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More "Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raged and all was dim through a ghostly, whirling pall. The season of drifting snow had come, and Neale's winter work ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... through the fog on our right. Nothing was visible through the gloom, but we quickly hove to, and turned our canoe in the direction from which the feu-de-joie had sounded. As we approached the shore human forms began to appear in ghostly outline, more and more distinct, until they resolved themselves into a company of Indians, who were delighted to see us, and had been on the look-out for days. They had come sixty miles from the interior, and had camped on that point jutting out into the river, for the purpose ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... noticed a woman at the other side of the enclosure. Remembering how intensely superstitious the colored folks were said to be, he wondered at one of them coming alone into the grove so nearly darkened by the dense covering of pine, and with only the ghostly white of the tombs ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... its extension. His tone toward his opponents was correspondingly bitter. When he first arrived in Boston, after his speech, and spoke to the great crowd in front of the Revere House, he said, "I shall support no agitations having their foundations in unreal, ghostly abstractions." Slavery had now become "an unreal, ghostly abstraction," although it must still have appeared to the negroes something very like a hard fact. There were men in that crowd, too, who had not forgotten the noble ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... a dull September afternoon, and the clouds had settled thick round the chapel, which is never very light, and is nearly 4000 feet above the sea. I waited till such twilight as made it hopeless that more detail could be got—and a queer ghostly place enough it was to wait in—but after giving the plate an exposure of fifty minutes, I saw I could get no more, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... in order to avoid Kruger's Post Farm, which was occupied by the Boers. This took the column over some millraces, a biggish jump for the men. The mules, having been relieved of their loads, were man-handled across. Once over these and then a wade through a stream knee deep, the ghostly column again halted. It was now 3.30 a.m. The foot of the low hills behind which was the laager, had been reached, and the officers were ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... maid to meet her at a certain place not far from the house, exactly at the ghostly and dreadful hour of twelve, began to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... predominates and the zhing (or zing) in the pho or animal soul. At death the hwun (Or spiritual soul) wanders away, ascending, and the pho (the root of the Tibetan word Pho-hat) descends and is changed into a ghostly shade (the shell). Dr. Medhurst thinks that "the Kwei Shans" (see "Theology of the Chinese," pp. 10-12) are "the expanding and contracting principles of human life!" "The Kwei Shans" are brought about by the dissolution of the human frame—and consist of the expanding and ascending Shan ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... was shining brightly, giving to the dead whitened trees on the little island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore a pair of ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... in silence, and once more planted herself before him, her slim figure looking ghostly between the fading light of the departing day and the yellow flame ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... found it to be irresistible. "An archdeacon," wrote Mr. Carlyle afterwards to me, "with his own venerable lips, repeated to me, the other night, a strange profane story: of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days any ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... work. Each led his band of coureurs de bois, white Indians, without discipline, and scarcely capable of it, but brave and accustomed to the woods. On their left were the Iroquois converts from the missions of Saut St. Louis and the Mountain of Montreal, fighting under the influence of their ghostly prompters against their own countrymen. On the right were the pagan Indians from the west. The woods were full of these painted spectres, grotesquely horrible in horns and tail; and among them flitted the black robe of Father Engelran, the Jesuit of Michillimackinac. ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... the cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Sleep!—the ghostly winds are blowing; No moon's abroad; no star is glowing; The river is deep, and the tide is flowing To the land where you and I are going! We are going afar, Beyond moon or star, To the land ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... heard differs from yours," observed the Duke of Richmond: "it runs that the spirit by which the forest is haunted is a wood-demon, who assumes the shape of the ghostly hunter, and seeks to tempt or terrify the keepers to sell their souls ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was vague and ghostly, but to eyes accustomed to northern whiteness it was full of suggestion, full of secrecy; to nostrils accustomed to keen, rarefied air there was something poignant and delicious in the scent of turned earth, ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... to the Vosges, there are hundreds of thousands of graves where British soldiers keep the ghostly bivouac of the dead. They gave their young lives on the soil of France to save France, and when the great result is finally accomplished, a grateful world will never forget that "fidelity even unto ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... very mercifully awoke, and lay, for a while, blinking in the ghostly radiance of the moon, which was flooding in at the window directly upon me. Now whether it was owing to the vividness of my dream, I know not, but as I lay, there leapt up within me a sudden conviction that somebody was indeed standing ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the images, supine, Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay: And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray: 40 A crucifix of dim and ghostly white Surmounted the large ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost—not to my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own—by my stopping however idly for it. The day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... strange events of the evening, Paul Lanier lay awake all night after return from his visit with Agnes Randall. Longer he thought, deeper became the mystery. He mutters: "Not one weird circumstance alone, but such grouping of ghostly coincidents! Being ushered into the private room of Sir Charles was explained by Agnes, but why that fitful glare of lights? How came that copy of London Press, with underscored reference to the Thames ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... the ghostly narrative by a shrill little scream and making for the door, to Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, without the least ceremony. "You freeze the very marrow of my bones. Good-morning!" She coolly tossed the Oriental Cashmere Robe into Mrs. Wragge's expansive lap and ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the looking-glass at the side the reflection of part of the house, stalls, dress-circle, boxes, rows of faces, pretty dresses, bonnets, all as it were drowned in a blue haze, and presenting the colourless ghostly appearance of things dimly seen under water. During the entr'acte came the ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Earth. Men were now building it. Presently it would float as Joe dreamed of it, and where the sun struck it, it would be unbearably bright, and where there were shadows, they would be abysmally black—except, perhaps, when earthshine from the planet below would outline it in a ghostly fashion. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... on my heart. The room in which they were, communicating with that in which he stood, was only lighted by the fire. Ada sat at the piano; Richard stood beside her, bending down. Upon the wall, their shadows blended together, surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught from the unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects. Ada touched the notes so softly and sang so low that the wind, sighing away to the distant hills, was as audible as the music. The mystery of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... only with difficulty caught the terrible cuts of his weapon upon his shield. Like a gold-scaled dragon the Mohammedan swung himself round his antagonist with an agility which, with his long flowing white beard, was ghostly and horrible to witness. Heimbert was prepared to meet him on all sides, ever keeping a watchful eye for some opening in the scales made by the violence of his movements. At last it happened as he desired; between the arm and breast ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great drawing-room, once the dormitory of the monks, is now a splendid apartment richly decorated; above the chimney is a fine portrait ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... moon-misted sea came a procession of ghostly sails. Every ship seemed to bear troops of white-robed maidens and, as they floated past, they gaily waved their hands to me, calling for comradeship and understanding, a wide-open heart, freedom ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Indian file, the chief as before at the head of the line and Blackstaffe at the rear. The moon had now faded a little, and the light over the forest turned from silver to gray. Many of the stars had withdrawn, but on sped the ghostly procession of seven. No, not of seven only, but of eight, because behind them at a distance of two hundred yards always followed a youth of great build, and of wilderness instinct and powers that none of them ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... pines, for acres upon acres; sufficient, I should think, to furnish all the navies of the world, present and yet unborn, with spars. What a solemn and wintry aspect these northern forests have; what weird murmurs and ghostly sighs haunt their virgin glades. Sometimes in the midst of this almost black greenness, some forest monarch, bleached and scared by the icy breath of generations of Siberian winters, stands out with skeleton distinctness. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... silence. Piotr came to tell the heir that his old room was prepared; but Ivan still sat beside the fire, smoking, lost in vague conjectures. It was as well that he had not gone to bed. Precisely at midnight—the ghostly hour—the older doctor ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... sky there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northern lights, pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines, like aigrettes set in a band of silver. Then these slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... lived in his loneliness and cursed curses that were prayers, and here for near five decades he read and thought and dreamed and wrote. Here the spirits of Cromwell and Frederick hovered; here that pitiful and pitiable long line of ghostly partakers in the Revolution answered to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... seemingly phantom host ever quivering before him in the tremulous heated air against the cloudless horizon. Now all his energies were bent toward finding the way that led to the camp by the water-holes, but sense of locality seemed to have left him, and the ghostly company which hung so persistently on his flanks gave no indication of direction, but merely followed as before they had fled. One by one the Count's soldiers succumbed, and when at last the forty spears hedged ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-spangled banner. It was ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens. And yet there are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds, beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only (timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive again for ever. They are known to be healthy and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time to bring in the clothes before leaving, but a willing neighborhood had guarded the premises for them, so Clothes-line Park was shrouded in a whiteness that looked ghostly in ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... in the streets wandering from ghostly passage to passage, one hears no step but that of the watchman with staff and lantern. Presently there appears, far off, a light like a low-flying firefly, as it comes nearer, it is seen to proceed from the Mellah lamp of open-work brass ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... fog curtain, of ghostly outline, a jutting cliff appeared and Sammy luffed slightly. On both sides of us the seas were dashing up some tremendous rocks, but directly ahead there was an opening between the combers that hurled themselves aloft, roaring and impotent, to fall back ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... longer daylight when they came out of the little apartment in the Rue Spontini. Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered the carriage with Therese. Close together, they rolled among the vague shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around them ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... the Black Watch's ghostly piper that plays proudly when the men of the Black Watch do well, and ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... from the hill-top to which we have removed, we notice more how the appearance of the mountains changes with the changes of the sky. This morning they were all rose-color; and are now so ghostly, the snow like shrouds about them. Before, we had only single chains and solitary peaks; here, we look into the bosom of a mountainous country, and every change in the light reveals something new. Where we have many times looked without ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... next on tip-toe. He stood in the dining-room, before the fireplace. He had sat where he now stood on so many evenings of winter days whose suns had set with his youth. The barren hearth was full of ghostly flames which struck a chill into his heart. There was the room opening to the left, which Mabel and Vi, the little twin daughters of his former chief, used to occupy. He seemed to hear the laughter of the children echoing from some far-off paradise of the past, before the portal of which ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... for his help, and they two stood there, some yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city of ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... and sudden fell, As though some mighty wizard Had hushed them with a spell; And every sound was muffled, And every soldier's tread Fell lightly as a mother's 'Round her baby's cradle-bed; And rank, and file, and column, So softly by they swept, It seemed a ghostly army Had passed him as he slept; But mightier than enchantment Was that with magic move— The spell that hushed their voices— Deep ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... through its crannies and the creaking of its beams and rafters become strangely like the tones of the human voice, or thundering laughter, or heavy footsteps treading the deserted chambers. It is as if the echoes of half a century were revived. Such were the ghostly sounds that roared and murmured in our ears when I took leave of the circle round the fireside of the Province House and, plunging down the doorsteps, fought my way homeward against a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a child who discovers some curious phenomenon of nature, Agatha tried her voice again and again, listening, between whiles, to the ghostly tones reverberating among the pines. She sang the slow majestic "Lascia ch'io pianga," which has tested every singer's voice since Haendel wrote it; and then, curious, she tried the effect of the aerial sounding-board with quick, brilliant runs up and down the full range of the voice. But the effect ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... quarters throwing up dirt and pebbles, the air became so ominously and deathly still that the little girl and Sassy fairly gasped for breath. Over the grass tops the heat halted and lay in long, faintly visible waves, like a ghostly sea. And in the west there began to arise, silently and swiftly, a vast mountain of peculiar, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... rattling the window-sashes, and swaying the white curtains in a ghostly way. Later, a gray fog stole softly over the roofs, soothing the wind-roughened surfaces, and inwrapping all things in an uncertain light and a measureless peace. She lay there very quiet—for all her troubles, still a very pretty bride. ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... it still," he said, "drip! drip! faster and plainer than ever. That ghostly dropping of water is the last and the surest of the fatal signs which have told of your father's and your brother's deaths to-night, and I know from the place where I hear it—the foot of the bed I lie on—that it is a warning to me of my own approaching end. I am called where my son and ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... ill. The flakes of the first snow of the season were whirling past the windows—no more on autumn leaves they looked, no more on far-off bare but azure mountains, feigning summer. The distant ranges were ghostly white. The skeleton woods near at hand were stark and black, and trembled with sudden starts, and strove wildly with the winds, and were held in an inexorable fate, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... a truck," suggested Henri, peering into the gloom, and seeing the ghostly outline of twenty or more trucks which stood upon the rails in a siding quite close to them. ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... Elsie, therefore, was surprised, when they passed through the door-way to the street, at the apparition of a man covered from head to foot in a long robe of white serge, with a high-peaked cap of the same material drawn completely down over his head and face. Two round holes cut in this ghostly head-gear revealed simply two black glittering eyes, which shone with that singular elfish effect which belongs to the human eye when removed from its appropriate and natural accessories. As they passed out, the figure rattled a box on which was painted an image of despairing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... distinguish one object from another. Then slowly my eyes adjusted themselves to the change, and, taking one uncertain step forward, I came suddenly face to face with a Capuchin priest appearing almost ghastly with his long, pale, ascetic countenance, and ghostly gray robe ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... last long. Major Kent drove into the town in his pony trap and pulled up opposite the statue. He called to Father McCormack, who had satisfied himself about Mary Ellen's appearance, and was prowling round the statue, making mild jokes about its ghostly appearance. Doyle detected a note of urgency in the Major's voice, and hurried across the square, reaching the pony trap just as Father ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... have watched his vast creation Loom through its smoke—the spectre-haunted Thane, The Sisters at their ghostly invocations, The jealous ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... perverse and unaccountable feeling which causes a heart-broken man at a dear friend's funeral to see something irresistibly comical in a red-nosed or one-eyed undertaker, I receive your communication with ghostly facetiousness; though on a moment's reflection I find better cause for consolation in the hope that, relieved from your most trying and painful duties, you will now have leisure to return to pursuits ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... comrades, who in their madness leaped into the water and were floated ashore in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, and death ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... for the removal of corpses from the field to the North. There were quantities of spirits, consigned mainly to Quartermasters, but evidently the property of certain Shylocks, who watched the barrels greedily. An embalmer was also on board, with his ghostly implements. He was a sallow man, shabbily attired, and appeared to look at all the passengers as so many subjects for the development of his art. He was called "Doctor" by his admirers, and conversed in the blandest manner of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... "Mohabdi! Mohabdi!" When the forceps came near, he cried: "Don't put them in!" And after this he maintained a silence made up of dignity and indolence. During the day he was to be seen wandering about the wards, holding up his ghostly muffled arm with his sound hand. In the evening, he learned to play draughts, because it is a serious, silent game, and ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... probably employ a "bird chorus," the use of talking-birds as messengers; that they would repeat the plots current in other countries, and display the same non-Christian idea of death and of the future world (see "The Lyke-wake Dirge"), the same ghostly superstitions and stories of metamorphosis, and the same belief in elves and fairies, as are found in the ballads of Greece, of Provence, of Brittany, Denmark and Scotland. We shall now examine ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... thoroughly terrified savages, who by this time realised that to remain in the canoe was but to court death. Yet what else could they do? There was but one alternative, and that was—to jump overboard, and trust to their ability to swim to the island that loomed ghostly in the moonlight ahead. And this they did, one after the other—the laggards being stimulated by another shot or two from Leslie's rifle—until the canoe, a fine big craft of about five feet beam and forty feet long, fitted ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... organ, and sitting there alone in the little glow, practice the hymns and chants for the service. The whitewashed arches retreated into darkness, the sound of the organ and the organ-pedals died away upon the unalterable stillness of the church, there were faint, ghostly noises in the tower, and then the music swelled out ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... water. The "L" trains crawl over the Wells Street bridge and the water below them becomes alive with a moving silver image. For a moment the reflection of the "L" trains in the river seems like a ghostly waterfall. Then it changes and becomes something else. What? The light reflections in the dark water are baffling. It is a game to stand on the bridge and make up similes about them. They look like this, like that, like something else. Like golden pillars, like Chinese writing, like monotonous ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Of all species of ghostly phenomena, that commonly known as "haunted houses" appeals most to the ordinary person. There is something very eerie in being shut up within the four walls of a house with a ghost. The poor human being is placed at such a disadvantage. If we know that a gateway, ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... the Channel, to and from the anchorage at Spithead. Some were low in the water and venomous looking, with bulbous turrets and tiny masts. Others were long and stately, with great lowering hulks and broad expanse of canvas. Occasionally a foreign service gunboat would pass, white and ghostly, like some tired seabird flapping its way home. It was one of Kate's few amusements to watch the passing and repassing of the vessels, and to speculate upon whence they had come and whither ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... called to me that day with a hundred faint voices and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no certain message for me, but the message ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is one to do, when a friend is so pressing? Now, as to going over everything thoroughly, it is out of the question; it would take us years. Meanwhile, I should have the hue-and-cry out after me, you would be neglecting your ghostly work, Pluto would lose the shades that you ought to be shipping over all that time, and Aeacus would never take a single toll, and would be proportionately furious. We have only to think, therefore, of contriving you a general view of what is ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... was carried out in a ghostly manner, in order, without a whisper, without a sound, through forests, ravines, and valleys. A tortuous and ill-omened march. A stealthy gliding ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... was the first to find a solution of Tchitchikof's conduct. He asserted that Tchitchikof, in his love for money, had committed some fraud or some misdeed to obtain it, and that his conscience smiting him, he had sought ghostly solace from some minister, by whom he had been ordered, as adequate penance, to get off a certain portion per annum in bad bargains—thus at once doing good to the sellers and torturing the avaricious ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... hands are light, they are singing with emptiness. Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . . What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; And hew rock out of the earth, and build ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element—real though slight—is subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the sunny air he springs; To his timid mate he calls; With dangling legs and fluttering wings On the tangled smilax falls; He mutters, he shrieks— A hopeless cry; You think that he seeks In peace to die, But pity him not; 't is the ghostly chat, An imp if there is one, be sure ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... from her brow and cast it from her, and, thereafter, laid by her rings and jewels, and coming to the open casement fell there upon her knees and reached forth her pale hands to where, across the valley, the dark forest stretched away, ghostly ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... scout told him of a change in their surroundings. He felt rather than saw the difference. They had crossed the sand belt, and the contour of the prairie was rising. Then the Cimarron was near! Even as the conviction took shape, the ghostly outline of a small elevation loomed through the murk. He stared at it scarce believing, imagining a delusion, and then sent his cracked voice back in a shout on ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... answer back to him. His heart grew colder and colder, when suddenly the cloud above him was rent in a dozen places, and lightning flashed through the valley, and the thunder rolled over the echoing mountains. In the lurid glare of the lightning Cuglas saw a hundred ghostly forms sweeping towards him, uttering as they came nearer and nearer shrieks so terrible that the silence of death could more easily be borne. Cuglas turned to escape, but they hemmed him round, and pressed their ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... whispering gallery of ghostly fears in which her life crouched, Michael's voice spoke to her also. She could hear his grave, low tones. "Think ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... afternoon when we went again, but this time we took the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far as the navyyard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among the vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships. The grass grew in the Kittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and those pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than they would have been if resonant with saw and hammer. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wherewith she was pressing out the seams of Lady Margaret's night-gown. On the second occasion, she fled along the kitchen hall, shrieking piteously, and preceded by Doll, the kitchen wench, the latter having in her seeming a certain ghostly appearance, as she was clad only in her shift, which the draughts in the hall inflated to a great size. The poor maid fled affrighted into her room and locked the door behind her; yet when I did essay to assuage the terror of Mistress Butter, identifying ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... and the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... lingered by the side of the deep old road where this robbery was committed, to cast wistful glances into its mysterious windings; and when night deepened the shadows of the trees, have urged my horse on his journey, from a vague apprehension of a visit from the ghostly highwayman. And then there was the Bollin, with its shelvy banks, which Turpin cleared at a bound; the broad meadows over which he winged his flight; the pleasant bowling-green of the pleasant old inn at Hough, where he produced his ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... street a derelict house rears ghostly debris of roofs and chimney-stacks upward to the sky. A tiny square of yellow light, blinking like a giant eye through a curtainless window, pierced the wall of the house. Roger pointed ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... we feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal des Ursins chronicles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... return home. On his arrival at the castle, as he was passing up the stairs, he heard a footstep behind, and on turning round he perceived the same apparition. He hastily entered his room, and bolted, locked, and barred the door, but to his horror and surprise this offered no impediment to his ghostly visiter, for the door sprang open at his touch, and he entered the room! The apparition was seen by various others, all of whom asserted it bore the strongest resemblance to their deceased master! One gentleman spoke to him, and the spirit told him "that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... nun-like ghostly face hung before him, stronger in outline the farther time widened between ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... away, regarding him breathlessly, hatted, gloved, all in white, one hand resting lightly on the center-table, one folded about the crook of a dainty draggled parasol. The match threw a small and ghostly light, but he saw her, and ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... grinding and crumbling to pieces against the faces of the cliffs. A cloud of snow-spray, rising like a thick white mist, filled the whole ravine—as if to conceal the work of ruin that was going on—and underneath this ghostly veil, the crushing and tearing for some moments continued. Then all at once the fearful noises ceased, and only the screaming of the birds, and the howling of beasts, disturbed ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... glided by little restaurants where the Venetians, in olden days, talked liberty for themselves and death to the Austrians, and at length they came out upon the Grand Canal where the Rialto curves its ancient blocks of marble and stalactites gleam ghostly overhead. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... haze in the distance. In the sea, just below him, several heads of swimmers moved. One boy was "making death." He floated on his back with his eyes closed and his arms extended. His body, giving itself without resistance to every movement of the water, looked corpselike and ghostly. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... on Midsummer Eve of this year, and as the hour grew later, and nine o'clock drew on, the irradiation of the daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of indistinctness. Imagination could trace upon the trunks and boughs strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights; the surfaces of the holly-leaves would here and there shine like peeping eyes, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... it that says, "After all, let a bad man take what pains he may to push it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unique possession for a bad man to have?" During the time that had elapsed between the death and burial of his father and wife, Philip had become thoroughly acquainted with the truth of ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... appeared. Gone was the far sweeping expanse of forest-clad mountain side, stretching off to the sunrise; in its place lay a level space closed in by substantial buildings of marble, granite and brick—the Art Museum, Latin School and clustered hospitals,—their walls changing from ghostly gray to growing rose and gold. She drew a comfortable dressing gown—the gift of her new friend—about her girlish form, and sat down by the window in the familiar posture with her chin on her cupped hands. By Miss Merriman's description of the view which the window gave upon she recognized ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... laid by some upon the simple declaration of this man, who in all probability died in the faith of a roman catholick. This, however, I am apt to think, will not disparage his declaration in the opinion of some great men at home, even tho he did not make his confession to a ghostly physician. ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... never still. And with their yapping came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora, like the song of a vast piece of mechanism in the still farther north. Toward this Wapi turned his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just beyond the ghostly pale of vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had slunk out and around it, cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had caught its smells and its sounds; he had come near enough to hear the voices of men, and those voices ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... place was weird and death-like; there she stood in her loveliness, as if just attired for some merry-making; her rosy lips seemed ready to break out into song and laughter and shout, to startle this ghostly scene. ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... church stood a large crucifix still undamaged. The roof had gone, and the moonlight flooded the ruins through the broken Gothic windows. To the left, ploughed up with shells, were the tombs of the civilian cemetery, and the whole place was ghostly and uncanny. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the church to the subdued rustle of Sunday silks and the whisper of Sunday voices. At the door some one shook hands with Callandar and remarked in a ghostly whisper that it was a fine day. A grave young man, in black, led them to a pew half way down the aisle. Most of the pews were already full, the latest comers showing slight signs of hurry; and as they seated themselves the bell stopped and ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer—balmy sleep—but did not get it—a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and should ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... expressed the negative stress of conscience, the "thou shalt not" of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom. Socrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a message from heaven. He taught a feeble voice—senseless like all ghostly voices—to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element within himself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for some external sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man is obviously so small a part of the world, that he could reasonably subordinate reason ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... night, and the Adventurer made extremely slow progress, a leadsman at the bow calling off the depth of water, and a huge light, rather ingeniously arranged, casting a finger of radiance along the ghostly shore line. With no marks of guidance on either bank, the wheelsman felt his uncertain passage upward, advancing so cautiously progress was scarcely noticeable, and I could frequently distinguish the voice of the anxious captain from the upper deck, above the hiss of the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... not like about the cavern was that it had innumerable passages and windings about, and odd places, with dark holes, and ghostly-looking corners. I was not satisfied until I had explored them all, blocking up narrow little slits, and doing all I could to rout out anything that might be harbouring there. There was one passage very long and steep, the entrance to it out of the cavern was so narrow ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... in the face of this, he turned sick at the thought of going forward to the certain annihilation awaiting him in that ghostly wilderness of mist and wet and wreckage ahead. On the other hand, how in God's name could he keep from going, he asked himself, when the blood of innocents was calling on every side! He felt again the "something strong within him ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... and drew nearer, and she stood waiting passively, as if daring him to touch her again; but he stooped and peered into her face. The night was not dark and in the ghostly moonlight he could see the cold anger ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... In a very few moments something of an unusual and ghostly appearance—so much only I could discover of what afterwards became a very familiar sort of vehicle—was waiting for me alongside the platform. The only means of getting into it was through an opening directly in front. Towards this I was encouraged to ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... thunder of the approaching train, and were in time to see the gates of the level-crossing at the end of the platform swing silently open as if by ghostly hands, till their red lanterns blocked the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... in its place he saw the stern brow, and gleaming garments, and drawn flaming sword of the Avenger. And then he was in a great wood alone, and wandering, when the well-known voice called his name, and entreated him to turn from that evil place; and he longed to turn,—but, whenever he tried, ghostly hands seemed to wave him back again, and irresistible cords to drag him into the dark forest, amid the sound of mocking laughs. Then he was sinking, sinking, sinking into a gulf, deep and darker even than the inner ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... descendants of the Prophet, wearing monster green turbans and green kammerbunds; the women are dressed in white throughout—white socks, white pantalettes, and white shrouds; they move silently about, more like ghostly visitants than human beings. Distinctly different types of people from the majority are sometimes met with—full-bearded, very dark-skinned men, whose bared breasts betray the fact that they are little less ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... a wild glare far into the depths of the great, black, silent woods. The trees seem to stand out like startled giants, gazing at the unusual scene; and all above and around the frightened shadows lurk, in ghostly boughs, behind dark trunks, among the deep grasses, and in hollows of the black morass. And the darkness of the night overhangs the army like a vast ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... was burned down, but the place has been haunted. I, myself, good gentlemen, have heard ghostly music, and I swear ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... always learned law-doctors and ghostly confessors to strengthen and to absolve them, they could never expect anything but broken faith and contempt ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one'? To this 'mystic or secondary impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august soul-exalting echo.' Has anything that has been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... transfigured in glorious array. Now the last of the twilight purple has vanished, the stars begin to shine, and all trace of the day is gone. Looking across the fiord the water seems perfectly black, and the two great glaciers are seen stretching dim and ghostly into the shadowy mountains now darkly massed against ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... know, no doubt, How quickly such news flies— Throughout the place, From "Higgses Chase" Proceeded ghostly cries. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... shaken with nervousness while she read her aunt's letter aloud, but Quentyns held the sheet of thin paper steadily. As the sentences fell from his lips, his full tones seemed to put new meaning into them—the ghostly terrors died out of Hilda's heart. When her husband laid down the sheet of paper, and turned to her with a triumphant smile, she could not help smiling back at him ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... window in the second story, and glanced across the desolate, bare forest, which, with its snowy mantle, had a ghostly, uncanny look. ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... close chamber. It should seem they had drunk deeply before they died here—perhaps they had collected the last liquids, and resolved to perish when they had once more feasted: for there was wine still in some of the vessels, nay, in one there was water; and the ghostly shapes were adorned and fantastically covered with jewels and velvet, and all sort of rare and exquisite ornaments. Some were still on chairs, some fallen forward on the table, some prostrate, as if they had lain down to sleep. There were fragments of shivered glass on the floor; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... loftier Brother shall be King, High-priest be thou to Brahma unrevealed, While thy white sanctity forever sealed In icy silence leaves desire congealed. In ghostly ministrations to the sun, And to the mendicant stars and the moon-nun, Be holy still, till East to West has run, And till no sacrificial suffering On any shrine is left to ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... so sad and solemn, that things meant in jest are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become dreadful earnest,—gayly dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is laid off utterly without regard to human consideration, and serves no purpose save as a means of defining voting boundaries and limiting the spheres of constables and sheriff's deputies—a mere ghostly phantom of a social entity that we need not consider ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... mine, seemed to nod imperceptibly above the ghostly grey of my sleeping-suit. It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... and pleasant murmur Of its subsiding, As the pulse of the storm beats firmer, And the steady rain Drops into a cadenced chiding. Deep-breathing rain, The sad and ghostly noise Wherewith thou dost complain,— Thy plaintive, spiritual voice, Heard thus at close of day Through vaults of twilight-gray,— Doth vex me with sweet pain! And still my soul is fain To know the secret of that yearning Which in thine utterance ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... Starratt was booked at the detention hospital. They took away his clothes and gave him a towel and a nightgown and led him to a bathroom... Presently he was shown to his cell-like room. Overhead the fading day filtered in ghostly fashion through a skylight; an iron bed stood against the wall. There was not another ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... key of the door he had locked, which in haste he had taken out and still held in his hand. Without attempting to decide whether the thing he had seen was of common clay or of some lighter substance, he still did not lend his mind with sufficient readiness to ghostly theory to imagine that his unwelcome guest could pass ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... those lofty tiers of seats in the pale, clear starlight. Can you see no shadowy figures sitting there, hear no light whisper of ghostly laughter, no thin ripple of clapping hands? What flash of wit amuses them, what nobly tragic word or action stirs them to applause? What problem of their own life, what reflection of their own heart, does the stage reveal to them? We shall never ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... to be starved, and himself in it. The market-people would not have dared to come to the city with provisions so long as it remained under the ban. There would have been too much inconvenience to himself and his ghostly brethren in such a measure; and, as the viceroy anticipated, the good cardinal reserved his thunders for ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... itself quickly obvious, and even odious, in all the secular relations of life. The American became a sort of braggart playboy of the western world, enormously sure of himself and ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And on the ghostly side there appeared the same accession of confidence, the same sure assumption of authority, though at first less self-evidently and offensively. The religion of the American thus began to lose its inward direction; it became less ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... something like favour; and before the first month of my banishment expired, had got the length of an invitation to tea, in her own snuggery—an honour never known to be bestowed on any before, with the exception of Father Malachi Brennan, her ghostly adviser; and even he, it is said, never ventured on such an approximation to intimacy, until he was, in Kilrush phrase, "half screwed," thereby meaning more than half tipsy. From time to time thus, I learned from my hostess such particulars of the country and its ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... the window, where a frosted pattern of ivy showed like a delicate lacework on the small greenish panes. Another dropped; then another. Gradually he began to listen for the sound and to miss it when there came a long silence. One might easily imagine it to be the tapping of ghostly fingers—of the fingers of pretty Janet Merryweather—some quarter of a century earlier. Her daughter was hardly more than twenty now, he supposed, and he wondered how long the mad idyllic period had lasted ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... those who can understand—but it is delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the extraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this collection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it; you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon blown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little village lying near the Portsmouth Road about half-way between London and the sea; the farmer grumbling at the loss of so many turnips; the captain of the weird vessel acknowledging the justice ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... be not of German but foreign birth. He appeared to come from the land of Bohemia. He cast a contemptuous smile on Froda, who, as usual, had opened the ancient book of Aslauga's history, and was attentively reading in it. "You must be a ghostly knight?" he said, inquiringly; and it appeared as if a whole train of unseemly jests were ready to follow. But Froda answered so firmly and seriously with a negative that the Bohemian stopped short suddenly; ...
— Aslauga's Knight • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... her eyes and had damp fat fingers; the hymn-singing, the wheezy harmonium, the amazing pseudo-mystical oracular messages that revealed nothing which a religiose fool could not invent—in fact the whole affair, from the sham stained-glass lamp-shade to the ghostly tambourines overhead, the puerility of the tricks played on the inquirers, and all the rest of it—this seemed as little connected with what he had experienced with Mr. Vincent as a dervish dance with High Mass. He had ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... stood here with Tim at the open grave of her whom we both called mother. And on that same day her ghostly footstep had sounded in our ears in the grim kitchen of Kilgorman, summoning us to a duty which was yet unfulfilled. What had not happened since then? The boatman's boys were grown, one into the heir of half the lough-side, the other into a servant of his Majesty. Tim, entangled hand ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... neighboring fields and lost itself at last in the Oswegatchie. The interior of the house was just as wild and dreary as the exterior. The rooms, for the most part, were too large for comfort. When one spoke, a dozen ghostly echoes answered, and at twilight the smaller children huddled around the kitchen fire and seldom went beyond that cheerful room until bed time. Often, in the dead of night, the creaking of timber and the voices of the wind startled the little ones from sleep, and a sense of something unreal ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... an infinite space that he had lived through and travelled over, and he fancied it hardly possible that he could ever get back again. But now, with every step that he took, he found himself getting miserably back into the old enchanted land. The mist rose up about him, the pale mist-bow of ghostly promise curved before him; and he trod back again, poor boy, out of the clime of real effort, into the land of his ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... brutal avidity that makes them blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed countenance, floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would have conveyed to him. His own experience ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The green ghostly light came flooding in, and then went out as abruptly as it had come. But the moment was enough. Clear stamped on his brain, like a photographic exposure, was the image of two men. One lay at the bottom of the trench and grinned at the sky with his throat cut from ear to ear; the other—huddled ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... as the foam, light as the air; And ghostly Achilles raceth there, Far in the Friendless Waters. [ANTISTROPHE 1.] Ah, would that Leda's child ... (So prayeth the priestess maiden) From Troy, that she beguiled, Hither were borne, to know What sin on her soul is laden! Hair twisted, throat held low, Head back for the ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... finger at a wandering robin. "I am as guiltless of theories as that bird. It is passing strange. Your cousin and our ghostly Huron seem to have gone ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... slow of coming. They could see the barge from which they were to be sent; they could watch the movements of the men in white oil-cloth who moved in a ghostly fashion about the barge; they could hear the tap of hammers; but nothing ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... bridge, with a cross raised above the centre of the parapet. Soon after this I began to descend the hill that leads into Coutances. A bend in the road, as I was rapidly descending, brought into view a whole blaze of lights, and I felt that here at last there were people and hotels, and an end to the ghostly sights of the open country. Then I came to houses, but they were all quite dark, and there was not a single human being in sight. Following this came a choice of streets without a possibility of knowing which one would lead in the direction of ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... visible on its roof and sides, and the red slime of Slumgullion clung tenaciously to its wheels. I opened the door; the stage creaked easily, and in the gloomy abyss the swaying straps beckoned me, like ghostly hands, to come in now and have ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Tall, ghostly-looking elder-trees grew round the old manse, which people had told me always kept moving, even when no breath of wind ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... cheerfully unlocked a glass case behind the racked and ghostly dead; he brought out a suit that seemed to Milt almost decent. And it almost fitted when, after changing clothes in a broiling, boiling, reeking, gasoline-pulsing hole behind the racks, he examined it before a pier-glass. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily, this is enchantment; I am bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves—apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... darned long space before I'll snicker again. My laugher has gone unused for so long that it's atrophied and won't work. I've tried warming it up by going home at night and guffawing before the mirror, but the result is only a mirthless giggle—a ghostly chortle! Of course, I wouldn't dare attempt to laugh ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... above have penetrated and are hanging down. It is said that the gallery led on to the castle, but since this latter has been ruined it has been blocked. In the holes whence flints have dropped spiders harbour, that feed on ghostly moths which flit in the pitch darkness, and when caught between the fingers resolve themselves into a trace of silver dust. But on what did these spectral moths feed? A pallid boy of sixteen who guided me about the town told me that he had been born in a cave; that he slept in one ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... and darkness began again in a ghostly ruin in the mountains of Biscay. A forge fire blazed through a yawning doorway of tumbled-down stones. It was not yet day, but very soon it would be; and Manrico, the handsome knight, brigand, troubadour, lover of Leonora, lay wounded upon a low couch near the forge fire. ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... attitude of fixed, sullen defiance. What her features expressed it was impossible to tell, since they were hidden by the deep shadow in which she had taken up her position. The rest of the apartment was lit with a grey, ghostly light, the reflection from the courtyard, in part visible through the open doorway, and which lay bathed in all the brilliancy of a ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... in which "companies" scarce existed, "regiments" were counted by tens, and "divisions" by hundreds only, need not here be elaborately dwelt upon. It was indeed the phantom of an army, and the gaunt faces were almost ghostly. Shoeless, in rags, with just sufficient coarse food to sustain life, but never enough to keep at arm's-length the gnawing fiend Hunger, Lee's old veterans remained firm, scattered like a thin skirmish-line along ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... experience of this kind is still well remembered. It was a fine crisp March morning, and the sun had not yet shown himself among the distant tree-tops as we hurried along through the ghostly wood. Presently we arrived at a place where there were many signs of the animals. Then each of us selected a tree and took up his position behind it. The chipmunk caller sat upon a log as motionless as he could, ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... beginnin' to figger,' says Peets, 'that this ghostly rider is the foxy little Jose Miguel. Which I've frequent talked with him; an' he saveys enough about drugs an' chemicals to paint up with phosphorus an' go surgin' about an' stampedin' cattle over bluffs. It's a mighty good idee from his standp'int. He can argue that ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... young man who wanted my heart and liver, and of my acquaintance with the iron on his leg, and if I slept at all that night it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a strong spring tide to the Hulks, a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking trumpet that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at once. I was afraid to sleep even if I could have, for I knew that at the first dawn of morning I must rob the pantry and ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... an English outpost at the Point of Orleans; and, about eleven o'clock, the sentries descried through the gloom the ghostly outlines of the approaching ships. As they gazed, these mysterious strangers began to dart tongues of flame; fire ran like lightning up their masts and sails, and then they burst out like volcanoes. Filled ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... solemn and terrific, Hinted some tragedy of that old hall Locked up in hieroglyphic! Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread; But to one gloomy window pointing mostly, The while some secret inspiration said, That chamber is the ghostly! ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... stiffly, and while she clung whispering at his breast he looked out over her head, glancing his eyes in all directions. Straight in front of him across the glade, the great beeches were gray and ghostly, and beyond them in the strip that concealed the ride it seemed that the shadows ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... stirred from her place—sat yet with her brother's letter in her lap, her hands lying heavily upon it, although her muslin dress was ghostly in the stream of moonlight flowing across the chamber. She had wept her eyes dry, and her voice ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... revealed by his performances in Egyptian free-masonry. Molten gold was said to stream at pleasure over the rim of his crucibles; divination by astrology was as familiar to him as it had been of yore to Zoroaster or Nostradamus; graves yawned at the beck of his potent finger; their ghostly habitants, appeared at his preternatural bidding. The necromantic achievements of Doctor Dee and William Lilly dwindled into insignificance before those attributed to a man who, although apparently in the bloom of manhood, was believed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... alone that curiosity is punished. Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor is, we are told, a great penal settlement for refractory spirits. Many of the former inhabitants of the parish are supposed to be still there expiating their ghostly pranks. Of the spirit of one old farmer it is related that it took seven clergymen to secure him. They, however, succeeded at last in transforming him into a colt, which was given in charge to a servant-boy with directions to take him to Cranmere Pool, and there on ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... strongly appealed to my imagination and somewhat excited my mirth. One needs a powerful imagination, I thought, to live in these regions where the native element, the hill-folk, dwell so fondly and earnestly upon the ghostly and mysterious. Three miles down the river, Dunderberg, "the thundering mountain," on the west bank, with the town of Peekskill on the opposite shore, was passed, and I entered Haverstraw Bay, the widest part of the river. "Here," says the historian, "the fresh and salt water usually ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... see the tartans wave, and nodding plumes among the rolling smoke? Oh, I can. Seems as if the guitar would burst its very strings; but, the battle is over—cry of vanquished, shout of victor, all are hushed. And now comes the ghostly music of the coronach: they are burying the dead. And the instrument appears to sob, to weep, till the sweet low song ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... stifled sobbing is heard in the damp woods—the evenings in late autumn time, when the white mist creeps across the fields, making it seem as though old Earth, feeling the night air cold to its poor bones, were drawing ghostly bedclothes round its withered limbs. I like the twilight of the long grey street, sad with the wailing cry of the distant muffin man. One thinks of him, as, strangely mitred, he glides by through the ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... his very ear, the words made him jump. He had been lost in contemplation; and the address had a ghostly suddenness. But it was no ghost that stood beside him—nor indeed was it a night for those presences to be abroad ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... opened the door, motioned him in. The room appeared as before. The light burned low over the white desk; the portieres hung close. Rosalie pointed to the rounded, further end of the room—the space where he had seen the ghostly thing which was Annette disappear through the floor. That floor space was bare; a rug, rolled up, rested against the further wainscot. Blake took it in, and smiled at Rosalie as though to say, "everything is ready I see!" Then for a minute ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... till the raindrops were outlined distinct and glistening like a gossamer veil of silver, while the office building to their left was ripped and rended and the adjoining walls leaped out into sudden relief, their shattered windows looking like ghostly, sightless eyes. The curtain of darkness closed heavier than velvet, and the men cowered in their tracks, shielding themselves behind the nearest objects or behind one another's bodies, waiting for the sky to vomit ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... more. He had been the victor in a combat that still had for him all the elements of the ghostly. He had triumphed, but just in time. His nerves were relaxed and unstrung, and his hands were damp. He carefully reloaded all the empty chambers of his repeating rifle, and without looking at the falling horse, which he felt had suffered for the wickedness ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... Travis looked around at the thick adobe wall surrounding the old mission in which they stood. In the cold, yellowish twilight even the flaring cook fires of his hundred and eighty-two men could not dispel the ghostly air that clung to the old place. Travis shivered involuntarily. But the walls were thick, and they could turn one-pounders. He asked, "What was it you called this place, ...
