it was not without a thrill and a flutter that she asked him, for she thought to herself, what must she seem to him after all the grand people he had been mixing with so lately at Dunbude? Was it possible he could see anything in her, a little country village girl, coming to her fresh from the great ladies ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... After the oysters, came a fish nearly three feet long all done up in sea-weed, then a big silver bowl was brought in covered with pie-crust. When the carver broke the crust there was a flutter of wings, and "four and twenty black birds" flew out. This it seems was done by the Japanese cook as a sample of his skill. All sorts of queer courses followed, served in ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... tomatoes that didn't pay for the plants, nothing but soft corn and no potatoes compelled Uncle and Aunt Tompkins to open an account at the corner grocery. The first month the bill came in, Aunt Sally was all in a flutter when she audited the items: Sugar, 60; coffee, 40; oatmeal, 50; sugar, 75; ditto, 80. "Lige, you go right back to the store and tell that cunnin' clerk that he's charged us fer what we never got. We ain't had no 'ditto' in this house." ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... house after the minister sat down was broken by the sounding of the trombones: then from beneath the trees Leonhard saw the beautiful procession again following the bier; and as he watched the flutter of garments between the dark-green cedar walls, it had been no difficult thing to see in that company not a company of mourners, but the ransomed sons and daughters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... direction at any time, he had removed the top of the jeep. Now he had to crouch below the windshield to avoid overhanging branches. Once three deer—a buck and two does—stopped in front of him and stared for a moment, then bounded away with a flutter of white tails. ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... happiness, and Love to be the desire of happiness, although the meaning of the word has been too often confined to one kind of love. And Love desires not only the good, but the everlasting possession of the good. Why then is there all this flutter and excitement about love? Because all men and women at a certain age are desirous of bringing to the birth. And love is not of beauty only, but of birth in beauty; this is the principle of immortality in a mortal creature. When beauty approaches, then the conceiving power is benign and diffuse; ...
— Symposium • Plato
... the moonlight had transformed into elfin playhouses. Perplexity as to Terry's whereabouts gave way to deep anxiety. Then his eyes caught the flicker of something white in the shadowy grove that fronted Ohto's house. Looking closely, he watched it flutter away among the trees, then a darker figure emerged ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... most becoming though sable garments, allowing her veil of thinnest gauze to flutter artfully and display her beautiful face while the long velvet sleeves open to the shoulder showed the double manacles at the wrist and above the elbow, made purposely too tight and cutting into the lovely ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege: how could he talk of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he worshipped? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard, he used to watch the flutter of the little girl's white dress, as she passed by to "meeting." He could not help it that his great limbs trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
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