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More "Idle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then. I was returning from a trip to the Rocky Mountains when it happened. Many bad pale-faces were in the mountains at that time. They were idle bad men from many lands, who hated work and loved to fight. One of them had been killed by a Sioux Indian. They all banded together and swore that they would shoot every Indian they came across. They killed many—some even who were friendly to the white men. They did not ask to what tribe they ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... had done our hanging upon the parapet of the bridge we found a somewhat reluctant cab and drove homeward through the muted Sunday streets. The roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle, shuffling crowd. The air itself seemed more vacant than on week-days, and there was a silencing suspense everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best, and the children strayed along the streets without playing, or lagged homeward ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... not that!" she said quickly. "I have enough to eat, but—" She looked at him more closely, looked into his eyes, and felt rather than saw that it was not mere idle curiosity ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... constituted what may fairly be considered a hard day's work. Then came a well-occupied week in Cairo, where much hospital-visiting was again got through, and many interviews respecting the site for the new hospital at Port Said were held with the Egyptian authorities. This pleasant but by no means idle dawdling brought the party to Suez on December 23rd, where they embarked at once on board the P. & O. steamer 'Thames,' Captain Seaton, and started at ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... by reason or argument, had recourse to recrimination. In the paper which he sent me next day, he insisted in general that he had carefully perused the case (which you will perceive was a self-evident untruth); he said the theory it contained was idle; that he was sure it could not be written by a physician; that, with respect to the disorder, he was still of the same opinion; and adhered to his former prescription; but if I had any doubts I might come to his house, and he ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... be a worthless element in life when idle, but when otherwise, is it not the mainspring of the watch? Think of the manifold results of "mere curiosity," when rightly persevered in! But then we change the name—it becomes insight—research—it becomes a power which can climb the dizziest height, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... knowledge may be proved to the complete satisfaction of those who do not possess it. How many, not altogether stupid men, think the scientific study of languages useless, think ancient literature useless, all erudition useless, logic and metaphysics useless, poetry and the fine arts idle and frivolous, political economy purely mischievous? Even history has been pronounced useless and mischievous by able men. Nothing but that acquaintance with external nature, empirically acquired, which ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... say, my sweet Maria, to excuse Ammalat: he has already lived a year and a half in my house, and hitherto has never confessed to me the object of his love; though he might well have known, that it was from no idle curiosity, but from a real heartfelt interest, that I wished to know the secret of his heart. At last, however, he has told me all; and thus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Bar had to be encountered before the dawn of such a hope could come to him. And he had gradually learned to feel that his prospects at the Bar were not as yet very promising. As regarded professional work he had been idle, and how then ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... poets, and counted Edmund Spenser among his friends. Gosson's pamphlet was only one expression of the narrow form of Puritan opinion that had been misled into attacks on poetry and music as feeders of idle appetite that withdrew men from the life of duty. To show the fallacy in such opinion, Philip Sidney wrote in 1581 this piece, which was first printed in 1595, nine years after his death, as a separate publication, entitled "An Apologie for Poetrie." Three years afterwards it was added, with ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... by their situation from external dangers. It may be observed in certain favored classes even in communities which, by long and strenuous effort, have conquered nature and raised themselves high in the scale of civilization. The idle sons of the rich, relieved from the spur of necessity, may undergo the degeneration appropriate to parasitic life. In the midst of a strenuous activity adapted to call out the best intellectual and moral powers of man, they may remain ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the king was departed, Judas was not idle; for as many of his own nation came to him, so did he gather those that had escaped out of the battle together, and gave battle again to Antiochus's generals at a village called Adasa; and being too hard for his enemies in the battle, and killing a great number of them, he ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... the poor girl, when the young countess (who was married by this time) discovered La Fosseuse arrayed in one of her ball dresses, and dancing before a mirror. La Fosseuse was no longer anything but a waiting-maid, and the orphan girl, then sixteen years of age, was dismissed without pity. Her idle ways plunged her once more into poverty; she wandered about begging by the roadside, and working at times as I have told you. Sometimes she thought of drowning herself, sometimes also of giving herself to the first comer; ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Look into your own mind, and you will see you have absolutely no reason to support what you say. How can you inflict all this agony upon a poor creature foolish enough to love you as she does, and weak enough to believe in your idle dreams?" ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... And Spain was not idle. In 1513 Balboa leads his Spanish treasure seekers across the Isthmus of Panama, discovers the Pacific, and realizes what Cabot has already proved—that the New World is not a part of Asia. Thereupon, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... at him and rattled the keys in his girdle, for he hated Little John because he had found favor with the Sheriff. "So, Master Reynold Greenleaf, thou art anhungered, art thou?" quoth he. "But, fair youth, if thou livest long enough, thou wilt find that he who getteth overmuch sleep for an idle head goeth with an empty stomach. For what sayeth the old saw, Master Greenleaf? Is it not 'The late fowl ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... idle to deny that the great principle which lies at the bottom of anti-rentism, if principle it can be called, is the assumption of a claim that the interests and wishes of numbers are to be respected, though done at a sacrifice of the clearest rights of the few. That this is not liberty, but ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... villagers; and her faded brocade rustled with indignation at the slight cast upon her alliance by the wife of a petty farmer. She maintained that her niece had been a companion rather than a waiting-maid to the young ladies. "Thank heavens, she was not obliged to work for her living, and was as idle as any young lady in the land; and when somebody died, would receive something that would be worth the notice of some folks, with all their ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... permit her to harbour, even for an idle moment, the idea of leaving her shelter and going away? At this the thin, dark face grew rigid and stern. But too well the man knew the folly of setting up active opposition to any young thing straining against the door of a cage. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... for every second the course of the hounds seemed to vary, at one instant they would appear to be rushing directly down to us, and the next instant they would turn as though they were going up the hill again. Meantime our beaters were not idle—their stirring shouts, serving alike to animate the hounds, and to force the deer to water, made rock and wood reply in cheery echoes; but, to my wonder, I caught not for a long time one note ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... freely. It was of course none of his business what Dock did with himself, though he might think the other was a mean shirk to hang around idle when his people needed every dollar they ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... It is idle to speak now of such thoughts, and circumstances have unquestionably been rightly and mercifully ordered. We are all well and composed—poor papa supporting us by his own surpassing fortitude. It is an inexpressible comfort to me to witness ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... was certain—much as he loved her (and at the thought his heart grew heavy with longing), his words on war had not been the idle declaimings of a sophist. There was a higher citizenship; the world was wrong to allow this war; and ignorance was the foe ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... ordered to advance upon Oxford. But though the king held himself ready to fall back on the West, the Earl shrank from again risking his raw army in an encounter. He confined himself to the recapture of Reading, and to a month of idle encampment round Brill. But while disease thinned his ranks and the Royalists beat up his quarters the war went more and more for the king. The inaction of Essex enabled Charles to send a part of his small ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... bars of the corral, cavorting feebly on stiffened legs while the bereaved mothers cast languishing glances at them from outside, conscious that their milk was being basely diverted from the rightful heirs. They picked many blossoms and talked of many things. There was no idle moment from early morning until high noon; and yet, though they were very busy, they achieved ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... seem triflin' to set your mind to anything but Holy Writ when you're idle, but to-day I found an ole paper up to the works with a mighty stirrin' picture on it; a real techersome picture of a man danglin' from a high cliff by his two hands, and nothin' 'twixt him an' certain death, I reckon, but the writingman's understandin' ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... Weyanoke lies Fleur de Hundred. One day, with a daughter and a son of the Weyanoke household aboard, we sailed over to visit the old plantation. We knew that we should find nothing in the way of plantation life there, as the estate has long lain idle; and we knew also that no mark was left on the broad acres to tell of the life of colonial days. But the broad acres themselves were there, and they would remember the old times no doubt; and perhaps, lying in the sunshine and with nothing ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... said, turning around to face her, and leaving the spoon idle in the steaming pot, "do you know, I think there's ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... but, Carrie, I don't believe you understand Nan one bit. When people lose their money they have to work. We shall all have to put our shoulder to the wheel. We would give you tea, of course, but as for paying visits and playing tennis, it is only idle girls like yourselves who have time for that sort of thing. It will be work and not play, I ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... roundelay, and so loud That first they mocked, but, after, reverenced him. Or Gareth telling some prodigious tale Of knights, who sliced a red life-bubbling way Through twenty folds of twisted dragon, held All in a gap-mouthed circle his good mates Lying or sitting round him, idle hands, Charmed; till Sir Kay, the seneschal, would come Blustering upon them, like a sudden wind Among dead leaves, and drive them all apart. Or when the thralls had sport among themselves, So there were any trial of mastery, He, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... trade. The manual skill of a policeman is useless outside the police force. One cannot sell it in other markets. People said that Chadwick was a fool to leave the police force. He was; but he was a sublime and dignified fool in his idle folly. What he wanted was a position of trust, a position where nothing would be required from him but a display of portliness, majesty and incorruptibility. Such positions are not easy to discover. Employers had no particular objection to portliness, majesty ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... reflected from his past experience. When circumstances condemn such generous souls as Father Hecker to inactivity, a favorite solace is picking up fragments of work or recalling high ideas from the crowded memory of their former zeal, often with much profit to those who listen. And this was no idle-minded or boastful trait in him, as we see ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... with a printed brief for company, Kirkwood went to the Bartletts', but no one answered his summons and he turned away disappointed. Thinking they were probably at some neighbor's house he decided to walk about and return later. His idle roaming led him past Center Church. It was prayer-meeting night, and through the open windows floated a hymn sung waveringly by the small gathering of the faithful. It was here, on just such an April ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... lay apparently idle in his trenches before Petersburg, the presidential election of 1864 took place, and in spite of the unpopular draft of five hundred thousand men in July, and a summer and Autumn of severe fighting both East and West, Mr. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... learned, the magazine in this early period was regarded in a more serious light than to-day. It was not a means to while away an idle hour—something to be glanced at hastily and then thrown aside. The editors attempted, on the contrary, to give the best literature at their disposal, whether original or reprint, and endeavored to improve the public taste by selecting matter that would ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... The doors of these shops are corrugated iron and are raised up like the cover of a roll-top desk. Above the shops are the residences of the more well-to-do class. Little balconies are built out over the sidewalk and here the "idle rich" ladies sit and watch the ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... The Author wrote this Stuff merely to Get Back at himself and see how Sloppy he could be. He did not intend to Print it, because he was not a Vendor of Death-Beds, and he shrank from making any violent Assault on the Sensibilities. So he tossed the Idle Product into the Waste-Basket and wondered if he was biginning to lose his Mind. With that Poem in his Right Hand he could have walked into Bloomingdale and no ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... left there four or five days earlier we should have made Florence in 3 days; but by the time we got started Livy had got smitten with what we feared might be erysipelas—greatly swollen neck and face, and unceasing headaches. We lay idle in Frankfort 4 days, doctoring. We started Thursday and made Bale. Hard trip, because it was one of those trains that gets tired every seven minutes and stops to rest three quarters of an hour. It took us 3 1/2 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... No idle word The quiet stirred Among us as the morning neared; And brows were bent, As silent went Unto its ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... left to him pushed forward (20th October) towards Wittenberg, and recovery of those lost Saxon Countries. To Wittenberg from Lubben is some 60 miles;—can be done, nearly, in a couple of days. With the King, after Goltz is furnished, there are about 30,000; Eugen and Hulsen, not idle for their own part, wait in those far Western or Ultra-Wittenberg regions (in and beyond Dessau Country), to join him with their 14,000, when they get signal. Joined with these, he will be 44,000; he will then cross Elbe somewhere, probably not where Daun and the Reich imagine, and be in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... again buttoned his coat; but he got on much better this day than the former. He was less awkward and less idle, though not less observant than before; and he succeeded ere evening in tracing, in workmanlike fashion, a few draughts along the future column. He was ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... the meantime, has not been idle. With his old, rusty, unloaded musket, he has gathered in enough to make his old heart swell with pride, and to this number he has added many by using "rough on rats," a preparation that never killed anything except those that were unfortunate ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... side without, sentries pace their slow beat, bearing loaded muskets. Men are ranging through the grounds or hanging in synods about the doors of the different buildings, apparently without a purpose. Aimless is military life, except betimes its aim is deadly. Idle life blends with violent death-struggles till the man is unmade a man; and henceforth there is little of manhood about him. Of a man he is made a soldier, which is a man-destroying machine in two senses,—a thing for the prosecuting or repelling an ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... themselves are to blame for the large sums they have to pay for servants. They saw the native princes and rajahs surrounded by a multitude of idle people, and, as Europeans, they did not wish to appear in anyway inferior. Gradually the custom became a necessity, and it would be difficult to find a case where a more ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... any of those people if they are safe themselves! This work belongs to you; this privilege your ancestors bequeathed to you, the prize of many perilous exertions. But if every one will sit seeking his pleasure, and studying to be idle himself, never will he find others to do his work; and more than this, I fear we shall be under the necessity of doing all that we like not at one time. Were proxies to be had, our inactivity would have found them long ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... instantly a squall of conflicting emotions burst in her breast, angry emotions for the most part, because he was no longer with her in either sense of the word, because he was indifferent to all that concerned her inmost soul, and was content to live like a lady himself, a trivial idle life, the chief business of which was pleasure, unremunerative pleasure, upon which he would have had her expend her highest faculties in return for what? Admiring glances at herself—and her ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... watching too. He knew that the Padre's threat had been no idle one, but he meant to forestall its operation. The Padre was away to his home by now. Nothing that he could do could operate until the morning, when these men were sober. He had got this night, at least, in which ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the old English chivalry even in these few words addressed to a sister whose approbation he values, and with whom he hoped to spend the winter of his days. Having been, as he confesses, idle in answering letters, or rather, too busy to find time for long letters, he made use of his enforced leisure, while on his way from the Nerbuddah River to the Himmaleh Mountains, in search of health, to give to his sister ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... elections in 1877 by frightening France into a belief that a Conservative victory at the polls would be followed by a new German invasion. I am not sure, mind you, that this was an idle scare. For under the Conservative administration of our affairs we had cleared off in six years' time the frightful burdens imposed upon us by the war, by the senseless Parisian revolution of 1870, and by the Communist ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... friends. It is different with a father or mother: they are only lent to us for a part of our lives, and no memory of sensible, useful work will be to us the same pleasure in after years as the thought of the time that passed more pleasantly for a mother because we spent it in idle (!) talk, or the knowledge that a father had enjoyed the feeling that we were always at hand if he wanted us. A strong-minded woman might consider matters differently, and feel that a language learnt, or a district visited, was of more value, but we shall not be able to reason so when we ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... as if goaded by the furies of Orestes, when half a dozen stout men, sheathed in the full armor of Roman legionaries, sprang out of the brushwood on the gorge's brink, and seizing the ropes which had hung idle during that critical hour, hauled on them with such energetical and zealous power, that the ladder was drawn across the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... say,"—here he lowered his voice to a tone of mysterious and weighty reproach,—"what shall I say of your most unseemly and indiscreet companionship with these worldly young men who are visiting the Fjord for their idle pastime? Ah dear, dear! This is indeed a heavy scandal and a sore burden to my soul,—for up to this time I have, in spite of many faults in your disposition, considered you were at least of a ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... were wrong. Parents and teachers must have the power of doing such things without being judged. Sometimes they see that a child is really unable to learn, when the others perceive no difference; and it would be very harsh and cruel to oppress one who is out of order for fear little silly, idle, healthy things should think themselves ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... right!" was the cheerful reply, and Philip, accompanied by Peter, came rushing up in time to help his mother and sisters to unpack from their somewhat uncomfortable conveyance. "It does not do to be idle out here, and so, having our fishing gear, we were employing ourselves while waiting your arrival in catching some fish for your supper," he said, as he helped his mother to the ground. "Mr Job Judson here did not quite approve of our proceeding, as he would rather we had spent the time ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... as it is idle for a man to refuse to go on despoiling weaker men for gain—but why not? I can spend a fortune every year for a long life-span, and still leave loot a-plenty behind my taking off. Yet, my idling is not mere slothfulness. I know the Orient, not as the ordinary white man knows it, but as ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... painted show thereunto, borrowed even from the praises which are proper to virtue itself. As of a most notorious thief, and wicked outlaw, which had lived all his life-time of spoils and robberies, one of their bardes, in his praise, will say, 'that he was none of the idle milk-sops that was brought up by the fire-side, but that most of his days he spent in arms and valiant enterprizes; that he never did eat his meat, before he had won it with his sword; that he lay not all night slugging ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... thither, Illo? I must stay And wait here for the Countess Terzky. Know That we, too, are not idle. Break one string, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... same questions, the nuisance became intolerable. Our military visitors were soon disgusted at the concise nature of our replies, and we could overhear them muttering curses against us. While we sat smoking, not in the best imaginable humor, Tete Rouge's tongue was never idle. He never forgot his military character, and during the whole interview he was incessantly busy among his fellow-soldiers. At length we placed him on the ground before us, and told him that he might play the part of spokesman for ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and his mother would not be idle on this occasion. She was a perfect mistress of all the camp qualifications, and thought it a duty incumbent on her to contribute all that lay in her power towards distressing the enemy. With these sentiments she hovered about the ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... were authors; these vessels were books; these heaps of refuse in the bays were great libraries. The allegory admits of any amount of ingenious parallelism. It is nevertheless misleading; it is the illusion of an idle fancy. I have introduced it because it expresses, with some whimsical exaggeration—not much more than that of "The Vision of Mirza"—the popular notion about literature and its relation to human life. In the popular conception, literature is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... about it. So next morning he left home—and never came back! His parents did not take his loss much to heart, but were rather glad that their useless son had for once shown a little spirit, and they hoped that time and hardship might cure Tiidu of his idle folly. ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... Idle Tears," is beyond all praise. Passion was never wed to music more deliriously and satisfyingly. I am entranced by this poem always, as by God's poem of the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... supposed that Clive was most cordially welcomed home by his family, who were delighted by his success, though they seem to have been hardly able to comprehend how their naughty idle Bobby had become so great a man. His father had been singularly hard of belief. Not until the news of the defence of Arcot arrived in England was the old gentleman heard to growl out that, after all, the booby ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... transferred to one of the British sectors where another offensive was being prepared. But before leaving the Fismes or Rheims district, Guynemer was active. He had not been given his new rank in the Legion of Honor to be idle: that was not his way. On the contrary, his habit was to show, after receiving a distinction as well as before, that he was worthy of it. On July 6 he engaged five two-seaters, and brought down one in flames. The next day his notebook ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... discussions into which Heurtebise passionately threw himself, with arbitrary assertions, brutal contempt, or blind enthusiasm, the false and honeyed voice of his wife would suddenly make irruption, forcing him to listen to some idle reasoning or foolish observation invariably outside of the subject of discussion. Embarrassed and worried, he would cast us an imploring glance, and strive to resume the interrupted conversation. Then at last, wearied out by ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... and his brother, doubtless with the best intentions, had made life more painful for him after his mother's death than they could have made it if she had been alive. But Hurrell was gone, his father was in Devonshire, and he could do as he pleased. He lived with the idle set in college; riding, boating, and playing tennis, frequenting wines and suppers. From vicious excess his intellect and temperament preserved him. Deep down in his nature there was a strong Puritan element, to which his senses were subdued. Nevertheless, for two ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... style of life they would have had to lead there, for they were both very pretty and elegant, and had never been accustomed to hard work, though they now did their best to make themselves useful in the house, and were never idle. Their brother, Nat, was a capital little fellow—as merry as a cricket and never out of temper, even when his face and hands were bitten all over by mosquitoes, or when the pugnacious insects were buzzing round us in thousands, and that is a trial to the sweetest ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... fasten upon us irremediably unless we feed it with our own belief in its existence. You see men of the most delicate frames engaged in active and professional pursuits, who literally have no time for illness. Let them become idle, let them take care of themselves, let them think of their health—and they die! The rust rots the steel which use preserves; and, thank Heaven, although Gertrude, once during our voyage, seemed roused, by an inexcusable imprudence of emotion on my part, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... came to Court, Fa la! When first I came to Court, I deemed Dan Cupid but a boy, And Love an idle sport, A sport whereat a man might toy With little hurt and mickle joy— When first I came ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... knew how unhappy she would be when he did not come back, and how she would stand at the door and look out for him. He longed to set about making this great fortune at once, it seemed a waste of time to sit idle; but he knew he must rest that night, for his legs felt stiff and aching; besides he had ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... sustenance, and the protection of her creatures. They afford the wild animals their shelter and their abode, and yield them the greater part of their subsistence. They are, indeed, so evidently indispensable to the wants of man and brute, that it would be idle to enlarge upon the subject, except in those details which are apt to be overlooked. In a state of Nature man makes direct use of their branches for weaving his tent, and he thatches it with their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... consulted his bonne amie, Madame de Montbrune. This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry and honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices. She was not therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... typical Samarian market day—crowds and noise; buying and selling; idle rich and drudging poor; haughty military grandees, in their resplendent attires, and cowed, miserable beggars in their rags; color and laughter at the bazaars, and tears and sorrow at the auction block just across the way—always crowds and ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... to put six months' work in the next three. That was not so hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived on it. Also there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in the salon propped in a chair and Harmony playing, the room dark save for the glow from the stove and for the ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... an idle word Spoke in a huff by a poor monk. God wot, Tasting the air this spicy night which turns The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine! Oh, the church knows! don't misreport me, now! 340 It's natural ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... listed industries are not reflected in the statistical indexes and tend to reduce such published figures. Moreover, there is estimated to be a constant figure at all times of nearly 1,000,000 unemployed who are not without annual income but temporarily idle in the shift from one job to another. We have an average of about three breadwinners to each two families, so that every person unemployed does not represent a family without income. The view that the relief problems are less than the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover
... have not studied the classic for nothin'; if there is any one thing I am strong on, it's anatomy. Only look at his hair. Why, sir, I spent three weeks once dissectin'; and for more'n six months I didn't do anything, during my idle time, but dror figgers. Art is a kind of thing that's born in a man. This saying the ancients were better sculpters than we air, is no such thing; what did they know about steam-engines or telegraphs? Fiddle! ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... He liked the man and on the whole thought he could be trusted, while he imagined that he was not prompted by idle curiosity but knew something. Besides, Jake was often impulsive and ready, as he said, to ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... dust from them and fought their way again to the heights. You're not an old man, you are strong and clever, and you are not alone." he said, in a lower voice. "I'm not much use, I know. But I'll try and help you all I can. I've often felt ashamed of myself for living such an idle, useless life; often felt that I ought to do something to justify my existence. There's a chance now; at any rate, there's an occasion, a necessity for my waking up and stepping into the ring to do a little fighting on my own account. We may be beaten by Mr. Falconer; but don't say we're ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... our ideas cohere harmoniously, and our action is edifying. The convenience of least disturbing vested ideas, and at the same time rearranging our views in accordance with new facts that come to our knowledge, this is our proper care. But it is idle to say we do not know anything about things—perhaps we do, perhaps we don't—but we at any rate know what sane people think and are likely to think about things, and this to all intents and purposes is knowing the things themselves. For the things only are what ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... personage of his time. How his subsequent career might justify the hushed awe with which a proud senate received him if he had devoted himself to the broad and comprehensive questions of imperial jurisprudence, for which he seemed so eminently fitted, it would be idle now to conjecture. Certain it is that no act of his after life, varied and wonderful as it was, realised the promise of that glad ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... of art, or nature, when I behold in a goodly, rich and fertill soyle, a garden adorned with all the delights and delicacies which are within man's understanding, because the naturall goodnesse of the earth (which not enduring to bee idle) will bring forth whatsoever is cast into her; but when I behold upon a barren, dry, and dejected earth, such as the Peake-hills, where a man may behold snow all summer, or on the East-mores, whose best herbage ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... immortality through the endless life of children's children. Seeking counsels of our own souls' perfection, we have despised and rejected the possible increasing perfection of unending generations. Or if we are thrown back in pessimistic despair from making living folk decent, we leap to idle speculations of a thousand years hereafter instead of working steadily and persistently for ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... say, too," and Billy's exasperation strained its bonds, "that if you don't believe she was there—if you think I got up this little party to while away an idle evening, why it was most uncommonly good of you to come! But I can't think why you did it if you weren't convinced of the necessity. Certainly it was not from love ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... handsome public buildings, and their villas and theatres and baths were models of classic architecture and the scenes of unbounded luxury; the streets were narrow, provided with side-walks, the walls often decorated with painting or scribbled over by idle gamins; the number of shops witnesses to the fashion and gaiety of the town, the remains of painted notices to its municipal life; a terrible earthquake ruined it and drove out the inhabitants in A.D. 63; they returned and rebuilt it, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... naturally gives little idea of its real merits. In 1833 it was actually given under the proper conditions, as a sacred opera, strengthened by a generous infusion of Handel's 'Israel in Egypt,' under the direction of Mr. Rophino Lacy. It would be an idle task to give even the names of Rossini's many operas. Suffice it to say that between 1810 and 1828 he produced upwards of forty distinct works. In 1829 came his last and greatest work, 'Guillaume Tell,' which ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... The faint, idle breeze died of languor. The bushes stood up straight. The leaves hung motionless. The forest, which was always to Henry a live thing, seemed no longer to breathe. A leaf could have been heard had it ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... between a dollar invested with us and increasing and yielding day by day and the dollar which you use to purchase a few moments idle diversion or pleasure. The latter is lost forever—the dollar put to ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... Low Country. Why, beside Hepburn's regiment, which has made itself a name throughout all Europe, there are half a score of Scottish regiments in the service of the King of Sweden, and his gracious majesty Gustavus Adolphus does not keep them idle, I ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... of my own saw phantasmagoria very frequently. She was eminently sane, and of such good constitution that her faculties were hardly impaired until near her death at ninety. She frequently described them to me. It gave her amusement during an idle hour to watch these faces, for their expression was always pleasing, though never strikingly beautiful. No two faces were ever alike, and no face ever resembled that of any acquaintance. When she was not well the faces usually came nearer to her, sometimes almost suffocatingly ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... set off for morning school, with his pile of books upon his arm, the others waylaid him, jostled him to and fro, knocked him into the gutter, scattered his books on the street, and then officiously reported him late for school. He was clever, and, therefore, the masters called him idle; and when he did not know his lesson they made him stand in the street, with a pair of ass's ears on his head, and a placard on his back proclaiming to the public that the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... ninety vessels and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth in October for the coast of Spain. But these vast projects broke down before Buckingham's administrative incapacity. The plan of alliance proved fruitless. After an idle descent on Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned broken with mutiny and disease; and the enormous debt which had been incurred in its equipment forced the favourite to advise a new summons of the Houses in the coming year. But he was keenly alive to the peril in which his ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... breaking, but when he found I applauded his design, the voice within, which bade him see his father's and mother's faces no more, grew louder and more persistent. If he could not cut himself adrift from those who he knew would hamper him, when so small an effort was wanted, his dream of a destiny was idle; what was the prospect of a hundred pounds from his father in comparison with jeopardy to this? He still felt deeply the pain his disgrace had inflicted upon his father and mother, but he was getting stronger, and reflected that as he had run his ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... Brown, on the top of the hill, Why are you standing, idle still?" "Oh, I'm looking over to London town; Shall I see the horsemen if I ...
— Under the Window - Pictures & Rhymes for Children • Kate Greenaway
... know, Mary," he said, one day, when she happened to be idle and was standing talking to him as he sat on the edge of his bed, "a curious thing happened to me the very day before we went out on that sortie. I saw that fellow, Cumming, the rascal that ruined the bank, and then bolted, you know. For a moment I did not recall his face, but it struck ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... but it makes my crew so idle that I'm afraid they won't understand the meaning of the word work, much less be able to spell it when I ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... immediately revolted, Pissuthnes having privily got away their hostages for them, and provided them with means for the war. Whereupon Pericles came out with a fleet a second time against them, and found them not idle nor slinking away, but manfully resolved to try for the dominion of the sea. The issue was, that, after a sharp sea-fight about the island called Tragia, Pericles obtained a decisive victory, having with forty-four ships ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... workings By which they have been, are, or cease to be, Is but a vision;—all that it inherits 780 Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams; Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less The Future and the Past are idle shadows Of thought's eternal flight—they have no being: Nought is but that which feels itself to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the top of the hill, Why are you standing, idle still?" "Oh, I'm looking over to London town; Shall I see the horsemen if I ...
— Under the Window - Pictures & Rhymes for Children • Kate Greenaway
... not ask from an idle curiosity," added Andre. "The foreign residents in Paris were generally taken to the same hospital, in the Rue Lacepede. I was then the valet of an English gentleman, who died there of cholera. While I ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... I must suit myself with another page: this idle Prosaites will never be brought to ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... as will be attested by any intelligent boy who in campaigns against orchards has experienced detention by the Cerberi of the places. Taking his own figures Mr. Smith calculates that we have in this country 3,500,000,000 pounds of "idle dog power." But this statement is more ingenious than ingenuous; it gives, as doubtless it was intended to give, the impression that we have only idle dogs, whereas of all mundane forces the domestic dog is most easily ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... been idle while his mistress was away, and he showed her the hospital garden he had made close by, in which were cabbage, nettle, and mignonette plants for the butterflies, flowering herbs for the bees, chick-weed and hemp for the birds, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... next few days Lushington did not lead a life of idle repose; in fact, he did not remember that he had ever taken so much exercise since his Oxford days. On an average he must have bicycled twenty or thirty miles between breakfast and dinner, which ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... of the cupbearer. It is idle attempting anything of the kind as long as she is about ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... top of the first long rise Peleg Snuggers stopped the team for a few minutes' rest. Here the view was magnificent, and many a cadet stopped his idle talk to gaze at the mountains to the westward and the sparkling lake winding along in the opposite direction. It was early fall, and nearly every tree was tinted with red and gold, while here and there the first frosts had covered the ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious polities, no idle contest for ministerial victories, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... unmeaning; void of that very weak and very human instinct in which titles originated. In essential nonsense of application there is nothing to choose between Northcliffe and Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolk means (as my exquisite and laborious knowledge of Latin informs me) the Leader of Norfolk. It is idle to talk against representative government or for it. All government is representative government until it begins to decay. Unfortunately (as is also evident) all government begins to decay the instant it begins to govern. All aristocrats were first meant as envoys of democracy; and most envoys ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... this pompous detail of material triumphs, whether for the one or for the other, is worse than idle, unless the men of the two countries shall remain, or shall become, greater than the mere things that they produce, and shall know how to regard those things simply as tools and materials for the attainments of the highest purposes of ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... look back to the time I spent with her, as a bright spot in the otherwise barren desert of my life. Better, far better would it have been for me had I never left her. But I became alarmed, and thought the convent people were after me. It was no idle whim, no imaginary terror. I had good cause to fear, for I had several times seen a priest go past, and gaze attentively at the house. I knew him at the first glance, having often seen ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... not be idle during these attacks, a bill for a new test was introduced into the house of peers by the earl of Lindesey. All members of either house, and all who possessed any office, were by this bill required to swear mat it was not lawful, upon any pretence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... an hour like this the common words of sympathy may seem like idle words, and yet I want to say something to you, the noble wife of the hero of the nineteenth century. Belonging to the race your dear husband reached forth his hand to assist, I need not tell you that my sympathies are with you. I thank you for the brave words ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... It is an evil day with him, and the devils will be as busy with him, as the flies are with a lean and scabbed sheep. It shall go hard but such a man shall be full of maggots; full of silly, foolish, idle inventions, to get up, and to abound with fulness again. It is not a time now, will Satan say, to retain a tender conscience, to regard thy word or promise, to pay for what thou buyest, or to stick at pilfering, and filch from thy neighbour.[32] This Agur was afraid ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... himself was by no means idle. It would not be from official circles, he knew, that his redemption would come. Time had already proved that. For months past every police chief in the country had held his description of Binhart. That was a fact which Binhart himself very well knew; ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street,' published in 1607, and attributed by some to Shakespeare, tobacco-taking or tobacco-drinking (as smoking was then usually called) appears no longer in the induction, but in the play itself, Idle, the highwayman, says to the old soldier, Skirmish, 'Have you any tobacco about you?' Idle being supplied, smokes a pipe on the stage. These extracts, however, may have been cited before, together with ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... thoughtfully up to the house and into her room, which had as yet been left undisturbed behind the bars she had placed against idle invasion. ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... that was the length of time required to travel along his gallery to the end and down five flights of steel stairs. He travelled the whole distance on every portion of his anatomy except his feet, and the eight hall-men were not idle. The mulatto struck the pavement where I was standing watching it all. He regained his feet and stood upright for a moment. In that moment he threw his arms wide apart and omitted an awful scream of terror and pain and heartbreak. At the same instant, as in a transformation scene, the shreds of his ...
