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More "Freak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Amendment, since, should it arrive at woman's estate, it will, of course, be entitled to a double vote. How will it be should one end go Republican and the other Democratic? To send a duplex woman into the world seems to be a very unnecessary freak of Nature, seeing that there is enough of duplicity ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... was in the hotel, in my room. Some freak of fortune placed her in the apartment opposite. Knowing what presumably brought her to Algiers, the desire to have revenge upon you, I entertained a feeling of almost contempt for a woman who could so forget her sex and seek a man who loved her not. If it were I whom you jilted, ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... step toward her. At that, she looked around for some place to hide in, the animal instinct of flight arising first, and darted from her brother into the graveyard. Rice beheld this freak with quizzical surprise, but he had noted the disappearance of more than one maid through that gate, and was glad to have ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... first time giving him his adopted name, and smiling very amicably. "As I happened to be one of the very few people who knew or surmised anything about the matter, I thought it better to take affairs into my own hands—especially when I found that my daughter had come to your house. But for this freak of hers I should not, perhaps, have interfered. As you are no doubt prepared now to resign all hope of her, I am quite satisfied with the result of my afternoon's work. ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... on her way out to California, you see," Ellsworth began again; "down at El Paso she took a sudden freak for coming up here to see about the climate—lots of folks go West nowadays, you know, even in the spring. I'll warrant she's sick of the trip by now. A good climate has to have dust to season it. One of the mules went lame—thought we would never get here. And ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... farce, or freak, or whatever you call it, to end?' said I, as Harriot pulled me into the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... poetry, Browning takes rank with our greatest. His humour, like most of his qualities, is peculiar to himself, though no doubt Carlyle had something of it. It is of wide capacity, and ranges from the effervescence of pure fun and freak to that salt and briny laughter whose taste is bitterer than tears. Its full extent will be seen by comparing The Pied Piper of Hamelin with Confessions, or in the contrast of the two parts of Holy-Cross ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... special bibliography on the subject, and induced the new Woman's Club to take up a course of reading in it, so that there gradually filtered into the Orchardina mind a faint perception that this was not the freak of an eccentric individual, but part of an inevitable business development, going on in various ways ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... few quite private letters found their way into the archives of Nineveh, unless indeed this is a mere freak ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sometimes degenerate into sallies of passion, but which, upon the whole, raised and exalted his character to the true heroic dimensions. His factor, a respectable Edinburgh burgess, a gunsmith by trade, whom he had selected for no aptitude but from the freak of the name (Innes), could not always appreciate his schemes of improvement on the estate, which really were not based on economic considerations, but were meant to afford large means of employment to the people. In consequence, the duke, though he respected ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... wonderful freak of nature, been standing over there for ages untold; and I settle down beside those Cliffs because I can see there will be something in them for my children in days to come. But then, without warning, my baby grows ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... letters, to whom the Duchess presented her with the half kindly, half patronising air of one who feels that any genius in man or woman is a kind of disease, and that the person affected by it must be soothingly considered as a sort of "freak" or nondescript creature, like a white crow or a ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... Miss Bretherton! How many men and women, I thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who have! It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night before, as if the sudden overthrow ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gave no sign of recognition. He never knew his poor mother again. He was literally frightened out of his senses. The mother's anguish was terrible. The remorse of the sailor for his thoughtless freak was so great that it in some degree disarmed the indignation of the passengers and crew. The child had learned to read, and had made rapid progress in the studies suited to his age, but all was swept away by the cruel blow. He was unable to utter a word intelligently. Since he has been here, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... a great-aunt," began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, "a very wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was considered cracked, so maybe that's why I am a freak, and she was as wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... that, were it not for the company in which the fragments occur, we should be tempted to assign it to a much later age.' It is unfortunate that only a part of the design has survived, and that no parallel to it has ever been found. Was it merely a sport, the freak of some ancient potter who was weary of the conventional designs of his time, and tried his hand at something new, combining the wild life that he could see from the window of his workshop with that which crawled upon ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... thick among the gravel. But most of the parties were sinking, and it was a long way down to the bedrock; for the hills on both sides sloped steeply, and the Yuba must here at one time have rushed through a narrow gorge, until, in some wild freak, it brought down millions of tons of gravel, and resumed its course seventy feet above its ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... clasped a beautiful rose, because during his rational moments he so often spoke of the "pretty roses a-growin' by the brook down in the lane." The rose was presented by none other than Dr. Dale, not—so he assured himself—that he was in the least sympathetic with the Fairfaxes in their eccentric freak. It was simply for the good of the patient that ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... dislike to me. I am not a type that would please every one. My hair is too red—brilliant, dark, fiery red, like a chestnut when it tumbles out of its shell, only burnished like metal. If I had the usual white eyelashes I should be downright ugly, but, thank goodness! by some freak of nature mine are black and thick, and stick out when you look at me sideways, and I often think when I catch sight of myself in the glass that I am really very pretty—all put together—but, as I said before, not a type ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... he'd done, Johnny! Joe says their camp was just over the range from us that night FitzHugh looked us up, an' Joanne thought she'd been dreamin'. He didn't have any help, but his intention was to finish us alone—murder us asleep—when Joanne cried out. Joe says it was just a devil's freak that took 'im to the top of the mountain alone that night. He saw our fire ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... troops of horsemen dash down the wide causeway that crosses the narrow river. With equal speed the camp of the Crusaders, fully roused, is pouring forth its thousands, and King Baldwin sees, with the joy of a practised warrior, that the foolish freak of a thoughtless little maiden has brought about a great and glorious battle. The rescued Isabelle is quickly given in charge of a trusty squire, who bears her back to camp, and then, at the head of the forward battle, the boy ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... "Singular freak on the part of Grayson. Most eccentric man," he continued. "Danby tells me—now really what a coincidence! Sir James, by all that is singular! Ah, my dear Sir James, I was thinking about you. Ah, Edgar, my ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... therefore, when they were enjoying a quiet chat after school hours, he managed—without the slightest allusion to the runaway freak—to turn the conversation to the subject of "self-made men." Not, be it understood, that species of fungi who only love their ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... that these men had no conception of the great being they were practising cruelty upon. It is indeed a strange freak of nature that makes it possible that the human mind can think of Napoleon and these bureaucrats at the same time, but that is part of the mystery that cannot at the present stage be understood. Time may reveal the phenomenon, and in ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... course, but how would he get the fun out of doing a thing like that? No, we have to look either for a freak or a poor neglected child. Now, True Treds, take your ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... Sometimes they would give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female the over-vowelled ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... ticket, which he hands to the lady of his admiration, and which counts towards the prize. Each young lady also receives 5 per cent. on what she sells at her bar. The places are awarded by lot; and, by a freak of fortune, the two most attractive demoiselles happened to come together. These were Numbers One and Fourteen. The former young lady—who desires to be known by her number only, true genius being ever modest—was certain to stand Number One in popular esteem; and, if chignons are taken ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... fellow," exclaimed Captain Molineux, as the youth now joined their circle, "so you have clapped on the true harness at last. I always said that your figure became a red jacket a devilish deal better than a blue. But what new freak is this? Had you not a close enough berth to Jonathan in the Miami, without running the risk of a broken head with us today ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... It becomes us not to tell how that strange wooing sped. Suffice it to say that at the expiration of an hour Maude Glendower had promised to be the wife of Dr. Kennedy when another spring should come. She had humbled herself to say that she regretted her girlish freak, and he had so far unbent his dignity as to say that he could not understand why she should be willing to leave the luxuries which surrounded her and go with him, a plain, old-fashioned man. Maude Glendower scorned to make him think that it was love which actuated her, and she replied, "Now that ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... as plug hats don't grow on fig trees! Only not in the way I meant then. Not as a freak. But as a lawyer." ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... world has many unusual experiences in his life, but he rarely encounters men who say 'Well?' to him between their teeth. Mr Shute eyed this freak with ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... these rude sports in vessels of the King; but I do not remember to have known any more serious result than the settlement of some ancient quarrel, or some odd freak of nautical humour, which has commonly proved as harmless as it ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... I had that foolish fancy, a lover's freak, I suppose. When we married the curtain was removed although the brass rod on which it hung was left by some oversight. On my return to England after my loss, however, I found that I could not bear to look upon this lifeless likeness of one who had been taken from ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... young man, is a jealous mistress; she allows no divided affection." Are my affections divided? I think not, and I certainly do not confess any such thing to M. Mouillard, who has not yet forgotten what he calls "that freak" of a Degree in Arts. He builds some hopes upon me, and, in return, it is natural that I should build a few ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that some young wag of the company is "chaffing" him? Have you ever tried the sarcastic or Socratic method with a child? Little simple he or she, in the innocence of the simple heart, plays some silly freak, or makes some absurd remark, which you turn to ridicule. The little creature dimly perceives that you are making fun of him, writhes, blushes, grows uneasy, bursts into tears,—upon my word it is not fair to try ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... faith can alter never?"— Indeed it lasted for a—week! I know the length of Love's forever, And just expected such a freak. In peace we met, in peace we parted, In peace we vowed to meet again, And though I find thee fickle-hearted No pang of mine ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... submitting Miss Francis to vulgar publicity. Everything is for the best—Ive seen a hundred instances to prove it. Perhaps—who knew—something might yet happen to make it possible for me to profit by the freak growth. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... and scribblers are my game: Speed, Pegasus!—ye strains of great and small, Ode! Epic! Elegy!—have at you all! I, too, can scrawl, and once upon a time I poured along the town a flood of rhyme, A schoolboy freak, unworthy praise or blame; I printed—older children do the same. 50 'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A Book's a Book, altho' there's nothing in't. Not that a Title's sounding charm can ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... tither was a ploughman's collie— A rhyming, ranting, raving billie, Wha for his friend an' comrade had him, And in freak had Luath ca'd him, After some dog in Highland Sang,^2 Was made ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... fortunate rival. Although she found herself a guest at the Alhambra instead of being the mistress of the palace, probably, like many other ladies, she looked upon this affair of the singing-bird as a freak that must end—and then perhaps his Grace, who was a charming young man, would return to his senses. There also was her sister, a long, fair girl, who looked sentimental, but was only silly. There was a little French ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... independency. Let him make the most of his individuality; yet, as Aristotle said, "Man is a political animal;" his nature apart from the nation is incomplete; sundered from that to which he belongs he seems a freak. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... trotted on behind, but my military escort looked troubled. No longer striding proudly in front, he showed a desire to loiter behind, although so long as my grand chair kept close at my heels he could save his face by explaining my strange proceeding as the mad freak of a foreigner. But finally, when I bade the chair-men stop for a smoke at a rest-house, knowing they could easily overtake my slow-moving vehicle, he too disappeared, and only took up his station again at the head of the procession ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... shows some of the most fantastic workmanship of the sea, but the Gouliot Caves are its wildest and maddest freak. A strong, swift current sets in from the southwest, and being lashed into a giddy fury by the lightest southwest wind, it has hewn out of the rock a series of cells, and grottos, and alcoves, some of them ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... her friends, thought it the wisest and most promising scheme conceivable. Mr Ruthven would not hear of spending a night down in the harbour, watching for a boat which would never come. To ask such a thing of him after his sabbath-day's services, and all for a woman's freak, was such a thing as—as he would not describe. He could not think of doing such a thing. Lady Carse said he was no friend of hers if he did not. While Mrs Ruthven trembled and wept, Annie said that if she could only learn where Rollo was, all would be easy. Rollo ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... to tell him very little. Let him suppose it a mere freak, but a secret one, until the morning comes: then let him know that there is urgent reason for your getting Provis aboard and away. You ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell the story out ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... half adoze; Mimulus, wild in change and freak; Dainty flesh of the China Rose, Tender and fine as a fairy's cheek; (I watched him finger the folds apart To get at the blush in ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... courtyard. Broken tiles littered the ground. Here and there, lay bricks and bits of mortar. Some freak of backblast had torn a shutter off the house and it lay brokenly a few feet from him. He ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... came to the conclusion that Miss Gibson is as beautiful as it is possible for a dark beauty to be, and as nice as she looks. She isn't dark really, only her eyes and hair; her complexion is like cream: she's a freak of nature. Lucky young Maurice if she is to be his fate—and both ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... whose writings you ought not to neglect, describes beautifully a human menagerie. We'll quote that, and then let you off for the day. Heine was living in Paris in the forties, and used to visit a curious revolutionary freak named Ludwig Borne. Of this man's house ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... is likewise peculiar, but of more merit. It is one of Sir G. Scott's restorations. In the S. wall of the nave is the recumbent effigy of a layman (cp. Cleeve). Beneath the tower is a tablet commemorating a local "freak"—the two ladies of Foxcote, who appear to have been an early edition of the Siamese Twins. A neighbouring garden contains a good Elizabethan dovecot. Norton St Philip claims to possess the oldest licensed house in England—the George—a stately 15th ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... songs of the forest, or give out in brilliant scintillations the sunshine it absorbed in its growth. Flame is an ethereal sprite, and the spice of danger in it gives zest to the care of the hearth-fire. Nothing is so beautiful as springing, changing flame,—it was the last freak of the Gothic architecture men to represent the fronts of elaborate edifices of stone as on fire, by the kindling flamboyant devices. A fireplace is, besides, a private laboratory, where one can witness the most brilliant chemical experiments, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... properties of all the animals in its tribe, for it has no locomotion, stability, or endurance, neither goes to pasture, gives milk, chews the cud, nor performs any other function of the horned beast, but is a mere creation of the brain, begotten by a freak of the fancy and nourished by a ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Chatsworth Garden grew in this time out of the exaggerated taste, and must have delighted the French heart of Charles. Other artists have had the handling of this great domain since the days of Le Notre. A crazy wilderness of rock-work, amid which the artificial waters commit freak upon freak, has been strewed athwart the lawn; a stately conservatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive, if he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the monster-vegetation of the Eastern archipelago; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... King's service), wondering anxiously, meantime, what could have become of Walter, with many secret and painful misgivings, though she had been striving to persuade her mother that he was only absent on some freak of ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sixteen when you were born, and, having had my head shaved during my illness, my hair grew out the bright gold you see it now, instead of the dark brown it had hitherto been. A strange freak of nature, but a providential aid to the disguise I wished to maintain. I wrote to Cuthbert, informing him of your birth, praying his speedy return, but no reply came; and again and again I repeated the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... mean is you're really an individual very like the rest of us, subject, if I may say so, to the common desires, weaknesses and prejudices of humanity—and not a damned freak. ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... staircase, instead of concentric circles which twist around with each complete turn, the involutions become wider as they proceed, in such a way that the bottom of the pit is three times as large as the opening. Is it an architectural freak, or did some reasonable cause determine such an odd construction? It matters little to us. The result was to cause in the cistern that vague reverberation which anyone may hear upon placing a shell ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through the mess. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... Lucretia was the sole offspring. He was a man dissolute and devoted to play; and cared for nothing much but his pleasures and billiards, in which latter he was esteemed unrivalled. According to some, in a freak of passion, according to others, to cancel a gambling debt, he had united himself to his present wife, whose origin was obscure; but with whom he contrived to live on terms of apparent cordiality, for she was much admired, and made the society of her husband sought by those who contributed ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... It appears that the man wore an old hat of mine, which he lost in the storm. That was not the only article of property belonging to me he carried off. I have since had a penitent letter from him. He is doing well in the United States, and has been elected to the Legislature. I have given up the freak of dabbling in the show business, and merely keep a private theatre at such a distance from human abodes that no one can complain of it as a nuisance. Since the disappearance of my valet I have been travelling in my own yacht. I reached England the day before ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... him. His clothes were drying nicely, and did not seem to be losing any of their former generous proportions. So in time Landy might hope to be garbed in his proper attire as became a scout, and not an Arab or a "side show freak," such as ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... into the garden and, while Winkle climbed the wall to throw himself at Arabella's feet, Mr. Pickwick kept guard at the gate with a dark lantern. So far he threw its beam that a scientific gentleman who lived a few houses away, seeing the light from his window, took it for some new and wonderful freak of electricity and ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... here, you lazy freak, and work," cried Yan, and flung a handful of mud to emphasize ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... expressed surprise that she did not resemble her supposed father or mother in the least. She remembered that, on those occasions, Mrs. Minford had been much disconcerted; and Mr. Minford, remarking that it was a freak of nature, he presumed, had always seemed desirous of changing the subject. She remembered that this strange want of resemblance to either of her reputed parents had often been a puzzle to ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... remained insensible from the effects of the blow nearly two weeks; and when he recovered from that, he was sound again; his insanity was all gone. I saw him about three weeks afterward, but he had no recollection of me. He remembered nothing of the past year, not even his mad freak on my engine. But I remembered it, and I remember it still; and the people need never fear that I shall be imposed upon again ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Clipstone, whence he found the young ladies setting out to walk to Rockstone. He could not deny that he had acted and sung, though, as he said, his performance in both cases was vile. Little Miss Primrose had most comically taken upon her to patronize him, and to offer him as buccaneer captain had been a freak of her own, hardly to be accounted for, except that Purser Briggs's unsuitableness had ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Peter!" the young man broke in, soothingly; "you mustn't take those Sunday newspapers as gospel truth; those stories are printed for just such rampant old tenderfoots as you are; and even if there is one foolish freak, he doesn't represent all society in the better sense ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... some spirit Which protects us, and controls Every impulse we inherit, By some sympathy of souls? Is it instinct? is it nature? Or some freak or fault of chance, Which our liking or disliking Limits to ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... will excuse me, but I am not very well to-night." And so at last I got rid of him, still brandishing his pencil and his note-book. My troubles may be bad to hear, but at least it is better to hug them to myself than to have myself exhibited by Wilson, like a freak at a fair. He has lost sight of human beings. Every thing to him is a case and a phenomenon. I will die before I speak to ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... echoed with a sensation of relief: then, after all, her secret had not been guessed: it was truly some freak of the Queen's, and she turned more ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... one,' I replied shortly, as I had done before. 'It's a freak of the imagination, and you fancied ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... I believe," Mr. Hammond said to the two girls. "Bilby's attempt to annoy us must fall through now. We will get Totantora and Wonota back from Canada and finish the picture properly. But, believe me! I have had all the experience I want with freak stars. The expense and trouble I have been put to regarding Wonota has taught me a lesson. I'd sell my contract with Wonota to-morrow—or after the ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... had captured me poured out to meet us. Again I was the center of a wildly chattering horde. I was pulled this way and that. Pinched, pounded, and thumped until I was black and blue, yet I do not think that their treatment was dictated by either cruelty or malice—I was a curiosity, a freak, a new plaything, and their childish minds required the added evidence of all their senses to back up ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... come, I wondered, in one who from his face appeared to be old? Was there perchance, after all, some truth in the legend of Samson and did it dwell in that gigantic beard and those long locks of his? It was impossible to say and probably the man was but a Herculean freak, for that he was as strong as Hercules all the stories that I heard afterwards of his feats, left little ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... circle passed entirely across the greater orb, and then I was surprised to see it detach itself from the planet and remain for a few moments as a separate small orb in the sky! Could this be another freak of refraction? But before I could determine, the little orb disappeared behind the greater disc and was gone. The greenish spot, which I judged to be truly on the surface and caused by an ocean or great sea, was about ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... squadrons: an indisputable gap, though it turned to rich profit for Friedrich; Prince Karl paying no attention to it. Upon such indisputable gap a wakeful enemy might have done Friedrich some perilous freak; but Karl was in his bed, as we say;—in a terrible flurry, too, when out of bed. Nothing was done upon the gap; and Friedrich had his unexpected ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a tiny dwarf! Neither within nor without a freak exhibition had I seen so small a human being! A kind of supernatural dread gripped me by the throat at sight of it. As it turned with animal activity and bounded into my bathroom, I caught a three-quarter view of the creature's swollen, incredible head—which was nearly as large as that ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... To find in these words of Paul the guarantee of the inspiration and infallibility of the books of the collection which are translated from the Hebrew, and not those which are written in Greek, is a freak of exegesis not more violent than fantastic. We know that Paul read and used some of these apocryphal books, and there are several of the books in our Hebrew Bible that he never quotes or refers to in the remotest way. The attempt which is often made ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... to be dearly gained by the discredit into which the Parliament had fallen through its intemperance. But the contest between Wilkes and the ministry was only closed for a time; and when it was revived, a singular freak of fortune caused the very minister who had led the proceedings against him on this occasion to appear as his advocate. To avoid the consequences of his outlawry, he had taken up his abode in Paris, waiting for a ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... for an instant, and then resumed their watch of Harietta. Denzil looked at him and did not speak for a while. He had always been drawn to Stepan, from a couple of terms at Oxford before the Russian was sent down for a mad freak, and did not return. He was such a mixture of idealism and brutal commonsense, a brain so alert and the warm heart of a generous child—capable of every frenzy and of every sacrifice. They had planned great things for their afterlives before the one joined his regiment, ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... considerably; and she awoke her other daughters. Next, she learned from the maid that Aglaya had gone into the park before seven o'clock. The sisters made a joke of Aglaya's last freak, and told their mother that if she went into the park to look for her, Aglaya would probably be very angry with her, and that she was pretty sure to be sitting reading on the green bench that she had talked of two or three days since, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... producing seed. Nature is slyly freakish at times, and in this instance she changed the individual flowers into ray florets. Fortunately some observing flower lover saw this one original plant, for undoubtedly the freak occurred in one plant only, and transplanting it to his garden, eventually gave to the floral world the now common golden glow. If not noticed by some one, the plant would have lived its allotted term and died unknown to the world, for ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... work them off, as some might have done. I possessed no distinct talents, no marked vocation. If there was nothing behind and beyond all this, what an empty freak of destiny my life would have been—full, not even of sound and fury, but of dull common-place suffering: a tale told by an idiot with a spice of ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... him Ed had gone with this circus side show. "Side show!" he says. "That's just where he belongs. He ought to be setting right up with the other freaks, because he's a worse freak than the living skeleton or a lady with a full beard—that's what he is. And yet he's sane on every subject but that. Sometimes he'll talk along for ten minutes as rational as you or me; but let him hear ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... into a precious row, ye young spalpeen, in consequence of your freak," answered Adair. "Why didn't you pull up at once ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... in this freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man, dressed in the very fashion ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the other with a grimace. "Japs and Chinks eat all kinds of freak things—nightingale tongues and such stuff. No—thanks. Your Oku's a decent little sort, as Jap butlers go, but when it comes to cooking, give me Christian food and a ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... now became still, only a low laugh was just audible, and the fisherman said, as he came back to his seat, "You will have the goodness, my honoured guest, to pardon this freak, and it may be a multitude more; but she has no thought of evil or of any harm. This mischievous Undine, to confess the truth, is our adopted daughter, and she stoutly refuses to give over this frolicsome childishness of hers, although she has already entered her eighteenth year. But ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... may seem, this freak struck Madam Conway favorably. Arthur Carrollton knew that Maggie was unlike any other person, and the joke, she thought, would increase, rather than diminish, the interest he already felt in her. So she made no objection, ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... short-lived. It was resorted to for the last time during the Peloponnesian War (417 B.C.). The people then, in a freak, ostracized a man whom all admitted to be the meanest man in Athens. This was regarded as such a degradation of the institution, as well as such an honor to the mean man, that never thereafter did the Athenians ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... SUMMER-HOUSE was at the garden end, Which to the pair much ease was found to lend; Old Aldobrandin, when he built the same, Ne'er fancied LOVE, would in it freak and game. In cuckoldom he took his full degrees; The horse he daily mounted at his ease, And so delighted with his bargain seemed, Three days, to prove it, requisite he deemed. The country house received him ev'ry night; At home he never dreamed ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... knowledge that will just shake the puzzle into place, and explain the whole mystery to us. It seems to me a most remarkable thing that these two strange affairs should have happened in exactly the same place. That it is some strange freak of nature I have no doubt, but I am absolutely at a loss to think ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... the negro, the carpet-bagger, and the scallawag of Ulster. A peculiar freak of weather in the early morning added to their terror. The sun rose clear and bright except for a slight fog that floated from the river valley, increasing the roar of the falls. About nine o'clock a huge black ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... mots. The adherence of such men as are weak enough to be subverted by such trifles can do as little honor to Christianity, as their abandoning it for such reasons, can affect it with disgrace. The belief of such men could never have been more than habit, and their Infidelity nothing else than a freak of folly, which is reproachful only to themselves. But after all, this vehement objection to wit and ridicule, appears to me a little imprudent; for a sarcastic opponent might reply, that sceptics, have ...
— Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary • George English
... Through a queer freak of fate, Thad Brewster and his comrades of the Silver Fox Patrol find themselves in somewhat the same predicament that confronted dear old Robinson Crusoe; only it is on the Great Lakes that they are wrecked instead of the salty sea. You will admit that those Cranford scouts are a lively and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... of light in the western sky, whether caused by the low-hanging, mist-hidden moon or a freak reflection of the coming dawn. Against that patch of brightness the northern headland of Lost Island loomed up high and barren save for its one tall tree. But it was neither headland nor tree that caught Jerry's attention and caused the gasp ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... show of one of the great circuses some years ago was a strange creature which, for lack of a better name, its owner and the public dubbed, "A What Is It?" This freak had the semblance of humanity, and yet was not human. All its functions and feelings reversed the normal. Tickle it and it would cry bitterly; pinch or torture it and it would grin rapturously; when starved it repelled food, and when overfed it was ravenous for more. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... hour before our melancholy-looking guest had fully improved the opportunity with which a benignant Providence had supplied him,—a freak in which, one might conclude, she seldom indulged. He ceased to eat, and sat for a moment gazing pensively at the dishes. It seemed to me—but in this I may possibly be mistaken—that a darker shade of sadness possessed his face at the conclusion than the one that shadowed it so ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the cascade already introduced to the reader, there rises a little hill, with a flat or table-shaped top, as if it had once been a cone, whose apex had been cut off by some freak of nature. As already observed, such eminences are not uncommon throughout the plains of America, where they are generally termed mesas, or cerros de la mesa (table hills). The archaeologists of the province, in speaking of the hill in question—which simply bore the name of Cerro-de-la-mesa—declared ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... imitates the dead oak leaf, that again which imitates the human figure; the commonest but most pretty bee orchis, and the parallel ones which are called after the spider, the frog, and the fly. Strange freak of nature this, in a lower order of creation, to mimic her own handyworks in a higher!—to mimic even our human mimicry!—for that which is called the man orchis is most like the imitation of a human figure that a child ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... loveliest, and, in the old sense of the word, the liveliest. Why is this? Is it that it is born between Wind and Water?—Wind the father, ever casting himself into multitudinous shapes of invisible tides, taking beauteous form in the sweep of a "lazy-paced cloud," or embodying a transient informing freak in the waterspout, which he draws into his life from the bosom of his mate;—Water, the mother, visible she, sweeping and swaying, ever making and ever unmade, the very essence of her being—beauty, yet having no form of her own, and yet again manifesting herself in the ceaseless generation ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the west end of the nave, with which it is connected by an arch, low at first, but loftier as time goes on, until, in later Gothic churches, its height frequently is nearly that of the whole nave. The remaining three walls are usually external, and clear of the aisles. But sometimes, owing to a freak of planning, or, more frequently, owing to the conditions of the site, the tower is, as at Bibury, at the west end of one of the aisles. At Gedling in Nottinghamshire the tower and spire are at the end of the north aisle. The tower of St Michael's, ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... a dozen of the Arrowhead forces. Two of these were swiftly detached and bade to repair the break in the fence by which one Timmins was now profiting, the entire six being first regaled with a brief but pithy character analysis of the offender, portraying him as a loathsome biological freak; headless, I gathered, and with the acquisitive instincts ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... This was found in an undisturbed tomb in the Osiris temenos, where also was a strangely shaped three-sided pottery bowl, similar in shape to a stone bowl of the same period, but otherwise unknown in antiquity. This three-sided bowl may be regarded as a freak of the workman rather than as having any particular value along the line of evolution of pottery forms; and it is interesting to note that bowls of this form have been quite recently made by the modern English potters in South Devonshire, as the result of the inventive ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... affords me a sort of prideful satisfaction, which you may or may not be able to understand, that this cabin and everything in it is the work of my hands—of stuff I've packed in here with all sorts of effort from the outside. Maybe I'm a freak. But I'm proud of this place. Barring the inevitable lonesomeness that comes now and then, I can be happier here than any place I've ever struck yet. This country ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... quiet one; given to mischief like other boys of his age, doubtless, but always amenable. What can have possessed him to behave in such a wild manner I cannot conceive, but it seems to me that it was but a boy's freak." ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... Convenience to the publick be removd to Cambridge? Will our Constituents consent to be at the Expence of erecting a proper House at Cambridge, for accommodating the General Court, especially when they have no Assurance that the next Freak of a capricious Minister will not remove the Court to some other place? Is it possible to have that Communication with our Constituents, or to be benefited by the Reasonings of the people without Doors here, as at Boston? We cannot ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... gleam of pity or devotion in those lurid, upturned faces. To many of them it was a show, a spectacle; to others a terrible nightmare, to others a cruel freak of ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... was he fully dressed, but the white evening waistcoat he had been wearing had been changed by him within the last few moments for a waistcoat she had not seen before, though she had heard of its arrival from London. It was of cashmere, the latest freak of fashion. She also saw with surprise that his nankeen trousers were stained, as if he had been kneeling on damp ground. He looked very hot, his wavy hair lay damply on his brow, and he appeared ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... with her hands clasped, thinking. The officer at her side, looking down at her, was thinking also. He was fighting a slight mental struggle, a sort of combat he was quite unused to. Should he let the child go on in this wild freak? He knew the cottage by the sea; the peasant home would be dreadful to her. He knew that by that same day after to-morrow, life in lower Italy, with the dirty, coarse people about her would be a burden. Yet he hesitated. He fought the battle in this way: ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... the only available forest fire was one to the south of the Ohio River. For all I know, soot from a very great fire south of the Ohio might fall in Montreal, Canada, and conceivably, by some freak of reflection, light from it might be seen in Montreal, but the earthquake is not assimilable with a forest fire. On the other hand, it will soon be our expression that profound darkness, fall of matter from the sky, lights in the sky, and earthquakes are phenomena of the near approach ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Till dawn of day and I was made aware. Among the true were some vainglorious fools Called by the fife and drum from native mire To lord and strut in shoulder-straps and buttons. Scrubs, born to brush the boots of gentlemen, By sudden freak of fortune found themselves Masters of better men, and lorded it As only base and brutish natures can— Braves on parade and cowards ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the best position after all, and thus she remained till a man's step was heard on the stairs. Whereupon Lucetta, forgetting her curve (for Nature was too strong for Art as yet), jumped up and ran and hid herself behind one of the window-curtains in a freak of timidity. In spite of the waning of passion the situation was an agitating one—she had not seen Henchard since his (supposed) temporary parting from her ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... to have saved the shop from being smashed up, and you from getting a punched head," returned the Doctor with a laugh. "He's no fool—yet it's a freak of human nature that a simple hayseed like that—a man who's lived in the backwoods all his life, is likely to be the first to tumble before a pot of ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... help thinking of the notorious starvation freak at the circus who gets his meals on ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... the bushes, and that the horse bolted and ran away. And the man died from concussion of the brain. That would have happened if we had had a road of the first class, twenty feet wide, instead of this little seven-foot freak you all ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... side: No wonder now I look so thin; The tyrant stript me to the skin: My skin he flay'd, my hair he cropt: At head and foot my body lopt: And then, with heart more hard than stone, He pick'd my marrow from the bone. To vex me more, he took a freak To slit my tongue and make me speak: But, that which wonderful appears, I speak to eyes, and not to ears. He oft employs me in disguise, And makes me tell a thousand lies: To me he chiefly gives in trust To please his malice or his lust. From me no secret ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... shuddered slightly, and by a singular freak of my brain pictured to myself Monsieur Georges—Georges—my husband—in a cotton night cap and a dressing-gown. The vision flashed across my mind in the midst of the storm. I saw him just as plainly ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... a quarter of a century, the writing of many books, and the building up of a justly great and world-wide reputation between the two writings) strikes me as a singular, and, in a way, pleasing literary coincidence; singular, as a freak of subconscious memory for words, pleasing, as a verification in mature life of the writer's comparatively youthful observations of natural phenomena. I wonder if the author, or any others among his almost innumerable readers, have chanced to light ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... rejoicing over them. There was even a further surprise. Years ago an artist cousin had sketched her portrait in pastel crayons upon the color-wash of the wall. It had been done as a mere artistic freak, but like many such spontaneous drawings it had been an admirable likeness and a very pretty picture. It bore her name, "Ingred," in flourishy letters underneath. The whole of this had now been protected with a sheet of glass ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, individuality; curiosity, freak, abnormality, rarity, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... a couple of years, but brought few returns, except in Russia. Wagner became despondent and almost convinced he ought to give up trying to be a composer. People called him a freak, a madman and ridiculed his efforts at music making. And yet, during all this troublesome time, he was at work on his one humorous opera, "Die Meistersinger." On this ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... See Major Wee-Wee, the smallest man in the world, no bigger than a two-year-old baby, and Tom Morgan, the giant who stands seven feet three inches in his stocking feet. They are all there—every kind of human freak from the living skeleton to the fat woman who weighs four hundred pounds. The price is the same to one and all—twenty-five cents, only a quarter of a dollar. This way and get your tickets for the side show. There is just ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... minutes after the fixed time, and was told that a respectable clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... they were gone. But my father had come back to America, had sat down quietly in his elder brother's house, among the hills where I am to live, and was thought to be a sedate young man and a good match, till a freak took him that he must go back and find that girl in Italy. How to do it, with no clue but an amber rosary? But do it he did, stationing himself against a pillar in that identical church and watching the worshippers, and not having long to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... articles in the "Critical Review" next month, because they are yours. Young Evans (W. Evans, a branch of a family you were once so intimate with) is come into our office, and sends his love to you. Coleridge, I devoutly wish that Fortune, who lias made sport with you so long, may play one freak more, throw you into London or some spot near it, and there snug-ify you for life. 'Tis a selfish but natural wish for me, cast as I am on life's wide plain, friendless," Are you acquainted with Bowles? I see by his last Elegy (written at ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... however obnoxious, crammed down its throat. This Government has lost ground in public opinion, they were daily falling lower, and these predestinated idiots come and bolster them up just when they most want it. Tavistock acknowledged to me that they were unpopular, and that this freak had been of vast service to them; consequently they are all elated to the greatest degree. The Tories are sulky and crestfallen; moderate men are vexed, disappointed, grieved; and the Radicals stand grinning by, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the moment I found surprising and extremely startling, yet which I took for a mere carnival freak, while later on I could scarce review the occurrence with any degree ...
— The Gray Nun • Nataly Von Eschstruth
... is a matter of absolute indifference to me who the person is; but if it is that lout Coldevin—Lord, man! do you really pay any attention to what such a freak says? A man who carries a cigar-holder and a dirty comb in the same pocket! Well, I must be ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... hour later I'm on my way, with fifty dollars' worth of freak posies in a box, and instructions to stick around Thundercaps as long as I can, with my eyes wide open and my ears stretched. Mr. Robert figures I'll land there too late for the night train back, anyway, and after that I'm to use my bean. If I finds the case desp'rate, I'm to beat it for the nearest ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... of a hundred provincial middle- class women are boorish (pignouf lardes) to a high degree, even with pretty faces that ought to give evidence of delicate instincts. One is surprised to find a basis of gross self-sufficiency in these false ladies. Where is the woman now? She is becoming a freak in society. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... the gold had settled down and lay thick among the gravel. But most of the parties were sinking, and it was a long way down to the bed-rock; for the hills on both sides sloped steeply, and the Yuba must here at one time have rushed through a narrow gorge, until, in some wild freak, it brought down millions of tons of gravel, and resumed its course seventy feet ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... so doing. But Francis had no desire to be caught, and perhaps imprisoned for a considerable time, until he was able to convince the council that his share of the night's work had been merely the result of a boyish freak. With two strokes of his oar, therefore, he swept the boat's head round, thereby throwing their pursuers directly astern of them; then he and Giuseppi threw their whole weight into the stroke, and the boat danced over the water at a ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... thinking it some strange freak of the boy's disordered brain, and not wishing to break his friend's much needed rest, was trying in low tones to persuade the boy to ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... ought to be prepared to find, as in point of fact we do find, within the main body of Judaism, and not merely as a freak of occasional eccentrics, distinct mystical tendencies. These tendencies have often been active well inside the sphere of the Law. Mysticism was, as we shall see, sometimes a revolt against Law; but it was often, in Judaism as in the Roman Catholic Church, the outcome ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... occasional belts of woodland; the rugged ravines and limestone ridges affording good natural protection against fire; abundant fuel and water everywhere—these seemed to constitute the ideal ranch conditions. At the Upper Forks, through some freak of formation, the stream divided into two. From this point was easy access into the valleys of the Y.D. and the South Y.D., as they were subsequently called. The stream rippled over beds of grey gravel, and mountain trout darted from the rancher's shadow as it fell across ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... astray by my freak of fancy, without an opportunity of correcting it by MR. TURNER'S statement, the proper course for me is to acknowledge myself wrong—palpably, unmistakeably wrong,—MR. TURNER'S explanation is the correct one; thanks to him for ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... he had climbed so laboriously before, Ross miscalculated and tumbled back, rolling down into the mud of the reed bed. Mechanically he wiped the slime from his face. The tree was still anchored there; by some freak the current had rammed its rooted end ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... not that kind of people. You're not a real mountain man. You're not like Zavier or the men at Fort Laramie. You're Napoleon Duchesney just as I'm Susan Gillespie. Your people in St. Louis and New Orleans were ladies and gentlemen. It was just a wild freak that made you run off into the mountains. You don't want to go on living that way. That part of your life's over. The rest will ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... you—you, the greatest romantic actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie—now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and his ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... openly evince any spleen at her more fortunate rival. Although she found herself a guest at the Alhambra instead of being the mistress of the palace, probably, like many other ladies, she looked upon this affair of the singing-bird as a freak that must end—and then perhaps his Grace, who was a charming young man, would return to his senses. There also was her sister, a long, fair girl, who looked sentimental, but was only silly. There was a little French actress, like a highly finished miniature; and a Spanish danseuse, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... time of occurrence, which has nevertheless turned and altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in M. Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry Esmond ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... was not pure. If we could trace back the line of his ancestry we should expect to find that by some freak of fortune, one of the rigid old Puritans had married a descendant of some great Flemish or Italian painter. Love of graceful forms and bright colouring and voluptuous sensations had been transmitted to their ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... room she had a fancy to put on her "freak" dress. It was of gold tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes, and a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... when he heard of this freak of the Dey. He wrote to O'Brien,—"I frankly own, I would have lost the peace, and been myself impaled, rather than have yielded this concession. Will nothing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... every city, town, and village in the island. The same considerations of policy and advantage which render the union of Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more force to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a dozen of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or, still worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to fail in our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal blindness to the lessons which immemorial history has been tracing on the earth's surface, either ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... upon your honor, that when this freak of yours is over, and the bug business (good God!) settled to your satisfaction, you will then return home and follow my advice implicitly, as ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... sat an incongruous, startling, awe-inspiring apparition—a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect. He might have been frozen to stone, so immobile, so lifeless were his features. Belated visitors passed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words. Nobody ventured to overstep the threshold, whether from religious fear or because of something repellent, something almost putrescent, which radiated from his person. A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... eyes and moved the hearts of kings. See Major Wee-Wee, the smallest man in the world, no bigger than a two-year-old baby, and Tom Morgan, the giant who stands seven feet three inches in his stocking feet. They are all there—every kind of human freak from the living skeleton to the fat woman who weighs four hundred pounds. The price is the same to one and all—twenty-five cents, only a quarter of a dollar. This way and get your tickets for the side show. There is ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... "To what strange freak do I owe this visit from the Princess of Helium, who, two days ago, with rare consideration for my pride, assured me that she would prefer Tal Hajus, the green Thark, ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... first of these was the Baron de Maulincour. That young officer had met with disdain from Mme de Langeais and a better reception from Mme de Serizy; he betook himself at once therefore to his mistress, and under seal of secrecy told her of this strange freak. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... sluggish brain. What was it? I groped in vain for some clue. The pebble worried me, and I made a peevish gesture to throw it away. No! Whatever it was, I must not do that, rather wash it, wash it. Yes! that was what we used to do. But where was the batea, for now by some strange freak I was back in Brazil, and must have my batea. We washed our gravel for diamonds ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... days I saw nothing of Rodney. When at last we met, I said, 'That was a wild freak of Jeannette's ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Another strange freak, in a land where there is no night for two or three months, is that the better houses never have shutters, and seldom blinds, at the windows; therefore the sun streams in undisturbed; and when a room has four windows, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... of this pew and the aristocratical air of the family struck My imagination wonderfully, and I fell desperately in love with a little daughter of the squire's about twelve years of age. This freak of fancy made me more truant from my studies than ever. I used to stroll about the squire's park, and would lurk near the house to catch glimpses of this little damsel at the windows, or playing about the lawns, or walking out ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... imperfect self-knowledge dreaming of some sort of key and arguing that in the measure that its dream is based on true self-knowledge there must be a reality corresponding to it—a valid argument enough, supposing the locksmith to act on the usual lines and not to be indulging in a freak. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... during the first day's fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... over a couple of years, but brought few returns, except in Russia. Wagner became despondent and almost convinced he ought to give up trying to be a composer. People called him a freak, a madman and ridiculed his efforts at music making. And yet, during all this troublesome time, he was at work on his one humorous opera, "Die Meistersinger." ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... trusted Sssuri implicitly when it came to tracking. If the merman said that the snake-devil had a definite goal in view, he was right. But the scout was still a little bemused by a monster who was able to have any goal except the hunting and devouring of meat. Either the one who fled was a freak among its kind or—There were several possibilities which could answer that "or," and none of them were very pleasant ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... instance, the only available forest fire was one to the south of the Ohio River. For all I know, soot from a very great fire south of the Ohio might fall in Montreal, Canada, and conceivably, by some freak of reflection, light from it might be seen in Montreal, but the earthquake is not assimilable with a forest fire. On the other hand, it will soon be our expression that profound darkness, fall of matter from the sky, lights in the sky, and earthquakes are phenomena of the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... His clothes were drying nicely, and did not seem to be losing any of their former generous proportions. So in time Landy might hope to be garbed in his proper attire as became a scout, and not an Arab or a "side show freak," such as Toby ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... admiration. Surging through the muddy tide with a powerful trudgeon stroke, making a wake of swirling bubbles across which snaked the black coils of a heaving line, Little headed for the shore. Once he disappeared, as a freak of churning waters gripped several coils of line and jerked him back and under. But the innocent cause of all the trouble made no false estimate of his ability to rectify his error. He forged straight for his mark—that mass of slimy roots ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... an odd freak, but Bob began to have a pleasure in this renewal of intimacy; he wished he had been wearing his best suit. Years ago his father had brought him on a public holiday to the Museum, and his interest was chiefly excited ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... straightway I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust man. He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden: for the writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred! Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or perversity. It has a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more estimable origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness. It is, indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given (reluctantly) for a consideration, for several considerations. There is that robustness, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... waiting to meet me, was Father Knickerbocker himself! I know not how it happened, by what queer freak of hallucination or by what actual miracle—let those explain it who deal in such things—but there he stood before me, with an outstretched hand and a smile of greeting, Father Knickerbocker himself, the ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... misjudged," said Tom simply; "I got the reputation of being kind o' queer, anyway, and they'll just say I had a freak. You can see for yourself," he added, "that it wouldn't be good for us to go back together—even if my ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college; for having read De Quincey's description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. He found, as so many more have done, that the practice is ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... said. "A son. That's what I want. A real son. Not a freak. Not a damned little monster that has to go to the Clinic every month and take injections so it won't grow. And what happens to you if you take your shots now? What if they drive ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter that he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Had almost brought him off his legs,) Us'd him so like a base rascallion, That old Pyg — (what d'y' call him) malion, That cut his mistress out of stone, Had not so hard a-hearted one. 330 She had a thousand jadish tricks, Worse than a mule that flings and kicks; 'Mong which one cross-grain'd freak she had, As insolent as strange and mad; She could love none, but only such 335 As scorn'd and hated her as much. 'Twas a strange riddle of a lady: Not love, if any lov'd her! Hey dey! So cowards never use their might, But against such as will not ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... beggars beg, and the commonest people swear, in French! Oh! it's inexpressibly delightful. Why, the dogs understand it, and the horses—"everybody," as Kurz Pacha said to me, the morning after our arrival (for he insisted upon coming, "it was such a freak," he said,) "everybody rolls in a luxury of French, and, according to the ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... By some freak of fortune I had managed to qualify with a put of thirty-eight, one and a half. There were four of us in the finals, Fosgill, Tanner and Burt of the enemy, and I. Of course Patsy was there, and he worked like a Trojan. You could see, though, that ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... will not be till next week. I have been here since Friday as much a hermit as yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief seat is unwillingness ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... A wooden ellipse with a roof but no windows; such it appeared and such it proved to be. A mystery to Sweetwater's eyes, and like all mysteries, interesting. For what purpose had it been built and why this isolation? It was too flimsy for a reservoir and too expensive for the wild freak ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... In ten minutes I knew, that a sudden freak on the part of the girl he was engaged to had released him, without fault of his own, and that with this release new life had entered his veins, for the conflict was over and love and duty were ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... fruit. No milk, butter, cheese, tea, or meat appeared. Even salt was considered a useless luxury, and spice entirely forbidden by these lovers of Spartan simplicity. A ten years' experience of vegetarian vagaries had been good training for this new freak, and her sense of the ludicrous supported her through ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... this freak struck Madam Conway favorably. Arthur Carrollton knew that Maggie was unlike any other person, and the joke, she thought, would increase, rather than diminish, the interest he already felt in her. So she made no objection, and in a few days ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... am not so much worse off than Wildeve. There is nobody so poor as these professional fellows who have failed; and if you shouldn't like my redness—well, I am not red by birth, you know; I only took to this business for a freak; and I might turn my hand to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... is impossible to avoid contrasting this beautiful account of elegant dissipation with the noted freak of Sir Charles Sedley, to whom it is addressed. In June 1663, being in company with Lord Buckhurst and Sir Thomas Ogle, in a tavern in Bowstreet, and having become furious with intoxication, they not only exposed themselves, by committing the grossest indecencies in the balcony, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... "But her greatest freak was seen when th' Assizes came. Sir, she wouldn' even go to the trial. She disdained it. An' when, that mornin', the judges had driven by her window, same as they drove to-day, what ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... your life," interrupted the other with a grimace. "Japs and Chinks eat all kinds of freak things—nightingale tongues and such stuff. No—thanks. Your Oku's a decent little sort, as Jap butlers go, but when it comes to cooking, give me Christian food and a French chef ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of Friedrich's efforts, and hitchings of battalions and squadrons: an indisputable gap, though it turned to rich profit for Friedrich; Prince Karl paying no attention to it. Upon such indisputable gap a wakeful enemy might have done Friedrich some perilous freak; but Karl was in his bed, as we say;—in a terrible flurry, too, when out of bed. Nothing was done upon the gap; and Friedrich had his unexpected profit by it ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... down, and then—my stars! All the other women in the room may just as well go to bed and get a good night's rest for all the chance they've got. It isn't that she's beautiful. From what they tell you about her, you might fancy her a freak. Looks don't appear to matter to her; she gets there anyhow. I tell you ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Police was moved to quick sympathy. Really, when all was said and done, it was a shame that one like her should by some freak of fate have become involved in the sordid, vicious things that his profession made it obligatory on him to investigate. There was a considerable hint of the paternal in his air as he made an attempt to offer consolation to the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... to hunt for a man that isn't there; the next worst is to watch a man that has nothing to conceal. And our little old million-dollar-a-rod hill is the unlikeliest place to look for a mine I ever did see. Just plain dirt and sand. No indications; just a plain freak. I'd sooner take a chance in the pasture lot behind pa's red barn—any one would. We covered up all the scratchin' we did and the wind has done the rest. Here—you was to do ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... And so, though Lord Digby, Endymion Porter, and some others still spoke manfully for Montrose with the King, he is found back in Carlisle, late in July, with only his little band of Scottish adherents. Then ensued the strangest freak of all. With this very band he set out again distinctly southwards, as if all thought of entering Scotland were over, and nothing remained but to rejoin the King at Oxford. The band, however, had been but two days ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... these days when locomotion was making such strides. She hazarded this in the lowest key; but it happened in just that momentary hush upon which the faintest remark falls resonantly. The Commandant heard it across the room as he waited for Mr. Rogers to cut the cards; and the Vicar, by a freak of hearing, picked ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... burning such as induced Cassidy, who knew little of impressions and feelings in the absence of facts, to believe that no other head than his ever concocted the crime. Still, from the manly sincerity with which his young client spoke, he felt inclined to impute the act to a freak of boyish malice and disappointment, rather than to a spirit of vindictive rancor. He entertained no expectation whatsoever of Connor's acquittal, and hinted to him that it was his habit in such cases to recommend his clients to be prepared for the worst, without, at the same ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... enthusiasm of his youth, as well as personal antipathy, Bernadotte had never liked General Bonaparte when they were comrades and rivals for military fame. The fortune of Napoleon had dug a gulf between them. Raised to the throne by a curious freak of destiny, Bernadotte had brought to his new country no attachment for Napoleon, nor the enthusiastic recollections of France with which he was generally credited. He had asked the emperor to grant him Norway; but Napoleon did not wish to rob Denmark, and a contemptuous ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... much disposed to laugh at this freak of the old man's fancy, but to her surprise Humfrey coloured up, and looked so much out of countenance that a question darted through her mind whether he could have any such step in contemplation, and she began to review the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thin, and every sound from it can be plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in competition with the mail steamer's ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... upon me, I had lived in a world where I was great—alone. I had made myself a life—for that. I had thought I was the victim of some strange freak of nature. And now my world has crumbled