— Remember the Alamo • R. R. Fehrenbach
... of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the bell. And the ghostly procession thrice tracks the four ambulatories of the cloisters, solemnly chanting a requiem ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... properly backed up by the Flying Artillery. Their banner announced that they were 'for the reduction of Sebastopol,' and it is safe to say that they will certainly take that fortress, if they get a chance. If the Russians hold out against those four ghostly steeds, tandem, with their bandy-legged and kettle-stomached riders,—that gun, so strikingly like a joint of old stove-pipe in its exterior, but which upon occasion could vomit forth your real smoke ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... captive, seem'd in long disastrous strife, Some, in the deadly fray, bereft of life; And freshly wounded some. A viewless hand Led me to mingle with the mornful band, And learn the fortunes of the sentenced crew, Who, pierced by Love, had bid the world adieu. With keen survey I mark'd the ghostly show, To find a shade among the sons of woe To memory known: but every trace was lost In the dim features of the moving host: Oblivion's hand had drawn a dark disguise O'er their wan lineaments and beamless eyes. At length, a pallid face ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... acquiescence was not quite what Elspeth Glendinning wished or expected. She made up, however, by her own enthusiasm, for the lady's want of eagerness to avail herself of ghostly counsel, and Martin was despatched with such haste as Shagram would make, to pray one of the religious men of Saint Mary's to come up to administer the last consolations to the widow ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... might have added that French ballads would probably employ a "bird chorus," the use of talking-birds as messengers; that they would repeat the plots current in other countries, and display the same non-Christian idea of death and of the future world (see "The Lyke-wake Dirge"), the same ghostly superstitions and stories of metamorphosis, and the same belief in elves and fairies, as are found in the ballads of Greece, of Provence, of Brittany, Denmark and Scotland. We shall now examine these supposed common notes of all genuine ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... falling swiftly, layer on layer of twilight, as they turned to come back to the house. The steeple of the church rose up on their left, slender and ghostly against the yellow sky, out of the black yews and cypresses that lay banked below it. They stopped and looked at it a moment, as it aspired to heaven from the bones that lay about its base, like an eternal resurrection wrought ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... had no charm for him, and the brightness of the summer days chased not away his gloom. More congenial to him were the "watches of the night," when the few sounds that fell upon his ears were weird and ghostly. Here, amid the gloomy shadows where the only sounds were the sighing of the winds among the trees, the melancholy hootings of the owls, or the distant howlings of the wolves, he passed ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... on a truck," suggested Henri, peering into the gloom, and seeing the ghostly outline of twenty or more trucks which stood upon the rails in a siding quite close to them. "A ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... friend; but when we see a man with his eyes fixed in that ghostly way, and his mustaches and all in perfect repose, we reasonably imagine that he's seeing visions; and I suppose you'll come flaming out presently with some dreams that shall have, for remote consequences, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the crowd. But it was impossible to resist for long the glamour of these preparations. The trek wagon, the tents, the night lanterns, all helped to stir his quick blood. They whispered of evening, and night fires springing to light, and white tent walls showing ghostly ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... they ere death— Flirt wanly, dance in ghostly-wise, With ghosts of tunes for melodies, And vanish at the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... and rattling the doors in its deserted corridors. One of our party had been placed by himself at the end of a long suite of apartments, with balconies commanding the wide sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. He confessed in the morning to having passed a restless night, tormented by the ghostly noises of the wind, a wanderer, "like the world's rejected guest," through those untenanted chambers. The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Isabella had a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer—balmy sleep—but did not get it—a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Miss Jenkyns, which had been troubling her all the afternoon, and for which she now felt penitent, she kept telling me how good and how clever Deborah was in her youth; how she used to settle what gowns they were to wear at all the parties (faint, ghostly ideas of grim parties, far away in the distance, when Miss Matty and Miss Pole were young!); and how Deborah and her mother had started the benefit society for the poor, and taught girls cooking and plain sewing; and ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... she believed it was owing to some trickery of his that men still declared it haunted by evil or troubled spirits. Travellers passing that way had been scared almost out of their senses by the sight of a ghostly white figure gliding about, or by the sound of hollow moans and the rattling of chains. None but the ignorant stranger ever ventured within half-a-mile of that ill-omened spot. Cuthbert, as he sat thinking over the gipsy's words and charge, saw clearly that there was ample ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... He sits—nor deems his Helen flown, Tearless and voiceless on the spot; All desert, but he feels it not! Ah! soon alive, to miss and mourn The form beyond the ocean borne Shall start the lonely king! And thought shall fill the lost one's room, And darkly through the palace gloom Shall stalk a ghostly thing. [26] Her statues meet, as round they rise, The leaden stare of lifeless eyes. Where is their ancient beauty gone?— Why loathe his looks the breathing stone? Alas! the foulness of disgrace Hath swept the Venus from her face! And visions in the mournful night Shall dupe the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heavily on my bed, and put a pillow comfortably to her back while I dressed. Hikeses' boy sat waiting for me in the porch whistling under his breath. He was the tallest and lankiest of them all, and like some ghostly cicerone, he never spoke, but led the way through the dewy grass into the white, glorious moonlight, and kept a few yards ahead of me in the dusty road until we ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... distance the road had been bordered by fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madronos, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable. For some moments Holker saw nothing of the building, but as they turned into the woods it revealed itself in faint gray outline ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... inquire. No doubt, however, had it so happened, I should have deemed myself honorably bound to warn them of a listener's presence by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or by sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place, as if this were one of the trees of Dante's ghostly forest. But real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance. In the first place, they did not sit down at all. Secondly, even while they passed beneath the tree, Zenobia's utterance was so ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... himself, in the gloom of the night, on three great ships, with an average of 100 guns each! Was ever a more daring feat attempted? Silently through the darkness the Superb crept, her canvas glimmering ghostly white, till she was within some 300 yards of the nearest Spaniard. Then out of the darkness to windward there broke on the astonished and drowsy Spaniards a tempest of flame, a whirlwind of shot. Thrice the Superb poured ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... prudent, whether Mrs. Ponsonby were a prude or no, but it had its rise in quite a different cause. She had no dress she considered suitable for such an occasion. Her wedding dress still hung in ghostly splendor in a closet all by itself, but that was too grand, and the others of her trousseau had been few in number and plain in make, and would now have been consigned to the rag bag had she seen any means of supplying their place. They were certainly too shabby to grace one of ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... sun stood in the sky like a moon, and its shadows were ghostly. Terrified rooks and bats flew around, and hovered about the cross in this horrible twilight. Rocks on the hills broke away, and skulls rolled down the slope. As for the people, they seemed to have lost the power of speech, they stood dumb and ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... splashed into her glass. She was remembering how some mysterious instinct had restrained her from going with John Redmond, though it seemed the only sane thing to do. What if she had disobeyed that instinct! And then—through her mind in swift ghostly march—past trailed the persons and events of the days just gone—just gone, yet seeming as far away as a former life in another world. Redmond and Gulick—Etta—yes, Etta, too—all past and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... have been some one like him she had seen, then. Yes, that was it. It was the shadow of another face in his that had startled her with so strange a feeling, almost as if she had been looking upon some ghostly thing. Another face, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... most interesting and a remarkable experience to have lived in one of Brigham Young's very own houses. But the place was ghostly—lonesome beyond everything—and when the wind moaned and sighed through the rooms one could fancy it was the wailing of the spirits of those seven wretched wives. When we returned at night to the dark, unoccupied ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... us. To-morrow shall we be with our uncle Hal. I only wish his lord was not of the ghostly sort, but perhaps he may prefer me to some great knight's service. But oh! Ambrose, come and look. See! The fellow they call Smallbones is come out to the fountain in the middle of the court with a bucket in each hand. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... from the ship. As it was, with the outfly of the hurricane that weird, unnatural, ruddy light of which I have spoken almost immediately died out from the sky, leaving the night as pitch-dark as before, save for the ghostly gleam of phosphorescent light which arose from the storm-swept ocean, and which gave the water, as far as it could be seen, the appearance as if moonlight were ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... mistrust thy love,' continued Emma, 'or canst thou hope for my affection whilst that ghostly gift divides us? Never! Inhuman man, thou wilt teach me ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... portion being communicated to Dolores on Sunday afternoons. There were at first a few scruples on Constance's part whether this were exactly a Sunday occupation; but Dolores pronounced that 'the Sabbatarian system was gone out,' and after Constance had introduced the ghostly double of her vanished waif walking in a surpliced procession, she persuaded herself that there was a sufficient aroma of religion about the story to bring it within the ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... away so much blood," Catesby replied that he was "resolved that in conscience it might be done," whereon Rookwood, "being satisfied that in conscience he might do it, confessed it neither to any ghostly father nor to any other." (Exam, of Rookwood, Gunpowder Plot Book, article 136.) Sir William Wade writes that "Rookwood can procure no succour from any of his friends in regard of the odiousness of his actions," (Additional Manuscript 6178, folio 34). He seems to have been fond of fine clothes, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... crook I must get free. At great risk of hurting my head I rolled to the door of the tool house, which Stumpy had left wide open. Outside, the stars were shining brightly, and in the southwest the pale crescent of the new moon was falling behind the tree-tops, casting ghostly shadows that would have made a timid person shiver. But as the reader may by this time know, I was not of a timid nature, and I gave the shadows scant attention until a sudden movement among the trees attracted ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... very air; in it the war-time precautions against light seemed fantastic, like shading candles in a room still full of daylight. What lights there were had the effect of strokes and stipples of dim colour laid by a painter's brush on a background of ghostly whitish blue. The dreamlike quality of the town was perhaps enhanced for her eyes by the veil she was wearing—in daytime no longer white. As the music died out of her, elation also ebbed. Somebody had passed her, speaking ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... fetch them?" said his wife, and went out, flitting once more through the still, ghostly house. But she thought of her husband, of his last word and look, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... gateway and along the ghostly streets, and survey the crowning achievement of the cultured Boche. The great buildings—the Cathedral, the Cloth Hall—are jagged ruins. The fronts of the houses have long disappeared, leaving the interiors exposed ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... plain, miles upon miles away. But perhaps its most awful circumstance was the preternatural silence. The distant boom and muttering of thunder had died away, and now the great storm swept on in voiceless majesty, like the passage of a ghostly host, from which there arose no sound of feet or of rolling wheels. Only before it sped the swift angels of the wind, and behind it swung ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... when he took me out of the basket The old house stood on a high hill, and we could see the stars of heaven through the ruined door and one of the back windows. Uncle Eb lifted the leaning door a little and shoved it aside. We heard then a quick stir in the old house—a loud and ghostly rattle it seems now as I think of it—like that made by linen shaking on the line. Uncle Eb took a step backward as if it had ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... arrival at the castle, as he was passing up the stairs, he heard a footstep behind, and on turning round he perceived the same apparition. He hastily entered his room, and bolted, locked, and barred the door, but to his horror and surprise this offered no impediment to his ghostly visiter, for the door sprang open at his touch, and he entered the room! The apparition was seen by various others, all of whom asserted it bore the strongest resemblance to their deceased master! One gentleman spoke to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... present that memorable night will forget his reading of "The Night Wind." We turned the lights down low and listened, while with that wonderful voice he brought "the night that broods outside" into the darkened room, with that weird and ghostly: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... and unaccountable feeling which causes a heart-broken man at a dear friend's funeral to see something irresistibly comical in a red-nosed or one-eyed undertaker, I receive your communication with ghostly facetiousness; though on a moment's reflection I find better cause for consolation in the hope that, relieved from your most trying and painful duties, you will now have leisure to return to pursuits more congenial to your mind, and to move more easily and pleasantly ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... dissolved in, different studios having different methods of accomplishing this. The point is that visions of this kind are obviously written into the scene proper, just as you would introduce any new character. If it is a ghostly visitor of some kind, you simply say: "Harding looks in horror (at whatever point of the room or location you desire). Vision of Blake, standing quite still and pointing an accusing finger at Harding." Or, if Tom is in the city and has reason to believe that ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... sinfulness, therefore, the apostle, to make way for the former, adds, "Because the carnal mind is enmity against God." Do not wonder then that your ways and courses, your affections and inclinations bring forth that ghostly and dreadful end of death, seeing all these are enmity to the greatest King, who alone hath the power of life and death. They have a perfect contrariety to his holy nature and righteous will. Not only is the carnal mind ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... in the bright moonlight as they stretched away into primitive forests, where the trees on the shores hung heavy with icicles, or were so bent under the weight of snow that, at times, they looked like ghostly visitants from dreamland. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... a voice of death! And did you not mark the paly form Which rode on the silvery mist of the heath, And sung a ghostly ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... English traveller in America the language which he hears spoken about him is at once a puzzle and a surprise. It is his own, yet not his own. It seems to him a caricature of English, a phantom speech, ghostly but familiar, such as he might hear in a land of dreams. He recognises its broad lineaments; its lesser details evade, or confuse, him. He acknowledges that the two tongues have a common basis. Their ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... safe than with such as might shun to own her rights of blood and heirship. Commend me to my brother, if so be that he cares to hear of me; and tell him that Guy hath wedded the lady of a castle in the land of Italy. And so praying you, ghostly father, for your blessing, I greet you well, and rest ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for the ghostly movements of the submarine or submarines which crossed the tracks of the first contingent of American transports on the night of June 22. In the absence of more tangible proof of their presence beyond that provided by white streaks and wakes on the sea surface, the incident might well ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... thought as how you were more knowing about it than you owns. Dear, dear, I shall never forgit the night when Judith brought the poor cretur here,—you knows she had been some months in my house afore ever I see'd the urchin; and when she brought it, she looked so pale and ghostly that I had not the heart to say a word, so I stared at the brat, and it stretched out its wee little hands to me. And the mother frowned at it, and throwed it ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Israelites had no belief in rewards and punishments after death, nor in anything similar to the Christian heaven and hell; but our story proves that it would be an error to suppose that they did not believe in the continuance of individual existence after death by a ghostly simulacrum of life. Nay, I think it would be very hard to produce conclusive evidence that they disbelieved in immortality; for I am not aware that there is anything to show that they thought the existence ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... from the infinite spaces. Voices of unborn babies, the little babies who were meant to be born unto her.... They were begging her never to bring them into earthly existence. Now, like Antigone, she makes her choice; to soothe a ghostly pain no matter what may be her ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... thundered with the deafening exaggeration of confined space, then its echo had beaten against the clay-chink wall timbers and rolled upward to the rafters. Now, dwindled to a ghostly whisper, it lingered ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... sovereign. But the noise of the pistol had alarmed Mrs. Pickle, who, running downstairs, with the most frantic appearance, attended by two maids and the curate, who still maintained his place of chaplain and ghostly director in the family, would have assaulted our hero with her nails, had not she been restrained by her attendants. Though they prevented her from using her hands, they could not hinder her from exercising her tongue, which she wagged against him with all the virulence ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... like a bird from a cloud On the clammy lawn, Moving alone, bare-browed In the dim of dawn. The candles alight in the room For my parting meal Made all things withoutdoors loom Strange, ghostly, unreal. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... dust that whirled and eddied about them so thickly that Connie could not see the dogs from the rear of the toboggans. Covering their noses and mouths, the two bored on through the white smother—a slow moving, ghostly procession, with the snow powder matted thick into the hairy coats of the dogs and the clothing of the mushers. Not until darkness added to the impenetrability of the storm did 'Merican Joe halt. In the whirling blizzard, without protection of timber, one place was as ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... told me that Lacy lies a-dying of the pox, and yet hath his whore by him, whom he will have to look on, he says, though he can do no more; nor would receive any ghostly advice from a Bishop, an old acquaintance of his, that went to see him. He says there is a strangeness between the King and my Lady Castlemayne, as I was told yesterday. After dinner my wife and I to the New Exchange, to pretty maid Mrs. Smith's shop, where I left my wife, and I to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... for one ingredient of the bitter potion given to our Saviour on the cross, about the composition of which the commentators are greatly divided. Thus the eighth prayer of the Fifteen Oos in the Salisbury Primer, 1555, begins thus: 'O Blessed Jesu, sweetness of heart and ghostly pleasure of souls, I beseech thee for the bitterness of the aysell and gall that thou tasted and suffered for me in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... mysterious hours were sped And day returned; but all was silent now, And with the dawn the ghostly ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... patient, waiting for its evening provender. To Charmian it seemed like a great personality. Often she found herself thinking of it as sentient, brooding over the opera, secretly attentive to all that was going on in connection with it. She loved its darkness, the ghostly lightness of the covers spread over it, the ranges of its gaping boxes, the far-off mystery of its galleries receding into a heaven of ebon blackness. She wandered about it, sitting first here, then there, becoming intimate with the monster ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... peering into the blue darkness of the lake, trying to see with his eyes, to catch the same ghostly signals from the past. The romance of the story and the moment, Manisty's low, rushing speech, the sparkle of his poet's look—the girl's fancy yielded to the spell of them; her breath came quick and soft. Through all their outer difference, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thick on the Chippendale table and chairs, and from its corner the tall clock looked down on them solemn and voiceless. There was no denying that it was scary, as Belle expressed it. What light there was seemed unreal, and the closed rooms when they peeped in were cheerless and ghostly. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... fall deep upon the quiet fields where the dead rest. Squadrons of white clouds drift down the valley, as if to cover the sleeping heroes with a shroud of white. Above Sedan's heights appears the shining crescent of the moon and sheds a ghostly light over the wide field of death—the ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... than many others, he is not greatly distinguished by scholarship, he is only one in a numerous company of high-minded men who live devout and disinterested lives. But no man conveys, both in his writings and in personal touch, a more telling sense of ghostly earnestness, a feeling that his whole life is absorbed into a Power which overshadows his presence and even sounds in his voice, a conviction that he has in sober truth forsaken everything ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... with them. Poor people, crime-laden people! Before many doors, she saw other signs, "Barristers." And of that multitude of clients, how many left these offices with heavy hearts! In that dim, vague light of stairway and landings she seemed to feel, to see, a ghostly procession, sad-eyed, weary. But Captain Forsythe had said that John Steele had helped many, many. Her own heart seemed strangely inert, without life; she stood suddenly still, as if asking herself why ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... in earnest, and, to save his self-respect and character for canniness, he 'jocks wi' deeficulty.' He amuses himself with trying how far he can carry speculations on metaphysics (not yet reformed by himself) into the realm of the ghostly. He makes admissions about his own tendency to think that he has an immaterial soul, and that these points are, or may be, or some day will be, scientifically solved. These admissions are eagerly welcomed by Du Prel in his ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... save blackness and wreathing vapour, which gleamed in a grey ghostly way some distance in front, and to try and see better some ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... with so small cost and suit obtained, that I cannot see how he that hath any friends amongst them (as I say) or money in his purse, or will at least to ease himself, can any way miscarry or be misaffected, how he should be desperate, in danger of damnation, or troubled in mind. Their ghostly fathers can so readily apply remedies, so cunningly string and unstring, wind and unwind their devotions, play upon their consciences with plausible speeches and terrible threats, for their best advantage settle and remove, erect with such facility and deject, let ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... an hour, I think, they sat there, two ghostly figures formless against the woods; then one rose, and presently I saw it ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... unlike that of any other American singer. "Religious feeling," it has been well said, "is dominant. The reader seems to be moving about in cathedral glooms, by dimly lighted altars, with sad procession of ghostly penitents and mourners fading into the darkness to the sad music of lamenting choirs. But the light which falls upon the gloom is the light of heaven, and amid tears and sighs, over farewells and crushed happiness, hope sings a vigorous ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... horizon took shape against it, stark and black. Slowly, stealthily, the formless dawn dusk spread over the sleeping world; to the zenith the light-smitten stars reeled and died, and houses, fields, and thoroughfares lay a-glimmer with ghostly twilight as the car tore headlong through the grim, unlovely, silent hinterland of ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... peace:— Though dread artillery rattle, And ghostly corses load the ground, Cheer up, cheer up; Where groan'd the field of battle, The song, the dance, the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... A kind of hoarse ghostly laugh came from the bed. "Charles is always right," whispered the sick man. "Quite unnecessary, ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... whole battle scene in "L'Aiglon," with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light; the ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against one another (seen only through the eyes of the poor little Duke of Reichstadt); the mangled shapes lying motionless in various postures of death upon the blood-stained sward; the moans of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like vague ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... evening, and the grocery man got behind the cheese box, while the ghost continued in a sepulchral voice, "doomed for a certain time to walk the night," and, waving a chair round, the ghost strode up to the grocery man, and with the other ghostly hand reached into a ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... the life he offered was not for Peter, not for Thomas as yet; though Thomas, in the years to come, should choose his own path. At present there was for both of them the merry, shifting life of the roads, the passing friendships, lightly made, lightly loosed, the olive hills, silver like ghostly armies in the pale moonlight, the sweetness of the starry flowers at their twisted stems, the sudden blue bays that laughed below bends of the road, the cities, like many-coloured nosegays on a pale chain, the intimate sweetness of lemon gardens by day and night, the happy morning ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... spring song, and the bare boughs of the tree beside the cabin waved and creaked the time. Somewhere distantly a wolf lifted up his voice, and the long, throaty howl swelled in a lull of the wind. It was black and ghostly outside, and strange, murmuring sounds rose and fell in the surrounding forests, as though all the dormant life of the North was awakening at the seasonal change. She closed the window and went back ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that weapon in its place; Let those who bore it bear it still, Lest thou displease the ghostly race That float in mist from hill ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... kindling that must melt it out. Judith, thou hast now five days more to live This life of beautiful passion and sweet sense: And now my love comes to thee like an angel To call thee out of thy visionary love For lost Manasses, out of ghostly desire And shadows of dreams housing thy soul, that are Vainer than mine were, dreams of dear things which death Hath for ever broken; and lead thy life To a brief shadowless place, into an hour Made splendid to affront the coming night By passion over sense more grandly burning ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... I sat musing, 'twas not one but ten —- Rank on rank of ghostly soldiers marching o'er the fen, Marching in the misty air they showed in dreams to me, And behind me was the shouting and the shattering ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... tombs, where lie these breathin' corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend to the ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... some pattern, or meaning—withdrew baffled. But its invasion, as ghostly as that had been, loosened a knot ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... calculate to ask the Earl of Yalding to permit me to pass a night in his ancestral best bed- chamber. And if I hear so much as a phantom footstep, or hear so much as a ghostly sigh, I'll take ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been inclined, for I knew that at the first ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... it—is to get more and more into His heart, and to find within Him, and not away from Him, 'all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.' We leave all other great men behind. All other teachers' words become feeble by age, as their persons become ghostly, wrapped in thickening folds of oblivion; but the progress of the Church consists in absorbing more and more of Christ, in understanding Him better, and becoming more and more moulded by His influence. The Spirit's teaching ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... beautiful surrounding conceivable, a sheltered cove of the lagoon where the swaying palms dipped their boles in the ultramarine, and bulky banana-plants and splendid breadfruit-trees formed a temple of shadow and coolth whence one might look straight up the lowering mountain-side to the ghostly domes, or across the radiant water to the white ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... and perhaps the most impressive scene on our route was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting. As we staid ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... variety of cedar, but did not grow closely together; also there was practically no undergrowth, perhaps for the reason that their dense, spreading tops shut out the light. As I saw afterwards both trunks and boughs were clothed with long grey moss, which even at midday gave the place a very ghostly appearance. The darkness beneath those trees was intense, literally we could not see an inch before our faces. Yet rather than stand still we struggled on, Hans leading the way, for his instincts were quicker than ours. The steep rise of the ground beneath our feet told us ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... would the ghostly glimmer of merriment still linger in the eyes? When would the hoarse, mirthless laugh rise to the lips, that awful laugh that proclaims madness? Oh! she could have screamed now with the awfulness of this haunting terror. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... her from head to foot with his mantle. He had just drawn himself up from perfecting this arrangement, and had just leaned back in his own seat contemplating it with great satisfaction, when he became aware of a curious appearance at the open carriage window,—a ghostly little tin box floating up in the moonlight, and ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... by which such a soul is depressed and dragged down again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the invisible and of the world below—prowling about tombs and sepulchres, in the neighbourhood of which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed pure, but are cloyed ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... a hellish vocal hum. Now and then I would recognize the subdued voice of a friend; now and then I would hear the voices of some I believed were not friends. All these referred to me and uttered what I could not clearly distinguish, but knew must be imprecations. Ghostly rappings on the walls and ceiling of my room punctuated ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... no coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible, however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Elfin King, Who woned within the hill,— Like wind in the porch of a ruined church, His voice was ghostly shrill. ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Mardikian had assembled his receiver after acceleration ceased—a big thing, surrounding the flagship Ranger like a spiderweb trapping a fly—and had kept it hopefully tuned over a wide band. The radio beam swept through, ghostly faint from dispersion, wave length doubled by Doppler effect, ragged with cosmic noise. An elaborate system of filters and amplifiers could make it no ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... which surrounded the power-plant, they discovered the machine in question standing dark and deserted in the shadows. Evidently the driver, whoever he was, well knew what he was about, and had not blundered upon this place by accident. A hundred yards away they could now see the ghostly Rio Grande, its saffron surface faintly silvered by the low moon; lights gleamed from the windows of Morales's house. In the distance the vague outlines of the Mexican shore were resolving themselves, and far beyond winked the evidence that some belated citizens ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... faint pallor overspread the canon till it lay like a ghostly sea dotted with strange islands of brush and rock; islands that seemed to waver and shift in a sort of vague restlessness, as though trying to evade the ever-brightening tide of moonlight that burned away their shrouds of dusk and fixed them in still, tangible shapes upon ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... Mr. Wagge with a tall, crape-banded hat in his black-gloved hands, standing in the very centre of her drawing-room. He was staring into the garden, as if he had been vouchsafed a vision of that warm night when the moonlight shed its ghostly glamour on the sunflowers, and his daughter had danced out there. She had a perfect view of his thick red neck in its turndown collar, crossed by a black bow over a shiny white shirt. And, holding out her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... old nurse, stood behind her chair; the oil was richly scented that she burned; the single light illumined only her, and covered with her shadow the low ceiling,—a shadow that seemed to hang above her like a pall ready to fall from ghostly fingers and smother her in its folds; the others lounged about the room and waited on her pen, in gloom they, their faces gleaming from that dusk demoniacly. It was a concealed room, entered by secret ways, unknown to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... church after my ancient mariner No. 2 had fumbled a good deal with a bunch of ghostly-looking keys. The door opened with a dismal scroop, and shut with an appalling bang. Grim and dark as the church is without, it is grimmer and darker within, and damp and vault-like, a faire fremir. There are all the mysterious cupboards and corners peculiar to such edifices; an organ-loft, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... the poor women, should be the lot of all, sat upon me like a nightmare. More than this, the secret I had discovered seemed to pall every sense and sicken me to the heart, and throughout the silent hours of the dismal darkness I passed in review the ghostly pageant of the fight and all its horrors, the escape of the unhappy survivors, the finding of the murdered boy and starving women, and more than all—the secret I had rather even now draw a veil over, and leave to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... fire. Lightning was very destructive, sinking the temple of a god or a nut-tree by the roadside indifferently. An ox spoke in Sicily. A precocious baby cried out "Io triumphe" before it was born. At Spoletum a woman became a man. An altar was seen in the heavens. A ghostly band of armed men appeared in the Janiculum (Livy, xxiv., 10). On such occasions the "aruspices" always ordered a vast slaughter of victims, and no doubt feasted as did ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily, this is enchantment; I am bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves—apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the consciousness of the ancient ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... blackness and wreathing vapour, which gleamed in a grey ghostly way some distance in front, and to try and see better some ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... beech tree with a white mark some way up the trunk stood in the mound by a gate which opened into a lane. Strangers coming down the lane in the dusk often hesitated before they approached this beech. The white mark looked like a ghostly figure emerging from the dark hedge and the shadow of the tree. The trunk itself was of the same hue at that hour as the bushes, so that the whiteness seemed to stand out unsupported. So perfect was the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... next morning was heralded by only a thin line of red parting the masses of black-grey snow clouds which still hung low down in the east. The wind had dropped, and there was something ghostly about the still twilight as Dominey issued from the back regions and made his way through the untrodden snow round to the side of the house underneath Rosamund's window. A little exclamation broke from his lips as he stood there. From the ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... glittering foam into the upper darkness, while we held our breath at the unique sight of a whale breaching at night. But when he fell again the effect was marvellous. Green columns of water arose on either side of the descending mass as if from the bowels of the deep, while their ghostly glare lit up the encircling gloom with a strange, weird radiance, which reflected in our anxious faces, made us look like an expedition from the FLYING DUTCHMAN. A short spell of gradually quieting struggle ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... wind, rougher than the others, swirled the fog about him in great ghostly sheets, turning and twisting it like the clouds of greasy smoke from a fire of wet leaves. The dory rolled heavily, and Code, losing his balance, sprawled forward on the fish, the horn flying from his hand overboard as he ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself less than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who might reasonably regard ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was. At that I did feel more or less ghostly. I seemed to have lost some of my confidence. I expected to "go west" on the next time in. And that's a bad way ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... had to be properly lugubrious, to tally up to his impressions of what I ought to be. He had been here just a week, then, and he had me down pat. Somebody must have coached him grandly, and he's the sort who revels in woe and in consequent and ghostly consolation." ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Mother Teresa of Jesus, Foundresse of the Monasteries of the Discalced or Bare-footed Carmelite Nunnes and Fryers of the First Rule. "Written by herself at the commaundement of her ghostly father, and now translated into English out of Spanish. By W.M., of the Society of Jesus. "Imprinted in Antwerp by ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... possession of him; but all the while he did not know where his foot stepped; his head swam, and his pulse beat feverishly. About midway between the forest and the mansion, where the field sloped more steeply, grew a clump of birch-trees, whose slender stems glimmered ghostly white in the moonlight. Something drove Truls to leave the beaten road, and, obeying the impulse, he steered toward the birches. A strange sound fell upon his ear, like the moan of one in distress. It did not startle him; indeed, he was in a mood when nothing ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... carriage proved him to be not of German but foreign birth. He appeared to come from the land of Bohemia. He cast a contemptuous smile on Froda, who, as usual, had opened the ancient book of Aslauga's history, and was attentively reading in it. "You must be a ghostly knight?" he said, inquiringly; and it appeared as if a whole train of unseemly jests were ready to follow. But Froda answered so firmly and seriously with a negative that the Bohemian stopped short suddenly; as when the beasts, after venturing to mock their king, the ...
— Aslauga's Knight • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... unthickened by innumerable shapes of awe and terror; or that the wind, as it sung in the trees, or whistled round an empty building, was not pregnant with sounds of wailing and despair. Sometimes realities took ghostly shapes; and it was impossible for one's blood not to curdle at the perception of an evident mixture of what we knew to be true, with the visionary semblance of ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... wind long to drive us back on our cable, stern foremost, on to the wreck, which now loomed out huge and ghostly on the wild water. As we drifted down under her stern we were conscious, amidst the smoke of the burning tar-barrels and the spray of the waves which broke over her, of a crowd of faces looking over her sides, and fancied we heard a faint ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... had on Midsummer Eve of this year, and as the hour grew later, and nine o'clock drew on, the irradiation of the daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of indistinctness. Imagination could trace upon the trunks and boughs strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights; the surfaces of the holly-leaves would here and there shine like peeping eyes, while such ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... world whom she would have chosen had such choice been vouchsafed her by kind Heaven, o'ermastering love will sweep her through all the heavens a sensuous fancy ever feigned; but the chances are that her idol lives only in the ghostly realm of dreams, else goes elsewhere to wive, and she marries not whom she would but whom she must— wedlock, thanks to her mistaken training, being the end and aim of her existence. Instead of an idol to adore, she secures some foolish eidolon whom she can scarce ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... felt the Gallic, traveller, When far in Arab desert, drear, He found within the catacomb, Alive, the terrors of a tomb? While many a mummy, through the shade, In hieroglyphic stole arrayed, Seem'd to uprear the mystic head, And trace the gloom with ghostly tread; Thou heard'st him pour the stifled groan, Horror! his soul was all thy ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... cruelly, and led me to the deeper shadow and seclusion of a great rock, rising from the path to the flake. 'Twas very still and awesome, there in the dark of that black rock, with the light of the moon lying ghostly white on all the barren world, and the long, low howl of some forsaken dog from time to ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... told at last how, today and yesterday, arising in the dim dawn to build his fire before the camp was stirring, he had seen lurking at the edge of the clearing a white four-footed shape. It was a pig, yet not a pig; its ghostly hue, its noiseless movements, divided it from all proper mundane porkers by the dreadful gulf which divides the living from the dead. The first morning Cookie, doubtful of his senses, had flung a stone and the spectral Thing had vanished like ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... had taken, and on the bed with the high, carved walnut back lay the night-dress borrowed from Mary. Through torn clouds a few stars glittered like coins in a gashed purse, and very far away to the west, at the end of all things visible, was a faint, ghostly gleam which meant the dazzling lights of the Casino and its terrace, at ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... they looked, at the terrific scene below. From that point, Njedegorze was as a huge boiling caldron, from which arose twisted wreaths and coiling lengths of white vapor, faintly colored with gold and silvery blue. Dispersing in air, these mists took all manner of fantastic forms,—ghostly arms seemed to wave and beckon, ghostly hands to unite in prayer,—and fluttering creatures in gossamer draperies of green and crimson, appeared to rise and float, and retire and shrink, to nothingness again in the rainbow ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... description of this ruin in the twenty-seventh chapter of this narrative, as the vault in which young Bertram, under the auspices of Meg Merrilies, witnessed the death of Hatteraick's lieutenant. The tradition of the country added ghostly terrors to the natural awe inspired by the situation of this place, which terrors the gipsies, who so long inhabited the vicinity, had probably invented, or at least propagated, for their own advantage. It was said that, during ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... also, by the triumph that such men make over all their enemies, both bodily and ghostly: "Now thanks be unto God," said Paul, "which always causeth us to triumph in Christ." And, "who shall separate us from the love of Christ" our Lord? and again, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... full of such wonders. Here, again, we have giants and dwarfs and kobolds; and birds and beasts and fishes who can talk; and good fairies, who come in and help their friends just when they are wanted; and evil fairies, and witches; and the wild huntsman, who sweeps across the sky with his ghostly train; and men and women who turn themselves into wolves, and go about in the night devouring sheep and killing human beings, In Russian tales we find many creatures of the same kind, and also in those of Italy, and Spain, and France. And in our own islands we ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... for the fate of La Touche nor sorrow for the fate of Bompard, all that seemed unreal, just as the darkness and terror of the night before seemed unreal. The real thing that touched her through everything was Expectancy. Expectancy, ghostly ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Spring, a greeting fond from me! Rejoicing thrills within the breast of Mother Earth anew— From her once more the flowers push forth 'mid gleaming drops of dew, And like the Swans, across my soul my dreams will lightly sweep, And my heart blissful throbbing, ghostly tears of rapture weep. O Spring I feel thy coming! ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one'? To this 'mystic or secondary impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august soul-exalting echo.' Has anything that has been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is breaking. Faint, wan, and pallid is the feeble gleam that comes peeping over the low hills far over at the east. Bare and desolate look the barren slopes on every hand. Not a tree, not a shrub of any kind can eye discover in this dim and ghostly light. All is silence, too. Even the coyotes who have set up their unearthly yelping at odd intervals during the night seem to have slunk away before the coming of the morning's sun and sought the shelter of their lurking-spots. Here on the bleak ridge, where three men, wrapped in cavalry ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... the blue darkness of the lake, trying to see with his eyes, to catch the same ghostly signals from the past. The romance of the story and the moment, Manisty's low, rushing speech, the sparkle of his poet's look—the girl's fancy yielded to the spell of them; her breath came quick and soft. Through all their outer difference, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... insurance laws, banking laws, franchise laws, etc. Yet no sooner were the lights turned down than the phenomena began. John Smith, on the right of the medium, suddenly felt a sharp blow on the neck. As he turned around instinctively a ghostly hand snatched away his pocket-book and the sound of mocking laughter could be plainly heard from the dark cabinet. Another weird hand pulled Thomas Jones's insurance policy out of his breastpocket, dangled it in the ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... us may leave this chamber alive with Thuvia of Ptarth." Then, seeing that the man wore no sword, he exclaimed: "Bring on your bowmen, then, or come with us as my prisoner until we have safely passed the outer portals of thy ghostly city." ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... scene in "L'Aiglon," with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light; the ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against one another (seen only through the eyes of the poor little Duke of Reichstadt); the mangled shapes lying motionless in various postures of death upon the blood-stained sward; the moans of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like vague ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to a Craft or Science. And for Fayries, and walking Ghosts, the opinion of them has I think been on purpose, either taught, or not confuted, to keep in credit the use of Exorcisme, of Crosses, of holy Water, and other such inventions of Ghostly men. Neverthelesse, there is no doubt, but God can make unnaturall Apparitions. But that he does it so often, as men need to feare such things, more than they feare the stay, or change, of the course of Nature, which he also can stay, and ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... to bother his head about her, and Biddy dragged her up in the kitchen of Roscarna where she had suckled her half-brothers before her, Mr. Considine exercising a general supervision, pending the day when her soul should be fit for salvation and ghostly admonition. ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... trot this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful apparition which at three ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... certainty, purity, warmth, and precision than they had been capable of while they still were in the midst of life. Yea, the most graceful, most humorous creations were given to the light from that ghostly refuge. By the side of this marvellously significant phenomenon, all other national literatures appear to me without importance. If nature produced such an individual as Shakespeare amongst the English, we can easily see that ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... are enchanting little rooms reached by unexpected staircases, by secret doors in the wall, by dark passages where one hears the rustle of ghostly brocade dresses. Those are the most lovable rooms, for, once safely in them, one is at home and warm, while in the state rooms one feels, as the dear old squire who died here thirty years ago said, "like a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... church This Ghost would search, And whenever it would see The passers-by Take wings and fly It would laugh in ghostly glee, Hee, hee!—it would ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... sought shelter in a thick spruce. It rained and hailed. By and bye the air grew bitterly cold, and Teague suggested we give up, and ride back. So we did. The mountains were dim and obscure through the gray gloom, and the black spear-tipped spruces looked ghostly against the background. The lightning was vivid, and the thunder rolled and crashed in magnificent ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... all so grand When pipes and tabors had their sway Stood leafless now, a ghostly band Of skeletons in cold array. A lonely surge of ancient spray Told of an unforgetful sea, But iron blows had hushed for aye ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... not noticing the light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after—when my friend read the Mosses from an Old Manse, she found that the incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the sound as a ghostly happening. She told me another story which she said she had directly from Hawthorne. During a sojourn in Boston he often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly interested to see a certain newspaper. This paper he often found ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend to the ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... mainly hinge. Semper eadem—"Always the same"—has been the proud motto of the mightiest hierarchy that has controlled human action and shaped the destinies of mankind, no less in material than in ghostly concerns. Yet is a vast and very beneficial change, due to the imperious spirit of the times, manifest in the Roman Church. No longer do the stake, the sword, and the dismal horrors of the interdict figure as instruments for assuring conformity and submission to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... and unimaginative spirit somewhat daunted by the ghostly silence of the house. Sylvia tiptoed to the swinging-door and pushed it open. Yes, there was the pantry, like the kitchen, in chaotic disorder, tissue paper and excelsior thick on the floor, and entangled with it the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... road had been bordered by fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madronos, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable. For some moments Holker saw nothing of the building, but as they turned into the woods it revealed itself in faint gray outline ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... space before I'll snicker again. My laugher has gone unused for so long that it's atrophied and won't work. I've tried warming it up by going home at night and guffawing before the mirror, but the result is only a mirthless giggle—a ghostly chortle! Of course, I wouldn't dare attempt ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... different animals. There are twelve of us who are taking parts in the charade, and dear Hollyhock is to be the ghost. She 'll stalk in, in her ghostly garments, and create a great sensation amongst the animals. We would not have done it if we had known that you were coming back, Leuchy, being but too well aware of your terrible nervousness about ghosts, even when ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... the atmosphere and hour, the talk of the little circle fell upon things ghostly and mysterious—strange happenings and prophetic dreams. Dorothea, who had a love of horrors, lent a suddenly attentive ear; but Jennie, though plainly fascinated, uttered a protesting plaint. "Oh, please stop! You don't know how you frighten me! Dorothea has had some ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... little manual of piety, composed, in 1712, for the young ladies who were then pensioners at the monastery of St. Augustin, at Bruges, we have been surprised into frequent smiles by the scrupulous watchfulness with which the ghostly writer followed the lady-pensioners (though with pious fancy only) to the very sacred of sacreds! He was not contented with directing them concerning the prayers which he believed proper to be used ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... a brave man, as respected all bodily enemies or the dangers of human warfare, but was as sensitive and timid as the most superstitious of old women in facing the frowns of a priest or under the vague anticipations 10 of ghostly retributions. But had it been otherwise, and had there been any reason to apprehend an unsteady demeanor on the part of this prince at the approach of the critical moment, such were the changes already effected in the state of their domestic politics amongst ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... stay here," she said. "I never loved the rooms—and now I hate them. It seems to me it was another woman who lived in them—in another world. 