— The Road • Jack London
... besides, which they had been sent to learn, and for the learning of which, some of them to my certain knowledge had paid upwards of three hundred pounds. What then? the boys are rather slow, and require time; or a little idle, and will, it is hoped, grow more thoughtful as they grow up; or your ushers have neglected their duty; and you have therefore thought it ...
— The Academy Keeper • Anonymous
... thoughtlessly by using it as an exclamation in our conversation, by reading or hearing God's Word without devotion, jesting about sacred things, quoting Scripture in fun, and the like. Thoughtlessness is no excuse. We must give an account to God for every idle word; [Matt. 12:36] how much more for every vain ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... Ireland, he said, which might not be made ten times more productive than it was, and yet it was proposed to feed men in idleness in a workhouse. The system of workhouses acted well in England, where a sort of slave labour was adopted in them, to force the idle to seek employment elsewhere; but what could be expected from it in Ireland where men worked for twopence per day? Many expected that a poor-rate in Ireland would prevent the influx of Irish labourers into England; there could not be a greater mistake: ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... smallest foot, and the most lovely complexion of any young lady in the Paflagonian dominions. Her accomplishments were announced to be even superior to her beauty; and governesses used to shame their idle pupils by telling them what Princess Angelica could do. She could play the most difficult pieces of music at sight. She could answer any one of "Mangnall's Questions." She knew every date in the history of Paflagonia, and every other country. She ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... griddle, the baking of her cakes. After that, some of the neighbours came and carried off to their own fires the beef, mutton, chickens, and ducks intended for the day's dinner. It was woman's work that was to the fore, and all idle men were hustled ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... 25th, the horses of the escort were crossed to Sousoleto in a launch, and on the following day we resumed the journey by way of Bodega and Sonoma to Sutter's fort, where we arrived on the morning of the 2d of July. Along the whole route mills were lying idle, fields of wheat were open to cattle and horses, houses vacant, and farms going to waste. At Sutter's there was more life and business. Launches were discharging their cargoes at the river, and carts were hauling goods to the fort, ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... a remarkable degree. The bears here combine together in numerous herds, to catch the salmon near the cataracts in the rivers, where great numbers are stopped in their ascent, and are exceedingly relished by that animal. Some of them plunge into the water, and pursue their prey, while others more idle watch them from the banks. There are only two islands of note in this gulf,—the island of Anticosti, 90 miles long and 20 broad, covered with rocks, and wanting the convenience of a harbor; and Prince Edward's ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... an' fettling, an' washing pots; so I sat me down i' th' muck—who should come in but Maister Weston! I started siding stuff then, an' sweeping an' doing; and I expected he'd begin a-calling me for my idle ways, as Maister Hatfield would a' done; but I was mista'en: he only bid me good-mornin' like, in a quiet dacent way. So I dusted him a chair, an' fettled up th' fireplace a bit; but I hadn't forgotten th' Rector's words, so says I, "I ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... high as richer men. But Frank Tregear was only his second son; and though Frank would hereafter inherit his mother's fortune, he was by no means now in a position to assume the right of living as an idle man. Yet he was idle. The elder brother, who was considerably older than Frank, was an odd man, much addicted to quarrelling with his family, and who spent his time chiefly in travelling about the world. Frank's mother, who ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... reached Enderby, Mrs. Middleton still lay unconscious—at death's door, it was said. And one whispered to another that it was, perhaps, better so, that it would be a blessing to the minister if she were to be taken away. She had been worse than a drag upon him all these years. Foolish, idle, lazy, extravagant, she had exaggerated her physical delicacy and given herself up to indolence and self-indulgence, running the household into debt until it was a disgrace to the minister and to the church. Mr. Middleton, dear saint, hadn't known ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... story of the idle rich, and is a vivid and truthful picture of society and stage life written by one who is himself a conspicuous member of the Western millionaire class. Full of grim satire, caustic wit and flashing epigrams. "Is sensational to a degree in its theme, ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... have half cut our boatswain in two, when, raising my pistol, I fired at the man's head. The bullet went through his brain, and his cutlass, though wounding Johnson slightly in the leg, fell to the deck. The boatswain's weapon meantime was not idle, and at the same moment it descended with a sweep which cut the Frenchman's head nearly in two, and he fell dead among his comrades. It was at that instant the French discovered that their ship was under way. "Sauve qui peut!" was the cry. Some jumped overboard and endeavoured to swim on shore. Many ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... this ungallant speech, Rose entered the room; and Miss Eliza rising to greet her, they both seated themselves near the fire, where that idle lad Fergus was standing, leaning his shoulder against the corner of the chimney-piece, with his legs crossed and his hands ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Why, the Babes in the Wood were prodigies of analysis and wizards of cunning compared with this carefully selected civilian and military party, which, it has to be acknowledged, spent a by no means idle time while sojourning in the territories of our eastern Ally. For among them they promised away any amount more munitions and war material of all kinds. They went into the details of the contemplated deal with meticulous care and consummate ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... have united to destroy Wilson, who is the strongest man in the West. The bosses are all against him. They recently produced an application which he had made for a pension, under the Carnegie Endowment Fund for Teachers, which had been allowed to lie idle, unnoticed for a year or so after its rejection, but owing to campaign emergencies was produced, at this happy moment, to show that Wilson wanted a pension. As a Philadelphia poet whom you never ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... particular circumstances and the state of the country and the public mind warranted his action. Foreign interference or recognition of the Confederacy was threatened. No decided Union victory had been won. McClellan had held the Army of the Potomac idle for six months in sight of the White House. Halleck at St. Louis, in command of a large and important department, had long talked of large plans and so far had executed none. Matters were at a standstill in Western Virginia. Buell was, so far, giving ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Island, written the preface to the Studies, a small book about the Inland Voyage size, The Silverado Squatters, and over and above that upwards of ninety (90) Cornhill pages of magazine work. No man can say I have been idle.—Your affectionate son, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... arranged," said she, red and hesitating. For, she feared he would think her altogether selfish in her anxiety. He certainly would have been justified in so thinking; he knew how rarely generosity survived in the woman who leads the soft and idle life. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... as precede the evening exercises. We should make the going to sleep a sacred part of our lives. In giving up our consciousness we should be sure to surrender it to the positive forces of the universe. This is not an idle dream, nor a mere mystical fancy. Even from a psychological point of view the emotion with which we go to sleep is apt to remain with us and get in its good or evil work in the unconscious, involuntary metabolism that takes place ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... Clavering had a wonderful way with her pupils, a very stimulating way, and she so arranged her prizes and her certificates that no girl who had really worked, who had really taken pains, was excluded from distinction. It was only the hopelessly idle, the hopelessly disobedient, who could leave Cherry Court School without some token of its ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... me, you have approved what my nation has done. You have honoured all Hungary by it, and I pledge my word to you that we will yet do what you have approved. The approbation of our conscience we have—the sympathy of your generous people has met us—and it is no idle thing, that sympathy of the people of Ohio—it weighs as the sovereign will of two millions of freemen. You have added to it the sanction of your authority. Your people's sympathy you have framed into a law, sacred and sure in its consequences, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... ground, as if he actually had the spider under it. "I will crush the life out of him, the venomous beast!" and the fierce, determined expression of his usually calm, mild countenance showed that this was no idle threat, but that ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... i'th' shuttle, i'th' loom, an i'th frame, Ther's melody mingled i'th' noise, For th' active ther's praises, for th' idle ther's blame, If they'd hearken to th' saand of its voice; An' when flaggin a bit, ha refreshin to feel As yo pause an luk raand on the throng, At the clank o' the tappet, the hum o' the wheel, Sing this plain unmistakable song:— Nick a ting, nock a ting; Wages keep pocketing; Workin ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... these I sing, of Raghu's line, Though weak mine art, and wisdom mine. Forgive these idle stammerings And think: For virtue's sake ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... put his bat over into the garden, and began to throw the ball about in an aimless fashion, while he cogitated on what he should do next. His father's hack was standing away at the farther end of the paddock, and in an idle, thoughtless way Bunty sauntered down towards it, and then sent his ball spinning over the ground in its direction "to give it a jump." Nothing was further from his thoughts than an idea of hurting the animal, ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... gallantly. Singular to say, he has met with, and perhaps served under, our lamented and lost brother Duncan, of whom and his family he may give us interesting particulars. You know how this neighborhood excels in idle talk, and if John Smithies becomes our tenant, his discourse must be confined to his own business. But he must not hesitate to impart to you any facts you may think it right to ask about. Jordas will bring us your ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... perilous to his safety. They had been idle for days in a hot week in summer, waiting for orders to return from the rail-head where they had gone to quell a riot, and where drink and hilarity were common. Suddenly—more suddenly than it had ever come, the demon ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... there are, if you wait long enough—and nobody comes crashing through the bushes! I don't suppose—I mean if you are not going to use it any more yourself—" Loraine looked toward the idle pole. "I never fished in my life," she explained. The boy ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... is not to be bought for love or money; for it can go from one end of the earth to another in a few minutes. Of course the cunning Corva will do her best to dissuade you from taking the foal, and will tell you that it is both idle and sickly; but do not believe her, ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... hour to recover my quiet mind. After all, it is as idle to rage against man's fatuity as to hope that he will ever be less a fool. For me, the great thing was my sixpenny miracle. Why, I have known the day when it would have been beyond my power altogether, or else ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... stretches its large boughs lovingly about the corner, and sometimes over the roof, of the dwelling. Under this the peasant and his family sit to enjoy themselves on summer evenings. Not to be entirely idle, however, the father is usually engaged in weaving baskets, while the children amuse themselves with cleaning and preparing the twigs; the mother, often with a baby in her lap, applies herself to the reparation of the family wardrobe; and the whole group, especially when lighted up by the slanting ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... flight of the Prioress reaches the city of Worcester, a hundred tongues, spiteful, ignorant, curious, or merely idle, will at ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... Sir Charles," Finglemore answered, rubbing his hands somewhat nervously. "But he never went there. Being an idle young dog, with a taste for amusement, he got for the time no further than Paris. Since then, he's hung about a bit, here, there, and everywhere, and done no particular good for himself or his family. But about three or four years ago he somehow 'struck ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... I have heard from an American lady that "progressive dinners" have recently been introduced by the idle and rich set of young people in New York. The modus operandi is that several dinners will, by arrangement, be given on a certain day, and the guests will go to each house alternately, eating one or ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... patient voice, "this that you call a lie is already an accomplished fact. I am not laying before you the fruits of idle speculation. I have upon me the most positive proof that such a result as was hoped for has already been reached. Gian Maria has received from his subjects a notification that unless he is in his capital ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... English proverb says, that more know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows; and the influence of the adage seems to extend to works composed under the influence of an idle or foolish planet. Many corresponding circumstances are detected by readers of which the Author did not suspect the existence. He must, however, regard it as a great compliment that, in detailing incidents purely ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Prostrates uprooted on the plain, a fume Rises sulphureous from the riven trunk, And if, perchance, some traveller nigh at hand 500 See it, he trembles at the bolt of Jove, So fell the might of Hector, to the earth Smitten at once. Down dropp'd his idle spear, And with his helmet and his shield himself Also; loud thunder'd all his gorgeous arms. 505 Swift flew the Grecians shouting to the skies, And showering darts, to drag his body thence, But neither spear of theirs nor shaft could ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... is such as to result in continual breakages. While these breakages in themselves are small and inexpensive, they mean the cessation of all farming operations during the hour or day required for repairs. A large crew of men is thus left more or less idle, to the serious injury of the work and to the great expense of the owner. Undoubtedly, the traction engine has a place in dry-farming, but it has not yet been perfected to such a degree as to make it satisfactory. On heavy soils it is much more useful than on light soils. When the ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... home idle for a few weeks, and then hearing that there might be an opening for operators on the C. Q. & R., a new road building up in Nebraska, I once more started out. It was an all night ride to the division headquarters, and thinking I might as well ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... being able, I would not do to pleasure Currado; and, true it is that I have had in my house for these fourteen years the boy whom thou dost now demand of me, and his mother, and gladly will I surrender them; but tell Currado from me to beware of excessive credulity, and to put no faith in the idle tales of Giannotto, or Giusfredi, as thou sayst he calls himself, who is by no means so ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... is to be maintained at a depth of 18 feet. The Americans maintain that there will be no finer harbour in the Far East when the work is completed. The reclaimed acreage will be covered with warehouses and wharves, enabling vessels to load and discharge at all seasons instead of lying idle for weeks in the typhoon season and bad weather, as they often do now. With these enlarged shipping facilities, freights to and from Manila must become lower, to the advantage of all concerned in import and export trade. The cost of these improvements up ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... circumstances she would have enjoyed it intensely, and basked in it as a flower in the sunshine; to-night, however, she could not dismiss the image of Rose in the gaunt hospital in Lamb's Conduit Street. She knew the comparison was crude; she assured herself that there must always be rich and poor, idle and industrious, gay and sorrowful, elegant and shabby, arrogant and meek; but her discomfort none the less persisted, and she had the uneasy feeling that the whole of civilisation was wrong, and that Rose and the earnest ones were justified in their scorn ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... mother of the girl who entered; and she seemed faint and tired. Well had the old woman called her a drudge, for such she was—a poor patient household drudge, laboring for a hard, heartless, idle, and cunning husband, and but too tenderly fond of the poor girl whose beauty had been a snare ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the world by urging any longer a useless and fruitless contest. Such a condition of things would not be tolerated on the European continent. Why should it be on this? A war of desolation, such as is now threatened by Mexico, can not be waged without involving our peace and tranquillity. It is idle to believe that such a war could be looked upon with indifference by our own citizens inhabiting adjoining States; and our neutrality would be violated in despite of all efforts on the part of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... of time and labour that certain implements would effect, answered with characteristic conservatism. "What," said he, "would you have us do? Our only concern is to fill our bellies, to get good clothes and houses, to say to one slave, 'Do this,' and to another, 'Do that,' and to sit idle ourselves and be waited upon. As to our tillage, or building, or planting, our forefathers did so and so and were satisfied, and why should not we do the same? The English want us to use their ploughs instead of our ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... This is no idle repetition of an old belief, or tradition. It is a fact; and we say this quite mindful of the records made by the grizzly bear, the Alaskan brown bear, the tiger, the leopard ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Barks when he hears the step of the Baker"; and because probably all men know that tale the Company of the Powderers for the Face have dared to consider it famous. Yet it lacks mystery and is not ancient, is not fortified with classical allusion, has no secret lore, is common to all who care for an idle tale, and shares with "The Wars of the Elves," the Calf-butcher's tale, and "The Story of the Unicorn and the Rose," which is the tale of the Company of ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... whim, I fear, sir,' was my answer; 'or else an idle whim is going to spirit me away. I shall set out for London next week; and I must give you warning that I feel no disposition to retain Thrushcross Grange beyond the twelve months I agreed to rent it. I believe I shall not live ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... as might restrain and lie in ambush for those that went out for provisions. So these men obeyed the orders of Antigonus, and got together a great number of armed men about Jericho, and sat upon the mountains, and watched those that brought the provisions. However, Herod was not idle in the mean time, for he took ten bands of soldiers, of whom five were of the Romans, and five of the Jews, with some mercenaries among them, and with some few horsemen, and came to Jericho; and as they found the city deserted, but that five hundred of them had settled themselves on ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... the time of this war. Let us remember, too, what she has been in peace. "After all, in our saner moments we all of us know that the Germans are a great people, with a great part in the world to play. Their boasts about their 'culture' are not idle boasts, and, when one comes to think of it, it is rather important to have in our midst a people that cares to boast about its culture. The Englishman is more given to complaining than boasting, and when he does boast it is certainly not about culture. As it seems to me, the Germans excel in ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... many beggars, I am sorry to say, in fair Italy, who are called Lazzaroni, and they live on whatever they can get, sleeping under porticos, piazzas, or any place they can find, and are, as you may guess, excessively idle, ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... in this way, his keeper was not idle, for he mingled among the crowd, and spread his praises most industriously. To one gentleman he whispered some very choice thing that the noble animal had said in the very act of coming up-stairs, which, of course, rendered the mental effort still more astonishing; to another he murmured ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... given you a wrong impression about her," Priscilla said, speaking with a slight effort. "It is only the idle, foppish men about town she ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... brightness of the social air, together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood should have descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in front of the cafe, in the mild October afternoon suffused with human sounds, is perhaps the most abiding thing I brought away from ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... grip on the wholeness of life, an active consciousness that, though he might now derive a grim sort of enjoyment from watching the unfolding of circumstance, the experience would be nevertheless real, would represent so much of his personal life. No longer would it be a mere desperate submission to idle drifting amid the scenes of a dreamland; though the same temperament as before was at the back of his decision. Of course, his general determination to face the full responsibility of his relation to Cleo likewise counted for a good deal in his assenting to accompany her ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... are on the march towards London by the Yorkshire road, intending to cut us off if they can. And now, gentlemen, farewell; for I have no idle ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... this, the Randolphes could not pay for such service. Moreover, the family had to give up their beds (which were but poor cribs in the wall) to the strangers; and as they had to be up, they had better be employed than idle. ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... confess, since here if anywhere we are candid, that it is the way of violence to which I feel called myself, and that I shall die as I have lived, an active revolutionary. But because force is a way, is a necessary way, is my way, I do not imagine that there is no other. Were it not idle to wish, I could rather wish that I were a poet or a saint, to serve the same Lord by the gentler weapons of the spirit. There are anarchists who never made a speech and never carried a rifle, whom we know as our brothers, though perhaps they know not us. Two I will name who live for ever, Shelley, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... his end. Towards French nationalism he acted in the same spirit. As has already been seen, he was conscious of the political shortcomings of the French. Yet there was nothing penal in his attitude towards them, and he saw, with a clearness to which Durham never attained, how idle all talk of anglicizing French Canada must be. "I for one," he said, "am deeply convinced of the impolicy of all such attempts to denationalize the French. Generally speaking, they produce the opposite effect from that intended, causing the flame of national ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... alarms, And wakes him from the dreams she had instilled. "What means this fantasy that hath me filled, And spirit form that o'er my pillow leans; I wonder what this fragrant incense means? Oh, tush! 'tis but an idle, wildering dream, But how delightful, joyous it did seem! Her beauteous form it had, its breath perfume; Do spirit forms such ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... be idle to detail the incidents of a journey across the prairies. Ours differed in no way from hundreds of others that have been made, and described—except, perhaps, that after reaching the buffalo range, we travelled more by night than by ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Elizabeth. He was condemned to death and sent to the Tower. There seems to be no reason to believe that Raleigh was guilty, but, guilty or innocent, he spent fourteen years in the Tower. He was not the kind of man to sit idle, so he set to work and wrote a book on the history of the world, which kept him occupied, and showed that he was clever as well as gay and daring. Then once more he was let out for a short time while he sailed to the West to discover a gold-mine of which someone had told ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... said: Lord, this creature that you have given me makes my life miserable. She chatters incessantly and teases me beyond endurance, never leaving me alone; and she requires incessant attention, and takes all my time up, and cries about nothing, and is always idle; and so I have come to give her back again, as I cannot live with her. So Twashtri said: Very well; and he took her back. Then after another week, man came again to him and said: Lord, I find that my life is very lonely, since I gave you back ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the people' to whom there is an amaranthine crown, a festal diadem glorious and beautiful, which can never fade, even God Himself. To them who love Him He is an ornament, and His presence is the consecration of the true joyful feast. They who are crowned by Him are crowned, not for idle revelry, but for strenuous toil ('sit in judgment') and for brave purpose ('turn the battle to the gate,') and their coronation day is ever the day when earthly garlands are withered, whether it be the crises and convulsions of nations and institutions, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... not return to us while Day and Night divide— Never while the bars of sunset hold: But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died, Shall they thrust for high employments ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... the subject of the first is no idle piece of subtle argument, but a consideration of such decidedly practical importance that it comes up whenever the plan of pushing War to the utmost extremity is mooted, and by its weight in most cases restrains the execution of ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... should he not lend his talents to business enterprises, to great commercial undertakings which make for the prosperity and stability of a country as surely as even its army or navy? Thus also will he create happiness for himself, because, if idle, at five and twenty, having enjoyed all that rank and fortune can give him, he will be unhappy from not knowing what ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... ails you?" exclaimed Madeleine, perceiving that Emma paid no attention to her idle gossip. "When I was of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... slipped rapidly away, the party at the Waldorf was not idle. There were conferences, numerous and protracted, behind dosed doors, telegrams and cablegrams in cipher flashed hither and thither in multitudinous directions, while Mr. Sutherland seemed fairly ubiquitous. Much of his time, however, was ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... a dance or two, performed creditably, made his peace, for the sake of peace, with Sylvia Quest, whose ignorant heart had been partly awakened under his idle investigations. But this was Sylvia's second season, and she would no doubt learn several things of which she heretofore had been unaware. Just at present, however, her heart was very full, and life's outlook was indeed tragic to a ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... I'm still wearing my pistol, and I've got two boxes of shells for it in my pocket—it's a small caliber, and there's fifty in each box. There are plenty of blankets and cooking utensils, magazines for idle hours and, Heaven bless us, an old and battered phonograph on the table. Don't scorn it—anything that has to be packed on a horse this far mustn't be scorned. We can have music with our meals, if we ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... enough for the welfare of the royal family, and is it not in their interest to place her without delay and with perfect resignation among the inferior powers, since all their efforts to restore the position she has lost merely serve to distress their subjects and cherish idle regrets?" "What the Emperor would prefer," said this same memorandum, "is that the Turks should remain in peaceable possession of Wallachia and Moldavia; still he would hand over these provinces to the Czar in return for a just compensation ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... gloomy prison, with leisure to reflect more calmly on my painful position, I realized what an ass I had been, and I vented my wrath chiefly on myself. But it was idle to repine. My object now was to go free again at the earliest possible moment, and I cast about to see how I might ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... some time felt ashamed of being idle; for though his host might have received payment for his support from the government, yet that, he was sure, could not be sufficient to cover the expense to which he was put. He expressed his wishes ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... Stone! Thou art right well be-called Stone; for there is no more wit nor no more quickness in thee than in a pebble. Lack-a-daisy! but this were never good land sithence preaching came therein,—idle foolery that it is!—good for nought but to set folk by the ears, and learn young maids for to gad about a-showing of their fine raiment, and a-gossiping one with another, whilst all the work to be wrought in the house falleth on their betters. ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... the minds of some who would not openly stand for it. A manufacturer standing near the furnace of a glasshouse and pointing to a procession of young Slav boys who were carrying the glass on trays, remarked, "Look at their faces, and you will see that it is idle to take them from the glasshouse in order to give them an education: they are what they are, and will always remain what they are." He meant that there are some human beings—and these Slavs of the number—who ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... was all Symford the sport of Priscilla. Fritzing knew nothing of his loss. He had not told Priscilla a word of his money difficulties, his idea being to keep every cloud from her life as long and as completely as possible. Besides, how idle to talk of these things to some one who could in no way help him with counsel or suggestions. He had put the money in his drawer, and the thought that it was still unchanged and safe comforted him a little in the ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... much, and am so glad you keep "office hours." It is very good of you not to be angry with my good advice! "Experientia does it," as Mr. 'Aughton would say.... I break down about once in three months like clockwork—from sheer overwork. I certainly am never happy idle; but I have too often to sit in sackcloth in the depths of my heart—whilst everybody is beseeching me to be "idle"—from a consciousness that, not from doing nothing, but by doing B when I should have done A, and C when I should have ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... been ill, and suffered from a malarial affection, which compelled him to be idle much of the time. But he was always studying the antique statues, and made many copies. Some of the first original works which he attempted were failures, when, at last, he modelled a colossal statue of Jason, ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... he could be seen among his workmen, and till late in the evening he wandered about on the building-ground, praising the industrious and blaming the idle. He looked out anxiously sometimes in the direction of Treves to see if he could discern anything uncommon there. But he never saw the slightest change, nor any sign that the stranger with whom he had betted, had really ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... accept this covenant, were unfit for society. If a man does not behave justly towards others, he cannot expect that they will behave justly towards him; to live a life of injustice, and expect that others will not find it out, is idle. The unjust man cannot enjoy a moment of security. Epicurus laid it down explicitly, that just and righteous dealing was the indispensable condition to every one's comfort, and was the best means ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... said coldly. "You must remember that you are not in Eccleston Square. 'An idle soul shall suffer hunger,' says the prophet. You are here to be disciplined, and ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hour, he came to a small country called the Land of the Busy Bees. The streets were filled with people running to and fro about their tasks. Everyone worked, everyone had something to do. Even if one were to search with a lantern, not one idle man or one tramp could ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men, child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle, invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers, the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition of the islands, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I was the "Illustrious Lazy." In my professional studies and avocations, I have been so hard driven, in order to make up for four idle years, that I am wasted almost to a shadow, and fears are entertained that I shall wholly vanish into thin air. My physician talks gravely about my having exhausted my nervous energy, and sends me to Ratborough, as the place of all others the most favorable ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... them went to St. Louis to see my prosecutors. He found they would do nothing unless they got all their money back. Of course I could not give them that," said he with a wink, "as I haven't it; and so my lawyer was unable to do anything for me. Shanks, however, has just been in, and he has not been idle during the five days he has been absent. He has made arrangements with a party to go my bail, provided I will advance a considerable sum as security. Nothing is needed now but security, and I think I can manage it. I can give ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... course is European Thought; and, to some, music may perhaps seem in this connexion rather like an intruder. Indeed, if the musician is, in William Morris's phrase, 'the idle singer of an empty day', if his business is to administer alternate stimulants and soporifics to the nerves or, at best, the surface emotions, or to serve in Cinderella-like fashion any passing, shallow needs of either ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Fanny did not suffer her pen to lie idle. Her tragedy, "Edwy and Elgiva," was produced, though without success, at Drury Lane. On the other hand, the success of her third novel, "Camilla, or a Picture of Youth, " published by subscription in 1796, was, at least from a financial ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... me," said the old colonel, "that he has known more than one orator affected with the qualms which precede, even with us old fire-eaters, the opening of a battle. But all this is idle talk. You want to be a deputy," added the old man, shrugging ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... to the ideas which we receive from them, as also to several of our thoughts, a concomitant pleasure, and that in several objects to several degrees, that those faculties which He has endowed us with might not remain wholly idle and unemployed by us. Pain has the same efficacy and use to set us on work that pleasure has, we being as ready to employ our faculties to avoid that as to ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... and let the poor work together by themselves. The rich in their enclosures, saying, This is mine; and the poor upon the Commons, saying, This is ours, the Earth and its fruits are common. And who can be offended at the poor for doing this? None but covetous, proud, idle, pampered flesh, that would have the poor work still for this devil (particular interest) to maintain his greatness that ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... response. I was in the darkest corner now, beyond the stairs, still hopelessly beating the gun barrel against the stone. The dim light revealed no change in the wall formation, the same irregular expanse of rubble set in solid mortar, hardened by a century of exposure to the dry atmosphere. Then to an idle, listless blow there came a hollow, wooden sound, that caused the heart to leap into the throat. I tried again, a foot to the left, confident my ears had played me false, but this time there could be no doubt—there was an opening here back ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... doubt; and has taken a fit with fright. Now, then, I must see you all back into your rooms; for, till the house is settled, she cannot be looked after. Gentlemen, have the goodness to set the ladies the example. Miss Ingram, I am sure you will not fail in evincing superiority to idle terrors. Amy and Louisa, return to your nests like a pair of doves, as you are. Mesdames" (to the dowagers), "you will take cold to a dead certainty, if you stay in ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... twofold in its nature. Some things may be changed by man, others are by his utmost effort immutable. God has implanted in you a right reason by which, when it is well trained, you can infallibly distinguish between the two, avoiding thus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... tank full, set the gas can aside and then, after priming the carburetor, yanked on the starter pull rope. The engine caught with a spluttering roar and began racing madly. Barney lunged for the throttle and cut it back to idle, but even then, the engine was running at near full speed. Then Barney noticed the white fluid running down the side of the engine tank and dripping from the spout of the gasoline can. He grinned broadly, ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... tell of yourself?" asked Louis XIV. "If I may judge by the blood and dust with which you are yet covered, you did not remain idle." ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the young woman is among us,[54] the young woman too; the fact {speaks for} itself; this Geta, besides, according to the common run of servants, not a bad one or of idle habits; he supports them; alone, maintains the whole family; take him, bind him,[55] examine him upon ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... feeling his way before committing himself, he at last admitted that 'there was some idle story of the kind, but for his part, he put no faith in such ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... were owing some one who needed the money. I am not a rich man, but I have no one save myself to provide for and I have funds lying idle that I would be glad to use for you. If you make a point of it, when you are rested, you can ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... Eradicate is getting batty in his old age, poor fellow! He and his mule Boomerang are growing old together, and I guess my colored helper is 'seeing things,' as well as hearing them. But, as you say, it may be that the house is going to be rented. It's too valuable a property to let stand idle. Did you hear how long Andy was ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... lounge around the tavern. Evidently they were poorly supplied with money, though Duane observed they could borrow a peso occasionally from the bartender. Duane set out to make himself agreeable and succeeded. There was card-playing for small stakes, idle jests of coarse nature, much bantering among the younger fellows, and occasionally a mild quarrel. All morning men came and went, until, all told, Duane calculated he had seen at least fifty. Toward ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... satisfaction. He stood there in the dark watching the fireflies amid the rhododendrons, till the hoofbeats had faded. Then he sighed and roused himself. He had much to do. His journey into the town had not been one of idle curiosity to see how the Spaniards conducted themselves in victory. It had been inspired by a very different purpose, and he had gained in the course of it all the information he desired. He had an extremely busy night before him, and must ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... much alarm prevailed with respect to the meditated invasion of England; and the command of the coast from Orfordness to Beachy Head was offered to him, and accepted. But he thought the alarm idle; he felt the service to be irksome; and gladly retired from it at the peace of Amiens. When war was renewed in 1803, he took the command of the Mediterranean fleet. For more than a year he kept his station ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... ill-stemmed current; he was amazed himself at the force with which this trivial fancy seemed to grasp him: he was even rather tremulous as he brushed his hair—pooh! it was riding in that break-neck way. It was because he had made a serious affair of an idle matter, by thinking of it as if it were of any consequence. He would amuse himself by seeing Hetty to-day, and get rid of the whole thing from his mind. It was all Irwine's fault. "If Irwine had said nothing, I shouldn't have thought half so much ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... doctor, without stopping for an instant the idle swinging movement of his legs. "Self-flattery. Food for that vanity which makes the world go round. Meantime, what do you think is going to happen to the treasure floating about the gulf with the great Capataz and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... having their votes in the National Government increased in proportion; and are, at the same time, to have their exports and their slaves exempt from all contributions for the public service. Let it not be said, that direct taxation is to be proportioned to representation. It is idle to suppose that the General Government can stretch its hand directly into the pockets of the people, scattered over so vast a country. They can only do it through the medium of exports, imports and excises. For what, then, are all the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... believed, the wheels of life Stand never idle, but go always round; Not by their hands, who vex the patient ground, Moved only; but by genius, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... departure had thus loosed free speech, was leagues distant from the gossip and the unrest which was its source. Her pink hair bows, even the second-best ones, lifted her to a state which made it much pleasanter to idle in her window, sniffing at the honey-suckle, than to hurry down to the piano. She longed to make up something which, like a tune of water rippling over pink pebbles, was running through her head. But faithfully, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... and solid armour; he will forge weapons for me, provide me with swords; he vaunts his art as if he could do something of account; but let me take hold of the thing he has hammered, with a single grip I crush flat the idle rubbish! If the creature were not so utterly mean, I would drop him into the forge-fire with all the stuff of his forging, the old imbecile hobgoblin! There might be an end then to vexation!" He casts himself fuming on a ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... in return for subsidies and for our assurance (which you know to be a very sincere one) of wishing to procure for them important acquisitions. The question of Hanover may I think be left aloof. As to plans of operations, it is almost idle to say anything. But you will have seen that we think the first and essential point is to act (as Prussia seems to intend) with a force sure of success in the rear of the French Army in Germany. Still I cannot conceive ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... big fast Steamer that has just run over from Marseille in ten hours with a full passenger list of French, English, Russians, and Americans. Few have braved the sea-trip just to idle about the casino as they used to do near Monaco. These are men and women who have come for hard business at the tables, and who for the most part expect to break or ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... improper, unreasonable, without reason, ridiculous, absurd, idiotic, silly, stupid, asinine; ill-imagined, ill-advised, ill-judged, ill-devised; mal entendu[Fr]; inconsistent, irrational, unphilosophical[obs3]; extravagant &c (nonsensical) 497; sleeveless, idle; pointless, useless &c. 645; inexpedient &c. 647; frivolous &c. (trivial) 643. Phr. Davus sum non [Lat][Oedipus]; "a fool's bolt is soon shot" clitellae bovi sunt impositae [obs3][Henry V.][Lat][Cicero]; "fools rush in where angels fear ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... himself for Gambia as soon as the rivers were fordable, and the grass burnt; and advised me to stay and accompany him. He remarked, that when a caravan of the natives could not travel through the country, it was idle for a single white man to attempt it. I readily admitted that such an attempt was an act of rashness, but I assured him that I had now no alternative; for having no money to support myself, I must either beg my subsistence, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... blocked with trucks of casks, others were so gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were so bright and clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."[7] ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... that he should have cared to tell this something gratuitously, or that any occasion should have arisen which led him to tell it. Indeed, this mode of arguing altogether ignores the relations in which the immediate circle addressed by Papias stood to St John. It would have been idle for Papias to have said, as Irenaeus says, 'John the disciple of the Lord, who also lay upon His breast, published his Gospel, while living in Ephesus of Asia' [182:3]. It would have been as idle ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... seconded by the engineer, thus occupied himself without losing an hour, Gideon Spilett and Herbert were not idle. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... spite of ages of oppression. In the course of centuries they have not furnished a single man to that army of rash minds which have carried the rest of Europe headlong through lofty, perhaps, but at bottom empty and idle theories, to the brink of that bottomless abyss into which no one ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... a muscle. The Boer burgher could eat, sleep, or fight whenever he wished, and inasmuch as he was a law unto himself, there was no one who could compel him to change his habits. It was an ideal idle-man's mode of living and the foreign volunteers who had leaves of absence from their own armies made the most of their holiday, but in that respect they did not surpass their companion, the ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... that I dropped a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said "Merci, Monsieur," in a tone in which there was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed their seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... preachers? And how is any race to rise without intelligent leaders of their own in every locality? These will naturally be found in their men of education and property, in their ministers, physicians, lawyers, editors, teachers and political representatives. It is idle and wrong to repress or ignore the ambition of negroes of talent to be something more than laborers and servants, bootblacks and whitewashers. They must have the chance that others have, in proportion to their numbers; no more, no less. And all these rising ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various