down, in half an hour, and I see another world, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... hail-fellow-well- met, and as a bird of the same feather. In it was a piano and a very good old-fashioned library. It was like Paxton to loot a library. He had had his pick of the best houses, and took this one, "niggers included," for the servants, by some odd freak, preferred freedom with Paxton to slavery with their late owner. This gentleman was a Methodist clergyman, and Paxton found among his papers proofs that he had been concerned in a plot to burn Cincinnati by means of a ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 1909 there had been practically no opposition to the ratification of charters adopted by the several municipalities. But this year the machine leader in the Senate, Wolfe, let it be known that he would henceforth oppose "freak charters," "freak charters" to Senator Wolfe being those ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... attract readers of all ages and of either sex. The incidents of the plot, arising from the thoughtless indulgence of a deceptive freak, are exceedingly natural, and the keen interest of the narrative is sustained from beginning to end. Under False Colours is a book which will rivet the attention, amuse the ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... pretty disguise was a freak, such as only the most gay ladies permitted themselves; and she had little doubt that her father would be extremely displeased at his wife and daughter so appearing, although danger there was none; since, though any one ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... next week or so, she did not chance to meet the poet on the boulevard; and since she wished to conquer her tenderness for him, one cannot doubt that all would have been well but for the Editor of L'Echo de la Butte. By a freak of fate, the Editor of L'Echo de la Butte was moved to invite monsieur Tricotrin to an affair of ceremony two days previous to the wedding. What followed? Naturally Tricotrin must present himself in evening dress. Naturally, also, he must go to ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... most modest and deprecatory way. The man who expresses an opinion, or even a doubt, on this subject, contrary to the ruling traditions, will have a swarm of angry critics buzzing about him. He will be called a heretic, a heathen, a cold-blooded freak of nature. As for the woman who hesitates to subscribe all the thirty-nine articles of romantic love, if such a one dares to put her reluctance into words, she is certain to be accused either of unwomanly ambition or of ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... just then instantly riveted the attention of the listeners, for as though by some strange freak it had an intimate connection with the object of the scouts' coming to ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... To-night, by some freak of memory, it all came back to him through the dream-inducing haze of tobacco smoke. And there, on his writing-table, stood a full-length photograph of Lance in Punjab cavalry uniform. Soldiering on the Indian Border, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... stand on the edge of one of them and look sheer down a precipice two thousand feet! You may fancy a whole mountain scooped out and carried away, and yet you may have to reach the bottom of this yawning gulf by a road which seems cut out of the face of the cliff, or rather has been formed by a freak of Nature—for in these countries the hand of man has done but little ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... name indicates, consists of two sets of planes, one above the other. There are some triplanes, but they have not been very successful, and there are some freak aeroplanes built with ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... a long talk with my father the night he died, so I happen to know just what my income is. And I don't spend much. There isn't anything to spend it for. Of course, when I go back to school, I mean to put up a new gymnasium. The one we have is a freak; but ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... that freak," said the jester. "There be a dozen tailors and all the Queen's tirewomen frizzling up a good piece of cloth of gold for the lion's mane, covering a club with green damask with pricks, cutting out green ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... been playing the chivalrous role of rescuer of distressed damsels—squire of dames and what not. The last one would have ascribed to you at least at this end of your life. Ha," throwing up his head with a mirthless laugh; "how little any of us would have thought what a blessing in disguise your freak of self-exile was destined to become ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... cries and rustling wings, rose here and there, startled from their quiet nests by the approaching inundation, which by this time had completely hidden what was called in that region the public road. De Fervlans, at a loss what to make of this singular freak of nature, sent a horseman to the right, and one to the left, to examine the ground, and learn whence came the sea of slime, and how it might be avoided. Each of his messengers returned with the information that the slime was flowing in the direction he had ridden. The source, then, ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... amiable towards him, because they loved him; and because they wholesomely feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and Ananias-and-Sapphira, the green parrot, so named, as MacPhairrson ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... men's. But fashion changes too rapidly to make value of material always wise expenditure for one of slender purse. Better usually have two dresses, each cut and made in the whim of the moment, than one which must be worn after the whim has become a freak. In men's clothes the opposite rule should be followed since good style ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... travels? How many millions of acres of primeval forest have the ages edged with their fine steel cut through, and given to the plough! Fashion has its Iron Age as well as its Golden; and, what is more remarkable, the first of the two has come last, in the fitful histories of custom. And this last freak of feminine taste has brought a wonderful grist of additional business to the Sheffield mill. The fair Eugenie has done a good thing for this smoky town, well deserving of a monument of burnished steel erected ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... completely for an hour by some freak of the memory, comes back to him, and he sees his sullen, morbid boyhood changing into something worse still, until by slow degrees he became what he is now—dissipated, ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... him? Ah, say why! How was her fancy caught? What was the dream that he drew her by, Or was she only bought? Gave she her gold for a girlish whim, A freak of a foolish mood? Or was it some will, like a snake in him, Lay a charm ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... strange, perhaps, that I should speak of it in the midst of the terrors that surround me, and yet I can't help thinking of the whole affair as one freak of fate." ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air current reflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then he answered himself. "No. I guess it ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... fine. And the next day the Gov'ment fellers said "clear" and Beriah said "rain," and she poured a flood. And, after three or four of such experiences, Beriah was all hunky with the "house-party," and they looked at him as a sort of wonderful freak, like a two-headed calf or the "snake child," or ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... them. Theirs was gratuitous, coldblooded, and without visible motive, except that they appeared to hate the race more inveterately for having fled from it. Yet Simon Girty, like the Indians among whom he lived, sometimes took the freak of kindness, nobody could divine why, and he once or twice saved an unhappy captive ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... Some freak of the fancy has mastered you. I know nothing of the documents. How could I, a ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... "Another freak of Uncle Oliver's!" he muttered, as he turned his back upon Phil, and so signified that the interview was at ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... have given the modern style of these regiments as they were before the last freak of the War Office. What they may be now, I do not know; nor is the knowledge important, for the style I have used will probably be most familiar to my readers. "My Uncle Toby," it will be remembered, was of Leven's regiment. There exists a letter from Schomberg ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... A freak of fancy set him wondering where and when in the future a beautiful girl with red hair might march along some splendid aisle. Never mind! He became ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... so to speak, Is, my child, an awful freak; For if you get him in a stew, He'll blush quite red and glare at you. Yet if you eat much lobster salad, It will make you ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... Robin came downstairs to find the house deserted except for the noiseless butlers who stared at her as though she were some strange freak. Apparently no one stirred before noon, for Tom, coming in from the garage, greeted her with a pleasant: "Say, you're an early bird, aren't you?" and then directed one of the butlers to bring her ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... The fact that this was a grave, sacred in the same sense that his father's grave in Woodlawn was supposed to be sacred to him and to his mother, was overlooked in the silent contemplation of what an even less sophisticated person might have been justified in describing as a "freak." Nothing was farther from his mind, however, than the desire or impulse to be disrespectful. And yet, as he was about to turn away from this sombre pile, he leaned over and struck a match on one of the huge boulders. As he was conveying the lighted sulphur match,—with ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... connected by an arch, low at first, but loftier as time goes on, until, in later Gothic churches, its height frequently is nearly that of the whole nave. The remaining three walls are usually external, and clear of the aisles. But sometimes, owing to a freak of planning, or, more frequently, owing to the conditions of the site, the tower is, as at Bibury, at the west end of one of the aisles. At Gedling in Nottinghamshire the tower and spire are at the end of the north aisle. The tower ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... Legislation.—Syphilis has had a limited amount of recognition in law, unfortunately not always wise or timely. Freak legislation and half-baked schemes are the familiar preliminaries which precede the grim onset of a real attack supported by public sentiment. Typical examples of such premature legislation may be found in the setting up of the ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... unraveled them every one. Mrs. Jones declared there was no reason for the disappearance of Tom; his aunt Quincy said her flightiness had driven him to it; and Cousin Jack, Mrs. Tom's adviser, thought it just a freak after much dissipation, for Tom had been acting queerly for months before he did the vanishing act. The three were talking either from spleen or the wish to hide the truth. When there was no trace of Tom after a month of ordinary searching much of the ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... sure,—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, Incondita, and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; but they won ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Then he climbed on the fire step and looked over the parapet. It was a place where the spoils party had been particularly busy; and though the Company Officer was full six foot, he could only just see over the top; as a fire step it was useless to any one but a giant from a freak show. ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... eggs in all sorts of places, even on the ground, most of them being lost. "Before and during the breeding-season the females, sometimes accompanied by the males, are seen continually haunting and examining the domed nests of the Dendrocolaptidae. This does not seem like a mere freak of curiosity, but their persistence in their investigations is precisely like that of birds that habitually make choice of such breeding-places. It is surprising that they never do actually lay in such nests, except when the side or dome has been accidentally broken enough to admit the light into ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... McClellan replied: 'Why, Mr. President, according to Military Science it is our duty to guard against every possible or supposable contingency that may arise. For example, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the Enemy, by any chance or freak, should, in a last resort, get in behind Washington, in his efforts to capture the city, why, there the fort is ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... imperfection about these children, that they had inherited from their father, which was a freak growth of an inch-wide streak of white hair which started from the center of their heads and continued downwards to the base of their skulls, and which as it showed plainly in their black hair made this strange birth-mark all the more conspicuous. Otherwise they were mentally, ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... voice, sir. It is not a voice, it is a freak of grammar. It is masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender, singular by nature, and generally accusative, and it is optative in mood and full of acute accents. If you can find such another voice in creation, sir, I will forfeit mine ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on my arrival ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... pretty, and the bubbles as they ascended took the most lovely colours—emerald, purple, etc., turning into aqua-marine before breaking on the surface; but the odour was like terribly bad eggs. These hot springs are a curious freak of Nature, boiling and bubbling up within three feet of a cold water lake; in fact, we sat down and placed one hand in cold water and the other in hot. This was a very ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from the wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that height. It writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the captain like some threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked it away, and the ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... laying himself parallel with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter that he had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... might be a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air current reflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then he answered himself. "No. I guess it ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... at a sharp angle over the prison camp, and as he cleared the barbed wire fence Tom, who had been given charge of the packets, let one go. It fell just outside the barrier, caused by some freak of the wind perhaps, and the lad could not keep back a sigh of dismay. One of the three precious packages had fallen short of the mark, and would doubtless be picked up ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... the foothills in the environs of Clinton, Lillooet District, Province of British Columbia, there lived a "mossback" who was as happy as the 22nd day of June is long in each year. At initiative conclusions he would be classified with the freak species of humanity, but beneath his raw exterior there lurked rich mines which the moss kept a secret from ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... the above, who was evidently ignorant of the extent to which these monuments are scattered over the earth, seemed to regard it as a singular freak of Nature with no significance other than that of a ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... have the best right, which of course they have if they pay, to enter the most select places; so the conglomeration even at Sherry's sometimes is too amusing, and at the mirror place, which society would only go to as a freak, the company is beyond description. But they all seem such kindly, jolly people, all amusing themselves, and gay and happy. I like it, and the courtesy and fatherly kindness of the men to the women is beautiful, and a lesson to the male creatures of other nations. ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... age of eighty-three he rode a horse in a procession in Baltimore, carrying in one hand a copy of the Declaration of Independence; and six years later, when by that strange freak of chance ex-Presidents Adams and Jefferson died simultaneously on July 4, leaving Mr. Carroll the last surviving signer of the Declaration, he took part in a memorial parade and service in their memory. In 1826, at the age of eighty-nine, he was elected a director of the Baltimore & ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... tariffs at home, diplomatic facilities and valuable information abroad smoothed the way of the Teuton trader. Berlin rightly gauged the worth of this pacific interpenetration at a time when Britons were laughing it to scorn as a ludicrous freak of grandmotherly government. To-day its results stand out in relief as barriers to the progress of the Allies in the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... those inexplicable emerald circles to supernatural agency; if, indeed, anything connected with the "good folks" or "men of peace" could properly be called supernatural in times when a belief in fairies and every sort of fairy freak and frolic was deemed the most correct and natural thing in the world. Did not these circles, it was argued, appear in the course of a single night? In the sequestered woodland glade, nor herd nor milkmaid could see anything odd or unusual as the sun went down, and lo! next morning, as ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... she had no need to ask the question. She had heard of Anne Hamilton's extraordinary freak and had suggested that for the protection of the interests of Anne's relatives she had better be put under proper restraint. Still, she asked the question. One would have said from the deadly monotony of Lady Drummond's voice that she ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... be possible!" exclaimed the physician, amazed at this intelligence. "That woman—Mrs. Walton—told me that he was her son, only at times he denied his own name, so when he told me his name was 'Palmer' that day I imagined it only a freak produced by his mania." ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... natural keenness and long training, were able to pierce the dusk and he showed the way, steep and slippery though it was, with infallible certainty. They were on a lower slope, where by some freak of the weather there was snow instead of slush, when he bent down and examined the path with critical and anxious eyes. Robert and Tayoga waited in silence, until the hunter straightened up ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... only was he fully dressed, but the white evening waistcoat he had been wearing had been changed by him within the last few moments for a waistcoat she had not seen before, though she had heard of its arrival from London. It was of cashmere, the latest freak of fashion. She also saw with surprise that his nankeen trousers were stained, as if he had been kneeling on damp ground. He looked very hot, his wavy hair lay damply on his brow, and ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... dreary. Without, pouring rain; within, a fireless hearth; a room with but one window, and that containing only one whole pane of glass; not an article of furniture to be seen, save an old painted pine-wood cradle, which had been left there by some freak of fortune. This, turned upon its side, served us for a seat, and there we impatiently awaited the arrival of Moodie, Wilson, and a man whom the former had hired that morning to assist on the farm. Where they were all to be ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... tangled web of influence, all the clashes of will with destiny, of desire with convention, that have led to the crisis depicted. Fra Lippo Lippi gives no consecutive history of his life, only such snatches of it as partially account for his present mad freak, but the strife between his own nature and instinct on the one hand and the conventions and traditions of religious art on the other could hardly be more vividly presented. In a Balcony, the one drama in Men and Women, has but a fragment of a plot, but in intensity, reality, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... "That one came from the skipper of an express freighter. He blasted off this morning and ran through this so-called dirt. He thought it was just a freak of nature but reported it to be ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... however, only at a later stage that the story was affiliated to the Epic Cycle of Charlemagne. On the face of it there is clearly stamped the impress of popular tradition. Heads are not so easily replaced, except by a freak of the Folk imagination. It is probably for this reason that M. Gaston Paris attributes an Oriental origin to the latter part of the tale, and for the same reason the Benedictine Fathers have had serious doubts about admitting it into the Acta Sanctorum. On the other hand, ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds with keen discriminating sight, "Black's not so black nor white so very white." Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, "The silver-fox is but a phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a difference—!" Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms, and beaver-farms, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... which have momentarily met together to form this woman, present a combination which is agreeable to the eye. But that is but a freak of nature, and the atoms know not what they do. They will some day separate with the same indifference as they came together. Where are now the atoms which formed Lais or Cleopatra? I must confess that women are sometimes beautiful. But they are liable ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... while the ceremony was progressing in the dim recesses of the choir, and the surprise and dishonor this unexpected denouement brought upon the home were nothing to the unhappiness in store for the childish bride, whose latest and wildest freak brought neither wisdom for self-discipline nor power to endure that relentless criticism which ceased only when a little one lay in the place of the child-mother, who had been too weak to cope with the worries of the year that had followed upon that unhappy ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Emily had just begun to speak of her flowers, when they came upon the gardener, who was standing in consternation over the fragments of a broken mowing-machine. Jack—that was the donkey—had been left to himself just for a moment. It was impossible to say what wild freak had taken him; but instead of waiting, as he was expected to wait, stolidly, he had started off on a wild career, regardless of the safety of the machine. At the first bound it had come in contact with a flower-vase, ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... or something better, from the lips of an old Highland seeress! For me, I felt it so true, that the joy of hearing her say so turned, by a sudden metamorphosis, into freak. I pretended to rise, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... absolutely to stop the progress of a bill in Committee, but they enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last the bill went through. Then Shaw rose; congratulated himself ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Heine, whose writings you ought not to neglect, describes beautifully a human menagerie. We'll quote that, and then let you off for the day. Heine was living in Paris in the forties, and used to visit a curious revolutionary freak named Ludwig Borne. Of ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... his man were at work making a rude pinewood coffin. The servant was the elder of the two. He had a giant-like, sinewy frame and a grotesquely small head; his cheeks were round and red like apples, and his long whiskers evidently received some attention from his vanity; it seemed an odd freak for vanity to take, for all the rest of him was rough and dirty. He wriggled when the girl darkened the doorway, but did not ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Michel Agnolo— Judge all I do and tell you of its worth. Will you? To-morrow satisfy your friend. I take the subjects for his corridor, Finish the portrait out of hand—there, there, And throw him in another thing or two If he demurs: the whole should prove enough To pay for this same cousin's freak. Beside, What's better, and what's all I care about, Get you the thirteen send for the ruff! Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, The cousin! what does he to please ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and nervous energy fascinated Lord Emsworth. As for Mr. Peters, nothing like the earl had ever happened to him before in a long and varied life. Each, in fact, was to the other a perpetual freak show, with no charge for admission. And if anything had been needed to cement the alliance it would have been supplied by the fact that they were ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... has been produced on my mind—that's all. Call it a freak or fancy; worth trying perhaps as a bold experiment, and worth nothing more. Come a little nearer. My housekeeper is an excellent woman, but I have once or twice caught her rather too near to that door. I ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... "Law, young man, is a jealous mistress; she allows no divided affection." Are my affections divided? I think not, and I certainly do not confess any such thing to M. Mouillard, who has not yet forgotten what he calls "that freak" of a Degree in Arts. He builds some hopes upon me, and, in return, it is natural that I should build a ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... speedily had become distasteful to Armitage, who inwardly was floundering for a method of escape from the predicament into which his folly had led him. He had no wish to pose as a freak in her eyes. Still, no solution ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... forward awkwardly. Mike advanced toward her with something of truculence. Joe knew what was in his mind. If Sally treated him like a freak.... But Joe knew with deep satisfaction that she wouldn't. He went down to the ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... D[)e]borah, a prophetess', suddenly stopped, not much to the astonishment of the rustics, for they knew his ways. Then he went on 'Deb[)o]rah? Deb[)o]rah? Deb[o]rah! Now Deb[o]rah, a prophetess', and so on. Probably a freak of memory had reminded him that the letter was omega in the Septuagint. It will be remembered that Miss Jenkyns in Cranford liked her sister to call her Deb[o]rah, 'her father having once said that the Hebrew ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... came into the possession of a dog of doubtful ancestry and antecedents, but reputed to be intelligent. It was called "Little Willie" because of its marked tendency to the predatory habit. His other leading characteristic was an inordinate craving for Punter's "Freak" biscuits. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... taken that rare and extraordinary form. The mirage of their own caravan, rising, was reflected, mirrored, by some freak of the desert sun and air, upon the fine sand blown in the air at a distance from the train. It was, indeed, themselves they saw, not knowing it, in a vast primordial mirror of the desert gods. Nor did the discovery of the truth ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... sense of humor was not of a kind to comprehend this freak of Vere's, was for once really taken aback. There were two sliding doors to the cabin, one opening into the bows of the launch, the other into the stern. He got up, looking very grave and rather confused, and opened the former. The wind rushed in, carrying with it ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... reply. "I am no longer in the army, but it seems to me that to repair the damage done by the Kaiser's freak performances in the international arena, quite a number of national committees must be constituted under the auspices of the German Government. There are the Anglo-German, the Austro-German, the American-German and the Canadian-German committees, all to be formed in their respective ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... so I resolved to make the best of it by meeting the disagreeable old pantaloon on his own ground. I lit one of his cigars and sat down to tell the curious old freak what I thought of him. Ordinarily I would have avoided doing this, but his tyrannical exercise of his temporary advantage made me angry to the very core ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... his eye. Gee whiz, and he wares white wings dose he, and jumps up in the air. Some angel beleeve me, say mebbe he is a angel that has fallen from the sky? or a acrobat from Barnums? only I guess if he comes from Barnums he must be a freak al-rite. Ennyway until this yere ends you are my godchild and I am your godfather, and I forbid you to tuch enny more of that Teddys eats, understand? If you are hungry you just tell me, and I will send you the proper food; and it will not be gum, or cold-cream or candels ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... in the bush!" Robert heard him say. "There can't be! The place has no people and we know there are no big wild animals on the islands in these seas! It's some freak of the wind ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... romantic actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie—now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... on Lightmark's derelict paper, with its scribble of a girl's head. He considered it thoughtfully for some time, starting a little, and covering it with his blotting-paper, when Mrs. Bullen, his housekeeper, entered with a cup of tea—a freak of his nerves which made him smile when she ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... a freak, must be, most of these writer people are freaks," said Wilbur sympathetically. "Poor old girl, and I suppose you have got up a nice ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Meade Burrell saw much of Necia. At first he had leaned on the excuse that he wanted to study the curious freak of heredity she presented; but that wore out quickly, and he let himself drift, content with the pleasure of her company and happy in the music of her laughter. Her quick wit and keen humor delighted him, and the mystery of her dark eyes seemed to hold the poetry ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his common sense states uncommon, and according to the degree of over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... not have been more astonished, so absolute was his sense of utter loneliness; but when he saw that the figure was that of Miss Wycliffe, he stood like one transfixed and deprived of the power of speech. This was like a wild freak of his fancy, and he could scarcely believe the vision real. The surprise appeared to be entirely on his side, for she smiled as if the meeting were a matter of course, or one of appointment. Undoubtedly she had been listening ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... way out to California, you see," Ellsworth began again; "down at El Paso she took a sudden freak for coming up here to see about the climate—lots of folks go West nowadays, you know, even in the spring. I'll warrant she's sick of the trip by now. A good climate has to have dust to season it. One of the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... enthusiastic followers of Colonel Arnold. The concluding part of the history is written in the blood of our brave and gallant general; and now, in the closing scene of the drama, I find myself, by a singular freak of fortune, thrown again in your company, in a place where I had little ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... members and the Latin language. Even my "Caesar" caused me less misery at this period than did the problem of the proper disposal of my hands and feet. Do what I would they were hopelessly (by some singular freak of nature) in my way. The breeding of all the Bolingbrokes would have been taxed to its utmost, I believe, to behave for a single instant as if they did ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... watch from that elevated station the course she would take; although, indeed, he would not have been surprised if he had seen nothing, no trace of her in the whole nearness or distance; in short, if she had been a freak, an illusion, of a hard-working mind that had put itself ajar by deeply brooding on abstruse matters, an illusion of eyes that he had tried too much by poring over the inscrutable manuscript, and of intellect that was mystified and ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... condoled as a most loving comrade with Cecil on gracious Lady Cecil's death. His letter exhorting to implacability testifies to the closeness of their league against Essex. The Earl's fiery anger had burnt against both alike. Had his mad freak of treason succeeded, both would ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... kind! You did something for Amy Carringford—the pauper! You were spoons with her then, and you wanted to get her to my party. You begged an invitation for her and then dressed her up. like a freak so ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... several hours had passed. It was early afternoon. He dragged himself into the stern and sat up. The boat was in the middle of the stream. The wooded banks, with their base-lines of flashing ice, were slipping by. Near him floated a huge, uprooted pine. A freak of the current brought the boat against it. Crawling forward, he fastened the painter ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... piety amounted to a species of insanity, for, on one occasion, when rain prevented a contemplated progress to Hosho-ji, he sentenced the rain to imprisonment and caused a quantity to be confined in a vessel.