'Tis so long ago that 'tis ghostly. Make ready the old red chambers for me," to her woman; "I will live there. They have been long closed, and are worm-eaten and mouldy perchance; but a great fire will warm them. And I will have furnishings from London to make them ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... best; but he was no match for the fawn-footed gentleman, who led him. Lumps of ghostly clay, inherited from a long line of furrow-following ancestors, clung to his ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... tall abbey, a Gothic nave and apse with beautifully traced windows, with the ruin of a very ancient chapel on one side, and crossing the back, a well-proportioned Renaissance building that had been a dormitory. The first time that Martin saw the abbey, it towered in ghostly perfection above a low veil of mist that made the valley seem a lake in the shining moonlight. The lines were perfectly quiet, and when he stopped the motor of his ambulance, he could hear the wind rustling among the beech-woods. Except for the dirty smell of huddled soldiers that ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire, "neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... into the tent, and covered her head up in the bed-clothes; but in about ten minutes she came back, feeling a little ashamed of her timidity, and sat down by Gypsy before the fire. It was a strange picture—the ghostly white tents and tangled brushwood gilded with the light; the great forest stretching away darkly beyond; the fitful shadows and glares from the flickering fire that chased each other in strange, uncouth shapes, among the leaves, and the two ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the Italian lakes, the Fishers found themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-spangled banner. It was particularly agreeable ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the face that looks into the night Over the stretch of sands; A sullen rock in the sea of white— A ghostly shadow in ghostly light, Peering and moaning it stands. "Oh, is it the king that rides this way— Oh, is it the king that rides so free? I have looked for the king this many a day, But the years that mock me will not ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... warning, when the evil star of Boabdil shall withhold its influence, and he may strike, without resistance from the Powers above, for his glory and his throne.' 'The sign and the warning are bequeathed thee,' answered the ghostly image. It vanished,—thick darkness fell around; and, when once more the light of the lamps we bore became visible, behold there stood before me a skeleton, in the regal robe of the kings of Granada, and on its grisly head was the imperial diadem. With one hand raised, it pointed to the opposite ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost—not to my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own—by my stopping however idly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... word that on my lips could render the effect of the headlong and vehement whisper, of the soft, passionate tones, of the sudden breathless pause and the appealing movement of the white arms extended swiftly. They fell; the ghostly figure swayed like a slender tree in the wind, the pale oval of the face drooped; it was impossible to distinguish her features, the darkness of the eyes was unfathomable; two wide sleeves uprose in the dark like unfolding ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... up the dock of the French harbour. The dusk had fallen, but Bridget was conscious of a misty town dimly sprinkled with lights, and crowned with a domed church; of chalk downs, white and ghostly, to right and left; and close by, of quays crowded with soldiers, motors, and officials. Carrying her small suit-case, she emerged upon the quay, and almost immediately was accosted by the official of the Red Cross who had been told off ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cooked against a hot rock. It was smoked black and cooked so hard it nearly broke my teeth, besides, it had a granite finish from association with the rock oven. But I ate it with boyish relish in spite of its flaws. My imagination expanded as I watched ghostly shadow-figures dance upon the face of the cliff. The shifting flame, the wood smoke, the silent, starry night swelled my heart to pride in my great adventure. I ignored the incident of the animal cry that had sent me scurrying to camp. ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... there alone one rainy night about a year ago," he said. "I didn't see or hear anything unusual. Such stories are ridiculous; and even if there was a little truth in them, noises can't harm you as much as sleeping out in the storm. I'm going to encroach once more upon the ghostly hospitality of the Squibbs. Better come ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... soothe the agitated woman. "We will let in a little light, and dissipate some of these shadows." And I attempted to throw back the curtains of the window, but they fell again immediately and I experienced a sensation as of something ghostly passing between us and ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... nearer, the effort to control myself grew more severe. The struggle was between my will, my identity, my very self, on the one hand, and on the other, the ten thousand ancestors who were twisted into the fibres of me and whose ghostly voices were whispering of the dark and the fear of the dark that had been theirs in the time when the world was dark and full ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... blasted its way into one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... up his courage to the point of springing across a black chasm, which he was aware descended some forty or fifty feet to the causeway of the street, and the opposite parapet, on which he was expected to alight like, a bird, appeared dim and ghostly in the uncertain light. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... the sanded paths of the garden. When the first guests arrived and were welcomed at the door by the count and the countess they were positively dazzled. One had only to recall to mind the drawing room of the past, through which flitted the icy, ghostly presence of the Countess Muffat, that antique room full of an atmosphere of religious austerity with its massive First Empire mahogany furniture, its yellow velvet hangings, its moldy ceiling through which the damp had ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... terrace was facing toward the noise, staring. The white-bearded man gave an order, deliberately. Men rushed. But as they swarmed toward an exit, a green beam of light appeared near the uproar. It streaked upward, wavering from side to side and making the golden walls visible in a ghostly fashion. It shivered in a ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... reappearing afar off, as if to mock our cautious progress, and invite us to follow it. The eye, wistfully pursuing its eccentric sweep, suddenly loses it in impenetrable shadows. There is not a vestige of any other ruin near it, and the long lines it here and there shows, ghostly white in the moonlight, seem ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... whose wan features were framed, as it were, by a short, bristly, snow-white beard. In his hands he clutched a fiddle and fiddlestick. It was old Hans, the village fiddler. Some of the lads had found him at the edge of the forest, on the spot where we had caught a glimpse of him, looking like a ghostly apparition, as we rattled past with the engine. There he was found standing in his shirt, and holding his fiddle in both his hands pressed ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... overspread the canon till it lay like a ghostly sea dotted with strange islands of brush and rock; islands that seemed to waver and shift in a sort of vague restlessness, as though trying to evade the ever-brightening tide of moonlight that burned away their shrouds of dusk and fixed them in still, tangible ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... There was no other room in their house from which the sound could proceed. She was not devoid of the superstitious feelings of the age, and had heard before of ghostly tappings that were said to be a harbinger of coming ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... they held. He swung himself out into the air with nothing beneath him, caught the rung under his knee, and for a moment hung there while the crowd withheld from breathing; then a cloud of smoke, swirling that way, made him the mere ghostly nucleus of himself, blotted him out altogether, and, as it rose slowly upward, showed the ladder free and empty, so that at first there was an instant when they thought that he had fallen. But, as the smoke cleared, there was the tall figure on ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... "I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... limitless space. For moments, hours, ages she was propelled with the velocity of a shooting-star. The earth seemed a huge automobile. And it sped with her down an endless white track through the universe. Looming, ghostly, ghastly, spectral forms of cacti plants, large as pine-trees, stabbed her with giant spikes. She became an unstable being in a shapeless, colorless, soundless cosmos of unrelated things, but always rushing, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... mind the real risk of the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone,—how do you think he will like it? He doesn't believe one word of ghosts,—but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly, but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber sometimes make ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the Pieta of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall find the points of superiority less salient and the connection between heart ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... begetteth first water, which is tears; air, which is sighings and groanings; and fire, which is heart-burnings and the like. Thus is love a passion elemental. But yet, and heed me, lady, love is also metaphysical, being a motition of the soul and e'en the spirit, and being of the spirit 'tis ghostly, and being ghostly 'tis—ha! Who comes hither to shatter the ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Constance as she walked beside the Master. She was thinking involuntarily of that absent word dropped by her uncle—"Oxford is a place of training"—and there was a passionate and troubled revolt in her. Other ghostly wills seemed to be threatening her—wills that meant nothing to her. No!—her own will should shape her own life! As against the austere appeal that comes from the inner heart of Oxford, the young and restless blood in her sang defiance. "I will ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... my suddenly aroused and somewhat bemused senses played tricks with me, and my startled imagination began to conjure up the gruesome stories I had heard of weird visitants, and ghostly beings, heard but seldom seen, on the East Anglian meres and broads? Then again came the remembrance of the shriek or cry I had fancied I heard earlier in the night, and with a shudder I thought: "How ghastly if it should be the drowned ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... garrisons, but by the founding of convents and cathedrals and the establishment of wealthy bishoprics. Wherefore their majesties were always surrounded in court or camp, in the cabinet or in the field, by a crowd of ghostly advisers inspiriting them to the prosecution of this most righteous war. Nay, the holy men of the Church did not scruple, at times, to buckle on the cuirass over the cassock, to exchange the crosier for the lance, and thus ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... anything to compare to riding across the desert at dawn? At dawn, when to your right and to your left march phalanxes of ghostly shapes, which maybe are the shadows of the night, or maybe, as says the legend, the ghosts of the many long-dead kingdoms buried in oblivion and the relentless sands; when the whistling of the wind is as the shouting of men and the thunder ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... had it been perfectly dark, which it was not. She arose, therefore, and, without taking a light with her, went into the parlour. A faint afterglow illumined the windows and suffused the room with an uncertain, dim, ghostly light which lent to all its objects that vague flatness from which the imagination carves what shapes it lists. As Gwen reached for the picture, a sudden conviction possessed her that her father stood just behind her ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... love,' continued Emma, 'or canst thou hope for my affection whilst that ghostly gift divides us? Never! Inhuman man, thou wilt teach me to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... them like a substance, a silence broken only by the roar of the storm and the crashing of wind-swept branches of the trees that lined the road. The car's powerful search-lights threw up in ghostly shapes the covered stumps and hedges they passed and the masses of snow that beat against them. Subconsciously the girl knew that this boy beside her, driving with the recklessness of a lost soul, was merely guessing at a road no one could have seen, but in that half-hour ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... passed. One of the friars in priest's surplice carried it in a box with the lid open, and two friars in brown habits walked before it with lifted candles. But as the painted image in its scarlet clothes and jewels entered the Countess's bedroom with its grim and ghostly procession, and was borne like a baby mummy to the foot of her bed, it ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... launched the pungy, not alone; Another vessel slipped Down in the water with their own, And ghostly sailors shipped; They heard the rigging flap and creak, And hollow orders cried. But not a living man could seek, And ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... up and down among those wrapped-up, ghostly chairs and tables and cabinets and statues many times before Joe arrived with the minister—and he was a Methodist, McCabe by name. You should have seen Mrs. Ball's look as he advanced his portly form and round face with its shaven upper lip into the drawing-room. She tried to be cordial, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... fields toward the town in the clear distance and sighed softly as he put the pouch back in his pocket, and, resting his arm on his knee and his chin in his hand, sat blowing clouds of smoke out of the shade into the sunshine, absently watching the ghostly shadows dance on the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... strongest castle in France and the most beautiful wife, and fought the bishops of Metz and Treves together, because they did not approve of the lady; Henri VI of England riding through the walled city with his bride, Marguerite, by his side: ghostly funeral processions of dead dukes, whose strange, Oriental obsequies were famed throughout the world; younger and more splendid ghosts: Louis XIII and Richelieu entering in triumph when France had fought and won Lorraine, only to give it back by bargaining later; ghosts of stout ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... concern, but, in the watchful eyes of Hillsborough, he was the embodiment of that vague and mysterious danger that seemed to be forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps, and steal forth under the midnight stars to murder, rapine, and pillage—a danger always threatening, and yet never assuming shape; intangible, and yet real; impossible, and ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... woods, until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in outlandish cities, and in the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which never in all these ages has heard a sound, or seen the sun, nor ever shall; therefore the water flowing from it carries to the upper air a deeper silence than the spell left by the old Quaker on the hills, or even the ghostly memory of the Indian tribes, who, ages long ago, hunted and slowly faded away in these forests on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Francis was summoned to attend her father. None of the household was stirring save Brooks, an old servitor, who stood at the foot of the steps with the horses. The statues of terrace and court gleamed ghostly white in the darkness, and the grim old keep frowned darkly upon them. The deserted aspect of the courtyard filled the girl with dismay. High purposes and noble resolves flourish in the bright light of day and grow into mightiness in the first ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... excitement, impatient of delay, and sick with repeated disappointments. The regulars were ready for service; the volunteers thought they were, but knew better a few weeks later. Time and again orders for embarkation were received, only to be revoked upon rumors of ghostly warships reported off some distant portion of the coast. Spain was playing her old game of manana at the expense of the Americans, and inducing her powerful enemy to refrain from striking a blow by means of terrifying rumors skilfully circulated through the so-called ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... of many generations of Incas had glowed in almost heavenly beauty, embosomed in green and gold and scarlet in the midst of inaccessible mountains which themselves were overtopped by the mighty peaks of eternal snow that I had so often seen glimmering white and ghostly in the moonlight, like guardian spirits round an enchanted realm, on many a night of delicious revelry now far past and lost in the swift flood of the years that had rolled ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... glanced around the room. There were no other doors, only the row of tiny windows around the ceiling of the room, pale, ghostly squares ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... the lead and they wove through ghostly rooms to what must have been the heart of the post—the transfer point. To Ross's unvoiced relief the plate was glowing. He had been nagged by the fear that when the lights blew out the transfer plate might also have been affected. He jumped for ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... a picture and leave man out. Whistler very seldom leaves man out, although I believe there is one "Nocturne" wherein only the stars and the faint rim of the silver moon keep guard. But usually we see the dim suggestion of the bridge's arch, the ghostly steeples, lights lost in the enfolding fog, vague purple barges on the river, and ships rocking solemnly in the offing—all strangely mellow with peace, and subtle thoughts of stillness, rest, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... me first know what it is all about. Not to know anything at all makes me so unhappy. I see nothing but a dreadful darkness, and shadows that are moving about—Give me light, so that I may see clearly! Perhaps I know these ghostly shallows? ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... to stand alone, and in fact did not suspect that here was a new kind of work, such that it would put an end forever to his old manner of writing. He intended to call the new volume "Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal,"—a title that is fairly ghostly with the transcendental nonage of his genius, pale, abstract, ineffectual, with oblivion lurking in every syllable. Fields knew better than that. But he gave him something more than advice; he cheered him with his extravagant ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... that he had lived through and travelled over, and he fancied it hardly possible that he could ever get back again. But now, with every step that he took, he found himself getting miserably back into the old enchanted land. The mist rose up about him, the pale mist-bow of ghostly promise curved before him; and he trod back again, poor boy, out of the clime of real effort, into the land of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... boat, our silent boatman, like a spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them waterways to the Hall ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... he kept to the road, his horse occasionally taking fright, as a truck passed clanking slowly in the opposite direction, or a staff car turned out to pass him like a fleeting, ghostly shadow. By following the trees which lined the road at regular intervals he was fairly sure to keep the road. He was very tired and soon began to feel sleepy, but the driving storm, which by this time had assumed the proportions of a tempest, stung him to wakefulness. Once, at a ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... that it lies in the construction, though Fielding's following of the ancients, both sincere and satiric, has imposed a false air of regularity upon that. The Odyssey of Joseph, of Fanny, and of their ghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a little haphazard, and might have been longer or shorter without any discreet man approving it the more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in the abounding ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... as you will guess, but pleased to be on shore again. It was a melancholy neighbourhood of low islands, overgrown with rank grass and bushes, salt water encircling them, and inside sandy dunes and hummocks with shallow pools, gleaming ghostly in the retreating daylight, while beyond these rose the black bosses of what looked like a forest. Thither I made my way, plunging uncomfortably through shallows, and tripping over blackened branches which, lying just below the surface, quivered like snakes as the ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... towering there, and its crest and the crests of all its lofty neighbors were brightly silvered by the descending sun. From Pilatus on the right, away to the green banks of Weggis and Vitznau on the left, the lake spread in blue and bronze, and by the opposite shore the water's calm was such that a ghostly Lucerne of the under-world lay upside down just beneath its level, and mocked reality above by the perfection of detail. Little bright-sailed boats danced here and there, a large steamer was gliding into the landing by the Gare, and the music from ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... old brass lantern, and presently he was flashing his way up among the dark sounds of the black old wood, with that ghostly face tenderly pressed against ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... was placed beyond the glance of my eye, the touch of my hand. She was mine, aye, as a dream might be; something I possessed but could not hold. Heigho! the faces that peer at us from the firelight shadows! They troop along in a ghostly cavalcade, and the winds that creep over the window sill and under the door—who can say that they are not the echoes of voices we once heard in ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... bated breath and pounding hearts, for shadowy forms to appear. They were not unaccustomed to danger and the suspense of an ambush. But in the forest they had solid ground beneath their feet. Trees and other tangible objects were all about them. But here everything seemed unreal, almost ghostly. The darkness of the forest was no blacker than the night here in the open. And yet there was no shady covering of leaves to shut out the light—only a strange, weird, unearthly canopy of mist. In the forest innumerable tree trunks ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... she was guided to a room, very unlike that fresh white bower at Bowstead, large, eerie, ghostly-looking, bare save for a dark oak chest, and a bed of the same material, the posts apparently absolute trees, squared and richly carved, and supporting a solid wooden canopy with an immense boss as big as a cabbage, and carved something like ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sky was beginning to warm the tops of the higher among the ice-masses, thereby rendering the rest of the scene more coldly grey. The calm which had favoured the escape of our fugitives still prevailed, and the open spaces had gradually widened until the floes had assumed the form of ghostly white islets floating in a blue-black sea, in which the fantastic cliffs, lumps, and pinnacles were sharply ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... engines carrying us up the James. Dancing Point reached sharply out as if to intercept us. But the owner of those strong dark hands that happened to be at the wheel knew the story of Dancing Point—of how many an ebony Tam O'Shanter had seen ghostly revelry there; and Gadabout was held well ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... gondola, which is conveying CULCHARD and PODBURY from the Railway Station to the Hotel Dandolo, Venice. The gondola is gliding with a gentle sidelong heave under shadowy bridges of stone and cast-iron, round sharp corners, and past mysterious blank walls, and old scroll-work gateways, which look ghostly in the moonlight. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 26, 1891 • Various
... performed, and deferred the sending to Don Alonzo, though her thoughts were perpetually on him. She, by the advice of Brilliard, writes a letter to Octavio; which was not like those she had before written, but as an humble penitent would write to a ghostly Father, treating him with all the respect that was possible; and if ever she mentioned love, it was as if her heart had violently, and against her will, burst out into softness, as still she retained there; and then she would take up ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... audience consists of but one person, and that person is a young lady, it is hardly possible that he should not become personally intimate with her; hardly possible that he should not be in some measure grateful. Miss Gushing's responses came from her with such fervour, and she begged for ghostly advice with such eager longing to have her scruples satisfied, that Mr Oriel had nothing for it but to give way to a ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... to startle Jolly Robin. But the moon-faced man paid not the slightest attention to the accident. There was something ghostly in the way he stood there, all in white, never moving, never ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... hill. On one side this hill was bathed by the blue waters of Tezcuco, on the other, a mile or more away, rose the temple towers of Mexico. Along the slopes of the hill, and in some directions for a mile from its base, grew huge cedar trees from the boughs of which hung a grey and ghostly-looking moss. These trees are so large that the smallest of them is bigger than the best oak in this parish of Ditchingham, while the greatest measures twenty-two paces round the base. Beyond and between these marvellous and ancient trees were ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... what effect was produced on his countenance and his mind; enough that he saw a fine thing, but not so fine as the idea cited above; which has been between the two eyes of humanity ever since women were sought in marriage. With yonder old gentleman it may have been a ghostly hair or a disease of the optic nerves; but for us it is a real growth, and humanity might profitably imitate him in his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pre-eminently rich. Aiar Urai Arang is said to be a small child whose mother is Aiar. Besides these there are other powerful spirits of the sea, the land, the up-river country, and so forth, and each is attended by innumerable slaves and attendants of ghostly kind; they have influence of many kinds over the dwellers in this world, some for good, others very much for evil. Madness is caused by various evil spirits throwing themselves into mortals, ghosts with red eyes which flash like lightning. The "amok" devil which comes from the swamp, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the night about him began to fill with ghostly life. His shadow beckoned and grimaced ahead of him, and the stunted bush seemed to move. His eyes were alert and questing. Within himself he reasoned that he would see nothing, and yet some unusual ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... as holding the hands of companions, I fled forth to the hiding, receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... in some remote and dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to happen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. Horror may have formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in no sense ghostly horror. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... understand anything. So much so that those who saw him exclaimed: "What a burden he'll be to his father!" Now when there was anything to be done, the eldest had always to do it; but if something was required later or in the night-time, and the way led through the churchyard or some such ghostly place, he always replied: "Oh! no, father: nothing will induce me to go there, it makes me shudder!" for he was afraid. Or, when they sat of an evening around the fire telling stories which made one's flesh creep, the listeners sometimes said: "Oh! it makes one shudder," the youngest ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... there, in his furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down in my direction. As I listen, one answers him from behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter sound,—wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills. Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mountains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to be compared with it. So wild! I get up in the middle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing to the ear, and one delights ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... and clear by now, and Chris often leaned his cheek on the sash as the priest talked, and watched that steady shining shield go up the sky, and the familiar view of lawns and water and trees, ghostly and mystical ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent,—ghostly mementos of England,—not as Arnold's weary Titan, but as a Herakles stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between them, that glaring noontide on ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... shot through Philip, and for an instant he stood rigid. What was that he saw out in the gray gloom of Arctic desolation, creeping up, up, up, almost black at its beginning, and dying away like a ghostly winding-sheet? A gurgling cry rose in his throat, and he went on, panting now like a broken-winded beast in his excitement. It grew near, blacker, warmer. He fancied that he could feel its heat, which was the new fire of life blazing ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... flaming birds-of-paradise, of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the arching aerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from which by day parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies of fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by that world of fierce appetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to have attained to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across which the passing calamities of existence only echoed. He merely recalled that he had ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... chill and moist, the quacking ducks were thickening on the pools, and strange noises came from ghostly swells and hidden creeks. The tired horses moved forward with soundless feet upon the sod, which had softened during the day. They quickened their steps when they saw the lantern shine from the ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... three stood there a soft whistle sounded from the bushes across the gully, and Jim Burdon pushed a ghostly ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the furious chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the echo of some hideous curse, and hell itself is upon earth, split ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Lucille departed. The ghostly Jarvis closed the door without so much as a click of the latch. Hastings advanced slowly toward the bed, his eyes not yet accustomed to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... thing I did not like about the cavern was that it had innumerable passages and windings about, and odd places, with dark holes, and ghostly-looking corners. I was not satisfied until I had explored them all, blocking up narrow little slits, and doing all I could to rout out anything that might be harbouring there. There was one passage very long and steep, the entrance to it out of the cavern was so narrow we did not notice it ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... the fog was outside—thick enough for a man to lose himself in it. The yellow mist which had crept in under the doors and through the crevices of the window-sashes gave a ghostly look to the room—a ghastly, abnormal look, he said to himself. The fire was smouldering instead of blazing. But what did it matter? He was going out. He had not bought the pistol last night—like a fool. ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the ruined grist mill and the old dam not before ten o'clock. There was a pale and watery moon, the shine of which glistened on the falling water over the old logs of the dam, but gave the searchers little light. The moon's rays merely aided in making the surroundings of the mill more ghostly. ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... darkness. The innumerable cornice lights had been extinguished. Graham saw the aperture of the ventilator with ghostly snow whirling above it and dark figures moving hastily. Three knelt on the fan. Some dim thing—a ladder was being lowered through the opening, and a hand appeared holding a ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... picture in which the little 'piou-pious' of the modern army advance, under the flag on which are inscribed the battles of the past; while the Old Guard rises from the earth to reinforce their ranks, and the ghostly figure of Jeanne d'Arc, symbolizing the spirit of France, leads on to victory. Listening as he talked, his hearers became infected with Sir Charles's spirit, and thinking of the past, looking to the future, he so kindled them that when he closed the book ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... at the sky; his eyes were fixed on a ghostly shape moving close ahead of them and on the fitful gleam of a ship's lantern that tossed and glimmered in the dark. Dropping his paddle he put his hands to his mouth and lifted his voice in a long hail. The light bobbed and swung and an ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... men see by night, Mitred, with eyes of serene command, Saint Patrick moved onward in ghostly white: The Staff of Jesus was in his hand; Twelve priests paced after him unafraid, And the boy, Benignus, more like a maid; Like a maid just wedded he walked and smiled, To Christ new plighted, that ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... is pity, is it not? Harmachis, being but a man, methinks that thou wilt need all thy ghostly strength to nerve ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the kindness of his heart, grasped the old woman to keep her from falling to the floor, he played directly into the hands of very material agencies under her control. There was nothing ghostly or even spiritual in the incidents that followed close upon the simulated fainting spell of the fortune-teller. It has been said before that her bony fingers closed upon his arms in a far from feeble manner. He had no time for surprise ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... sweetness of her youth, had she and I realized what might have been? Would Fanchonette always have sympathized with the whims and vagaries of the restless yet loyal soul that hung enraptured on her singing in the Quartier Latin so long ago that the memory of that song is like the memory of a ghostly ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... himself a ghostly chuckle. "I'm afraid that isn't possible, Mr. Malone. I would be happy to let you have a small model of the machine if we had one available—more than happy. I would like to see such a machine myself, as a matter of fact. ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... my test.' In the Paradiso it was, that he saw in beams of crystal radiance the ideal of the unity of the religious mind, the love and admiration for the high unseen things of which the Christian church was to him the sovereign embodiment. The mediaeval spirit, it is true, wears something of a ghostly air in the light of our new day. This attempt, which has been made many a time before, 'to unify two ages,' did not carry men far in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless it were an idle dream to think that the dead hand of Dante's ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and painting ghostly shadows on the wall. It was winter, and late in winter; indeed, the season was now at length drawing near to the end of winter, and approaching that dear time of spring which, beyond doubt, will be the eventful front ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... Notwithstanding the independence exhibited by her in all secular affairs, in her own spiritual concerns she uniformly testified the deepest humility, and deferred too implicitly to what she deemed the superior sagacity, or sanctity, of her ghostly counsellors. An instance of this humility may be worth recording. When Fray Fernando de Talavera, afterwards archbishop of Granada, who had been appointed confessor to the queen, attended her for the first time in that capacity, he continued seated, after she had knelt down to make her confession, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... spectre crew an act by itself. This would separate the poetical from the domestic side of the story. But by far the most important alteration was in the interview with the spirits. In the old versions they spoke and sang. I remembered that the effect of this ghostly dialogue was dreadfully human, so I arranged that no voice but Rip's should be heard. This is the only act on the stage in which but one person speaks while all the others merely gesticulate, and I was quite sure that ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... her raptures by an exclamation. Mrs. Bazalgette looked round, and there was her niece inspecting the ghostly robe which had caused her ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... break the spell at once," he declared, and having made a trumpet with his hand, he hallooed loudly toward the west. The result was unexpected. A ghostly triple echo, which the lower tone of their earlier conversation had failed to elicit, answered him from the opposite shore. In broad daylight an echo will suggest mystery and a bodiless, impish mocker, even to an unimaginative mind, but now the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... down the slope of the bank, laying her behind the tangled roots of a great oak. Already the sky was clearer, and the trees and men were beginning to take dim shape. The river rushed by, a deeper black than sky and woods, with a few ghostly bits of white where the foam of the ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... the wide window, looking out across the snow, lighted only by the stars and a ghostly crescent of moon. The evergreens were huddled closely together as though they kept each other warm. Beyond, the mountains brooded in their eternal sleep, which riving lightnings and vast, reverberating thunders were powerless ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... lavender breath entered the room, and looked up as if at a ghostly herald. She toed out her two small morocco-shod feet more particularly upon the floor, she smoothed down her own and her doll's little petticoats, and she also made herself all ready to ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... there were delicacies that he liked more than raw potatoes, he was hungry enough to enjoy them—and not even ask for salt. And his wife, too, ate almost as heartily as he did. The pale moonlight, streaming through the cellar window, lighted their banquet hall with its ghostly gleams. They enjoyed the cool dampness of the place. They liked its musty smell. And Moses Mouse remarked—between mouthfuls—that they hadn't had such an elegant feast for weeks. "It's quite like old ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... one away up on the shoulder of the mountain, and I imagined I could almost see him sitting there in his furs upon the illuminated surface and looking down in my direction. As I listened, maybe one would answer him from behind the woods in the valley, a fitting sound amid the ghostly winter hills. ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... of the large upper chamber, facing the east, was Peace." And so this old pilgrim found it, lying in his four-poster, listening to the cries and calls in the jargonelle pear-tree in the corner of the garden, and watching the ghostly oblong of the window that faced the east, glimmer and brighten into the effulgence of day. It was then, with his old hands folded on his breast, that he thought about ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
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