... generation was speaking. 'These people,' he said, 'want no education, for they learn their trades from their fathers, and to teach a workman's son the elements of mathematics and physical science would give him ideas above his business. They must be kept in their place, and it was idle to imagine that there was any science in wood or iron work.' And he carried his point. But the Indian workman will rise in the social scale in spite of the new ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... hujus saeculi." He complains of their avarice in inducing the queen, "at one chop, to give away fifty thousand pounds and better yearly from the inheritance of her crown unto them, and many a thousand after, unto those idle hypocrites besides." ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... light-keepers being idle!" continued Eric, warming to his subject. "Keeping a lighthouse in the shape that the Commissioner insists on isn't any easy chore. I tell you, the operating room of a hospital isn't any cleaner than the inside of a lighthouse. They tell a story in the service of a hot one that was handed ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and to make them steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, is a mystery to me. Antinomianism is Antichrist. The preaching which tends to lessen men's sense of duty, or to reconcile people to a selfish, idle, or useless life, is contrary both to Christianity and common sense. And all interpretations of Scripture which favor the doctrine that men have nothing to do but to believe and trust in Christ, are madness or impiety. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... like a nice, quiet place, with no "dear old friends" in it—a peaceful spot where people could write books if they wanted to. "Just why," he asked himself more than once, "was I inspired to grab the shaky paw of that human sponge? 'Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean'—oh, the devil! She must have a volume of Tennyson in her grip, and ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... for my idle curiosity—a curiosity which, in him, I had the moment before viewed both with suspicion and disgust; but so it was—I felt a desire to know who he could be who was neither lawyer nor preacher, and yet talked of ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the interval for dinner had ended, Uncle Paul and his nephew carried on what Rodd called a reptilian execution, the Spaniard's crew were lying about in the sunshine asleep upon their deck. They were too idle to take any interest in the shooting, while their captain, a rather marked object in the sunshine from the bright scarlet scarf about his waist, worn to keep up his snowy white duck trousers, lay upon the top of the big three-masted schooner's deck-house with his ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... of Thermop'ylae, a narrow defile on the western shore of the gulf that lies between Thessaly and Euboea, and almost the only road by which Greece proper, or ancient Greece, could be entered on the north-east by way of Thessaly. In the mean time the Greeks had not been idle. The winter before Xerxes left Asia a general congress of the Grecian states was held at the isthmus of Corinth, at which the differences between Athens and AEgina were first settled, and then a vigorous effort was made ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Gospel, concerning the improvement of their Time, and Talents, as things whereof they must one Day be accountable. For others it may be they cannot but see that there are such Commands; but the Sacred Law of Fashion has made endless Idle Visits, and less Innocent Entertainments, the indispensibly constant Employment of those of their Condition: and when they are grown Old in the perpetually repeated round of such Impertinence and Folly, they have but labour'd much ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... so that as much as possible of this detail work is accomplished before the sight is taken. Next, take your sextant and test it for index error. This should be done regularly before each series of sights as it is impossible to tell what may have happened when the sextant is lying idle, except by the above test. Now, with your sextant, watch and notebook, go to the place from which you have decided to take your observations and, at the proper watch time, start taking your altitudes. It is always advisable to take a number of ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... There was no part of Ireland, he said, which might not be made ten times more productive than it was, and yet it was proposed to feed men in idleness in a workhouse. The system of workhouses acted well in England, where a sort of slave labour was adopted in them, to force the idle to seek employment elsewhere; but what could be expected from it in Ireland where men worked for twopence per day? Many expected that a poor-rate in Ireland would prevent the influx of Irish labourers into England; there could not be a greater mistake: unmarried ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... E. copied was your own writing!! in a note to me, many long years ago—which she copied and sent to Mme. Sismondi; and lately my aunt, in sorting her letters, found E.'s and returned them to her...I have been of late shamefully idle, i.e. observing (Drosera) instead of writing, and how much better fun observing ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for their industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably even while I speak. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became again aware of their cohabitance. ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... too young to be taking momentous, decisive steps of that sort. This is a fancy which you have got into your head during an idle week or two: you must set to work at something and dismiss it. There is every reason against it. An engagement at your age would be totally rash and unjustifiable; and moreover, alliances between first cousins are undesirable. Make up your mind ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... think of her soul when she looks in the glass, would hear the cry of her naked mind when she dallies away her precious hours at her toilet, would listen to the sad moaning of her hollow heart, as it wails through her idle, useless life, something would be done for the elevation of womanhood. I hope I address those who appreciate my words and my feelings. Above almost every thing else do I desire woman's elevation in the moral and intellectual scale of ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... of a hill. They, too, like the Romans, held human life cheap, and bloodshed and murder were common among them. As a rule, the men scorned to work, leaving whatever labor there was, largely to the women, while they busied themselves in fighting and hunting, or, during their idle times, in gambling. Nevertheless, these people, about the time that the Roman honesty began to disappear, had virtues more like those of the early Romans. They were frank and honorable. The men were faithful husbands and ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... we had there I never expect to find. The milk was indeed so good that Aaron went down to the little log house under the hill a mile farther on and asked for more; and being told they had no cow, he lingered five minutes on the doorstone with his sooty pail in his hand, putting idle questions about the way and distance to the mother while he refreshed himself with the sight of a well-dressed and comely-looking young ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... than ten minutes Thornton had left his sorrel at the stable, seeing personally the animal had its grain, and had come back to the saloon. Blackie, idle with his gazette unnoticed in front of him, saw ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... long before the Turks will be driven out of Europe, and who shall possess Constantinople? That is a question upon which it would be idle for me to offer speculations. Another aspect of the question is, How far shall Russia be permitted to make conquests in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... paganism"; the Romans erected many handsome public buildings, and their villas and theatres and baths were models of classic architecture and the scenes of unbounded luxury; the streets were narrow, provided with side-walks, the walls often decorated with painting or scribbled over by idle gamins; the number of shops witnesses to the fashion and gaiety of the town, the remains of painted notices to its municipal life; a terrible earthquake ruined it and drove out the inhabitants in A.D. 63; they returned ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... say, although the tailor was good and industrious, his son was so idle and bad that his father and mother did not know what to do with him. All day long he played in the streets with other idle boys, and when he grew big enough to learn a trade he said he did not mean to work at all. His poor father was very much troubled, ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... not,—my object and duty is to save and preserve them [sic]; and I am come to dissuade you from this idle purpose, to urge you to live, and to keep your family from the disgrace of being thought ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... have I been ever since you went away to have spoken so unkindly to Mrs.... Heaven forgive me for it, and send her a happier conclusion to her life than the beginning might warrant. If you have an idle lover, my dear, present over to him my sermon, for those were words ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... over their bivouac fires. This is the life which has most attractions for Baden-Powell, and if he had not been locked up in Mafeking all through those precious months at the beginning of the war, it is no idle guesswork to say that we should have lost fewer men and fewer guns by surprise ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... its composition "inferior" to the Descent, but there are many more difficult problems involved in the Ascent. Its pattern is not so pleasing as the Descent, the subject is less appealing, and more sternly treated. There are more virile accents in the Ascent, though it would be idle to deny that in paint quality there is a falling off. Both pictures show the tooth of time and the ravages of the restorers. At St. Jacques, with its wonderfully carved pulpit, the St. George of Rubens hangs in a chapel. It has darkened much during the last twenty years. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... delightfully thrilled with a feeling of its own depravity, and found in the novel sensation the zest that had been wanting to its jaded powers of enjoyment. Nor was it awakened from its illusions by the first eruption from below. In a transport of delirium it threw away, as if they had been idle gems, of use only when cast into the public treasury, the privileges and prerogatives that had formed the basis of the monarchy. Thenceforth the only effort was to secure a tabula rasa on which to rear that new and perfect state of which the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... things they didn't seem to be taking in. They're a bunch of bulldozers and imagine others are in awe of them—socially, I mean. In all their heads together there aren't brains enough to make anything but trouble, but empty heads and idle hands are dangerous, and kings can be killed by cats. Don't you see this town is dividing itself into factions? Already one element is arraying itself against the other, and Mary Cary is the cause of it. It was time to let ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... he. 'The hurry and skurry of young folks! How idle it seems when you get fifty years away from it, and see how little anything counts! For all that, I thank God,' says he, 'that there's a little red left in my blood yet, which makes me sympathise with them. But the ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... apprentice to a tailor; for I always envied the comfortable seat which they appeared to enjoy upon the shopboard, and their elevated position, which enabled them to look down upon the constant succession of the idle or the busy, who passed in review before them in the main street of the country town, near to which I passed the first fourteen ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart, Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: "It's striking, but is it Art?" The stone was dropped at the quarry-side and the idle derrick swung, While each man talked of the aims of Art, and each in an ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... which indeed had something infernal about it, would have been extraordinary enough by itself; but what made it even more so was the fact that several hundred girls were perched among these crags, sitting idle, or standing up and flapping their wings like giant birds, and more were momentarily swooping in from above. I had, for an instant, the feeling that I was Dante, surveying the lower regions, and that here was a host of angels from ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... acquaintances by telephone. If forced to do so, she should make her communication as brief as possible. It is annoying to a young man to be called from his business to answer social or "nonsense" calls—the latter when some idle, ennuied or "smitten" girl takes a notion she would like to chatter to somebody awhile. It exasperates an employer to have his men called from their duties to answer such calls, and fellow employees are likely to "guy" the man about his "mash." The "note ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... baselessness? Then she had reflected, 'What motive could he have, according to my accusation?' She was ashamed to answer in her mind, 'The motive of gaining ME!' And covered her face, as if the lightest shadow of the idea of founding murder on such an idle vanity were a crime ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... startled from his waking dream by a swell in the noise outside. All the time there had been a few of the more idle of the inhabitants about the door, but they had been rather quiet. Now, however, the sounds of feet and voices began to grow, and grew so rapidly that it was plain a multitude was gathering. For the people of ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... son—and in southern families younger sons are still often sacrificed—would never do any good; so she contented herself with sending him to a school kept by a neighbouring old maid, where the lad learned nothing but how to idle his time away. The two brothers grew up far apart from each other, as ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... his People in vast works, and that will require years to finish, that he may inure them to Slavery, and prevent them from Plotting, against him, as haply they might do if they were at better leisure. Therefore he approves not that his People should be idle; but always finds one thing or other to be done, tho the work be to little or no purpose. According to the quantity of the work, so he will appoint the People of one County or of two to come in: and the Governor of the said County or Counties ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... is not therefore a Londoner, or even a Briton. Germans, Swiss, Frenchmen, &c., are settled there as merchants, in crowds. No nation, however, is compromised by any act of her citizens acting as separate and uncountenanced individuals. So that, even if better established as a fact, this idle story would still be a calumny; and as a calumny it would merit little notice. Nevertheless, I have felt it prudent to give it a prominent station, as fitted peculiarly, by the dark shadows of its ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... rumor." In this she is strangely mistaken. Madame Lenormant does not allude to the report at all. Still she tacitly contradicts it. Her account of Monsieur Recamier's course with regard to the divorce proposed between him and his wife is of itself a sufficient refutation of this idle story. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sat idle in the middle room of his clientless suite. A small anteroom connected—or rather separated—this apartment from the hallway. Here was stationed Archibald, who wrested from visitors their cards or oral nomenclature which he bore to his master while ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... who like reading, but are too idle for research, indebted to Mr. D'Israeli, who has given them the precious result of a long life of study, so admirably digested and beautifully conveyed that in a few volumes are condensed a mass of the most valuable information! ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... consequently less apparent than in views to which a sense of distance is essential. In portraits, the features appear slightly flattened; and until photographers are able to overcome this, the chief of all obstacles to perfection, it is idle to talk of the art giving a correct rendering of nature. This is what is wanted, more than colour, diactinic lenses, multiplication of impressions, or anything else. And when it is remembered that ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... took it, Robin; I know I should have grown idle if I had had it. Depend on it, 'twas that gave me this year of grace ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deny, and yet probably he will deny, that he was one of the most talented drinkers in America. I venture to say that every time he set foot in Liverpool coming East, or in New York going West, he was just on the verge of delirium tremens, because, being necessarily idle during the voyage, he did little else but drink and smoke. I never knew a man who could take so much liquor and show such small results. The fact was, that in the morning Plodkins was never at his best, because he was nearer sober then than at any other part of the day; ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... hundred to a thousand pounds, for the discovery of paying goldfields. The result was that during the course of the next two or three years many districts were opened up to the miner. Towards the end of 1867 a man named Nash, who had been wandering in an idle way over the country, found an auriferous region of great extent at Gympie, about 130 miles from Brisbane. He concealed his discovery for a time, and set to work to collect as much of the gold as possible, before attracting others to the spot. In the ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... in less than a year—could I. If you ask me what is an ordinary marital quarrel I will tell you, that it is a difference about nothing; I mean, these nothings which, as Mr Powell told us when we first met him, shore people are so prone to start a row about, and nurse into hatred from an idle sense of wrong, from perverted ambition, for spectacular reasons too. There are on earth no actors too humble and obscure not to have a gallery; that gallery which envenoms the play by stealthy jeers, counsels of ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... variety of natural character, affluent prodigality of animal spirits, delicious quaintness, exhilarating merriment, a lovely pastoral tone, and many touches of the transcendent poetry of Shakespeare. Dennis probably repeated a piece of idle gossip that he had heard, the same sort of chatter that in the present day constantly follows the doings of theatrical people,—and is not accurate more than once in a thousand times. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a brilliant and ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... pass whole hours in gazing at them and inhaling their perfume. But now, if he looked at them at all, it was only to calculate how much the garden would be worth if each of the innumerable rose-petals were a thin plate of gold. And though he once was fond of music (in spite of an idle story about his ears, which were said to resemble those of an ass), the only music for poor Midas, now, was the chink of one ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest semblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing these oblate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... flung its black And winged panels fluttering back, Triumphant, o'er the crested palls Of her grand family funerals; Some sepulchre, remote, alone, Against whose portal she hath thrown, In childhood, many an idle stone; Some tomb from out whose sounding door She ne'er shall force an echo more, Thrilling to think, poor child of sin, It was the dead ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... had not been idle, and aided by fifteen thousand of Sadasiva's troops from Vijayanagar he dethroned and captured the ambitious prince, following this up by several attacks on the Portuguese forces. The war lasted during the whole winter of 1556, but with no very decisive results. Next year ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... mean to spend several hours this morning in idle talk upon the highway. She motioned Jacob to move on, and in response to the thanks and blessings showered upon her for her ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... him up, for she wanted a box that she could not allow to have opened. The clerk then went up to the Sieur Picard's bedroom, but came back saying that what the marquise demanded was for the time being an impossibility, for the commissary was asleep. She saw that it was idle to insist, and went away, saying that she should send a man the next morning to fetch the box. In the morning the man came, offering fifty Louis to the commissary on behalf of the marquise, if he would give her the box. But he replied that the box was in the sealed ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... To an eye unused to the gloom the place would have been nearly dark; but they could see every corner turned by the ivy sprigs, and every line on which the holly-leaves were shining. And the greeneries of the winter had not been stuck up in the old-fashioned, idle way, a bough just fastened up here and a twig inserted there; but everything had been done with some meaning, with some thought towards the original architecture of the building. The Gothic lines had been followed, and all the lower arches which it had been possible to reach with ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... she knew by sight as belonging to a great rival Promenade. Aida had reached the purgatory of obesity which Christine always feared. Despite the largeness of her mass, she was a very beautiful woman in the English manner, blonde, soft, idle, without a trace of temperament, and incomparably dull and stupid. But she was ageing; she had been favourably known in the West End continuously (save for a brief escapade in New York) for perhaps a quarter of a century. She was at the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... Laveleye,[256] criticising Spencer, "the fate of each creature is determined by its individual qualities; whereas in civilised societies a man may obtain the highest position and the most beautiful wife because he is rich and well-born, although he may be ugly, idle or improvident; and then it is he who will perpetuate the species. The wealthy man, ill constituted, incapable, sickly, enjoys his riches and establishes his stock under the protection of the laws." Haycraft in England and Jentsch in Germany have strongly emphasised these "anomalies," ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... gazed about them with an idle curiosity, but, not seeing anyone, they began to grow uneasy, and to cast frightened ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... drowsy squirrel cried, "Trust him not, Lettice, trust, oh trust him not!" And many another woodland tongue beside Rose softly in the silence—"Trust him not!" Then cried the Pedlar in a bitter voice, "What, in the thicket, is this idle noise?" ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... her that? Strange fatality! But twice have I spoken to her of love, and each time it was to tear myself from her at the moment of my confession. And even now something that I have no power to resist compels me to the same idle and weak indulgence. Does destiny urge me? Ay, perhaps to my destruction! Every hour a thousand deaths encompass me. I have now obtained all for which I seemed to linger. I have won, by a new crime, enough to bear me to another land, and to provide me there a soldier's destiny. ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... classes this session,' he writes (1884), 'and shall not take any places.' The five or six most distinguished pupils used, at least in my time, to receive prize-books decorated with the University's arms. These prize-men, no doubt, held the 'places' alluded to by Murray. If he was idle, 'I speak of him but brotherly,' having never held any 'place' but that of second to Mr. Wallace, now Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, in the Greek Class (Mr. Sellar's). Why was one so idle, in Latin (Mr. Shairp), in Morals (Mr. Ferrier), in ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... for the next two days the axe of Cudjo could be heard with its constant 'check—check,' while every now and then the crash of a falling tree woke the echoes of the valley. While Cudjo was felling the timber and cutting it into logs of a proper length, none of the rest of us were idle. In cooking our meals, scouring the vessels, and looking after the children, Mary found sufficient employment; while Frank, Harry, and I, with the help of our horse Pompo, were able to drag the logs forward to the ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... deepens in my mind with every hour: this was never Christ's city. The confusion, the shallow curiosity, the self-interest, the clashing prejudices, the inaccessibility of the idle and busy multitudes were the same in His day that they are now. It was not here that Jesus found the men and women who believed in Him and loved Him, but in the quiet villages, among the green fields, by the peaceful lake-shores. And it is not here that we shall find the clearest traces, the ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... determined attitude of the Queen-mother rendered all further discussion upon this point at once idle and impolitic, De Luynes resolved to induce her to come to terms with the King without any allusion to M. d'Epernon; and for this purpose the Archbishop of Sens was directed to act in concert with the two original envoys, and to endeavour to convince her that a prolonged opposition to the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... with the malice of the Flowers. It was not until about five years later, when the younger son Francis fell sick of an illness to prove fatal, that suspicion seems to have lighted upon the three women.[18] The circumstances that led to their discharge were then recalled and along with them a mass of idle gossip and scandal against the women. It was remembered that Mother Joan was "a monstrous malicious woman, full of oathes, curses, and imprecations irreligious." Some of her neighbors "dared to affirme that she dealt with familiar spirits, and terrified them all with curses and threatning ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... thy rash presumption, They would correct it in the sharpest sort: Good Jove! what sense hast thou to be a sense! Since from the first foundation of the world, We never were accounted more than five. Yet you, forsooth, an idle prating dame, Would fain increase the number, and upstart To our high seats, decking your babbling self With ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... the knight fiercely; "but this is idle," he added, suddenly checking himself. "Aliva, your ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... afternoon were elderly men of leisure, who enjoyed talking with so bright a girl on their favorite hobbies. When they talked Miss Mitchell closed her book and took up her knitting, for she was never idle. With some of these visitors the friendship was kept ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... and I possess, shut up in my five foot eight inches, all the incoherences, all the contrasts possible; and those who think me vain, extravagant, obstinate, high-minded, without connection in my ideas,—a fop, negligent, idle, without application, without reflection, without any constancy; a chatterbox, without tact, badly brought up, impolite, whimsical, unequal in temper,—are quite as right as those who perhaps say that I am economical, modest, courageous, stingy, energetic, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... life), are dull and inert like the body itself. For all this, however, a person should act. This is the conclusion of Manu himself. The person that doth not act, certainly succumbeth, O Yudhishthira. The man of action in this world generally meeteth with success. The idle, however, never achieveth success. If success becometh impossible, then should one seek to remove the difficulties that bar his way to success. And, O king, if a person worketh (hard), his debt (to ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... have done something more—he would have given us symbols, songs of eternal truth, of unutterable magic and profound meaning like "La Belle Dame sans Merci." I am sure he would have done something of this kind—though it is idle to say he would have written anything as immortal as that. You must only indulge me in my partiality for Mitch, and my belief in his genius, and hope with me that he might ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... met with foes who sold too dearly the little they had to lose, and again they surged back into South Gaul, where they were joined by the Teutones, and once more threatened Italy. [Sidenote: How the Romans had been occupied meanwhile.] But meantime the generals of the Republic had not been idle. Rutilius Rufus, the old comrade of Marius, had been diligently drilling troops, having engaged gladiators to teach them fencing. Probably Marius was engaged in the same work at the beginning of 104, and then went to South Gaul, where, as we hear of Sulla capturing the king of the Tectosages, ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... May, 1898, a number of idle young men sat in a row on the edge of the store veranda. Some were whittling, some making aimless marks in the dust with a stick. All leaned limply forward, with their elbows on ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... position, presently, behind one of the poker games, with his back to the wall, so that he had command of the room. A stiff game was in progress, which Pan watched casually. Blinky and Gus lounged around, with apparently no more aim than other idle drinking visitors ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... in sight of steamers with cold boilers and the forests of masts of idle ships, one saw what sea power meant. That city of eager shippers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by shells. Hamburgers tried to make the best of it; they assumed an air of optimism; they still had faith that ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... imaginative temperament, excessively fond of gambling; and it was said of him, that he was more given to "dreams and dice than to study." His future eminence might be foreseen by some of his friends; but, in general, men looked on him rather as an idle and misled youth of fortune, than as a genius. Three years after, he removed to Lincoln's Inn, where he continued occasionally to gamble, and was sometimes punished for his pains, being plundered by more ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... not one consumed with a thirst of knowledge. Once he asks Mephistophilis a few questions on astrology; at another time he evinces some curiosity concerning Lucifer and Hell, idle curiosity because he regards it all as foolishness. We are told of a journey through the heavens and of voyages about the world, but we see him exercising his supernatural gifts in the most puerile and useless fashion. It is impossible, therefore, to regard his ambition as a lust ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... verse. Four years ago, at a provincial town in Italy, when one of the Italian ministers, at the opening of some public building, said that united Italy owed to the great English poet Swinburne a debt which it could never forget, the inhabitants cheered vociferously. This was no idle compliment; every one in Italy knows who Swinburne was. I will not hazard to guess the extent of the ovation which the names of Lowell and Lecky would receive, but I think the incident is a fair sign that ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... me this involves considerable self-denial and patience. I do not flinch. From you it demands unceasing devotion to your books, your studies, your researches. You are no longer a boy: you are a man. The idle sports of youth must be placed behind you. Stern life must ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... frustrated in its end" were we unable to understand abstract substances, "because it would have made what in itself is naturally intelligible not to be understood at all." But in nature nothing is idle or purposeless. Therefore immaterial substances ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... 2. If this idle ingurgitation of too much vinous spirit be daily practised, the urinary branch of absorbents at length gains an habit of inverting its motions, whenever the lacteals are much stimulated; and the whole or a great part of the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... much more attractive than the young women I hear of, who have seen and known a great deal too much,' answered the dowager; and as her granddaughter knew that Lady Maulevrier's word was a law that altered not, there was no more idle repinings. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... plenty between her and the victim and many back of her to blame for her ignorance. Who can untangle the responsibility for the ruin of a girl who was utterly untaught, underpaid, improperly dressed, ill-fed, influenced by every gorgeously dressed idle woman who stood before her counter, and tempted by many men in turn? There is the one "sin"—but ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... things of the world to serve the needs of nature, by the labours of the ploughman, the skill and pains of the artizan, and the dangers and traffic of the merchant.... The idle person is like one that is dead, unconcerned in the changes and necessities of the world; and he only lives to spend his time, and eat the fruits of the earth: like a vermin or a wolf, when their time comes they die and perish, and in the meantime ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... the back of the sleeping cottage, and found a little shed. On a bench in that shed a candle was burning in a ginger-beer bottle. By the candle was a structure meaningless to me, having nothing of which I could make a guess. It was fragmentary and idle, the building which a child makes of household utensils, naming it anything to its fancy. There were old jam-pots, brass door-knobs, squares of india-rubber, an electric bell, glass rods, cotton reels, and thin wires which ran up to the ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... of land, A boundless wealth of virgin soil As yet unfruitful and untilled! Our willing workmen, strong and skilled Within our cities idle stand, And cry aloud ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... excited. It is but fair to her to say, that, during the last few weeks of this trying ordeal, she looked like a sweet, pale martyr, and conducted herself toward her traducers with the gentle, forgiving manner of one who relied not upon the idle homage of the crowd, but upon the security of a principle that was dearer than popular favor. "They talk about myself and Mr. Oakhurst, my dear," she said to a friend; "but heaven and my husband can best answer their calumny. It never shall be said that my husband ever turned ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... morning the woodcutter said to his wife, 'Send our youngest child to-day with my dinner. She is always good and obedient, and will keep to the right path, and not wander away like her sisters, idle drones!' ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... surely to resist at the very outset: so much depends upon the first step. We must not give place to even the first thought of evil: nor listen to the tempter's whisper, whisper he ever so softly. How many, as they look back upon a downward career, can trace its beginning to some idle or vain thought, or to ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... will say this for the men, that whilst I go off duty with my heart in my mouth and hurry through it, they saunter about, and no amount of checking will make them understand that it is dangerous to idle about in the open. Afterwards they are hit—if not seriously wounded. They are very like little children, rather annoyed, but in their hearts, I am sure, secretly glad that they have escaped from the awful squalor ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... opposition to the marriage with Anjou, withdrew to Wilton to write the "Arcadia" by his sister's side; and "discontent of my long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet tells us, "and expectation vain of idle hopes" drove Spenser into exile. In 1580 he followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and remained there on the Deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an office and a grant of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. Spenser ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Bessie and Dolly were not idle, by any means. There was plenty of work for everyone to do, for the fire had made a pretty clean sweep, after all, and to put the whole camp in good shape, so that they could sleep there that night, ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... profit thee in nought, Except to pass away the time in idle prate; So spare thou to converse with them, except it be For gain of lore and wit or ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... It was idle to resist. We surrendered our arms, Peter almost in tears with vexation. Stumm swung his legs over a chair, rested his chin on the back ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... consistency of predestinarian teachers. Poor simple souls, who are thus led, do not you see that if such a decree is gone forth, you are supporting an idle man in vain?[1]—What end is preaching to answer? Let him lecture with ever such state and assurance, if the time, the place, the manner be all fixed: I say he is an ignorant, lazy drone, who is picking his poor people's pockets; but, perhaps, ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... weary of lying idle in the swamp, interrupted him with an enthusiastic cheer and continued shouting until he ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... force and impressiveness of his oratory. The presence of this extraordinary stranger could not remain long unknown to the Athenian literati; but, when they entered into conversation with him, some of them were disposed to ridicule him as an idle talker, whilst others seemed inclined to denounce him as a dangerous innovator. "Certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him; and some said—What will this babbler say? other some—He seemeth ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... he was expected to form. Restive under any save military discipline, averse by temperament and custom to studies of any sort, it was hardly to be hoped that they would easily exchange their gay, idle habits for schoolroom tasks under a foreign pedagogue. Yet this miracle did Peter Martyr work. The charm of his personality counted for much, the enthusiasm of the Queen and the presence in the school of the Infante Don Juan, whose example the youthful courtiers ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... slowly. "And I'm not an enthusiast without a mission. I may have been then, but I'm not now. You don't just understand. I'm pretty busy in a way, learning the ropes, business, social and all the rest of them, but I'm not idle. I'm learning something all the time, Una, and I'm going to try to ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... from a modern song is a wilful abdication of half the charm and half the power of verse.' To this general rule he might possibly admit one exception—Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,' which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... not avoid him abroad, determined to stay at home, and, much as she loved the sport, to ride no more till Peter should return. So she gave out that she had hurt her knee, which made the saddle painful to her, and the beautiful Spanish mare was left idle in the stable, or ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... nations' childish philosophies of life. The consciousness of nations contains, it may be, unsuspected powers, suppressed in the past by narrow nationalism, by fear, habit and convention. These powers may now, if ever, blossom forth; they have been wasted too long in patriotic feeling and in idle dreamery. They must now show what they can do in a practical world that will have no ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... mustache, and took other liberties—as the helpless are apt to do. And when he had built a fire against a tree, and had shown them other mysteries of woodcraft, their admiration knew no bounds. At the close of two such foolish, idle, happy hours he found himself lying at the feet of the schoolmistress, gazing dreamily in her face as she sat upon the sloping hillside weaving wreaths of laurel and syringa, in very much the same attitude as he had lain when first they met. Nor ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... Schimmelpodt, "you think I vos afraid when I climb dot pole. But I wos not—-I pledch you mein vord. It is nottings for me to climb flagpoles. Ven I vos ein poy in Germany I did it efery day. But I will not dake up your time mit idle remarks. I repeat dot I am not ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... the window guarded her from observation. She kept her post, fearing to look round, but was much pleased when Mrs Delvile, with great indignation answered "I am sorry, Lady Honoria, you can find any amusement in listening to such idle scandal, which those who tell will never respect you for hearing. In times less daring in slander, the character of Mortimer would have proved to him a shield from all injurious aspersions; yet who shall wonder he could ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... repeated themselves, clearly and distinctly, "You are wrong! you are wrong! you are wrong!" Then vaguely and almost inaudibly, "She is going to say, No;" with his own voice he made effort to drown the words of that fateful refrain. "It is the idle, spiteful chatter of some evil spirit. My heart is full of Hope, and I will not believe it." But that night, alone with his book and the face over the fire, only embers on the hearth—the Shadow was still there. But he said that it was a wild and troubled fancy—"It is not, can not be an ...