* To the nation, however, all this meant something very much more than a mere freak. It meant that the treasury was depleted and that revenue had to be obtained by recourse to the abuses which Go-Sanjo had struggled so earnestly to check, the sale of offices and ranks, even in perpetuity, and the inclusion of great tracts of State ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... presented his stick, banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and a stick ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... of the News-Record staff was that their journal was too "respectable," too intelligent, to be widely read; that the "yellow journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record's smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of Bentinck's despatches of 1814 (when Ferdinand had ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... even that advantage might be thought to be dearly gained by the discredit into which the Parliament had fallen through its intemperance. But the contest between Wilkes and the ministry was only closed for a time; and when it was revived, a singular freak of fortune caused the very minister who had led the proceedings against him on this occasion to appear as his advocate. To avoid the consequences of his outlawry, he had taken up his abode in Paris, waiting for a change of ministry, which, as he hoped, might ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... in great despair about his mistress, who has taken a freak of——. He began a letter to her, but was obliged to stop short—I finished it for him, and he copied and sent it. If he holds out, and keeps to my instructions of affected indifference, she will lower her colours. If she don't, he will, at least, get rid of her, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... of that which was to come, his mouth twitched to a smile; he flattered himself he had kept his neighbours well scandalised during his life; now, from his death-bed, he would send widening circles of amazement over the whole county, and set tongues clacking and heads wagging at the last freak of that old reprobate, Ruan of Cloom. He lay there, grimly smiling, the pleasure of the successful creator in his mind as he thought over the last situation of his making. The smouldering patches of red on the crumbling logs shrank ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... smoking-room disclosures. But whatever our bad or good fortune may have been, it is not to be supposed for a moment that any of us enjoy such an enchanting revelation as comes to a young girl who, by nature's kind freak, has been made beautiful. Daisy Medland was radiant as she turned from Norburn's pale thoughtful face and careless garb to Dick Derosne, the outward perfection of a well-born, well-made, well-dressed Englishman, bowing, smiling, and debonair. Daisy ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... mood, in spite of the encroachments of factories and apartment houses. There are window boxes with flowers, and a sort of dim suffusion of conscious literary feeling. One has a suspicion that in all those upper rooms are people writing short stories. "Want to see a freak?" asks the young man in the bookshop as we are looking over his counters. We do, of course, and follow his animated gesture. Across the street comes a plump young woman, in a very short skirt of a violent blue, with a thick mane of bobbed hair, carrying ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... with a front tooth is Show Low," began Slim, speaking like a lecturer in a freak-show. "The one without a front tooth is Fresno, a California product. This yere chap with the water-dob hair is Sage-brush Charley. It makes him sore when you call ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... is a freak of nature. I have read of such before, but they are rare. Either that—or—are you quite sure that no practical joke has been played by any ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... time whether he had entirely forgotten her or not. Would he call, now that he was informed of her presence in the city? She knew (almost as well as if he had written it) the reason for his hasty flight from Colorow, and with a knowledge that he considered her a freak if not something worse she could not write to him, although she still had ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... had suddenly bounded forward; but as Grant followed he could see that the cause was the example of Phemie, who had, in some mad freak, dashed out in a frantic gallop. A half-dozen of the younger people hilariously accepted the challenge; the excitement was communicated to the others, until the whole cavalcade was sweeping down the slope. Grant was still at Mrs. Ashwood's side, ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... he found the young ladies setting out to walk to Rockstone. He could not deny that he had acted and sung, though, as he said, his performance in both cases was vile. Little Miss Primrose had most comically taken upon her to patronize him, and to offer him as buccaneer captain had been a freak of her own, hardly to be accounted for, except that Purser Briggs's unsuitableness had been ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... affection made him nicely observant of any change in Angelica, but still he was at a loss to understand this new freak, and her manner ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... roasted the fallen men. At Shiloh, during the first day's fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... killed in a cause I did not understand. Then, too, I was threatened with the wretched condition of an object of common curiosity. If I was going to be gazed at by this officer and his men,—if I was to be regarded as a freak,—my way certainly ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... fowls, salad, and wines; she also was in a new spring hat of purple, which made her rosy old face look like a china aster. Lavinia reposed upon the other seat; and the infants insisted on sharing the driver's seat, up aloft, that they might enjoy the prospect, which freak caused Flabeau's boy to beam and blush till his youthful countenance was ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... given with decision, yet kindly. Never should the event be made matter of public remark, nor should a letter or line of the former correspondence be rudely exposed. Let oblivion rest on the whole transaction. But so painful an issue should, if possible, be averted. For no freak of fancy, still less for the gibes and jests of others, should so important a connection be frustrated. The cause should be one that sober judgment will ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... waited as long as I could for you to come over this side to look after me, that I might cease wandering and settle down. As you know, I've tried my hand at a good many occupations, often for the freak of the thing, but always with a reserve force for doing the right thing at last, and somehow I've mostly made bread and cheese and a little more. The gold fever was over long before I reached Australia, but ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... captive. The way, thickly strewn with moss-bound stones and the mouldering skeletons of trees, required all the maiden's horsemanship. But she struggled on, until she reached something midway between a grotto and a hut, projecting from the side of the gully, and looking as though by some fantastic freak of nature it had grown there, so admirably was it in keeping with the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... man! he has lost his senses completely!" screamed their pale, ugly, kindly mother, who was standing on the threshold, and had not yet succeeded in embracing her darling children. "The children have come home, we have not seen them for over a year; and now he has taken some strange freak—he's pommelling them." ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of law, breach, of law, violation of law, violation of custom, violation of usage, infringement of law, infringement of custom, infringement of usage; teratism^, eccentricity, bizarrerie^, oddity, je ne sais quoi [Fr.], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c (qualification) 469. nonconformist; nondescript, character, original, nonesuch, nonsuch^, monster, prodigy, wonder, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... show it to Clarence, to talk to him, and feel his sympathy. He never retired much before midnight, and it was scarcely ten minutes' walk. She would get back before her father returned, and no one would know. Seizing her hat, she went quietly out. It was a freak, but then Beth had freaks now and then. A great black cloud drifted over the moon, and made everything quite dark. A timid girl would have been frightened, but Beth was ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... by some freak of mocking destiny, in a house in which two bores had established fortified camps. On the first night, we all became so dazed with intolerable dulness, that our powers of resistance faded away to the vanishing point. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... a remarkable freak was perpetrated on the body of Capt. Broady. He was standing, when in an instant he was thrown to the ground with great force, and he lay there quivering as if life were the same as extinct. Col. Barlow saw him fall ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... prematurely old and wasted face something that told of a wrecked life. Olive, prone to romance-weaving, wondered whether nature had in a mere freak invested an ordinary low-born woman with the form of the ancient queens of the world, or whether within that grand body lay ruined an equally ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... biscuit to the mouth of any member of the family to whom he is favorably disposed, offered the biscuit in the same way, entirely of his own accord, to his own foot—sitting on the floor, holding the biscuit in a waiting attitude to his toes—and this strange freak was repeated many times in the twenty-third month. The ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... crowd were laughing at the strange, ungirlish freak, And the boy was scared and panting, and so dashed he could not speak; And, "Miss, I have good apples," a bolder lad did cry; But she answered, "No, I thank you," from ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... George out of this notion, which Mac and I regarded as a freak, unnecessary in the first place, and impossible anyhow. But he was persistent, and I had to start out and try. I expected an expense of $1,000 and a delay of two weeks, but fortune or the devil favored us. So, purchasing at the exchange broker's in London ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... this appears to me rather a mad sort of freak; but, as I have begun the adventure with you, I will conclude it ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... at the carnival of 1775, where he dressed himself up as Apollo, and recited at the public ball at the theatre a masquerade he had composed on the subject of love, twanging a guitar vigorously all the time. He was afterwards heartily ashamed of this freak, which he wonders he could ever have been guilty of. An ardent desire for glory now seized him, and after some months spent in constant poetical studies, and in fingering grammars and dictionaries, he succeeded in producing ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference of mutual ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... to run in gouties or rubber snow-boots which slipped about inside the binding so that I had absolutely no control. This did not make much difference, as I knew nothing of the art and only used the Skis as a freak on days off from tobogganing. I knew nothing of wax, and when the Skis stuck, they stuck, and I thought it a poor game. When they slid I sat down and I thought it a poorer game. It never entered my head that I could traverse across any slope and so I always went straight ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... stylish, nor pretty. She is stupid!" Ah, girls, girls, do you really know what she is, or what she may become? A girl commonplace! Suppose she is not lively, is not fond of parties, does not use slang appropriately at all, is utterly ignorant of the last freak of fashion, and hardly knows whether her skirt is draped or plain; suppose she has, on the whole, a rather forlorn appearance, being pitifully unconscious of what is unbecoming in dress, or gait, or habit; suppose, in fact, she does not at once show you she has ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... badge of manhood, Ted soothed his wounded soul by appearing in collars of an amazing height and stiffness, and ties which were the wonder of all female eyes. This freak was a sort of vengeance on his hard-hearted mother; for the collars drove the laundress to despair, never being just right, and the ties required such art in the tying that three women sometimes laboured long before—like ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Wakefield will probably be remembered as long as the history of Australia and New Zealand is read, the man himself was, during most of his active career, under a cloud. The abduction of an heiress—a mad freak for which he paid by imprisonment and disgrace—deprived him of the hope of ordinary public distinction. For many years he had to work masked—had to pour forth his views in anonymous tracts and letters, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... "If I don't win to-night," she said, "it's all over. I shall have to own that he cares for me less than the dust. I shall have to throw up my hands and creep away and hide. Oh, my God, am I such a rotten little freak as all that, Irene? Tell me, go on, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Drummond was discovered, by whom I do not know, but is said to have been found by a man named Drummond, whose name it bears; that will make no difference with me, the question is, how came it there? Was it a freak of nature, or was it caused by warring of the elements, is a question for the consideration of those who visit it? That it was the effect of fire caused by lightning setting fire to the turf, or ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... on toward Lockley. Big trucks and little ones; passenger cars in between them; a few motorcyclists catching up from the rear by riding on the road's shoulders. They were closely packed, as if by some freak the lead had been taken by great trucks incapable of the road speed of those behind them, yet with the frantic rearmost cars unable to pass. There was a humming and roaring of motors that filled the air. They plunged toward Lockley's miniature ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... two up to?" asked Fuller. "What good is another star? The one we're interested in is this freak underneath us." ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... disturbance had long lost its psychical accompaniment. It worked its mischief in a physiological sphere but was probably still the starting point for the persistent obsession. My aim was to remove this cause. It would have brought little improvement simply to suppress the freak idea as long as that physiological source was active. On the other hand I should not have the means to stop the physiological after-effects of that real experience: I had to sidetrack it and to secure thus a reduction. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... the illustration. This was found in an undisturbed tomb in the Osiris temenos, where also was a strangely shaped three-sided pottery bowl, similar in shape to a stone bowl of the same period, but otherwise unknown in antiquity. This three-sided bowl may be regarded as a freak of the workman rather than as having any particular value along the line of evolution of pottery forms; and it is interesting to note that bowls of this form have been quite recently made by the modern English potters in South ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... sow has given birth to a freak of nature. The animal's face is almost human in appearance, it has neither eyes nor nostrils, but a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... of this adventure as a most remarkable answer to prayer. He had prayed for Suleiman before starting, and had also asked for guidance for himself, and God heard him. It has sometimes been represented as a mad freak on Gordon's part to put himself into the lion's den in this way, but it was nothing of the kind. Suleiman was in revolt, supported by a splendid army. Gordon was absolutely at his mercy, for he could not rely on his troops. It was only ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... left of the track. This Jebel el-Murayt'bah ("of the Little Step") is lumpy grey granite of the coarsest elements, whose false strata, tilted up till they have become quasi-vertical, and worn down to pillars and drums, crown the crest like gigantic columnar crystallizations. We shall see the same freak of nature far more grandly developed into the "Pins" of the Shrr. It has evidently upraised the trap, of which large and small blocks are here and there imbedded in it. The granite is cut in its turn by long horizontal dykes of the hardest ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... onto the lounge window by creating vacuums against it. The monster's mouth—a beak made of horn and shaped like that of a parrot—opened and closed vertically. Its tongue, also of horn substance and armed with several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears. What a freak of nature! A bird's beak on a mollusk! Its body was spindle-shaped and swollen in the middle, a fleshy mass that must have weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms. Its unstable color would change with tremendous speed as the animal grew irritated, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... last girl in the world who needs pleading for; but suppose, Leucha—I don't say for a moment I shall succeed—but suppose I were to go to Hollyhock, who feels that she has done her part and has shown her sorrow for her little childish freak in every possible way, would you, my child, accept her words of contrition, and when I brought her to meet you, receive her as one so noble ought to ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... while to consider this large and human Bunyan, who has been very erroneously supposed to be a mere literary freak, detached from all such influences as go to the making of other writers. He tells us, indeed, that "when I pulled it came," and that is delightfully true. Yet, it came not out of nowhere, and it is our part in this essay to inquire as to the places from which it did come. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... spare, sallow of complexion, with long, straight, black hair, and dark eyes—the precise colour of which no man precisely knew, for it seemed to change with his varying moods—was, as we have seen, by some strange freak of fortune, an apothecary's assistant. But merely to say that he was an apothecary's assistant very inadequately describes the man; for, in addition to that, he was both a poet and a painter in thought ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... confounded millionaire soap-boiler," commented Mr. Blunt through his clenched teeth. "A man absolutely without parentage. Without a single relation in the world. Just a freak." ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... that go And lips that speak Are not to know That which they seek.... Does Time jest so In a madman's freak? ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... does not build because he has no impulse to build; he does not know how. So he represents what the beaver was, thousands of years ago, before he learned how to construct his dam and house, reappearing now by some strange freak of heredity, and finding himself wofully out of place and time. The other beavers drive him away because all gregarious animals and birds have a strong fear and dislike of any irregularity in their kind. Even when the peculiarity is slight—a ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... foolishly sensitive about," said he. "A childish freak—playing with edged tools, you know. A boy-playmate chopped it off by accident: I cut his head open with his own hatchet, and made an idiot ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... clever fellow a very clever fellow in the eyes of his father. Bernard Amedroz knew that he himself was not a clever fellow, and admired his son accordingly; and when Charles had been expelled from Harrow for some boyish freak in his vengeance against a neighbouring farmer, who had reported to the school authorities the doings of a few beagles upon his land, Charles had cut off the heads of all the trees in a young fir plantation his father was proud of the exploit. When he was rusticated a ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... only are there variations for inheritance, class, locality, and so on, but there are here and there cases of out and out exception—which from all we can see must be assigned to some external force in operation on the individual. We call them "freak" occurrences, only because we cannot see the wider law or causes at work. When we meet them in sufficient numbers, we make new tables to cover them as far as we can, again in general only. Other causes still elude us, though they ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... was impossible to catch the animal, he informed me that it had eight legs with which to run. Four of the legs came out of the back, and, when tired with using the four lower ones, it just turned over and ran with the upper set. I did not see this freak, so add the salt to your taste, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... you mean? Even a woman can't take a freak all about nothing! You must have some reason for it, and I'm sure I've done nothing to offend you. I wrote only today to my sister to tell her to come up next month to our wedding, and I've been as affectionate and happy as ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... returned, bringing his mother from Madame Desroches's, the concierge told him of Philippe's freak,—how he had called intending to wait, and gone away ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... I shuddered slightly, and by a singular freak of my brain pictured to myself Monsieur Georges—Georges—my husband—in a cotton night cap and a dressing-gown. The vision flashed across my mind in the midst of the storm. I saw him just as plainly as if he had been there. It was dreadful. The nightcap came over his forehead, down to his ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... two of the more youthful and adventurous attendants might come with them, but the soberer custodians might either be dismissed or outridden. They were accustomed to the vagaries of the Lady Joanna, and would not be greatly astonished at any freak on her part. ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... toward her. At that, she looked around for some place to hide in, the animal instinct of flight arising first, and darted from her brother into the graveyard. Rice beheld this freak with quizzical surprise, but he had noted the disappearance of more than one maid through that gate, and was glad to ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of Complaints tapped with his fingers on the desk. Then he smiled. The postmaster was fond of a joke. Why not let this odd little freak from the West have an ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... By some strange freak of his half awakened intellectual faculties, Holmes was living over again the incident of his meeting Barbara on the desert the morning after her first arrival in Kingston. "Is it really you, or is it some new trick of this confounded desert?" he muttered. "I never saw a mirage like ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line! Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind— Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind? Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak, That now assemble, now disperse, in freak; They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout, Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about; See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace, Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting dace! Baffled at last, they quit the ungrateful shore, Curse what they fail to ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... John Randolph had no more intellectual right to be a sceptic, than he had a moral right to be a republican. A person whose imagination is quick and warm, whose feelings are acute, and whose intellect is wholly untrained, can find no comfort except in belief. His scepticism is a mere freak of vanity or self-will. Coming upon the stage of life when unbelief was fashionable in high drawing-rooms, he became a sceptic. But Nature will have her way with us all, and so this atheist at fifteen was an ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... here no masterpiece of sound constructive science, but a freak of inventive fancy using studied details for the production of a pictorial effect. The details employed to compose this curious illusion are painfully dry and sterile; partly owing to the scholastic enthusiasm for Vitruvius, partly to the decline ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... could speak, He'd tell, (as well he might,) How he would bear with many a freak, And wag his tail and look so meek, And neither bark ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various
... one who from his face appeared to be old? Was there perchance, after all, some truth in the legend of Samson and did it dwell in that gigantic beard and those long locks of his? It was impossible to say and probably the man was but a Herculean freak, for that he was as strong as Hercules all the stories that I heard afterwards of his feats, left little room ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Gombroon; and how else could he get at me? Surely the very fiend himself, if he happened to be in a high arctic latitude, would not indulge his malice so far as to follow its trail into the tropic of Capricorn. And what was to be got by such a freak? There was no Golden Fleece in Gombroon. If the fiend or my brother fancied that, for once they were in the wrong box; and there was no variety of vegetable produce, for I never denied that the poor little island was only 270 miles in circuit. Think, then, of sailing through 75 deg. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... paused to gaze A moment on the quiet moon-lit face, The face yet beautiful with new-told love! Perhaps his heart misgave him,—or, perhaps—— Now, whether 't was some dark avenging Hand, Or whether 't was some fatal freak of wind, We may not know, but suddenly the door Without slammed to, and there was Regnald shut Beyond escape, for on the inner side Was neither spring nor bolt to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... is also alleged to have seized the lady in a drunken freak. It is stated that the Sultan was so much enraged at this that he proposed to make war on Bruni. His minister, however, suggested that enquiries should be made into the strength of that kingdom before commencing operations. He was accordingly ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe to-day. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but most looked like ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... of the characters who tangled me at the start. But I did not budge until I had unraveled them every one. Mrs. Jones declared there was no reason for the disappearance of Tom; his aunt Quincy said her flightiness had driven him to it; and Cousin Jack, Mrs. Tom's adviser, thought it just a freak after much dissipation, for Tom had been acting queerly for months before he did the vanishing act. The three were talking either from spleen or the wish to hide the truth. When there was no trace of Tom after a month of ordinary searching much of the truth came out, and I discovered ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Drug and Chemical Co., St Gabriel Street, Montreal, Canada. Bad sailors take note! On this steamer were also, as honoured guests, Jim Jeffries, the redoubtable, going to his doom; "Tay Pay" O'Connor; and Kessler, the "freak" Savoy Hotel dinner-giver; also, by the way, a certain London Jew financier, who gave me a commission to go to and report on the ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... The poems about dying boundary-riders, and lonely graves under mournful she-oaks, are the direct outcome of the poet's too close association with that soul-destroying animal. A man who could write anything cheerful after a day in the drafting-yards would be a freak ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... he is not going to die of a boil; fire refused to burn; water positively declined to seek its level, but stands up like a wall; grains of sand become lice; common walking-sticks, to gratify a mere freak, twist themselves into serpents, and then swallow each other by way of exercise; murmuring streams, laughing at the attraction of gravitation, run up hill for years, following wandering tribes from a pure love of frolic; prophecy becomes altogether easier than history; the sons of God become ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... student of philosophic systems to cultivate is the "historic sense": by force of these convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn, is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to have been the creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts; so, beliefs the most fantastic, the "communism" ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... must have gone over the terrible drop, as straight as a plumb-line, on to the awful rocks below. We could see where the brown had torn up the turf as he struck all four hoofs deep into it at once. Indeed, he had been newly shod, a freak of Jim's about a bet with a travelling blacksmith. Then the other tracks, the long score on the brink—over the brink—where the frightened, maddened animal had made an attempt to alter her speed, all in vain, and had plunged over the bank and the ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... for her boy, his best friends died; and he got then a situation as second clerk at a lawyer's in Casterbridge. He stayed there for some time, and might have worked himself into a dignified position of some sort had he not indulged in the wild freak of enlisting. I have much doubt if ever little Fanny will surprise us in the way she mentions—very much doubt. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... automobilism of this great trial one can hardly overestimate it. There is no place here for the freak machine or scorching chauffeur, such as one has found in many great events of the past. A great touring contest over such a course would be bound to have important results in many ways. The ordinary class of circuit is a very close approach to a racing-track, with gasoline and tire stations ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... many peculiarities, such as having only one of the three semicircular canals of the ear well developed. It has a strong tendency to waltz round and round in circles without sufficient cause and to trip sideways towards its dormitory instead of proceeding in the orthodox head-on fashion. But this freak is a very educable creature, as Professor Yerkes has shown. In a careful way he confronted his mouse-pupil with alternative pathways marked by different degrees of illumination, or by different colours. If the mouse chose compartment ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the time of occurrence, which has nevertheless turned and altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in M. Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... said Correy, "will probably be some little ball of mud with a tricky atmosphere or some freak vegetation they want to study. ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... "malice," and would vex, tease, pique me sometimes about what she called my "bizarreries anglaises," my "caprices insulaires," with a wild and witty wickedness that made a perfect white demon of her while it lasted. This was rare, however, and the elfish freak was always short: sometimes when driven a little hard in the war of words—for her tongue did ample justice to the pith, the point, the delicacy of her native French, in which language she always attacked me—I used to turn upon her with my old decision, and arrest bodily the sprite that ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... How frisky a few freak clothes make you feel, don't they? Mr. Robert begins cuttin' up at once, and even Ferdie shows signs of wantin' to indulge in frivolous motions, if he only knew how. The reg'lar movie people gets the idea this is goin' to be some kind ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... heavier precipitation; the occasional belts of woodland; the rugged ravines and limestone ridges affording good natural protection against fire; abundant fuel and water everywhere—these seemed to constitute the ideal ranch conditions. At the Upper Forks, through some freak of formation, the stream divided into two. From this point was easy access into the valleys of the Y.D. and the South Y.D., as they were subsequently called. The stream rippled over beds of grey gravel, and mountain trout darted from the rancher's shadow as it fell across ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... owned, an affliction; and an affliction against which, since the boats had parted company, there was no redress. He was conceited, selfish, tyrannical, and inordinately lazy. He never took a hand with the paddle, but would compel the others to work, or to idle, as the freak took him. He docked the crew's allowance but fed himself complacently on more than full rations, proving this to be his due by discourse on the innate superiority of Frenchmen over Canadians, Englishmen ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that night of our return from Penarvon? Judge of him by that. He would not spare you. To gratify I know not what wildness in his nature, he did not hesitate to open your old wound. And to what purpose? A freak of passion!" ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... admitted. "To hear you repeat it, of course it sounds as if the man was a freak. But he wasn't. He was just one of those fellows that are born utterly commonplace, and slide through life without getting any marks put ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... fatal cross or blight. He saluted hardly anybody except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark girl's that brought him there, for he had the air of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... question of time when it will reach the high lands. It is in the Dismal Swamp that Lake Drummond was discovered, by whom I do not know, but is said to have been found by a man named Drummond, whose name it bears; that will make no difference with me, the question is, how came it there? Was it a freak of nature, or was it caused by warring of the elements, is a question for the consideration of those who visit it? That it was the effect of fire caused by lightning setting fire to the turf, or some dead tree, there can be no doubt. At what time in the Christian era this eventful period ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... has not commanded my attendance. He will not, therefore, be surprised at my absence. I tell you, Roger,—I must go! Who would have expected the King to take it into his head to visit The Islands without a moment's warning! What a freak!" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... no farther in his protest against this unexpected freak of fortune, for Sylvia seized the paper and read the paragraph aloud with such happy emphasis amid Prue's outcries and his father's applause, that Mark began to feel that he really had done something praiseworthy, and that the "daub" was ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... own? I am thinking that it would be a good thing if there was never another dhrop of the crathur brewed in the world. How was it that the ship came to be cast away, I should like to know? Look at the mate there; he is steady enough now, but let him get liquor to his lips we don't know what mad freak he would play. No, no; if we find a keg, the best thing we can do will be to knock in the head at once, before any one is ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... had heard my version of the manner in which we had spent the afternoon, he only said, 'I should have foreseen this. But the child—she is only a child, Rosa!—did her best!' and he looked so mournful that I, knowing he blamed me for his bantling's freak of temper, told him plainly that he cared a thousand times more for this diminutive bundle of hypocrisy than he ever did for me, and that his absurd favoritism was fast begetting in me a positive dislike for her. I couldn't ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... perceived. His first appearance in public was at the carnival of 1775, where he dressed himself up as Apollo, and recited at the public ball at the theatre a masquerade he had composed on the subject of love, twanging a guitar vigorously all the time. He was afterwards heartily ashamed of this freak, which he wonders he could ever have been guilty of. An ardent desire for glory now seized him, and after some months spent in constant poetical studies, and in fingering grammars and dictionaries, he succeeded in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... strange freak Ashmole MS. writes Guesse, and the Museum MS. Ghesse; but the emendation Kiss (adopted both by Dr. Grosart and Mr. ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Flemish freak to spoil pastime! They are not so scarce on the Marches these Flemish wenches, that they should fear being ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... profusely amongst the mosses, and lichens, and dead leaves, which formed so rich a carpet beneath our feet. Primroses, above all, were there of almost every hue, from the rare and pearly white, to the deepest pinkish purple, coloured by some diversity of soil, the pretty freak of nature's gardening; whilst the common yellow blossom—commonest and prettiest of all—peeped out from amongst the boughs in the stump of an old willow, like (to borrow the simile of a dear friend, now no more) a ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... curtains. Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed that the listener, if such there were, must have discovered her suspicion of his presence. She searched the curtains every morning after that, but never found anybody within them. Alec d'Urberville had evidently thought better of his freak to terrify her by an ambush ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... exclaimed the physician, amazed at this intelligence. "That woman—Mrs. Walton—told me that he was her son, only at times he denied his own name, so when he told me his name was 'Palmer' that day I imagined it only a freak produced by his mania." ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... feeling besides anxiety and suspense; keen disappointment was wringing his heart cruelly. Just when their clever little plot seemed on the point of working, a freak of fate had dashed his hopes ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... was felt, and an office which had never before paid anything to that of Great Britain came, under their administration, "to yield three times as much clear revenue to the crown as the post-office of Ireland." Franklin narrates that in time he was displaced "by a freak of the ministers," and in happy phrase adds, "Since that imprudent transaction, they have received from it—not one farthing!" In this connection it may be worth while to quote Franklin's reply to a request to give a position to his nephew, a young man whom ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... the tower, the clock struck twelve with a very deep intonation, and immediately some chimes began to play, and kept up their resounding music for five minutes, as measured by the hand upon the dial. It was a very delightful harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and seemed a not unbecoming freak of half-sportive fancy in the huge, ancient, and solemn church; although I have seen an old-fashioned parlor-clock that did precisely the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... followed Meade Burrell saw much of Necia. At first he had leaned on the excuse that he wanted to study the curious freak of heredity she presented; but that wore out quickly, and he let himself drift, content with the pleasure of her company and happy in the music of her laughter. Her quick wit and keen humor delighted him, and the mystery of her ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere wanton freak, in unconditional release.—Preposterous indeed that the only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning to seem the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... proved fruitless. "You can know nothing of women," was the end of his reflections, "if you do not know that what seems most improbable is what is most likely to be true. This maid is certainly not one of the flute-players or the like. Who knows what incomprehensible whim or freak may have brought her here? At any rate, it will be easier for her to keep her eyes open than it ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fancy, there came before me Vaness's well-dressed person, panting, pale, perplexed; and beside him, by a freak of vision, stood the old darky's father, bound to the live-oak, with the bullets whistling past, and his face transfigured. There they stood alongside the creed of pleasure, which depended for fulfilment on its waist measurement; and the creed of love, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... I considered Mike a very nice lad. His family is respectable; and he would have come into a very comfortable business, if he hadn't taken this foolish freak ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... the face she saw when a freak of chance led to her following that cab, and looking in out of mere curiosity at its occupant, was the face of her old lover—of her husband. Eighteen—twenty—years had made a man of one who was then little more than a boy. The ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... in extorting from me what was supposed to be the truth, remember the threats which made me compliant. I am a victim of circumstances. Whatever I confessed is false. No man of sense can discover the stamp of probability in my statements. In a freak of desperation I bore false witness. Tell my father that his cruelty is more sure to rob him of his daughter than her seeming transgression. Already I know not what I should believe, the past escapes my memory, my confidence begins to totter. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... look at that old picture; got up, as you say, on a chair to do so. Wasn't that the freak of an idle man, wandering, he hardly knows why, from room to room in an old and ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief that they were the victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle. Of the others, many who came to scoff remained to take raffle tickets; and one of the phonographs was finally disposed of in this way, falling, by a happy freak of the ballot-box, into the hands of Sir William Thomson.' The other remained in Fleeming's hands, and was a source of infinite occupation. Once it was sent to London, 'to bring back on the tinfoil the tones of a lady distinguished for clear vocalisations; at another time Sir Robert Christison ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my study. Rather a liberty! Don't like liberties. Always courteous to everybody—consequently, expect everybody to be courteous to me! Still, can't help smiling. It was a quaint idea to hang my old wideawake on the clock in my study. I wonder what put such a freak into the joker's head! Now let me look at the paper that has just reached me from London. Dear me, "The Vacant Chair." That seems a good title. And all about Gray's Inn! Now, I like Gray's Inn—a most excellent place; everyone connected with it great friends of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... family to whom he is favorably disposed, offered the biscuit in the same way, entirely of his own accord, to his own foot—sitting on the floor, holding the biscuit in a waiting attitude to his toes—and this strange freak was repeated many times in the twenty-third month. The child amused ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... that I was obliged to submit, and to accept of another lodging, about twelve doors off, which Mrs. Moore recommended. And all the advantage I could obtain was, that Will., unknown to my spouse, and for fear of a freak, should lie ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... that I am foolishly sensitive about," said he. "A childish freak—playing with edged tools, you know. A boy-playmate chopped it off by accident: I cut his head open with his own hatchet, and made an idiot of him for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... stated, they have heard that he gave sound advice, and was a good and profitable man to consult. Was it not a strange freak on the part of God, who plays sometimes jokes on us, to have granted so many perfections to a man so ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... by the tornado getting into the opening and lifting off the whole roof after having first swept away the house above. Another pathetic case resulted in the death of a whole family by an extraordinary freak of the tornado. The storm first struck a large pond and swept up all the water in it. Its next plunge deposited this water on one of these dugouts, and the family were drowned like ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... probably be some little ball of mud with a tricky atmosphere or some freak vegetation they want to ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... and a half exactly. This just covered the case comfortably, and he was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of madness. Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions and remarks, they said let it go for this time, and did not prosecute. The Baldwins were very wealthy. This same Baldwin had momentary fits of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... know pretty well that I won't hold that seat. What worries me is the fool use that some people will make of a freak election as a forerunner of doom. However, as I was saying about the Conference—I hope to get such a reasonable endorsation of Canada's stand on the main issues that our party here can work to victory ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... lady considerably; and she awoke her other daughters. Next, she learned from the maid that Aglaya had gone into the park before seven o'clock. The sisters made a joke of Aglaya's last freak, and told their mother that if she went into the park to look for her, Aglaya would probably be very angry with her, and that she was pretty sure to be sitting reading on the green bench that she had talked of two or three days since, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... got some news for you," went on young Crawford, "did you know that Sam Redding has entered that freak motor boat he's been building in the yacht club regatta? He's out for the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... a man cracked enough to make freak wills and not cracked enough to have them disputed on the ground of insanity. What did you do to him at Marvis Bay? ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... the strangest sensations in that bed, whose heavy dignity of ornament symbolized a past age; sensations of sacrilege and trespass, of being a naughty girl to whom punishment would accrue for this shocking freak. Not since she was quite tiny had she slept in that bed—one night with her mother, before her father's seizure, when he had been away. What a limitless, unfathomable bed it was then! Now it was just a bed—so she had to tell herself—like any other bed. The tiny child that, safely touching its mother, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... something for him in this job bigger than financial gain or loss. Week after week, as he overcame one difficulty after another, he was learning, learning, just as he had done at Weil & Street's. His hazel eyes grew keener, his face thinner. For the job began to develop every freak and whimsy possible to a growing building. The owner of the department store next door refused to permit access through his basement, and that added many hundred dollars to the cost of building the party wall; the fire and telephone companies ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was laughing at the strange, ungirlish freak; And the boy was scared and panting, and so dashed he could not speak. And "Miss, I have good apples," a bolder lad did cry; But she answered, "No, I thank you," from the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... or sympathetic guide. Tolstoi realized he could not be of service to the people he would uplift unless he lived among them, shared their trials and experienced their needs. The time has gone by when the musician and composer was considered a sort of freak, knowing music and nothing else. We know the great composers were men of the highest intelligence and learning, men whose aim was to work out their genius to the utmost perfection. Nothing less than the highest would satisfy them. As George Eliot said, ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... some minutes after the fixed time, and was told that a respectable clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... understanding joyously this freak of fortune. Mrs. Pole joined in their merriment, and the carpenter punched the butcher in the ribs for emphasis, as he said, "How's that, Pole?" The butcher made use of unpleasant language, as John relieved said, "The sale is over. You can settle with Mr. Grace." As ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... think they would," remarked Jerry, shrugging his shoulders, "for you certainly have a collection of freak pictures, some of which would ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... Egremont had been brought up in the enjoyment of every comfort and every luxury that refinement could devise and wealth furnish. He was a favourite child. His parents emulated each other in pampering and indulging him. Every freak was pardoned, every whim was gratified. He might ride what horses he liked, and if he broke their knees, what in another would have been deemed a flagrant sin, was in him held only a proof of reckless spirit. If he were not a thoroughly selfish and altogether ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... value to automobilism of this great trial one can hardly overestimate it. There is no place here for the freak machine or scorching chauffeur, such as one has found in many great events of the past. A great touring contest over such a course would be bound to have important results in many ways. The ordinary class of circuit is a very close approach to a racing-track, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... the following curious observations:—"I have noticed," he writes, "that those who walk or ride in the Park are, generally speaking, of two sexes, and possess, as a rule, four fingers and a thumb on each hand. By a curious freak of fashion, a frock-coat is not now worn with a muslin skirt; and a moustache may be sought for in vain under a sun-bonnet. Horses are ridden with four legs, and, in some cases, with a tail, although this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... the Land of Oz, but none more queer than this giant frog, who dresses like a man and walks on his hind legs. Come here, Wiljon," she called to her husband, who was eating his breakfast, "and take a look at this astonishing freak." ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... with my usual impetuosity of feeling, I pushed on among the most enthusiastic followers of Colonel Arnold. The concluding part of the history is written in the blood of our brave and gallant general; and now, in the closing scene of the drama, I find myself, by a singular freak of fortune, thrown again in your company, in a place where I had little dreamed of such ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... campaign that is being waged against our country by a clever and powerful enemy. And I feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... already been in such mortal terror of the consequences of Joe's mad freak, I should have laughed to see the wayfarers as they skipped out of the course of the runagate, not one of them aware as yet that it held human contents, nor guessing that the end might be more than ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... masterpiece of sound constructive science, but a freak of inventive fancy using studied details for the production of a pictorial effect. The details employed to compose this curious illusion are painfully dry and sterile; partly owing to the scholastic enthusiasm for Vitruvius, partly to the decline of mediaeval ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... to that magnificent freak of the caliphs, the construction of the palace of Azahra, of which not a vestige now exists, we may form a sufficient notion of the taste and magnificence of this era from the remains of the far-famed mosque, now the cathedral of Cordova. This building, which still ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... The freak memory is not worth striving for, but a good working memory decidedly is. Your power as a speaker will depend to a large extent upon your ability to retain impressions and call them forth when occasion demands, and that sort of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... corrugation, pucker, crease, furrow, rumple, crinkle, ruck; (Colloq.) notion, fancy, whim, caprice, vagary, freak, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... as the name indicates, consists of two sets of planes, one above the other. There are some triplanes, but they have not been very successful, and there are some freak aeroplanes built with ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... thanks doubtless to the diffusion of my portrait, everybody seemed to do. The interest with which she regarded me would have been more flattering had I not been aware that I owed it entirely to my character as a freak of Nature and not ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... actually pretend to pity you—you, the greatest romantic actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie—now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... quite right, Quatermain. I had that foolish fancy, a lover's freak, I suppose. When we married the curtain was removed although the brass rod on which it hung was left by some oversight. On my return to England after my loss, however, I found that I could not bear to look upon this ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... causeway that crosses the narrow river. With equal speed the camp of the Crusaders, fully roused, is pouring forth its thousands, and King Baldwin sees, with the joy of a practised warrior, that the foolish freak of a thoughtless little maiden has brought about a great and glorious battle. The rescued Isabelle is quickly given in charge of a trusty squire, who bears her back to camp, and then, at the head of the forward battle, the boy Crusader bears down upon the Saracen host, shouting: "Ho, knights ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... may have had some definite object in view," said Harley, "or it may have been merely a freak of his client. Is there anything characteristic about the ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college; for having read De Quincey's description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. He found, as so many more ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... are more beautiful and more easily understood than most of Michael Angelo's allegorical figures. Nevertheless, I used sometimes, when looking at these four figures, to think that they had been created merely as architectural auxiliaries, and that their expression was an accident or a freak of the artist's fancy, rather than the expression of some particular thought: at other times I saw as much in them as most enthusiasts do—enough, I have no doubt, to astonish their great author himself. I believe that very few people really ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... snows, So vies the lily with the rose Full on your dimpled cheek; But ah! the worm in lazy coil May soon prey on this putrid spoil, Or leap in loathsome freak. ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... dress and accessories in the companion piece did not seem to the critic to agree with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures, the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left (as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... blind faith placed in him by M. Chasles, Lucas embarked upon a series of deceptions so impudent, that it is easy to sympathise with the defence put forward by his advocate at the trial, namely, that the fraud was so transparent that it could only be regarded as a freak. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... are over eight feet tall," he said, "and others under four feet." He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. "Then there is a group of humans," he went on, "who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that—approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children," ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... mean, he's just a freak to you, and you'd like to look him over a little longer. There's no harm in that, if it amuses you. But don't be silly about broadening yourself." He regarded his daughter critically. "And leave out the deserts. They're too broadening, if you like. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... upon others that had proven better able to stand up against the wind. A few were fashioned in weird shapes, too; and to tell the truth, it looked as if Nature had taken pains to gather together on that one particular island all the freak things possible. ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... home until autumn, and it was September before she landed at Muscatine, from which place she expected to travel by land to her father's house. She was a large-sized, hearty-looking girl, eighteen years of age. Arriving at Muscatine, some strange freak induced her to assume man's apparel and enlist in the Twenty-fourth infantry, then in rendezvous at that city. She did this without exciting any suspicion, burned all her feminine garments and papers, neglected to inform her friends of her arrival, and became a soldier. Some comment ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... McCormick, whose first reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a fool for proposing "to stop ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... she returned alone Exactly where my glove was thrown. Meanwhile came many thoughts: on me Rested the hopes of Italy. 50 I had devised a certain tale Which, when 'twas told her, could not fail Persuade a peasant of its truth; I meant to call a freak of youth This hiding, and give hopes of pay, And no temptation to betray. But when I saw that woman's face, Its calm simplicity of grace, Our Italy's own attitude In which she walked thus far, and stood, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... bone and sparse of flesh in the mountain-desert. It was the more surprising to Pierre to see this young fellow with the marvelously delicate-cut features. By some freak of nature here was a place where the breed ran ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... an insect could be heard. I recollected the danger of becoming lost in such a place, and therefore I fixed my eye upon one of the tallest pinnacles of the opposite mountain. It rose sheer upright from the woods below, and by an extraordinary freak of nature sustained aloft on its very summit a large loose rock. Such a landmark could never be mistaken, and feeling once more secure, I began again to move forward. A white wolf jumped up from among some bushes, and leaped clumsily away; but he stopped for a moment, and turned back his ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... mistress," "My dear, dear mistress," recur like sobs. Margaret would have become a fiend under the mean shrew; but the holy influence of a good lady made a noble woman of her, and she became a pattern of goodness long after one rash but blameless freak was forgotten. All Margaret's race now rise up and call her blessed, and her spirit must have rejoiced when she saw her brilliant descendant appearing in England two years ago as representative of a ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... to the 61st and 168th Battalions, mount guard there day and night, and relieve each other regularly, like old campaigners. They have two drummers and four trumpeters, who beat the rappel or ring out the charge whenever the freak takes them, without any one knowing why or wherefore. The officers, with broad red belts, high boots, and their long swords dragging after them, parade the Place with pipes or cigars in their months. They glance disdainfully at ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... "A freak storm, in Titan's atmosphere. Guess the Nomad's done for." Carr drew her fiercely close as an awful picture flashed across his mind—of Ora's body mangled in twisted wreckage; of the savages ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... maybe a hot-water supply, and modern plumbing. As it is, it affords me a sort of prideful satisfaction, which you may or may not be able to understand, that this cabin and everything in it is the work of my hands—of stuff I've packed in here with all sorts of effort from the outside. Maybe I'm a freak. But I'm proud of this place. Barring the inevitable lonesomeness that comes now and then, I can be happier here than any place I've ever struck yet. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Professor, glorying in his inability to classify this marvelous specimen. "No fish could ever attain such mental development. Evolution working backward from human to reptile and then fish—or a new freak of evolution whereby a fish on a short cut toward becoming human?" He sighed and gave it up. But more reams ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the moment Philippa was suffering acutely, she was by no means prepared to permit this vile thing to conquer. She would fight it and root it out. It had come upon her so suddenly. What was the cause? Was it merely a freak of that incomprehensible phenomenon the human mind that had twisted the chain of her affection into so mischievous a knot, or merely a figment of the brain springing from inner consciousness to torment her with devilish ingenuity? ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... of a nest antique, Was caught alive one day. It was the captor's freak That this so rare a bird Should on his sovereign be conferr'd. The kite, presented by the man of chase, With due respect, before the monarch's face, If our account is true, Immediately flew And perch'd upon the royal nose. What! on the nose of majesty? Ay, on the consecrated nose did he! Had ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... of the hood soon showed Lucy who it was, and with an exclamation of surprise she turned inquiringly to a young lady who was standing near. To her look the young lady replied, "A freak of Anna's, I suppose. She thinks a great deal ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... "Oh, I'm a freak! I get away with it because I'm passably good-looking and know how to dress, and do what I please by the divine right of—well, of just doing it. But, even so, a lot of the men are rather afraid of me in their hearts. They suspect the bluestocking. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... expected to join in a day or two. Every visitor is provided with a voting ticket, which he hands to the lady of his admiration, and which counts towards the prize. Each young lady also receives 5 per cent. on what she sells at her bar. The places are awarded by lot; and, by a freak of fortune, the two most attractive demoiselles happened to come together. These were Numbers One and Fourteen. The former young lady—who desires to be known by her number only, true genius being ever ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... height, and then, according to the contemporary records, he was able to cross a river of considerable size before coming to earth. It does not appear that he had any imitators, or that any advantage whatever was taken of his experiments; the age was one in which he would be regarded rather as a freak exhibitor than as a serious student, and possibly, considering his origin and the sale of his first apparatus to such a client, he regarded the matter himself as more in the nature of an amusement than ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... boy," she said. "My goodness me, Nance! what a freak he is," and Jennie burst into laughter at the remembrance of Scorch O'Brien. "John and I took him to luncheon and John couldn't eat ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... of the room, and suddenly his face was distorted. For, in the darkness of the hall, he heard the child crying and lamenting. He stopped and listened to it like a man who resolutely faces his destruction. And, as so many times, he asked himself; "Is this a freak of my imagination, a trick of my nerves?" No, the sound was surely real, was close to him. It thrilled in his ears keenly. He could not doubt its reality. Yet he acknowledged to himself that he could not actually locate it. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... capable of producing seed. Nature is slyly freakish at times, and in this instance she changed the individual flowers into ray florets. Fortunately some observing flower lover saw this one original plant, for undoubtedly the freak occurred in one plant only, and transplanting it to his garden, eventually gave to the floral world the now common golden glow. If not noticed by some one, the plant would have lived its allotted term and died unknown to the world, ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting the probity of some one: "What! can a man of intelligence like you accept the prejudice of meum and tuum?"[217] Such speech, however, was probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as who should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without anything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked toes. "She was absolutely charming," said one of a new-comer; "she did not utter one single word that was not a paradox."[218] ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... to catch the animal, he informed me that it had eight legs with which to run. Four of the legs came out of the back, and, when tired with using the four lower ones, it just turned over and ran with the upper set. I did not see this freak, so add the salt to ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... Lisieux, is reported, by authors writing long after the event, as having returned to the lieutenant sent to him by Charles the Ninth. History is occasionally capricious, but she has rarely indulged in a more remarkable freak than when putting into the mouth of an advocate of persecution, a courtier and the almoner of the king, who was not even in his diocese, but undoubtedly in Paris itself, at the time the incident is said to have occurred, this declamatory speech: "No, no, sir; I oppose, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... great despair about his mistress, who has taken a freak of——. He began a letter to her, but was obliged to stop short—I finished it for him, and he copied and sent it. If he holds out, and keeps to my instructions of affected indifference, she will lower her colours. If ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... capsize a loud shriek rent the air, for all knew that to be cast into that dreadful tideway meant almost certain death. The impulse of my sister Jessie and Thora to put out in a small boat that lay at the water's edge, on the possible chance of saving some of us, was, therefore, looked upon as a mad freak. But when the two girls were seen to rescue me from the upturned boat, they were praised ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... the Serpentine; and after five minutes I came to the conclusion that Miss Gibson is as beautiful as it is possible for a dark beauty to be, and as nice as she looks. She isn't dark really, only her eyes and hair; her complexion is like cream: she's a freak of nature. Lucky young Maurice if she is to be his fate—and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... ruins of the cathedral were covered with corpses burned black from the heat of the flames and exposure to the sun. One woman, by some freak of nature, had her arms poised above her head as she sat dead, shrivelled almost beyond human recognition. It was probable that the Boxers had pitched many of their victims alive into the flames and driven them back with their swords and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... a similar freak of nature, this instinct which prompts one bird to lay its eggs in the nests of others, and thus shirk the responsibility of rearing its own young. The cow buntings always resort to this cunning trick; and when one reflects upon their numbers, it is evident that these little tragedies are quite ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... going through some process of transformation. One would think that the atmosphere, continually filled with tobacco-smoke, might impregnate the water unpleasantly for the scaly people; but then it is continually flowing away and being renewed. And what if some toper should be seized with the freak of emptying his glass of gin or brandy into the basin,—would the fishes die or merely ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... course I know you will reimburse me, but that isn't the question; and, anyway, it's the opinion of your friends, old man, that you will not be worse off for a little abstinence from fleshly pleasures. You are positively a freak in this ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... he said. "That one came from the skipper of an express freighter. He blasted off this morning and ran through this so-called dirt. He thought it was just a freak of nature but reported it to be on the ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... only a low laugh was just audible, and the fisherman said, as he came back to his seat, "You will have the goodness, my honoured guest, to pardon this freak, and it may be a multitude more; but she has no thought of evil or of any harm. This mischievous Undine, to confess the truth, is our adopted daughter, and she stoutly refuses to give over this frolicsome childishness of hers, although she has already entered her eighteenth year. But in spite of ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... in this crusade I was called crazy and a "freak" by my enemies, but now they say: "No, Carry Nation, you are not crazy, but you are sharp. You started out to accomplish something and you did. You are a grafter. It is the money you are after." Jesus said: "John came neither eating or drinking and ye say, Behold a wine ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... rendered the young lady a service, sir, and require no reward for doing so; and as for punishing those fellows, I would rather have the opportunity of drubbing a few of them with my fists for worrying poor old Dame Pitt's lame cow, than see them sent to prison for their freak. It may be all very well for them to bait their cattle when they want tender meat, but they had no business to treat that poor animal in the way they did; and I told them so when they began, and promised them I would put a ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... parts of the mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his common sense states uncommon, and according to the degree of over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... if he had money enough to see him through. He might be no good—he sure wasn't!—but he was Jessie's brother, and Jessie believed in him and thought a lot of him. It would be hard lines for that little girl if Harry were caught. Bill Brown, the meddlesome old freak!—he didn't blame Jessie for not wanting to stop there that night. She did just the ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... wilds, I was one of about threescore of men who for three days traversed them in search of the dead. Then was the scenery of the mountains impressive, much beyond what can well be spoken. The bridal that loses the bride through some wayward freak of the fair may be sad enough; so also the train, in its dark array, that conveys the familiar friend to the chamber where the light of nature cannot come. But in this latter case, the hearts that still beat, necessarily know that their part is resignation, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... alone with his own thoughts, to arrange the impressions he had carried away from his recent journey. Valentina Mihailovna had looked at him intently several times during dinner, but there had been no opportunity of speaking to him. Mariana, after the unexpected freak which had so bewildered him, was evidently repenting of it, and seemed to avoid him. Nejdanov took up a pen to write to his friend Silin, but he did not know what to say to him. There were so many conflicting thoughts and sensations crowding in upon him that ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... girl whom she held in aversion if not contempt. Then the note once in her possession she wished to keep it a day or so, in the hope that Petty might discover for herself where it had gone. It never entered her head that Beverly would go straight to Petty and explain the situation, and in a reticent freak quite uncommon to her nature, Petty had not confided this fact to Eleanor. And now it was out of the question to do so for the pupils were not permitted to visit the girls in ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... captain and his black charger for quite a different individual! It was some time before order and decorum were restored, as it was much easier for the judge to order Captain Maguire to be arrested for his freak, than to do it, "Bonny Doon" not being disposed to let any man approach her head or heels. They shut the captain up, finally, for contempt of court, and fined him twenty dollars, but he escaped the disagreeable ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... it instinct? or some spirit Which protects us, and controls Every impulse we inherit, By some sympathy of souls? Is it instinct? is it nature? Or some freak or fault of chance, Which our liking or disliking Limits to ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... for them to think of the despised grub-rider in the light of a rival, so they decided it was just a freak of coquettishness in Bela. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... much deeper and broader than those caused by any species of cart he had yet seen or heard of in the country, and the width apart was so great, that he began to suspect he must have mistaken a curious freak of nature for the tracks of a gigantic vehicle. Following the track for some distance, he came to a muddy spot, where the footprints of men and horses became distinctly visible. A little further on he passed the mouth of what appeared to be a cavern, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... arranged, and in the course of a few days the parlor of Locust Grove was echoing sometimes to the laughter, and sometimes to the screaming, of little Ella Grey, who, from some unaccountable freak of babyhood, conceived a violent fancy for Eugenia, to whom she would go quite as readily as to Dora, whose daily absence at school she at last did not mind. Regularly each day, and sometimes twice a day, Mr. Hastings came down to Locust Grove, and his manner was ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... herself that her strong inclination to sit down was owing to want of exercise, and the heaviness of her eyelids a freak of imagination; so, speedily smoothing her ruffled plumage, she ran down to tell her father ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... adds, "This remarkable example shews that man may sometimes possess the arrangement of tendons of thumb and fingers characteristic of the macaque; but whether such a case should be regarded as a macaque passing upwards into a man, or a man passing downwards into a macaque, or as a congenital freak of nature, I cannot undertake to say." It is satisfactory to hear so capable an anatomist, and so embittered an opponent of evolutionism, admitting even the possibility of either of his first propositions. Prof. Macalister has also ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... but no one interfered with us. We carried on all our operations as quietly as possible; and the only circumstances likely to arouse suspicion in the minds of the authorities, was the unusual absence of all disturbances of a minor nature within the walls, in consequence of the one engrossing freak in which most of the more turbulent spirits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... that by some freak of fortune his little friend had indeed stumbled upon the truth. Dreux was leaning back in his ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in competition with the mail steamer's ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... deed is not wasted on Europe, let us hope, though it benefits the fugitive wolf only for a moment. The plutocratic wolves presently smell him out. The fugitive shoots the unlucky wolf whose nose is nearest; shoots himself; and then convinces the world, by his photograph, that he was no monstrous freak of reversion to the tiger, but a good looking young man with nothing abnormal about him except his appalling courage and resolution (that is why the terrified shriek Coward at him): one to whom murdering a happy young couple ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... tours extended over a couple of years, but brought few returns, except in Russia. Wagner became despondent and almost convinced he ought to give up trying to be a composer. People called him a freak, a madman and ridiculed his efforts at music making. And yet, during all this troublesome time, he was at work on his one humorous opera, "Die Meistersinger." On this ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... of the woman you imagined you loved,—the response to her query,—the other half of her being; and that she was and is his destiny, and he hers, should not excite your envy or hatred. I say you IMAGINED you loved the Princess Ziska,—it was a young man's hot freak of passion for an almost matchless beauty, but no more than that. And if you would be frank with yourself, you know that passion has already cooled. I repeat, you will never see Gervase or the Princess Ziska again in this life; so ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Meriwether as I myself; that he would win her if he could; that his chance was as good as mine, even if we were both at our best. I knew there was nothing at which he would hesitate, unless some strange freak in his nature might influence him, such freaks as come to the lightning, to the wild beast slaying, changes for no reason ever known. Remorse, mercy, pity, I knew did not exist for him. But with a flash it came to my mind that ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... was simply frightful! No one in all the world was so unhappy as he. He was no longer a human being—but a freak. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... first edition, by a strange and distressing freak of the imagination, I took the 'old struggler' out of Lockhart and put ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... upward until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark eyes. Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as from pegs clumsily arranged about my person. By no conceivable freak of outer circumstance could I have the adventures ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... hat stood on the hearth filled with coal-ashes, while an inkstand upside down on a pile of linen bosoms had left an impression not easily effaced; the paintings that were in the room were turned face towards the wall,—some freak of James', as though ashamed to have ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... surrounded by thousands of miles of sea, the nearest land a group of islets like unto them, is found the gigantic tortoise, and in only one other place in the wide world, the Galapagos group of islands in the South Pacific. How, or by what strange freak of Dame Nature these curious reptiles, sole survivals of another age, should come to be found in this lonely spot, is a deep mystery, and one not likely to be unfolded now. At any rate, there they are, looking as if some ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... to automobilism of this great trial one can hardly overestimate it. There is no place here for the freak machine or scorching chauffeur, such as one has found in many great events of the past. A great touring contest over such a course would be bound to have important results in many ways. The ordinary class of circuit is a very close approach to a racing-track, with gasoline and tire stations ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... the latter ventured to remark cautiously, "that ye're prudent in what ye have done? Remember ye have asked no pairson at a' to dine with ye as yet,—it's a vera sudden an' exceptional freak o' hospitality." ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... cheer, I awoke with a head-ache. I got up to take a long walk, which often relieves me when suffering from that malady; and, on ascending the stairs, I met our landlord's eldest daughter, a tall, graceful girl of twenty. I found she was coming down backwards, which I took to be a mere girlish freak, or perhaps a piece of coquetry, practised on myself: but I afterwards found, that about the time the earth is at the full, the whole family pursued the same course, and were very scrupulous in making their steps in this ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... man had time to wonder what mad freak had kept his young master so long from the beaten road, he was at ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... Marie Louise Claire, but owing to Buonaparte's first wife having been Marie Louise too, she had been compelled to drop that name and assume that of Clotilde; a proclamation having been made that no one should be called Marie Louise but the Empress, and so by that vain freak of Buonaparte's all in France who were called Marie Louise ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... of year," he said. "Folks expect no better from that reckless, harum-scarum Joe Raymond. He'll drown himself some day, there's nothing surer. This mad freak of starting off down the shore in November is just of a piece with his usual performances. But you shouldn't have ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that followed Meade Burrell saw much of Necia. At first he had leaned on the excuse that he wanted to study the curious freak of heredity she presented; but that wore out quickly, and he let himself drift, content with the pleasure of her company and happy in the music of her laughter. Her quick wit and keen humor delighted him, and the mystery of her dark eyes seemed to hold the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... enjoys a strange monopoly; for by the Senate's will it is declared that no other theatre shall exist within the city walls. Yet, curiously enough, a wonderful old woman, by some unaccountable freak, has the privilege, or hereditary right, of licensing or directing a theatrical establishment within the boundaries, and thus a second theatre contends for the favours of the public; and in order to define its position ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had said, there might be half a dozen reasons to ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... meal of all sorts, potatoes, and dried fruit. No milk, butter, cheese, tea, or meat appeared. Even salt was considered a useless luxury, and spice entirely forbidden by these lovers of Spartan simplicity. A ten years' experience of vegetarian vagaries had been good training for this new freak, and her sense of the ludicrous supported her through ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... philosophic, it is personal. Because the Revolution is the dominant fact in modern history, therefore people suppose that the doings of this or that provincial lawyer, tossed into temporary eminence and eternal infamy by some freak of the revolutionary wave, or the atrocities committed by this or that mob, half drunk with blood, rhetoric, and alcohol, are of transcendent importance. In truth their interest is great, but their importance is small. What we are concerned to know as ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... being wealthy, was a man of business. His daughter should marry a man who had money sufficient to insure his worth. With perspicacity rare in a man, he had observed that the two singular men of this narrative admired his daughter. Now, Bat, being a freak, was making money rapidly, while Sampey was only a poor literary bureau! Castellani felt the need of a partner. Why should not a partner be a son-in-law? Surely Bat was much ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... came before me Vaness's well-dressed person, panting, pale, perplexed; and beside him, by a freak of vision, stood the old darky's father, bound to the live-oak, with the bullets whistling past, and his face transfigured. There they stood alongside the creed of pleasure, which depended for fulfilment on its waist measurement; and the creed of ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... direction of affairs, and to have left his energetic wife to follow her own will about details. There was no doubt in that lady's mind as to the methods to be pursued. Her husband had been culpably weak, and had allowed himself to be swayed by the freak of a boy who hated work and wanted an excuse for idleness. Honore must be brought to reason, and be taught that "the way of transgressors is hard," and that people who refuse to take their fair share of life's labour must ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... you all these details, to you so paltry, and try to describe the vision of green with which my prophetic gaze clothes this bare rock—on which top some freak of nature has set up a magnificent parasol pine—it is because in all this I have found an emblem to which ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... From that day the miserable Fitzroy was in her power; and she resumed a sway over his house, to shake off which had been the object of his life, and the result of many battles. And for a mere freak—(for, on going into Fubsby's a week afterwards he found the Peris drinking tea out of blue cups, and eating stale bread and butter, when his absurd passion instantly vanished)—I say, for a mere freak, the most intolerable burden of his life was ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... insanity, for, on one occasion, when rain prevented a contemplated progress to Hosho-ji, he sentenced the rain to imprisonment and caused a quantity to be confined in a vessel.* To the nation, however, all this meant something very much more than a mere freak. It meant that the treasury was depleted and that revenue had to be obtained by recourse to the abuses which Go-Sanjo had struggled so earnestly to check, the sale of offices and ranks, even in perpetuity, and the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... "My dear, dear mistress," recur like sobs. Margaret would have become a fiend under the mean shrew; but the holy influence of a good lady made a noble woman of her, and she became a pattern of goodness long after one rash but blameless freak was forgotten. All Margaret's race now rise up and call her blessed, and her spirit must have rejoiced when she saw her brilliant descendant appearing in England two years ago as representative ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the little Count, it was known that people were on the spot at the precise time he mentioned, and had heard nothing. The Count was pardoned, on account of his youth. The Dauphin made him confess the truth, and it was looked upon as a childish freak to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... from Edgar Crandall's face; he pulled his hat over the flaming helmet of hair. "I might have known such things ain't true," he said; "it was just a freak that saved Alec. There's no chance for a man, for a living, in these dam' mountains. They look big and open and free, but Greenstream's the littlest, meanest place on the earth. The paper-shavers own the sky and air. Well, I'll let the ground rot, I won't work my guts out ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Rankin with willful irrelevancy, "a very wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was considered cracked, so maybe that's why I am a freak, and she was as wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if they ever ran away they'd be spoiled for ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... never saw it lovelier than now It rises for the last time. If it sets, 'Tis that the re-assuring sun may dawn. [As he prepares to ascend the last tree of the avenue, TRESHAM arrests his arm.] Unhand me—peasant, by your grasp! Here's gold. 'Twas a mad freak of mine. I said I'd pluck A branch from the white-blossomed shrub beneath The casement there. Take this, and ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... These were Balaam's Ass and the Speculum Regale. Williams was indiscreet enough to predict the King's death in 1621, and to send the poems secretly to his Majesty in a box. The odd thing is that he thought himself justly punished for his foolish freak, so very peculiar were men's notions of justice ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... in men's. But fashion changes too rapidly to make value of material always wise expenditure for one of slender purse. Better usually have two dresses, each cut and made in the whim of the moment, than one which must be worn after the whim has become a freak. In men's clothes the opposite rule should be followed since good style ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... dumped out of its crated cars at the little Brook Center station. To the lover of Flemish and Spanish carving, to the connoisseur of Genoese cabinets and Italian intarsia, to the student of time-fumed designs and forms, the coming of this furniture might well have been an event; for by a freak of destiny, on the little platform of an obscure country junction were assembled the hoardings of centuries of tradition, the adored heirlooms of a long line of ancestry. One huge case, half wrecked, showed the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the dominant race of Pellucidar. By a strange freak of evolution her kind had first developed the power of reason in ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... did happen to labour under the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death already, it occurred to him that the board had, perhaps, in some unaccountable freak, taken it into their heads that this extraneous circumstance ought to influence their proceedings. It was very unlike their general mode of doing business, if they had; but still, as he had no particular wish to revive the rumour, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... practise his profession, no more was heard of him as a lawyer. But they who had known the young man in the chambers of that great luminary, Mr. Rugby, declared that a very eminent advocate was now spoiled by a freak of fortune. ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... sighed, "I am by profession a manicurist, but some freak of nature gave me the power of keeping my mouth closed, of looking as though I knew a good deal, but of saying so little. Now, messieurs, what could a poor girl know in the way of secrets for which that young man would get credit if he had succeeded in eliciting them? What could I know, indeed? I ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... do," he replied, "but the more he says it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll be at her feet ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... us all, but chiefly those Whom fate has favoured with an easy trust, To keep a bridle upon restless speech And thought: and not in flagrant haste prejudge The first presentment as the rounded truth. For true it is, that rapid thoughts, and freak Of skimming word, and glance, more frequently Than either malice, settled hate, or scorn, Support confusion, and pervert the right; Set up the weakling in the strong man's place; And yoke the great one's strength to idleness; Pour gold into the squanderer's purse, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... dream!—since I first saw my name printed below a passage of critical opinion. How many reputations, within that half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed! We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the first Legende des Siecles rejected as unreadable. In face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is on its head or its feet—"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels," ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... had been greatly impressed by the many things which Ben Greenway had said about his master's present most astounding freak, and hoping in his heart that repentance and a suitable reparation might soon give this hitherto estimable man an opportunity to return to his former place in society, he said as little as he could against the name and fame of this once respected fellow-citizen. When he communicated with the ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... hear you say this, Countess," he said very seriously. "I have been so bold on occasion as to assert—for your private ear, of course—that you could not, by any freak of nature, happen to care for Count Marlanx, whom I know only by description. You have laughed at my so-called American wit, and you have been most tolerant. Now, I feel that I am justified. I'm immeasurably glad to hear you confess that you do not ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... full of tender solicitude, was, Brigit thought, almost divinely beautiful as she watched it. And by some curious freak of the down-falling light only his head and shoulders were visible, and seemed almost to be floating in the gloom. Never had he been so handsome, and never so pitilessly remote. He had forgotten her; he had forgotten love; he was not even the Musician—he was a ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... respecting the forest and the forest fetes held upon that day. Cuthbert had observed an unwonted animation in his eyes as he had done so; but nothing in the young nobleman's manner had prepared him for this freak on his part, and he had actually failed at the first moment to recognize this fanciful figure in its smart forester's dress when first saluted by the wearer. But he was glad enough of the meeting, and the proposition ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... "I may not take your hand, sir, until you know me for what I am. There are none worse. I have been through the mire of hell itself. I have dishonorably betrayed a kinsman in the hope of gold. I had thought to kill. Only a freak of fate has stayed my hand. And there is more that I may ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... speechlessly; his chin trembled. Instantly, without words of shame on one side or of forgiveness on the other, they were back again, these two, in the old friendship of youth and middle age. "It was a freak," said Mrs. Richie, soothingly. "She is probably at the hotel by this time. Don't be troubled, Blair. Go and see. If she isn't at the hotel let me ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... that "a social constitution which produced a Lincoln and others like him is a good tree whose sure fruit leaves nothing to envy in the product of any monarchy or aristocracy." Lincoln was not, we want to believe, a freak, a sport of nature, but the "sure fruit" that should not only leave nothing to envy in others, but leave nothing to question in the soundness of a democracy that gives evidence of its spirit in remembering Abraham Lincoln more tenderly, more ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... peasants, the two beautiful girls brought captive in their midst. He knew at once who they were; even if the viciously triumphant look in Shu[u]zen's eyes, the piteous fright and affectionate sympathy in theirs, had not enlightened him. The presence of O'Kiku and O'Yui was due to an ill freak played by fortune. In the fall of the year an illness of the mother—cold?—came to its end and herself with it. What was to be done with farm and girls? To the villagers this question was of serious debate. Of one thing they were in dense ignorance. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... my voice, sir. It is not a voice, it is a freak of grammar. It is masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender, singular by nature, and generally accusative, and it is optative in mood and full of acute accents. If you can find such another voice in creation, sir, I will forfeit mine ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... that shall show future ages who it was that built up our finances, and furnished the sinews of war. Some may look upon this move as a mercenary one, but with me it is a passion. It is not simply a freak, it is a desire of ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... far out into the gulf to avoid the treacherous shoals, and to pass beyond the furious race of white-capped billows that poured from the great river for miles into the sea. Then they turned and made for the group of half-submerged mountains and scattered rocks that Nature, in some freak of fury, had thrown into the throat of Seven Islands Bay. That was a difficult passage. The black shores were swept by headlong tides. Tusks of granite tore the waves. Baffled and perplexed, the ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... prediction, Clemence's "strange freak," as they called it in the little village, was not condemned by every one. There were a few liberal-minded ones, who saw at once how the case stood, and resolved to uphold the girl in her course, though they feared for the future, in which ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... hue, like light within a rose, Is dimpling on her cheek, It wins a grace, it deepens now With every airy freak; A love-light in the rose like this, Ah, you may vainly seek; It shines for me, no shadows mar, Oh, little love, ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... women of notable standing in politics, art and letters, to whom the Duchess presented her with the half kindly, half patronising air of one who feels that any genius in man or woman is a kind of disease, and that the person affected by it must be soothingly considered as a sort of "freak" or nondescript creature, like a white crow or a ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... contemporary books of the kind, its own individual interest is not small; and I commend it with confidence to students of seventeenth-century domestic manners. To apologise for it, to treat it as if it were some freak, some unowned sin of Digby's, would be the greatest mistake. On the contrary, its connection with his life and career is of the closest; and I make bold to assert that of all his works, with the doubtful exception of his Memoirs, it is the one best worth reprinting. It is in no spirit of ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... with Doctor Beddington, who had charge of the asylum, was not sure that he would be pleased with their freak, and earnestly dissuaded his ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... you I know nothing of this place!" he cried—"I never saw it before! Some trick has been played on me ... who brought me here? Where is Elzear the hermit? ... the Ruins of Babylon? ... where is, ... Good God! ... what fearful freak of fate is this!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... naturalist. [3] He did good work in his line, but nothing is more peculiar to the man than his waywardness. It was impossible for him to do anything after the manner of other folks. In all his words and actions he was a freak, a curiosity, the prince of eccentrics. Yet this, the essence of the man, the fundamental trait of his character which shines out of every page of his writing and every detail of his daily life—this, the feature by which he was known to his fellows and ought to be ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the progress of a bill in Committee, but they enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last the bill went ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... naval fighting against the Vandals in the days when Rome was crumbling. Finally, by a curious freak of history, Genseric the Vandal took a fleet out from Carthage against Rome, and swept the Mediterranean. In the year 455, some six centuries after Rome had wreaked her vengeance on Carthage, this Vandal fleet ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... frighten us!" exclaimed the King. "Don't let all those whimsies trouble you further, or you will give birth to some monstrosity, some freak of nature." His Majesty was a true prophet. The Queen was delivered of a fine little girl, black as ink from head to foot. They did not tell her this at once, fearing a catastrophe, but persuaded her to go to sleep, saying ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... she ran from one to another rejoicing over them. There was even a further surprise. Years ago an artist cousin had sketched her portrait in pastel crayons upon the color-wash of the wall. It had been done as a mere artistic freak, but like many such spontaneous drawings it had been an admirable likeness and a very pretty picture. It bore her name, "Ingred," in flourishy letters underneath. The whole of this had now been protected with a sheet of glass and enclosed by a frame. A table in the ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Surely the very fiend himself, if he happened to be in a high arctic latitude, would not indulge his malice so far as to follow its trail into the tropic of Capricorn. And what was to be got by such a freak? There was no Golden Fleece in Gombroon. If the fiend or my brother fancied that, for once they were in the wrong box; and there was no variety of vegetable produce, for I never denied that the poor ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... mistrust, methinks, must needs give way. Long has a creeping rumor filled the world That Dmitri, Ivan's son, is still alive. The Czar himself confirms it by his fears. —Before us stands a youth, in age and mien Even to the very freak that nature played, The lost heir's counterpart, and of a soul Whose noble stamp keeps rank with his high claims. He left a cloister's precincts, urged by strange, Mysterious promptings; and this monk-trained boy Was straight distinguished for his knightly ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... perigee of his orbit, he turned on his radio and cried for help. It was a bare hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that seeped through by some instant's freak of transmission was a fragment of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep for some time ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... manner with which she met his august civilities. They did not wound her sensibilities, as he hoped they might have done. Either this disappointment or the need of relief provoked a change of tactics. With a sudden zeal that was half earnest and half a freak of vanity, he devoted himself to Adele. The father's sympathy with him was just now dead; that of the aunt had never been kindled to such a degree as to meet his craving; with the Elderkins he was reluctant to unfold his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted, and which had a certain ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... interfered with us. We carried on all our operations as quietly as possible; and the only circumstances likely to arouse suspicion in the minds of the authorities, was the unusual absence of all disturbances of a minor nature within the walls, in consequence of the one engrossing freak in which most of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... place in her. She had never had any illusions about herself, and had never attempted to curb the obstinate self-will and haughty pride that had characterized her. She thought of it curiously, her mind going back over the last few months that had changed her whole life. The last mad freak for which she had paid so dearly had been the outcome of an arrogant determination to have her own way in the face of all protests and advice. And with a greater arrogance and a determination stronger than her own Ahmed Ben Hassan had tamed her as he ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... curiosity," said Chip, getting on his feet again. "I've always had the name of being something of a freak—I don't wonder you want to exhibit me to your—friends." He went down the hill to the bunk house, holding the unlighted cigarette still in ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... correspondence was no fictitious one, a freak of disordered nerves or imagination, but sane and actual, both brother and sister could convincingly have affirmed. And this although time—as time is usually figured—had neither lot nor part in it. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... led the unresisting young man to the coupe, Maximilian and the guides following the pair at a short distance in order to guard against any unforeseen freak on the part of poor Massetti. There was no occasion for their services, however, and the Viscount was soon safely installed in the coupe with Valentine upon one side of him and her ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... in the case of Lady Arabella Stuart, by life-long imprisonment; but it did not follow that to one nurtured on these traditions the crime had lost its heinousness. It struck a deadly blow at that ideal of the royal dignity which it was Hyde's chief aim to restore. By a freak of frivolous licentiousness, he saw the foundations of his life's work sapped. Into none of the love affairs of Charles II. and his brother did the tragedy of passion ever enter. Like the rest, this was a bit of vulgar, commonplace intrigue. It was scarcely ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... world is hard, and there was little mercy shown for JOANNA's freak. Her husband had slain her. That was all. She with her flashes, her gaiety, her laughter, was consigned to dust. But in Sir JOHN's note-book it was written that, "The hob-nailed boot is but a bungling weapon. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... "Commentaries" when she left school to begin teaching, and she loved to read about great generals; but these facts would scarcely explain her wanting that grim bald head to share her daily existence. It seemed a strange freak, when she bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen said to Mrs. Lorch, "no pictures ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... memory; but inasmuch as the conduct imputed to him was so natural, and the expressions he was made to utter so characteristic, he could not but regard it as a vision far more significant and important than a mere freak of the brain during ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... the matter with you two? Have you been listening to socialistic or other freak talk? Do you realize that the German Kaiser and his nation threaten the freedom of the world? Do you realize that the Germans want to rule this world, and do you know how they would rule it, and what a miserable, impossible world it would ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... was something for him in this job bigger than financial gain or loss. Week after week, as he overcame one difficulty after another, he was learning, learning, just as he had done at Weil & Street's. His hazel eyes grew keener, his face thinner. For the job began to develop every freak and whimsy possible to a growing building. The owner of the department store next door refused to permit access through his basement, and that added many hundred dollars to the cost of building the party wall; the fire and telephone companies were continually ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... they would," remarked Jerry, shrugging his shoulders, "for you certainly have a collection of freak pictures, some of which ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... no one has ever sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sure, sir. I returned here at nine o'clock, and saw this mark on our door. I did not pay much heed to it, but went upstairs. Then, as I thought it over, I said to myself, 'Is this a freak of some passerby, or is it some sort of signal?' Then I thought I would see whether our house alone was marked, or whether there were crosses on other doors. I went to the houses of several gentlemen of our party, and on each of their doors was a white cross. ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... musing over these things when a piece of news, very strange and unexpected, arrived at the rectory. A distant, almost a mythical relative, known from childhood as "Cousin Edward in the Isle of Wight," had died, and by some strange freak had left Lucian two thousand pounds. It was a pleasure to give his father five hundred pounds, and the rector on his side forgot for a couple of days to lean his head on his hand. From the rest of the capital, which was well invested, Lucian ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... having carried her freak of sensibility on long enough, and sweeping past Loveday with a dazzling smile, was accompanied to the front door by Mrs. Lear, and after standing poised for a moment against the sunny verdure beyond, took wing with a flutter of white taffetas and ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... to hear you say so, makes me feel like a man. Then I shall do for my mother what you did for yours, and get Josephine out of that school-teaching freak of hers. She has actually gone and done it, Scheffer.... Worth money, eh? Then I shall do some things as well as others, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have heard that he gave sound advice, and was a good and profitable man to consult. Was it not a strange freak on the part of God, who plays sometimes jokes on us, to have granted so many perfections to ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... the establishment, down to caretaker, messenger-boys, porters and the like. Never surely had been such wild doings in that sedate and reputable place of business—doings in which gross absurdity and ingenious cruelty went hand in hand; while, by some queer freak of the imagination, poor Pascal Pelletier, of hectic and pathetic memory, appeared as leader of the revels, at which the Lady of the Windswept Dust, sad-eyed, inscrutable of countenance, her dragon-embroidered scarf drawn closely about her ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... of acres of primeval forest have the ages edged with their fine steel cut through, and given to the plough! Fashion has its Iron Age as well as its Golden; and, what is more remarkable, the first of the two has come last, in the fitful histories of custom. And this last freak of feminine taste has brought a wonderful grist of additional business to the Sheffield mill. The fair Eugenie has done a good thing for this smoky town, well deserving of a monument of burnished steel erected to her memory on one of these ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... hardly understands herself to-night. That scene with her hostess has upset her mentally and bodily, and created in her a wild desire to get away from herself and from Baltimore at any cost. Some idle freak has induced her to use Beauclerk (who is detestable to her) as a safeguard from both, and he, unsettled in his own mind, and eager to come to conclusions with Joyce and her fortune, has lent himself to the wiles of his whilom foe, and ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference of mutual ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... Andrew Lanning's coming to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell the story out ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... not sixteen when you were born, and, having had my head shaved during my illness, my hair grew out the bright gold you see it now, instead of the dark brown it had hitherto been. A strange freak of nature, but a providential aid to the disguise I wished to maintain. I wrote to Cuthbert, informing him of your birth, praying his speedy return, but no reply came; and again and again I repeated the petition. At length I was answered ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... is, that this terrific object was a freak of fancy on the part of some old-world sculptor, and that its presence had suggested to the Kukuanas the idea of placing their royal dead under its awful presidency. Or perhaps it was set there to frighten away any marauders who might have designs upon the treasure chamber beyond. I ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... also alleged to have seized the lady in a drunken freak. It is stated that the Sultan was so much enraged at this that he proposed to make war on Bruni. His minister, however, suggested that enquiries should be made into the strength of that kingdom before commencing operations. He was accordingly sent to Bruni, where ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the commonest people swear, in French! Oh! it's inexpressibly delightful. Why, the dogs understand it, and the horses—"everybody," as Kurz Pacha said to me, the morning after our arrival (for he insisted upon coming, "it was such a freak," he said,) "everybody rolls in a luxury of French, and, according to the ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... Constitutionalist, he had words of disgust for princes, acknowledging, however, that we were not practical in our use of them, and kept them for political purposes often to the perversion of our social laws and their natural dispositions. He spoke of his son's freak in joining the Navy. 'That was the princess's doing,' said Temple. 'She talked of our naval heroes, till she made me feel I had only to wear the anchor buttons to be one myself. Don't tell her I was invalided from the service, Richie, for the truth is, I believe, I half-shammed. And ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... annoyed, not at his friends or clients of course; merely to his clerks and his servants and his wife and the people who are afraid of him. This was a nasty habit of our grandfathers—modern wives are hardly meek enough to stand much of it. However, if Perseus by some freak of atavism ever should so far forget himself in this way, Persephone will find the Biblical soft answer more efficacious than the loudest returning volume of sound. To speak in an exaggeratedly gentle voice always shames the shouter ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... the ruins of the cathedral were covered with corpses burned black from the heat of the flames and exposure to the sun. One woman, by some freak of nature, had her arms poised above her head as she sat dead, shrivelled almost beyond human recognition. It was probable that the Boxers had pitched many of their victims alive into the flames and driven them back ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... evening sky lighted up the vast rift for a while, and Bart forgot his hunger in the contemplation of this strange freak of nature, of a river running below in a channel whose walls were perfectly perpendicular and against which in places the rapid stream seemed to beat and eddy and swirl, while in other parts there were long stretches of pebbly and rocky shore. For as far as Bart could judge, the walls seemed to ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... article of property belonging to me he carried off. I have since had a penitent letter from him. He is doing well in the United States, and has been elected to the Legislature. I have given up the freak of dabbling in the show business, and merely keep a private theatre at such a distance from human abodes that no one can complain of it as a nuisance. Since the disappearance of my valet I have been ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... jealous thought, a petty pique, Enwraps in gloom, or bursts in storm; She questions all that love may speak, And weighs its tone, and marks its form, Or yields her frailty to a freak ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... hurried along over the back road, meaning to branch off at the point nearest to the tall sycamore that had been visited by a freak bolt from the thunder clouds, during some ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... much alarmed; concerned for the safety of the poor lunatic. There was no knowing what mad freak might seize her at any moment; no one was within call, and that being the only boat there, there was no way of reaching her until she should return to the shore of her own accord; if indeed, she was capable of managing the boat so as to reach the ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... letters and remembrances, Mr. Mavering." Dan mechanically received the packet she had been holding behind her; with a perverse freak of intelligence he observed that, though much larger now, it was tied up with the same ribbon which had fastened it when Alice returned his letters and gifts before. "Good-bye. I wish you every happiness ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... broke in Madeline despondently. "I was dreaming about castles in Italy instead of tackling the business in hand. If I had thought more I should have known that some freak would seize the opportunity to rake up old scores. Don't feel so bad, Betty. It was my fault, and I'll make it up to her somehow. Come and help me tell Christy that she's a trump, and that I truly wanted her, next ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... of the two. He had a giant-like, sinewy frame and a grotesquely small head; his cheeks were round and red like apples, and his long whiskers evidently received some attention from his vanity; it seemed an odd freak for vanity to take, for all the rest of him was rough and dirty. He wriggled when the girl darkened the doorway, but did not look ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... snow, Filling the earth and sky below, Over the house-tops, over the street, Over the heads of the people you meet, Dancing, Flirting, Skimming along, Beautiful snow, it can do no wrong, Flying to kiss a lady's cheek, Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak, Beautiful snow from the heaven above, Pure as an angel, gentle ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... a spinster sister to whom his specimens were the bane of her life. As the car rolled swiftly along, he occupied his time by peeping into the bag at frequent intervals to see that none of the specimens, by some freak of ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... She is neither cultured, rich, stylish, nor pretty. She is stupid!" Ah, girls, girls, do you really know what she is, or what she may become? A girl commonplace! Suppose she is not lively, is not fond of parties, does not use slang appropriately at all, is utterly ignorant of the last freak of fashion, and hardly knows whether her skirt is draped or plain; suppose she has, on the whole, a rather forlorn appearance, being pitifully unconscious of what is unbecoming in dress, or gait, or habit; suppose, in fact, she does not at once show you she has any special ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... I should make fun of anything that I have seen in this country!" replied the Hunter. "I now rejoice that a mad freak brought me here to these woods and fields, for otherwise I should probably never have learned to know the region; for it has very little reputation abroad, and there is, in fact, nothing here to attract exhausted and surfeited tourists. But the feeling has gripped me here ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... dining-room Lila caught sight of Bea waiting at the elevator door. Dodging three seniors, a maid with a tray, and a man with a truck full of trunks, she made a dash for the new arrival who in a sudden freak of perversity danced ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... more abuse, Than headlong dubb'd, to own himself a Muse, Unless to spread Poetick Honours so As should a Muse give each St. George's Show? A Mode of Glory might Parnassus fit, Tho our Sage Prince knows few he'd Knight for Wit. And thus this Freak is left upon the File, Or as 'tis written in this Poet's Stile. Next, as in Course, to Jotham we'll descend, Thoughtful it seems which Side he'll next befriend, As thinking Brains can caper to and fro, Before they jump into the Box they'd go. And 'tis a moody ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... thought of that." She stood still with her hands clasped, thinking. The officer at her side, looking down at her, was thinking also. He was fighting a slight mental struggle, a sort of combat he was quite unused to. Should he let the child go on in this wild freak? He knew the cottage by the sea; the peasant home would be dreadful to her. He knew that by that same day after to-morrow, life in lower Italy, with the dirty, coarse people about her would be a burden. Yet he ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... I'd have some Darkovan freak meddling with my mind—" Jay began hotly, then stopped. Under Regis' grave eyes, he felt a surge of unfamiliar humility. This crew of men needed their leader, and obviously he, Jay Allison, wasn't the leader they needed. He covered his eyes ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... something like an hour before our melancholy-looking guest had fully improved the opportunity with which a benignant Providence had supplied him,—a freak in which, one might conclude, she seldom indulged. He ceased to eat, and sat for a moment gazing pensively at the dishes. It seemed to me—but in this I may possibly be mistaken—that a darker shade of sadness possessed his face at the conclusion than the one that shadowed it so heavily at the ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... he stands pretty high. Might call him a freak mustang, I guess. He reverts to the ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... his head was uncovered. His elbow rested on the back of a cow, which was itself well calculated to attract attention, for, in addition to her four perfectly shaped legs, she had a fifth growing out of her hump. This wonderful freak of nature used its fifth leg as if it were a hand and arm, hunting and killing tiresome flies, and scratching its head with the hoof. At first we thought it was a trick to attract attention, and even felt offended ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... England from my second sojourn in West Africa, I discovered, to my alarm, that I was, by a freak of fate, the sea- serpent of the season, I published, in order to escape from this reputation, a very condensed, much abridged version of my experiences in Lower Guinea; and I thought that I need never explain about myself or Lower Guinea again. This was one of my errors. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... softer shade than Combeferre. His name was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied woman, wept ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... did something for Amy Carringford—the pauper! You were spoons with her then, and you wanted to get her to my party. You begged an invitation for her and then dressed her up. like a freak so she could ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... "is because you do not know. Now listen. You have to make, within the next few minutes, a great decision. Very likely, after you have chosen, you will curse me all your days. It was a freak of fate which brought us together. But I must say this. You are the sort of man whom I would have chosen, if any measure of choice had fallen to my lot. And yet," he looked around, "I am almost afraid to speak now that I have seen you in your home, now that ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the rising bank he had climbed so laboriously before, Ross miscalculated and tumbled back, rolling down into the mud of the reed bed. Mechanically he wiped the slime from his face. The tree was still anchored there; by some freak the current had rammed its rooted end up ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... all life's blessings centre not in sight; For Providence, that dealt him one long night, Had given, in pity to the blooming boy, Feelings more exquisitely tuned to joy. Fond to excess was he of all that grew; The morning blossom sprinkled o'er with dew, Across his path, as if in playful freak, Would dash his brow, and weep upon his cheek; Each varying leaf that brush'd where'er he came, Press'd to his rosy lip he call'd by name; He grasp'd the saplings, measured every bough, Inhaled the fragrance ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... returned, eyeing one another askance, Winterbottom looking daggers at his opponent, and Quince not quite easy even under the protection of Titania, Tom had just removed the frying-pan from the fire with its residuary grease still bubbling. Quince having deposited his load, was about to sit down, when a freak came into Tom's head, which, however, he dared not put into execution himself; but "a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse," says the proverb. Winterbottom stood before Tom, and Quince with ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to his own room. He wanted to be alone with his own thoughts, to arrange the impressions he had carried away from his recent journey. Valentina Mihailovna had looked at him intently several times during dinner, but there had been no opportunity of speaking to him. Mariana, after the unexpected freak which had so bewildered him, was evidently repenting of it, and seemed to avoid him. Nejdanov took up a pen to write to his friend Silin, but he did not know what to say to him. There were so many conflicting thoughts ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... would I not give for a full moon and a clear sky, just now. Bet your life, Dick, there are some very queer scenes being enacted all round us at this moment, had we but light to reveal them. I have come to the conclusion that this swamp is unique in many respects. By some freak of nature, things here are entirely different from what they are elsewhere. Even the vegetation is new and strange to me; and I am convinced that it is also the home of many forms of animal life ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... absolutely natural. No knife had sculptured it. No hand had given a support to its uplifted arm. Even the dog which followed us appeared deceived, for he barked furiously at the strange intruder. There was to me a singular fascination in this solitary freak of nature; and, surrounded though I was by immeasurably greater wonders, I turned again and again to take a farewell look at this dark, slender figure, raising its hand, as if in threatening gesture to ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the fresh night air, but so wonderfully curved and dimpled. And then, too, the perfect graciousness and simplicity of her manner and its absolute freedom from coquetry or self-consciousness. Her mother was right—I would not soon forget her. And yet, by what freak of Nature, I found myself continually repeating, had this flower been made to bloom on this soil? Through what ancestor's veins had this blood trickled, and through what channels had it reached these humble occupants ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... he will suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which he will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping that you involuntarily draw your chair further back. Next, in a freak of ventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile's mouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and are ready to implore him to play no more tricks. He knows when he has reached this limit, and soothes you at once ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... something to catch hold of, like the tannin in its overdrawn tea. It loved to stand before this poster and pick out the easily recognized characters and argue (as Sypher, whose genius had suggested the inclusion of the freak had intended) what the hairy creature could represent, and, as it stood and picked and argued, the great fact of Sypher's Cure sank deep into their souls. He remembered the glowing pride with which he had regarded this achievement, the triumphal progress ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... society was on the qui vive for a genius of so riotous an order as this, and all the wealthy families of Newport vied with one another for the privilege of being first to welcome him to our shores, not because he was a freak, mind you, but "for art's sweet sake." Mrs. Gushington-Andrews offered twenty-five hundred dollars for him as a week-end guest, and Mrs. Gaster immediately went her bid a hundred per cent. better. Henriette, in order to outdo every one else, promptly put in a bid of ten thousand dollars for a ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... such as having only one of the three semicircular canals of the ear well developed. It has a strong tendency to waltz round and round in circles without sufficient cause and to trip sideways towards its dormitory instead of proceeding in the orthodox head-on fashion. But this freak is a very educable creature, as Professor Yerkes has shown. In a careful way he confronted his mouse-pupil with alternative pathways marked by different degrees of illumination, or by different colours. If the mouse chose compartment A, it found a clear passage direct to its nest; if it chose ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... vulnerable point which could be reached. Fifty thousand Russians, in a single band, were marching through Germany to cooeperate with the Austrians on the French frontiers. The more polished Germans were astonished at the barbaric character of their allies. A Russian officer, in a freak of passion, shot an Austrian postilion, and then took out his purse and enquired of the employer of the postilion what damage was to be paid, as coolly as if he had merely killed a horse or a cow. Even German law was compelled to wink at ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... what I saw and heard, was, that the artist, by some unaccountable freak of fate, or perhaps in some fit of enthusiastic and fanciful passion, had been induced to unite himself with a person altogether beneath him, and that the natural result, entire and speedy disgust, ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... has had but the most limited advantages of education, and that he has shared the portion of his race in hardship, poverty and toil. He does not know why he wrote these poems. It is an amazing thing that he should have done so—a freak, we may call it, of the wind of genius, which bloweth where it listeth and singles out one in ten thousand to find a fitting speech for the dumb thought and feeling ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... the interest is not what is commonly called philosophic, it is personal. Because the Revolution is the dominant fact in modern history, therefore people suppose that the doings of this or that provincial lawyer, tossed into temporary eminence and eternal infamy by some freak of the revolutionary wave, or the atrocities committed by this or that mob, half drunk with blood, rhetoric, and alcohol, are of transcendent importance. In truth their interest is great, but their importance is small. What we are concerned to know as students of the philosophy of history is, not ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... "I heard of that freak," said the jester. "There be a dozen tailors and all the Queen's tirewomen frizzling up a good piece of cloth of gold for the lion's mane, covering a club with green damask with pricks, cutting out green velvet and gummed silk for his garland! In sooth, these ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... perhaps, that I should speak of it in the midst of the terrors that surround me, and yet I can't help thinking of the whole affair as one freak of fate." ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... Shirakawa's piety amounted to a species of insanity, for, on one occasion, when rain prevented a contemplated progress to Hosho-ji, he sentenced the rain to imprisonment and caused a quantity to be confined in a vessel.* To the nation, however, all this meant something very much more than a mere freak. It meant that the treasury was depleted and that revenue had to be obtained by recourse to the abuses which Go-Sanjo had struggled so earnestly to check, the sale of offices and ranks, even in perpetuity, and the inclusion of great tracts of State ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Haven't I already! Nature's a dial whose shade no hand puts back, Trick as we may! My friend, you are forty-three This very year in the world— [JOSEPHINE breaks out sobbing again.] And in vain it is To think of waiting longer; pitiful To dream of coaxing shy fecundity To an unlikely freak by physicking With superstitious drugs and quackeries That work you harm, not good. The fact being so, I have looked it squarely down—against my heart! Solicitations voiced repeatedly At length have shown the soundness of their ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... entirely forgotten her or not. Would he call, now that he was informed of her presence in the city? She knew (almost as well as if he had written it) the reason for his hasty flight from Colorow, and with a knowledge that he considered her a freak if not something worse she could not write to him, although she still ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... after the fixed time, and was told that a respectable clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... lengthing twine, Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line! Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind— Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind? Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak, That now assemble, now disperse, in freak; They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout, Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about; See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace, Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting dace! Baffled at last, they quit the ungrateful shore, Curse ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... loved Sybil Lamotte as a sister; she thought and sorrowed not a little over the strange freak Fate had played with her friend's life, and she wondered often if Doctor Heath had really lost all regard for her; she knew, as what woman does not, that a warm regard had once existed; and she assured herself that whether he had ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... next morning on the grave of Cadwalader's daughter, Evelyn, it has been thought by many that the boy really beheld this old soldier, who for some mysterious reason had chosen nightfall for this fleeting visit to his daughter's resting-place. But to others it was only a freak of the lad's imagination, which had been much influenced by the reading of romances. For, as these latter reasoned, had it really been Cadwalader, why did he not show himself at John Poindexter's house—that old friend who now ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... replied Julia, diving into the freak pocket of an expensive garment bought with her own money. "May ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... recompense of one hundred sous for every image destroyed. But, since no one seems ever to have been punished, it is probable that this report was a fabrication; and the question whether the mutilation of the Virgin of the Rue des Rosiers was the deliberate act of a religious enthusiast, or a freak of drunken revellers, or, as some imagined, a cunning device of good Catholics to inflame the popular passions against the "Lutherans," must, for the present, at least, remain a subject of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... For, in the darkness of the hall, he heard the child crying and lamenting. He stopped and listened to it like a man who resolutely faces his destruction. And, as so many times, he asked himself; "Is this a freak of my imagination, a trick of my nerves?" No, the sound was surely real, was close to him. It thrilled in his ears keenly. He could not doubt its reality. Yet he acknowledged to himself that he could not actually locate ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 'Rapahoe such a derned freak as thet thar would be a reg'ler snap fer ther boys. They'd hev more fun with him then a funeral. Somehow, this yere place seems dead slow, an' it makes me long ter go back whar thar is a little sport now ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... good joke," he remarked, "to call upon others to uphold the dignity of one who is always at some freak or ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of worldly advantage before Bunyan, which he could have gained by abandoning his religious profession, the words would have had a meaning; but there is no hint or trace of any prospect of the kind; nor in Bunyan's position could there have been. The temptation, as he called it, was a freak of fancy: fancy resenting the minuteness with which he watched his own emotions. And yet he says, 'It lay upon me for a year, and did follow me so continually that I was not rid of it one day in a month, sometimes not an hour in many days together, unless when ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... be till next week. I have been here since Friday as much a hermit as yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief seat is unwillingness ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... bitterly records his own sufferings. He says, in one of his books, "At this time I acquired this accursed habit of solitude." It has been said that the Hawthorne family were, in the earlier generation, afflicted with shyness almost as a disease—certainly a curious freak of nature in a family descended from robust sea-captains. It only goes to prove how far away are the influences which control ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... his gravity was never disturbed by the shadow of a smile; and Mrs. Crowley treated him as though he were a piece of decoration, with an impertinence that fascinated him. He looked upon her as an outlandish freak, but his heavy British heart was surrendered to her entirely, and he watched over her with a solicitude that amused and ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... impressions he had carried away from his recent journey. Valentina Mihailovna had looked at him intently several times during dinner, but there had been no opportunity of speaking to him. Mariana, after the unexpected freak which had so bewildered him, was evidently repenting of it, and seemed to avoid him. Nejdanov took up a pen to write to his friend Silin, but he did not know what to say to him. There were so many conflicting thoughts and sensations crowding in upon him that he did not attempt ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... the same thing," I replied. "By some freak its vibratory qualities had that effect. The deep whistle of the sunken Lusitania would, for instance, make the Singer Building shake to its foundations; while the Olympic did not affect the Singer at all but made the Woolworth shiver all through. In each case they stimulated ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... measure that its dream is based on true self-knowledge there must be a reality corresponding to it—a valid argument enough, supposing the locksmith to act on the usual lines and not to be indulging in a freak. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... stood in the pelting rain and howling wind, with the roaring sea below him. Was it all a dream, or was this only another freak of capricious fate, which doomed him to eternal misery. The storm roared and the hungry ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... All her dear former treasures adorned the walls, and she ran from one to another rejoicing over them. There was even a further surprise. Years ago an artist cousin had sketched her portrait in pastel crayons upon the color-wash of the wall. It had been done as a mere artistic freak, but like many such spontaneous drawings it had been an admirable likeness and a very pretty picture. It bore her name, "Ingred," in flourishy letters underneath. The whole of this had now been protected with a sheet ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... charged them with it," replied Paul. "I knew there was something up when they got ahead on that jump. Then I asked if I might take a look at that freak engine, and they allowed me to do so. I smelled camphor the minute I stepped aboard. They even had not sense enough to hide the bottle, and it's against the present racing rules on this lake to doctor gas. So I taxed them with ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... reached home. But I was clear in my mind about one thing. I meant to present myself at the office in the morning, and if the chance were given me, to apprentice myself for a while. It was indeed a strange freak of destiny, that he should have been confronted by me with the same appeal that I had heard him make so short a time ago. Perhaps it were better called a strange freak of my caprice, for though of course my position was not premeditated, ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... admiralty; besides Pitt who alone among them sat in the commons. Richmond again became master of the ordnance and a little later re-entered the cabinet. Dundas was treasurer of the navy. Pitt's acceptance of office was regarded by the opposition as a "boyish freak"; his ministry was "a mince-pie administration which would end with ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... are any, each, either, every, much, neither, no, or none, some, this, that, these, those. The pronominal adjectives which precede the article, are all, both, many, such, and what; as, "All the world,"—"Both the judges,"—"Many a[336] mile,"—"Such a chasm,"—"What a freak." In like manner, any adjective of quality, when its meaning is limited by the adverb too, so, as, or how, is put before the article; as, "Too great a study of strength, is found to betray writers into a harsh manner."—Blair's Rhet., p. 179. "Like many an other poor wretch, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... all. He had started by thinking Lilly a peculiar little freak: gone on to think him a wonderful chap, and a bit pathetic: progressed, and found him generous, but overbearing: then cruel and intolerant, allowing no man to have a soul of his own: then terribly arrogant, throwing a fellow aside like an old glove which is in holes at ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... soon showed Lucy who it was, and with an exclamation of surprise she turned inquiringly to a young lady who was standing near. To her look the young lady replied, "A freak of Anna's, I suppose. She thinks a great deal of ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... sprawling there on the rocks would never again be a menace. The only thing that had escaped destruction in that shattering blast was the strange head-piece the thing had worn. Either the small shining globe was practically indestructible, or else it had been spared by some odd freak of the explosive, for it still blazed in baleful opalescence atop ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... narrow passage was imminent, but suddenly, before reaching its entrance, they diverged with a volley of oaths, and dashing along the left bank of the arroyo, disappeared in the intervening willows. Divided between relief at their escape and indignation at what seemed to be a drunken, feast-day freak of these roystering vaqueros, the little party re-formed, when a cry from Barker arrested them. He had just perceived a horseman motionless in the arroyo who, although unnoticed by them, had evidently been seen by the Mexicans. He had apparently leaped into it from ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... had taken that rare and extraordinary form. The mirage of their own caravan, rising, was reflected, mirrored, by some freak of the desert sun and air, upon the fine sand blown in the air at a distance from the train. It was, indeed, themselves they saw, not knowing it, in a vast primordial mirror of the desert gods. Nor did the discovery of the truth lessen the feeling of discomfort, of apprehension. ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... will reach the high lands. It is in the Dismal Swamp that Lake Drummond was discovered, by whom I do not know, but is said to have been found by a man named Drummond, whose name it bears; that will make no difference with me, the question is, how came it there? Was it a freak of nature, or was it caused by warring of the elements, is a question for the consideration of those who visit it? That it was the effect of fire caused by lightning setting fire to the turf, or some dead tree, there can be no doubt. At what time in the ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... Chip, getting on his feet again. "I've always had the name of being something of a freak—I don't wonder you want to exhibit me to your—friends." He went down the hill to the bunk house, holding the unlighted cigarette still in ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... do nothing more," replied Moggy. "I must retire, ladies—your freak's up. You know I never keep late hours. Ladies, I wish you all a very ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... crocodile; and coming straight from the encounter, had in some way connected the children with its conquered enemy. Murtagh's shout might have freshly incensed it; or, what to Saloo seemed more probable than all, the seizure of the child might be a wild freak suddenly striking the brain ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... side the ruins of the cathedral were covered with corpses burned black from the heat of the flames and exposure to the sun. One woman, by some freak of nature, had her arms poised above her head as she sat dead, shrivelled almost beyond human recognition. It was probable that the Boxers had pitched many of their victims alive into the flames and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... please them," he said; "for in a lawless time a representative of the people is a real power." Mme. Turreau, wife of one of the new commissioners, was now the ascendant star in his attentions. One day, while walking arm in arm with her near the top of the Tenda pass, Buonaparte took a sudden freak to show her what war was like, and ordered the advance-guard to charge the Austrian pickets. The attack was not only useless, but it endangered the safety of the army; yet it was made according to command, and human blood was shed. The story was told by Napoleon ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the comment. "You mean, he's just a freak to you, and you'd like to look him over a little longer. There's no harm in that, if it amuses you. But don't be silly about broadening yourself." He regarded his daughter critically. "And leave out the deserts. They're too broadening, if you ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... brought dismay to the negro, the carpet-bagger, and the scallawag of Ulster. A peculiar freak of weather in the early morning added to their terror. The sun rose clear and bright except for a slight fog that floated from the river valley, increasing the roar of the falls. About nine o'clock a huge black shadow suddenly rushed over Piedmont from the west, ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... The highest record ever made for milk and butter was by an animal of no family, and she was valuable only for what she could earn. None of her power went to her offspring. She was simply a high-toned freak, but an animal with a clean pedigree back to some great progenitor is valuable independently of ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... done for the bill, and the legislators who had sold themselves, having received all they could reasonably expect from the allied corporations, were anxious to make a show of standing for their constituents. Politicians in general considered the bill a "freak" one. Some who voted for it explained that they did not believe in it, but felt the people should have a chance to vote on it themselves. By a large majority it passed the House. Two days later ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... By a strange freak Ashmole MS. writes Guesse, and the Museum MS. Ghesse; but the emendation Kiss (adopted both by Dr. Grosart and Mr. Hazlitt) cannot ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Captain Prescott. Some freak of the fancy has mastered you. I know nothing of the documents. How could I, a woman, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... are lacking? He does not build because he has no impulse to build; he does not know how. So he represents what the beaver was, thousands of years ago, before he learned how to construct his dam and house, reappearing now by some strange freak of heredity, and finding himself wofully out of place and time. The other beavers drive him away because all gregarious animals and birds have a strong fear and dislike of any irregularity in their kind. Even when the peculiarity is slight—a ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... worth. But Milly insisted. "The people we are after," she said, "like it all the better the more they have to pay." And to Ernestine's astonishment she seemed to be right again, for the present. That, Ernestine concluded, must be another freak of this "rich trade"; the "swells" expected to be done and would be disdainful if they weren't. Ernestine had a good deal of contempt for their patrons. But the glowing proof of their business success lay in the cash drawer, which literally overflowed with money, and they ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... about the house. The bright, cheery day soon put to flight all the terrors of the preceding night. Dolph laughed, or rather tried to laugh, at all that had passed, and endeavoured to persuade himself that it was a mere freak of the imagination, conjured up by the stories he had heard; but he was a little puzzled to find the door of his room locked on the inside, notwithstanding that he had positively seen it swing open as the footsteps ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... are at an end. I crept to the spot. I will not shock you by relating the extremes to which dire necessity had driven me. I review this scene with loathing and horror. Now that it is past I look back upon it as on some hideous dream. The whole appears to be some freak of insanity. No alternative was offered, and hunger was capable of being appeased even by a ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... else, and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions, and let your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon. "I cannot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The man who expresses an opinion, or even a doubt, on this subject, contrary to the ruling traditions, will have a swarm of angry critics buzzing about him. He will be called a heretic, a heathen, a cold-blooded freak of nature. As for the woman who hesitates to subscribe all the thirty-nine articles of romantic love, if such a one dares to put her reluctance into words, she is certain to be accused either of unwomanly ambition ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... all about it, and when at last he turned, they were gone. But my father had come back to America, had sat down quietly in his elder brother's house, among the hills where I am to live, and was thought to be a sedate young man and a good match, till a freak took him that he must go back and find that girl in Italy. How to do it, with no clue but an amber rosary? But do it he did, stationing himself against a pillar in that identical church and watching the worshippers, and not having long to wait before in she came, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak so and not ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... ad-agency tradetalk, 'house freak'] A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Thrice he carried it over to the fireplace and decided to chuck it behind the Japanese umbrella in the grate; then he thought it absurd to waste an expensive frame. There was no good in beating about the bush. Anna looked like a stranger—abnormal, a freak—it might be a picture taken just before or ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... down the smooth current of his time; and Blake, sensitive, unique, protestant, impracticable, aggressive: it was a rare freak of Fate that brought about such companionship; yet so true courtesy was there that for four years they lived and wrought harmoniously together,—Hayley pouring out his harmless wish-wash, and Blake touching it with his fiery gleam. Their joint efforts were hardly more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... obviously other beginnings that cannot be classed under any of the above heads. Some of them, much like the "freak" leads that may be seen in many newspapers of the present day, may be called free beginnings for want of a better name. These free beginnings are quite effective when properly handled but the novice must use them with fear and trembling. They may be witty or they may be sarcastic, but ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... heard yer Leddieship laugh at that auld rhyme," replied the servitor. "Fear naething for a madman's freak. But it's true that three oaks by its side are blasted, riven and laid on the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... tresses out and in Fold in many a curly freak, Round about the snowy chin And the softly tinted cheek, Where no sorrows now can weep, And ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... an effort of imagination, or in a supposition, conceive the reverse of that which is asserted. That there are such truths can not be doubted. We may take, for example, all relations of number. Three and Two added together make Five. We can not conceive it to be otherwise. We can not, by any freak of thought, imagine Three ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Cyclops, with one eye Staring to threaten and defy, That thought comes next—and instantly The freak is over, The shape will vanish, and behold! A silver Shield with boss of gold, 30 That spreads itself, some Faery bold In fight ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... unlike the usual known habits and tastes of the Conte Leandro, than such a freak. But supposing such a whim to have occurred to him, would he have set out on his walk evidently intending to be disguised—with a cloak wrapped round the fantastic costume in which he had been at the ball? Was such ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... in accommodating at one and the same time my bodily members and the Latin language. Even my "Caesar" caused me less misery at this period than did the problem of the proper disposal of my hands and feet. Do what I would they were hopelessly (by some singular freak of nature) in my way. The breeding of all the Bolingbrokes would have been taxed to its utmost, I believe, to behave for a single instant as ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... English folk might not thole to see my father's son in their hands without winning something out of him, and I saw by what passed the other day that thou and thy father would stand by me, hap what hap, and I'll never embroil him and peril the lady by my freak.' ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... herself, 'a great believer.' In January, 1597, Ralegh condoled as a most loving comrade with Cecil on gracious Lady Cecil's death. His letter exhorting to implacability testifies to the closeness of their league against Essex. The Earl's fiery anger had burnt against both alike. Had his mad freak of treason succeeded, both would have ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... during the afternoon bearing an albino penguin with a prettily mottled head; a curious freak of which the biologists immediately took possession. The penguins now swarmed along the foreshores, those not settling down in the rookeries wandering about in small crowds, occasionally visiting the Hut and exploring among the rocks or up the slippery ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... solid food, and took coffee. My mind now rebounded, and the joy of deliverance seemed as if it would counterbalance the dreadful anxieties of the past night. What a pure pleasure I now tasted a few moments! In a freak, I sat down and sketched The Demons' Palace, laughing defiance upon it all the while, with the wayward self-will and harmless spite of a child, I took this vengeance on the unlucky ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... first started out in this crusade I was called crazy and a "freak" by my enemies, but now they say: "No, Carry Nation, you are not crazy, but you are sharp. You started out to accomplish something and you did. You are a grafter. It is the money you are after." Jesus said: "John ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... I had lived in a world where I was great—alone. I had made myself a life—for that. I had thought I was the victim of some strange freak of nature. And now my world has crumbled down, in half an hour, and I see another world, other ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... with bidding him see St. Germain and charge him to be quiet; promising that, if necessary, the matter should be investigated and justice done. I still had good hopes that St. Mesmin's return would clear up the affair, and the whole turn out to be a freak on his part; but within a few hours tidings that Saintonge had taken steps to strengthen his house and was lying at home, refusing to show himself, placed a different and more serious aspect on the mystery. Before noon next day M. de Clan, whose interference surprised me not ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... dead leaves, which formed so rich a carpet beneath our feet. Primroses, above all, were there of almost every hue, from the rare and pearly white, to the deepest pinkish purple, coloured by some diversity of soil, the pretty freak of nature's gardening; whilst the common yellow blossom—commonest and prettiest of all—peeped out from amongst the boughs in the stump of an old willow, like (to borrow the simile of a dear friend, now no more) a canary bird from its cage. The wild geranium was already showing its pink stem ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... the girl, she welcomed her as cordially as possible. In her sweet, bell voice, she murmured an expression of concern for her grandfather and, when Marian bluntly said, "He's dead," she endeavored to convey her sorrow. To which Miss Pettis, staring at her with hard, bold eyes, as at some puzzling freak, made no reply, being engaged in uneasily wondering what "graft" the Frenchwoman was "on." Marian disliked being reminded of her grandfather's demise, having been largely responsible for it when she had run away with a plausible stranger who had assured her that she had only ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... of law, violation of law, violation of custom, violation of usage, infringement of law, infringement of custom, infringement of usage; teratism^, eccentricity, bizarrerie^, oddity, je ne sais quoi [Fr.], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c (qualification) 469. nonconformist; nondescript, character, original, nonesuch, nonsuch^, monster, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... excellent spying watch during these last few days that you are sure to be aware of it)—you had no right whatever to torment the—unfortunate man, and to worry my mother by your exaggerations of the affair; because the whole business is nonsense—simply a drunken freak, and nothing more, quite unproved by any evidence, and I don't believe that much of it!" (he snapped his fingers). "But you must needs spy and watch over us all, because ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... when he was alone, has asked me for a drink of water; and there is no breach of caste so heinous as to take water from the hand of a Christian. Now and then a Hindu lad will display such an audacious courage in religious matters that it partakes rather of the nature of a boyish freak. Several big Brahmin lads, most of them being about sixteen or seventeen years old, had been visiting the Mission-house rather frequently and showed a good deal of interest in Christianity. One of them, when sitting in the verandah, ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... whose manner did not denote a certain tolerance, not unmixed with contempt, as though, indeed, they were willing to accept the fact that he was of their acquaintance, but desired at the same time to emphasize the fact that he was outside the freemasonry of their class—a freak, whom they acknowledged on sufferance, as they might have done a wonderful lion-tamer, or a music-hall singer, or a steeplejack. He knew very well that there was not one of them who accepted his qualifications, notwithstanding the approval of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not in his mind when he started from the monastery; neither had he thought of it on the way, or of the dark history it had helped him to; in a freak, he took the seat he had formerly occupied, placed his arm along the coping of the parapet, and closed his eyes. And strange to say, the conversation of that day repeated itself almost word for word. Stranger still, it ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... resting. He soon recovered consciousness, and by the light of an old-fashioned Argand lamp he could make out the most charming girl's face he had ever seen, one of those heads which are often supposed to be a freak of the brush, but which to him suddenly realized the theories of the ideal beauty which every artist creates for himself and whence his art proceeds. The features of the unknown belonged, so to say, to the refined and delicate type of Prudhon's school, but had also the poetic ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... of his set to adopt the then reviving mode of parting the hair on the middle of the head. In the teeth of the village derision, he persisted in this with a tenacity that Kate declared gave promise of a "Wellington." For many who had at first adopted the foreign freak had been ridiculed out of it, discouraged by the obstinate refusal of the generality to follow the lead. In those sturdily primitive days the rich youth of the land had not so universally gone abroad as they do now, and "the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... conditions to hallmark and incorporate it as one of the elements of the new ordering. From the crimes laid to its charge they were prepared to make abstraction. The barbarous methods to which it owed its very existence they were willing to consign to oblivion. And it was only a freak of circumstance that hindered this embodiment of despotism from beginning one of their accepted means of rendering the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... To-morrow, satisfy your friend. I take the subjects for his corridor, Finish the potrait out of hand—there, there, And throw him in another thing or two If he demurs; the whole should prove enough To pay for this same cousin's freak. Beside, What's better and what's all I care about, {240} Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff! Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, The cousin! what does he ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Ed had gone with this circus side show. "Side show!" he says. "That's just where he belongs. He ought to be setting right up with the other freaks, because he's a worse freak than the living skeleton or a lady with a full beard—that's what he is. And yet he's sane on every subject but that. Sometimes he'll talk along for ten minutes as rational as you or me; but let him hear the word accident and off he goes. But, by doggie, he won't bother me again after what I give ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... a ploughman's collie— A rhyming, ranting, raving billie, Wha for his friend an' comrade had him, And in freak had Luath ca'd him, After some dog in Highland Sang,^2 Was made lang syne,—Lord ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... were to Lenore! True, she still remained something of an original, and her mother would at times shake her head at some daring freak or over-emphatic speech. It came naturally to her to play the gentleman's part whenever there was a lack of gentlemen. She was the leader in every expedition, delighting to carry off all her young female friends to some distant spot whence there was a fine view, to force ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... a wonderful child five years old, who, by an extraordinary freak of nature, was an amalgamation of two children. From the body of an otherwise perfectly formed child was a supernumerary head protruding from a broad base attached to the lower lumbar and sacral region. This cephalic mass was covered with hair about ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... him very little. Let him suppose it a mere freak, but a secret one, until the morning comes: then let him know that there is urgent reason for your getting Provis aboard and away. You ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Princess Lucretia was the sole offspring. He was a man dissolute and devoted to play; and cared for nothing much but his pleasures and billiards, in which latter he was esteemed unrivalled. According to some, in a freak of passion, according to others, to cancel a gambling debt, he had united himself to his present wife, whose origin was obscure; but with whom he contrived to live on terms of apparent cordiality, for she was much admired, and ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... my lad," said Captain Hardy, in patronizing tones, "I don't know how you got aboard my ship and I don't care. I am willing to believe that it was not intentional on your part, but either the outcome of a drunken freak or else a means of escaping from some scrape you have got into ashore. That being so, I shall take a merciful view of it, and if you behave yourself and make yourself useful you will not hear anything more of it. He has something the ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... more than adequate enthusiasm; if Marchmont were converted to him, who could still be obstinate? The two men began to talk, May falling more and more into silence. She did not accuse Marchmont of deliberate malice, but by chance or the freak of some mischievous demon everything he said led Quisante on to display his weaknesses. She knew that Marchmont marked them every one; he was too well bred to show his consciousness by so much as ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... witnessed these rude sports in vessels of the King; but I do not remember to have known any more serious result than the settlement of some ancient quarrel, or some odd freak of nautical humour, which has commonly proved as harmless ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... carriage and liveries. The first of these was the Baron de Maulincour. That young officer had met with disdain from Mme de Langeais and a better reception from Mme de Serizy; he betook himself at once therefore to his mistress, and under seal of secrecy told her of this strange freak. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... mean that we should adopt freak styles. There is no necessity for that Clothing need not be a bag with a hole cut in it. That might be easy to make but it would be inconvenient to wear. A blanket does not require much tailoring, but none of us could get much ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... Step") is lumpy grey granite of the coarsest elements, whose false strata, tilted up till they have become quasi-vertical, and worn down to pillars and drums, crown the crest like gigantic columnar crystallizations. We shall see the same freak of nature far more grandly developed into the "Pins" of the Shrr. It has evidently upraised the trap, of which large and small blocks are here and there imbedded in it. The granite is cut in its turn by long ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... and the measures, however obnoxious, crammed down its throat. This Government has lost ground in public opinion, they were daily falling lower, and these predestinated idiots come and bolster them up just when they most want it. Tavistock acknowledged to me that they were unpopular, and that this freak had been of vast service to them; consequently they are all elated to the greatest degree. The Tories are sulky and crestfallen; moderate men are vexed, disappointed, grieved; and the Radicals stand grinning by, chuckling at the sight of the Conservatives ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... fortunately, for it had been sent up to the station with my saddle, etc.; so had she been killed, as I thought not at all unlikely, at least my conscience would not have reproached me for aiding and abetting her equestrian freak. I inquired from every one who went to the races if they saw or heard of any accident to a woman on horseback, and I most anxiously watched the newspapers to see if they contained any notice of the sort, but as there has been no mention of any catastrophe, I suppose she has escaped ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... That was not the only article of property belonging to me he carried off. I have since had a penitent letter from him. He is doing well in the United States, and has been elected to the Legislature. I have given up the freak of dabbling in the show business, and merely keep a private theatre at such a distance from human abodes that no one can complain of it as a nuisance. Since the disappearance of my valet I have been travelling in my own yacht. I reached England the day before the trial. ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... with Louis Napoleon, points to Europe being likewise menaced by revolutionists. Unnecessary spread-eagleism, and an awful want of any, even diplomatic, tact. I hope that Mr. Dayton, who has so much sound sense and discernment, will keep to himself this freak of ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... perfunctorily, feeling that she was not carrying her audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine, in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, would ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... the house-tops, over the street, Over the heads of the people you meet, Dancing, Flirting, Skimming along. Beautiful snow! it can do nothing wrong. Flying to kiss a fair lady's cheek; Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak; Beautiful snow, from the heavens above, Pure as an angel ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... heard, at this moment, was the official United States broadcast announcing the ending of all real menace of atomic attack. By a fortunate freak of fate, somebody in authority realized that it was more important to get the news out than to make a professionalized production of it. So a tired but confident voice said very simply that American technicians seemed to have solved the problem of defense ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... behold, waiting to meet me, was Father Knickerbocker himself! I know not how it happened, by what queer freak of hallucination or by what actual miracle—let those explain it who deal in such things—but there he stood before me, with an outstretched hand and a smile of greeting, Father Knickerbocker himself, the Embodied Spirit ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... eye fell on Lightmark's derelict paper, with its scribble of a girl's head. He considered it thoughtfully for some time, starting a little, and covering it with his blotting-paper, when Mrs. Bullen, his housekeeper, entered with a cup of tea—a freak of his nerves which made him smile ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... orchises of summer;—for all the English orchises are here: that which so curiously imitates the dead oak leaf, that again which imitates the human figure; the commonest but most pretty bee orchis, and the parallel ones which are called after the spider, the frog, and the fly. Strange freak of nature this, in a lower order of creation, to mimic her own handyworks in a higher!—to mimic even our human mimicry!—for that which is called the man orchis is most like the imitation of a human figure that a child might cut from colored paper. Strange, strange mimicry! but ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... paradox in showing that indebtedness is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there is something so comical in a defence of debt, however transparent, proceeding from a man to whom never in his life a bill can have been sent in twice, and who would always have preferred ready-money payment to ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Estates? To the enforcement of such numerous proofs Doubt and mistrust, methinks, must needs give way. Long has a creeping rumor filled the world That Dmitri, Ivan's son, is still alive. The Czar himself confirms it by his fears. —Before us stands a youth, in age and mien Even to the very freak that nature played, The lost heir's counterpart, and of a soul Whose noble stamp keeps rank with his high claims. He left a cloister's precincts, urged by strange, Mysterious promptings; and this monk-trained boy Was straight ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... "freak dinners," when the guests themselves would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female the over-vowelled ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Do not try freak services. They are useless against high-class players. Sharp breaking underhand cuts can be easily angled off for points by a man who knows anything of the angles and effects of twist. These deliveries are affectation if ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... dreading a disclosure, had come to him to explain? To her a stranger would be an object of suspicion, against whom she would feel it necessary to be on her guard. The people of the house were doubtless accustomed to her ways, and would think nothing of any freak, however whimsical; but a stranger would look with different eyes. Few, indeed, were the strangers or visitors who ever came to Chetwynde Castle; but when one did come he would naturally be an object of suspicion to this poor soul, conscious of her ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Why is this? Is it that it is born between Wind and Water?—Wind the father, ever casting himself into multitudinous shapes of invisible tides, taking beauteous form in the sweep of a "lazy-paced cloud," or embodying a transient informing freak in the waterspout, which he draws into his life from the bosom of his mate;—Water, the mother, visible she, sweeping and swaying, ever making and ever unmade, the very essence of her being—beauty, yet having no form of ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... The assumption of divine emanations and of a differentiated divine pleroma represents the Deity as a composite, i.e.,[499] finite being; and, moreover, the personification of the divine qualities is a mythological freak, the folly of which is evident as soon as one also makes the attempt to personify the affections and qualities of man in a similar way.[500] (3) The attempt to make out conditions existing within the Godhead is in itself absurd and audacious.[501] (4) The theory of the passion ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... systems to cultivate is the "historic sense": by force of these convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn, is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to have been the creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts; so, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... inner bone receives the wine. I should think it would hold at least a quart,—enough to overpower any living head into which this death's-head should transfer its contents; and a man must be either very drunk or very thirsty, before he would taste wine out of such a goblet. I think Byron's freak was outdone by that of a cousin of my own, who once solemnly assured me that he had a spittoon made out of the skull of his enemy. The ancient coffin in which the goblet-skull was found was shown us in ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with, I bought this hoss for little or nothing. Mostly nothing. I knew he was a freak. He couldn't begin to untrack himself till he had gone a mile, but after that it seemed like every mile he went he got better. I held a watch on him an' he ran four miles close enough to the record to show me that he had a chance in the Thornton ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... choice of a foreign subject did the pretense of foreign authorship prove the servility of feeling prevailing at that time among the educated classes. This was in the first place, to be sure, the result of the freak that led Cooper originally to begin writing a novel; but it was a freak that would never have been carried out, after publication had been decided upon, had he not been fully aware of the fact that the least recommendation ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... risk a hundred-foot disk crashing in some American city?" said Redell. "No remote control is perfect, and neither is a detonator system. By some freak accident, a disk might come down in a place like Chicago, and then blow up. I just can't see the British—any more than ourselves—letting huge unpiloted missiles go barging around the world, flying along ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... Don't reproach me when I am in such need of—of friendship. One of these days you may know me better, but now you can regard me only as a freak. Yes, I am ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... anything save the signs of age. It is only in modern America that the mad extravagance of Nero's Rome may be matched. There the banquet of Trimalchio might be presented without surprise and without reproach. It differs from what are known as "freak dinners" only in the superiority of its invention and in the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... In other cases, as when Greeks and Trojans cite Plato and Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida, while Plato and Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the latest conceivable date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly suppose that a scholar would have permitted to himself the freak, any more than that in The Winter's Tale he should have borrowed from an earlier novel the absurdity of calling Delphi "Delphos" (a non- existent word), of confusing "Delphos" with Delos, and placing ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... The Caliph married his daughter whose true name was Buran; but this tale of girl's freak and courtship was invented (?) by Ishak. For the splendour of the wedding and the munificence of the Minister ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... on to assimilate a novel idea, and, in consequence, are choosing your words badly," he said. "It was not a freak marriage. Although I may have broken the laws of the State of New York by using a license issued to some other person, Lady Hermione and I are legally husband and wife, and no power on earth can dissolve the union without the expressed consent of ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... He supposed some geological freak had formed the mineral. Venus was a strange planet anyway. But that didn't matter. The important thing now was to get to know this process. He went off into a happy mist of quantum mechanics, oscillation theory, and periodic functions ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... bump was so large a lump (Nature, they said, had taken a freak) That its summit stood far above the wood Of his ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... gargoyle head, to which he will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping that you involuntarily draw your chair further back. Next, in a freak of ventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile's mouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and are ready to implore him to play no more tricks. He knows when he has reached this limit, and soothes you at once by a tender, far-off whisper, like ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... skeletons of trees, required all the maiden's horsemanship. But she struggled on, until she reached something midway between a grotto and a hut, projecting from the side of the gully, and looking as though by some fantastic freak of nature it had grown there, so admirably was it in keeping with the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... poor little fellow, saving the people in those three cottages of his. No one supposed his shop in danger, but the fire took a sudden freak and came down Long Street; and though the house is standing, it had to be emptied and deluged with water to save it. I never knew Pettitt had a mother till I found her mounting guard, like one distracted, over ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... too far, Edgar Vaughan," said Mrs. Grosvenor, catching Sylvia in her arms. The revengeful freak, which Vaughan's wounded vanity had suggested, had been countenanced by this lady, in the hope of curing Sylvia of her romantic notions, and reconciling her to the truths and realities of life. "Look at the poor child!" she continued. "I protest I tremble ...
— Sylph Etherege - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... coming to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... her, but can readily repeat the Matter it self; therefore, though she exposes all the whole Town, she offends no one Body in it. She is so exquisitely restless and peevish, that she quarrels with all about her, and sometimes in a Freak will instantly change her Habitation. To indulge this Humour, she is led about the Grounds belonging to the same House she is in, and the Persons to whom she is to remove, being in the Plot, are ready to receive her at her own Chamber again. At stated Times, the Gentlewoman at whose House she supposes ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was so exact a repetition of what had met my eyes when for the first time I passed under that roof, that it did not seem as though it could be real; it seemed as though it must be a freak of memory: the same long low room, the same heavy beams across the ceiling, the same three chairs, standing in the same places where they stood then, the same table, and upon it the crwth and bow. ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... curious freak of fate that such a sovereign, at such a time, should have had to get rid of the Duke of Wellington and accept Lord Grey as his Prime Minister. The Duke of Wellington was himself simple, plain, and occasionally rough in manners, with little taste for Court ceremonial and ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that for two hours after your departure I lay in bed in no small trepidation, thinking whether His Majesty might have a fancy to send me to Spandau, for the freak of which we had both been guilty. But in that case I had taken my precautions: I had written a statement of the case to my chief, the Austrian Minister, with the full and true story how you had been set to spy upon me, how you turned out to be my very near relative, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... effect, are lacking utterly for want of room. The place is not natural scenery; it is a junk-shop, a storehouse, a sample-room wherein the elements of natural scenery are to be viewed. It is not an arrangement of effects in accordance with the usual laws of landscape, but an abnormality, a freak ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... see there was not even a window anywhere. The door by which they had entered and another which evidently led into the interior of the castle were its only outlets. The earth at the bottom had remained as it had been left by the builders, who surely must have thought that no madder architectural freak was ever planned than this shut tower of the Castle of Machecoul with its blank walls and ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... interview in a few guarded words. Though Joyce by no means looked upon Jared as a protege of his organization, yet his essential sympathy with the country still held full sway, and he felt it possible to regard young Stiles not as a mere freak, but as a human creature like ourselves, and struggling upward, like the rest of us and to the best of his powers, toward the light. But the town did not want restraint and reason just then, and Joyce's well-considered words ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... more she talked at me. I had risen from the ranks, hadn't I? She thought careers like mine such a romance. I just sat and sweated and couldn't eat. She made me feel as if she was going to exhibit me as the fighting skeleton in her freak museum. If ever I see that woman coming towards me in the street, I'll turn ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... her strong inclination to sit down was owing to want of exercise, and the heaviness of her eyelids a freak of imagination; so, speedily smoothing her ruffled plumage, she ran down to tell her father of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... conception, fancy; whim, caprice, vagary, freak; priggery, vanity, egotism, self-conceit, inflation, self-glorification, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... that American newspapers are sneering about his preface to Uncle Tom's Cabin; but they ought at least to remember that his sentiments with regard to slavery are no sudden freak. In the first place, he comes of a family that has always been on the side of liberal and progressive principles. He himself has been a leader of reforms on the popular side. It was a temporary ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... adventurers kept steadily on their course. They knew that through those dismal portals they were to arrive at the most magnificent country in the world; they knew that awful screen concealed loveliness itself. It was a coquettish freak of nature, when dealing with European curiosity, as it came eagerly bounding to the Atlantic wave, to herald it through an avenue so sombre as to cause the wonders of the great valley of the Mississippi to burst with tenfold more force upon the bewildered gaze of those ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the center of a wildly chattering horde. I was pulled this way and that. Pinched, pounded, and thumped until I was black and blue, yet I do not think that their treatment was dictated by either cruelty or malice—I was a curiosity, a freak, a new plaything, and their childish minds required the added evidence of all their senses to back up the testimony ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... facts. Let him do the worrying," quoth Dick, the philosopher. "Ernie will get off, dead sure. As for yours truly, I made my bed, so I guess I'll have to sleep in it. Joey, I'll have the laugh on you. You always said I was a crazy freak when I told you where I was going to end. Just you remember that, will you, when you read about me doing the groundless dance one of these fine days. My old man did it before me. He was seventeen minutes strangling, they say. Almost a record-breaking performance. To tell you the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
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