— The Story of a Picture • Douglass Sherley
... peasant began to cut capers, as though to amuse his Generals, because they had been kind to him, an idle sluggard, and had not scorned his peasant toil. And he built a ship—not a ship exactly, but a boat—so that they could sail across the ocean-sea, up ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... distinguish them from the rest of men, forming a world by themselves. They felt out of humor with these painters of the last batch—proper, prudent, incapable of doing anything absurd, copying the fashions of the idle and presenting the appearance of State functionaries, clerks, who ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... corporation, every society was ambitious of the honour of assisting in the erection of the altar of the country: all wished to contribute, by individual labour, to the arrangement of the place where they were to swear to defend the constitution. Not a man, woman, or child remained an idle spectator. On this occasion, the aged seemed to have recovered the vigour of youth, and women and children to have acquired the strength of manhood. In a word, men of all trades and professions were confounded, and cheerfully handled the pickaxe and shovel: delicate females, sprucely ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... moorings and battered the shore. Dynamite was used to open a way for the water into the lake. Great damage was done all along the Cuyahoga River through Cleveland, where hundreds of big manufacturing plants are located. Fifty thousand men were idle. The telegraph companies were crippled and many lights were out throughout the city, as the electric-light plants were partly under water. All ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... when not a single word is spoken, especially between persons who are dear to each other, the dissatisfaction of Gabriele took possession also of the mother, who began to discover that Jacobi's plans were more and more idle and dangerous. Thus when Jacobi, not long afterwards, sought to have a tete-a-tete with her, in order to talk about his and Louise's plans, she could not help saying that the more she thought about the undertaking the more foolish ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... "Whate'er was mine, I lately said Is some mistake, my camarade One Cinna—Gaius—bought the lot, 30 But his or mine, it matters what? I use it freely as though bought, Yet thou, pert troubler, most absurd, None suffer'st speak an idle word." ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... passed in making ineffectual sorties, ordered by Coligny for the sake of reconnoitring the country, and of discovering the most practicable means of introducing supplies. The Constable, meantime, who had advanced with his army to La Fore, was not idle. He kept up daily communications with the beleagured Admiral, and was determined, if possible, to relieve the city. There was, however, a constant succession of disappointments. Moreover, the brave but indiscreet Teligny, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it as hot for them as we can, Dick; and if we cannot do more, we can certainly oblige the French to keep something like a division idle, to hold us in check. With the two battalions, and Moras's irregulars, we ought to be able to harass them amazingly; and to hold any of these mountain passes against ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... was confided. The state barge of fifteen oars in which he arrived was moored to the marbles of the quay in front of her palace, a handsomely ornamented vessel scarcely needing its richly liveried rowers to draw about it the curious and idle of the town in staring groups. At sight of it, the Princess knew there was a message for her from the Emperor. She lost no time in notifying the Dean of her readiness to receive him. The interview took place in ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... peculiar shape to the same original conception: as the gods dwelt on the summit of the Mountain of the World, so their shrines should occupy a position as much like their residence as the feeble means of man would permit. That this is no idle fancy is proved by the very name of "Ziggurat," which means "mountain peak," and also by the names of some of these temples: one of the oldest and most famous indeed, in the city of Asshur, was named "the House of ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... condemmeth? it is the Son of God that died for sin. Who shall lay anything to God's elect? it is God that justifieth. And as God shall, in the last day, summon up from the deep places of our souls all of our sins, and bring us to a strict account for everything, even to the idle words that we have spoken, we can look Him full in the eye, without a thought of fear, and with love unutterable, if we are really relying upon the atoning sacrifice of Christ for justification. Even in that awful Presence, and under that Omniscient scrutiny, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... among a crowd of beggars and great lazy dogs that were thrusting their heads into every iron pot that stood outside the kitchen door, until chance might give her "a sight of the squire afore he wint out, or afore he wint in"; and, after spending her entire day in this idle way, at last the squire made his appearance, and Judy presented her son, who kept scraping his foot, and pulling his forelock, that stuck out like a piece of ragged thatch from his forehead, making his obeisance to ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... why the Mississippi should not be made to roll, and Niagara to fall through our workshops, or even to impel our street-cars. They may as well work as to be idle as they go. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... those with whom the order originated in London were aware of the nature of the duty I was expected to perform I do not know; but it is obviously dangerous to send British troops of any category to an actual scene of operations and expect them to stand idle, uninterested spectators of the struggles of their friends. They should either be kept away or sent ready for ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... is pretty much a blank from 1609 to 1614. When he ceases to write about himself he passes out of sight. There are scarcely any contemporary allusions to his existence at this time. We may assume, however, from our knowledge of his restlessness, ambition, and love of adventure, that he was not idle. We may assume that he besieged the company with his plans for the proper conduct of the settlement of Virginia; that he talked at large in all companies of his discoveries, his exploits, which grew by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in Athens did not cease with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431. The city was full of sculptors, many of whom had come directly under the influence of Phidias, and they were not left idle. The demand from private individuals for votive sculptures and funeral reliefs must indeed have been abated, but was not extinguished; and in the intervals of the protracted war the state undertook important enterprises with an undaunted spirit. It is to this period that the ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... This was not an idle compliment from one girl to another. It was a courtly tribute from woman to woman. Clearly, Pauline ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... was composed of six men whom the coroner had picked from the large number of idle spectators found by him at the scene of the murder when he was first summoned. Two of them chanced to be acquaintances of his. As to the rest, the coroner had not the remotest idea. They might have been beggars or pickpockets, for aught that he cared. They looked stupid, and he ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... night alone that they appear. What have I not seen march across my window in the procession—a castle, a fan, a swan, a kerosene can, the king of spades, a cream jug, troops of angels, in short, anything that an idle imagination wants to conjure up. And when it dresses for the evening, in what glorious costumes does it appear. But all that is garish compared with the Sky upon which the night has settled down. That is the sort of Sky ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... for the war. King Priam had not been idle while the Greek leaders were mustering their forces. From all parts of his kingdom he had gathered immense supplies of provisions, and the princes and chiefs of Troas came with large armies to defend their king and country. The most celebrated of these chiefs was the hero ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... SEA-LAWYER. An idle litigious 'longshorer, more given to question orders than to obey them. One of the pests of the navy as well as of the mercantile marine. Also, a name ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... before his holy places, relaxed the vigilance of his watch upon them lest they should be invaded by the careless feet of those that did not comprehend. Scott Brenton did comprehend. To him, experimenting was an act of reverence, not a deed of idle curiosity. The world-laws were, to him, full of purpose, albeit only half revealed; and blessed was he who should assist ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Ravenna, and remained there for some time. Theodoric followed with his Ostrogoths and tried to take the city, but there was a very strong wall around it, and the Ostrogoths could not capture it. Although Theodoric was not able to take Ravenna, he did not remain idle. He marched off to other parts of the country, and took possession of towns and ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... poured into the ears of his mistress his gentle fancies: the mother stilled her child with some bizarre allegory as she rocked it in her arms; the bard favored by royalty—the poet laureate—amused the idle moments of his chief with some witty improvisation; the alii himself, gifted with the poetic fire, would air his humor or his didactic comments in rhythmic shape—all in the form ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... hewn small enough. Cicely, look to the pottage, that it boil not over. Al'ce, thou idle jade!"—with a sound box on the ear,—"thou hast left out the onions in thy blanch-porre! Margery! Madge! Why, Madge, I say! Where is Mistress Margery, maidens? Joan, lass, hie thee up, and see whether Mistress Margery ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... talked and laughed for some time, but although Dick listened with intense eagerness, no words were spoken that gave him any information. If the soldiers knew of any intended move on the part of the British army, they did not mention the fact in their conversation, which was made up of idle talk, of the kind as such men would ...
— The Dare Boys of 1776 • Stephen Angus Cox
... predecessor. But it suited the generous temper of that man to extol the greatness he admired, whose philosophic toleration was often known to have pardoned the libel on himself for the redeeming virtue of its epigram. In his forgiving temper, James I. would call such effusions "the superfluities of idle brains." ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... me, I would not anything were done, But would for ever sit on this soft seat Each sweet recurrent Saturday, and run An idle pencil o'er the foolscap sheet, The free unrationed blotting-pad, and scrawl Delightful effigies of those who speak, But not myself say anything at all, Only be mute ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... his cousin, indulged their puerile taste for the games of the Circus, under the specious pretence of complying with the inclinations of the people; and they frequently remained the greatest part of the day as idle spectators, and as a part of the splendid spectacle, till the ordinary round of twenty-four races [51] was completely finished. On solemn festivals, Julian, who felt and professed an unfashionable dislike to these frivolous ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... go!" begged Gato, harshly. "Let me go, that I may have all my time to myself that I may find the best way to avenge myself on this miserable Gringo. Don Luis, do not think of attempting to keep me penned in El Sombrero. I must be idle that I may have the ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... fault with a man who is so well liked that even the dogs will not bark at him. You are reminded of Irving himself, who for so many years was so idle; and yet who, out of his very idleness, ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... nor humour to render her writings entertaining; she narrates what she has seen in the plainest, frankest manner. And she imposes upon us the conviction that she entered upon her wondrous journeys from no idle vanity, no love of fame, but from a natural love of travel, and a boundless desire of acquiring knowledge. "In exactly the same way," she says, "as the artist feels an unconquerable impulse to paint, and the poet to give free expression to his ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... think of more than this; I know what thou wouldst say. Our life is ours to use, and we that debt must pay. What life is this men love? An idle, empty dream, Where nothing can endure,—where all things only seem. Death ends their every joy which fickle Fortune leaves, They gain a royal throne to learn how pomp deceives; They gather wealth that men may envy their estate, They clear a path by blood, so envy turns to hate. Such vast ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song) What drop or nostrum can this plague remove? Or which must end me, a fool's wrath or love? 30 A dire dilemma! either way I'm sped, If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead. Seized and tied down to judge, how wretched I! Who can't be silent, and who will not lie: To laugh, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... there's no great use in asking why Jack Glass's spoon is idle this morning. They says, them forecastle chaps, that they see'd his body streaming out over the starboard quarter, as if it had been the fly of one of his own ensigns. How was it, Ned? you was thereaway, and ought to know all ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... I must study law. They say that I have dreamed and dreamed too long, That I must rouse and seek for fame and gold; That I must scorn this idle gift ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... purified of prejudice. No one is complaining now that any concern is too large, too strong. All see that the great organizations of capital in industry are our salvation. Labor has taken on a new dignity and nobility. When the idle see the necessity of work, when we begin to recognize industry as essential, the working man begins to have paid him the ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... Brent Rock, Paul Balcom had not been idle. He had been immediately driven to a telegraph-office, where, after having used nearly an entire pad of blanks, he succeeded in composing the ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... way of the superior man in teaching, what departments are there which he considers of prime importance, and delivers? what are there which he considers of secondary importance, and allows himself to be idle about? But as in the case of plants, which are assorted according to their classes, so he deals with his disciples. How can the way of a superior man be such as to make fools of any of them? Is it ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... the G.C.B. play this trick on him? It happened in this way. Having nothing better to do during Watson's absence and at a critical moment of the War, these idle elderly well-fed lawyers solemnly deliberated upon the following ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... woman's second marriage. Steinbock returned to the conjugal domicile on the rue Louis-le-Grand, towards the latter part of Louis Philippe's reign. An exhausted artist, he confined himself to the barren role of critic; idle reverie replaced ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... hitherto idle, are now working. They take up and break off one by one the threads that keep the round mat stretched on the coarse supporting network. At the same time, the fangs grip this sheet, lift it by degrees, tear it from its base and fold it over upon the globe of eggs. It is a laborious operation. The ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... the broad rich fields, with her pail held towards the impatient cows, and her large plaited straw bonnet thrown recklessly on the back of her head, or being twisted by its safe strings on the fingers of the idle hand. Amidst such enchanting scenery one forgets the dusty village, one loses the hum and buzz in the comforting notes that Nature warbles to herself. Everything is so cool and refreshing and quiet. The weariest heart sighs from actual relief when ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Anglo-American Punch-and-Judy, which consists solely of a play really unique in the exact sense of that much-abused word. They were getting their fill of the delicious Italian art which is best described by an American verb—to loaf. And yet they were not wont to be idle, and they had both the sharp, quick American manner, on which laziness ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... two patients good at one stroke, kill two birds with one stone? Captain Carey had a pretty little yacht lying idle in St. Sampson's Harbor, and a day's cruising would do him all the good in the world. Why should he not carry me over to Sark, when I could visit my other patient, and nobody be ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... them, but judge by what one reads in that modern tyrant, the Times. Oh, mighty Times! how we abuse you, and yet how should we relish our breakfast without you? who ever comes up to all we look for when great occasions call for your wonderful pen, stirring us to the quick; or whether, in an idle mood, we seek to while away the passing hour by a description of the last new folly, or the latest odour of the Thames, or anything else instructive and amusing. By the way, if the senate of Carthage took quarter as long sending supplies to their general as the Commons discussing the way ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... flesh was abjured that more wool might be raised for home manufacture. England's colonial trade fell off so alarmingly in consequence that Manchester manufacturers petitioned Parliament to repeal the act, asserting that nine-tenths of their workmen were idle. Besides these popular demonstrations, delegates from nine colonies met in New York, in October, 1765, often called the Stamp Act Congress, and adopted a declaration of rights, asserting that England had no right to tax them without their consent. During the days of the Stamp ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... beautiful gospel of self-forgetfulness. Afterward, when mother was married and had the happiness of her five daughters at heart, she induced each one of us to take up something of absorbing interest, in order that there might be no empty, idle days when discontent could creep in. That is how I came to study medicine, and that is how I learned to love the word 'homely' in its first and best sense. She taught me the definitions which I ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... arise more truly here than with the Egyptians. Man here began to take notice, to record and to classify the facts of nature. We may count this the second visible step in his great progress. Never again shall we find him in a childish attitude of idle wonder. Always is his brain alert, striving to understand, self-conscious of its ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... that I was losing opportunities of real enjoyment for the idle purpose of persisting in my fable of having dropped down from the sky. However, I compelled him to explain to me what was the reason of these things. The information I obtained was briefly this: that Nature, in Skitzland, never removes the stomach. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... training here is to be in loving and in living out our love, we certainly have the clew to the heavenly life. We shall continue in the doing of the things we have here learned to do. Life in glory will be earth's Christian life intensified and perfected. Heaven will not be a place of idle repose. Inaction can never be a condition of blessedness for a life made and trained for action. The essential quality of love is service—"not to be ministered unto, but to minister;" and for one who has learned love's ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... had thought you," he continues, "a man desirous of glory. You are young and in the strength of life. What, then, in the name of God, keeps you inactive? Do you fear fatigue? Remember what Sallust says—'Idle enjoyments were made for women, fatigue was made for men.' Do you fear death? Death is the last debt we owe to nature, and man ought not to fear it; certainly he ought not to fear it more than sleep and sluggishness. Aristotle, it is true, calls death the last ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... mistress imagined her failure to be due to laziness and inattention, and sooner than confess that she could not understand the work, Winona was silent. She never mentioned the long hours she spent poring over her books in Aunt Harriet's dining-room. After all, it was better to be thought idle than stupid. But it was humiliating to feel that she was counted among the slackers of the Form, while Garnet was already winning laurels. The contrast between the two scholarship holders could not fail ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... have been ever counted fittest and properest for civil, virtuous, and industrious nations, abounding with prudent men worthy to govern; Monarchy fittest to curb degenerate, corrupt, idle, proud, luxurious people. If we desire to be of the former, nothing better for us, nothing nobler, than a Free Commonwealth; if we will needs condemn ourselves to be of the latter, despairing of our own virtue, industry, and the number of our able men, we may then, conscious ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... may buy shoes, my Zanze, not appear More destitute than you perhaps next year! Bluph—something! I had caught the uncouth name But for Monsignor's people's sudden clatter 30 Above us—bound to spoil such idle chatter As ours; it were indeed a serious matter If silly talk like ours should put to shame The pious man, the man devoid of blame, The—ah, but—ah, but, all the same, 35 No mere mortal has a right To carry ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... us'd to bit and bridle, But always much disposed to idle, Had often wished that he was able To ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... the underbrush with wild yellow eyes to see what danger threatened. But after I had hidden myself away a few times, and made no motion to disturb either the nest or the hungry prowlers that came to feast on the fishhawks' bounty, Deedeeaskh set me down as an idle, harmless creature who would, nevertheless, bear watching. He never got over his curiosity to know what brought me there. Sometimes, when I thought him far away, I would find him suddenly on a branch just over my head, looking down at me ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... first time in her life Desiree noticed the striking lack of harmony between her emaciated mother, scantily clad in little black dresses which made her look even thinner and more haggard than she really was, and her happy, well-fed, idle, placid, thoughtless father. At a glance she realized the difference between the two lives. What would become of them when she was no longer there? Either her mother would work too hard and would kill herself; or else the poor woman would ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... no time for idle vanities," he said; "it's no time to indulge unreal modesties; and you have none of either if it were. God has laid His hand on us all, Rotha; yes, and our hearts are open without disguise before Him—and before ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... The people that I have been to have not even the kindness to say 'No' plain and flat; they listen to all you have to say, and as soon as your back is turned they forget your existence. The coin that passes around in this infernal town is indeed nothing but idle words, and that is all that ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... way through the hosts of the enemy, and returned with the water. But the poet-warrior would not drink: he poured it out as a libation to God, saying, 'Can I indeed drink the blood of these noble friends, who have risked their lives to gratify my idle whim? I cannot do it.' Now, who can be this ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... startled at this, and Sandy goes on to say that though whale meat is now but a fad of the idle rich it's bound to be the meat of rich and poor alike in future. He'd bet a thousand dollars to a dime that by the time the next war come along the first thing they'd do would be to establish a whaleless day. He said whale ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... toil, 20 Dark frowns the rock, and fierce the tempests rave— Thy ingots go the unconscious deep to pave! Or thunder at thy door the midnight train, Or Death shall knock that never knocks in vain. Next Honour's sons come bustling on amain; 25 I laugh with pity at the idle train. Infirm of soul! who think'st to lift thy name Upon the waxen wings of human fame,— Who for a sound, articulated breath— Gazest undaunted in the face of death! 30 What art thou but a Meteor's glaring light— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... deep interest in you from the day I first saw you, and knew your excellent parents. At one time I had conceived great hopes of your future course, and your abilities seemed likely to blossom into excellent fruit. But you fell off greatly, and grew idle and careless. At last an event happened, in which for a time you acted worthily of yourself; and which seemed to arouse you from your negligence and indifference. All my hopes in you revived; but as I continued to watch your course (more closely perhaps than you supposed), I observed with ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... valuation should be as equitable as possible. Whatever they may resolve in regard to this matter, the governor shall cause to be executed, and advise us as to what he does, seeing to it that the Indians labor and are not idle."] ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... Johnson, a partially furnished house, where several large vacant rooms, opening on the "patio," served admirably as scientific laboratories. Here, then, he established himself with his assistants. It was soon understood that every living thing would find a market with him, and all the idle urchins about the town flocked to the house with specimens. An unceasing traffic of birds, shells, fish, etc., went on there from morning to night, and to the various vendors were added groups of Indians coming to have their photographs taken. ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... family of 1200 persons have sprung from five sisters, several of whom were illegitimate, and three of whom were known to be unchaste, and who married men whose father was an idle, thriftless hunter, a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... swept over her. Her tragedy was still so new that she could feel it with every breath. Every hour she was reminded of her loss by a thousand little things like this crochet hook. She was forced to sit still, her busy hands idle in her lap, while spring was calling, calling everywhere. She told herself, with a mad little laugh, that she would never again pick up anything; never again would she run through her neighbors' gates, tap on their doors and visit them in ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Ottoman soldiers performed prodigies in the way of repairing breaches in the walls as soon as they were made; but Kheyr-ed-Din from the city watched the progress of the bombardment gloomily, as he saw and knew that the fall of the Goletta was but a matter of days. All this time he was far from idle; sortie after sortie did the dauntless old warrior lead in person against those engaged in the task of bombardment. Time and again he heartened the Arab and Berber levies to attack, but the sallies were repulsed, and the lightly armed Africans were driven ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... of an English existence, I had been tormented in my wakings with such thought-phantoms, and ever had I followed them, as an idle man may follow a flitting marsh-fire. Indeed, I had grown so much interested in the phenomenon and its possible indications that I had invented various theories to account for them, some of which seemed to myself original and ingenious, while the common idea that they are vague reminiscences ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... own views; then feeling that he could not understand and must condemn them, he tried not to listen to them, but to attend to the thoughts, observations, and memories which floated through his brain with extreme vividness during this idle ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... I say?" said Major Buller, laying down his knife and fork. (The discussion took place at dinner.) "It's the tyranny of the idle over the busy; and why, in the name of common sense, should it be yielded to? Why should friends be obliged, at the peril of disparagement of their affection or good manners, to visit each other when they do not want to go—to receive each other when it is not convenient, and to write to each ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... was not only terrible but exceedingly singular, as well as trying, for as long as stones came thundering down on the deck it would have been sheer madness to have attempted to do anything aboveboard, and to sit idle in the cabins with almost certain death staring them in the face, was ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... fancied this accident a declaration of the will of God. Terror-stricken, he left the church, and did not regain his consciousness until he stood in the portico of the old temple. In a few moments he shook off his idle apprehensions, but the sombre scene perpetually reacted upon him, as we shall see hereafter. It left a deep trace upon his mind, and materially influenced ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Grimeston's history gives an interesting glimpse of D'Auvergne's character. We are told that after he had been arrested, and was being conducted to Paris, "all the way he seemed no more afflicted, then when he was at libertie. He tould youthfull and idle tales of his love, and the deceiving of ladies. Hee shott in a harquebuse at birds, wherein hee was so perfect and excellent, as hee did kill ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... period of our prosperity at Lha-Ssa, we had some familiar intercourse with the Chinese ambassador, Ki-Chan. He sent for us two or three times, to talk politics, or to use the Chinese expression, to speak "idle words." He talked much of the English, and of Queen Victoria. "It seems," said he, "that she is a woman of great understanding; but her husband, in my opinion, plays a very foolish part. She does not let him meddle with any thing. She ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... complaints of shipowners, passengers, and shipping merchants. The robbery was prodigious in its amount, the indignity put upon the nation unspeakable. And yet the least complaint came from those who suffered most. The New England seaport towns were filled with idle seamen, their harbors with pinks, schooners, and brigs, lying lazily at anchor. The sailors, with the philosophy of men long accustomed to submit themselves to nature's moods and the vagaries of breezes, cursed British and French impartially, and joined ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... difficulty, well, it is a difficulty, and nothing more. A difficulty does not destroy a thesis that is solidly founded. Once a truth is clearly established, not all the difficulties in the world can make it an untruth. A difficulty as to the truth revealed argues an imperfect intelligence; it is idle to complain that we are finite. A difficulty regarding the infallible Church should not make her less infallible in our mind, it simply demands a clearing away-Theological difficulties should not surprise a novice in theological matters; they are only misunderstandings ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... said, 'when you give this to your master, tell him he had better follow the advice on it implicitly. You are not to give it to him now, because I don't want him back asking me questions which I won't answer. Now be off, you idle fellow, the wagon is nearly out ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... the country; for from their remaining in these islands result many great inconveniences. In the first place, on account of their greed, they have taken to the cultivation of gardens and other real estate; whence it follows that all the native Indians live idle and vicious lives, without anyone urging them to labor. The Chinese have risen, by buying and selling and bringing provisions to the community, to be the retailers of supplies. From this it results that this country is so expensive to live in that where a fowl used to be ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... take the dampness out of the room, and forced open the windows to let in the good sun and wind. Over in one corner, pushed in between the clothes-press and the side wall, was, of all things, a prie-dieu; and upon it a dusty Bible with his name on the fly-leaf. Nor was it a book kept for idle show; it plainly had been read, perhaps wept over by a tortured heart, for it fell open at that cry of all sad hearts, the Fifty-first Psalm. I was moving this prie-dieu, when my foot slipped on the ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Manila, they were charged with robbing and making captives. The governor sent Alferez Don Fernando de Figueroa after them. After meeting them, he brought them back, after taking away their cargo, which is reported to have amounted to more than four thousand pesos. They remained idle in Manila, until they were freely dismissed, as no crime appeared against them. Governor Don Alonso Fajardo died, and the Ioloans returned to their own country, with the intention of asking the new governor, on his arrival, for what was taken from ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... waiting until he had some one to take proper care of him. The consequence was that he must just take an hour's look into Wiesbaden to see several old friends, and this led naturally to passing an idle moment looking at the green table doings. Here the excitement became too great for one of his temperament, and he felt compelled to stake a small sum. A small sum led to a larger amount, and when he left the place he was poorer to the tune of ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... always cracked and bleeding. His voice was husky and disagreeable, his small eyes bespoke the brute in him, and yet he was not without certain qualities of leadership which seemed to appeal particularly to the Indians. His store was headquarters for the rough and idle element of the reservation. Also it was the center of considerable white trade, for it was the only store for miles in either direction, and in addition was ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... empty hope, your Honour, but the full Assurance that to-day, as yesterday, Savonarola will let loose his thunder Against the vices of the idle rich And from the brimming cornucopia Of his immense vocabulary pour Scorn on the lamentable heresies Of the New Learning and on all the ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... The idle and bad, Like this little lad, May be dirty and black to be sure; But good boys are seen To be decent and clean, Although they are ever ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... interlacing of tracks that dazed the tired brain; the overburdened telegraph posts, that looked as if they really could not stand another wire; the long lines of empty, homeless, and deserted trains in sidings that had seen better days; the idle trains, with staring vacant windows, which were eventually seized by a pert engine hissing, "Come along, will you?" and departed with a discontented grunt from every individual carriage coupling; the racing ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... darkness came a sound slight but not in harmony with the ordinary noises of the forest. His acute senses, the old inherited primitive instinct, noticed at once the jarring note. He moved ever so little but an extraordinary change came over his face. The idle look of luxury and basking warmth passed away and the eyes became alert, watchful, defiant. Every feature, every muscle was drawn, as if he were at the utmost tension. Almost unconsciously his figure sank down farther against the log, until it blended perfectly ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... if they were seriously considering whether it was worth while continuing the dreary work any longer, and could not make up their minds on the point. Their slow motions, however, give evidence of life and toil below the surface. Other "bobs" standing idle tell of disappointed hopes and broken fortunes. There are not a few such landmarks at the Land's End—stern monitors, warning wild ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... complied with, and this opinion was verified when the car rose into the air and sped over the waters of the canal to South Tarog. It did not pause when it came over the military camps there—the massive ordnance depots in which were stored new and improved killing tools that had long been idle ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... her rest and think of nothing troublous, and in all wise made her good cheer; and she was merry with them, and praised their fairness and their deftness, and asked them many questions about their weaving and spinning and carding; (howbeit the looms were idle as then because it was midsummer, and the men gone to the war). And this they deemed strange, as it seemed to them that all women should know of such things; but they thought it was a token that she came ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... which the savage thrust forward his assegai at that final remark showed Granville Kelmscott in a moment this was no idle threat. It was clear for the present they must accept the inevitable. They must remain in Barolong land; and he must share hut and work with that doubly hateful creature—the man who had deprived him of his patrimony at Tilgate, and whom he firmly believed to be the murderer of Montague Nevitt. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... would probably seem to most people a somewhat teetering person, diffused, chaotic, or contradictory. It could hardly be helped—with the raw materials of a great man all scattered around in him, great unaccounted-for insights, idle-looking powers all as yet unfused. But a man in the long run (and longer the better) is always worth while, no matter how he looks in the making, and it certainly does seem reasonable, however bad it may look, that this ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the Du Chatelet to that improper dignity! In which he had not the least success, says Voltaire; but got "two women on his ears instead of one." It was not to be Stanislaus's mistress; nor a TITULAR one at all, but a real, that Madame was fated in this dull happy place! Idle readers know the story only too well;—concerning which, admit this other Fraction ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Pollux, forcing a smile; "their fate was nothing to me. What cared I if they chose to throw away their lives like fools for an idle superstition!" ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... back some time now from working for the government in detecting the smugglers, but, as you may well suppose, he had not been idle. Inventing a number of small things, including useful articles for the house, was a sort of recreation for him, but his mind was busy on one great scheme, which I will tell you about ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... bullets, and powder, which I always made it a point to refuse, lest at any moment a fracas occurring they might use the ammunition thus supplied to my own disadvantage. The men of this village were an idle set, doing little but hunting, gaping, gossiping, and playing like great boys. During the interval of my stay at Mrera I employed a large portion of my time in mending my shoes, and patching up the great rents in my clothes, which the thorn ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... for he visited Hamburg, where he avoided meeting his old friend Mattheson, though he corresponded with him from a safe distance. He also went to Halle, where his mother was still living; Zachow, however, was dead, and had left his widow in straitened circumstances, with an idle and intemperate son. Handel helped the widow, and continued to send her money in later years, but he eventually came to the conclusion that it was useless to do anything for the son. From Halle ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... and often at dinner at his own well-ordered table. Occasionally, to the inconvenience of his wife, he would bring in unexpected guests of diverse gifts, any one whom he might happen to meet—amateurs, fellow-artists, singers, poets. An idle hanger-on whose only merit lay in his companionable mood or in his jests, was as welcome as a gifted connoisseur or a distinguished musician. But the greater part of his recreation Mozart sought away from home. He was to be found ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... came into touch with the Abyssinian army; but negotiations took the place of fighting, with the result that both forces retired, the Italians only leaving some 5000 troops in Eritrea, as their colony was now called. Meanwhile John had not been idle with regard to the dervishes, who had in the meantime become masters of the Egyptian Sudan. Although he had set his troops in motion too late to relieve Kassala, Ras Alula, his chief general, had succeeded in inflicting a handsome defeat on Osman Digna at Kufit in September 1885. Fighting ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... whole room, and even the pedals of the organ (which, by the way, made a very pretty picture in the room), with leaves of music from a large portfolio that lay open. As she spoke she knelt down, and began picking up the music; Prince Albert helped, and I too was not idle. Then Prince Albert proceeded to explain the stops to me, and she said that she would meanwhile put ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... numbers at Flicoteaux's; his whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture. By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux's you learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the state of the weather and good or bad seasons. He knows when it is a good year for peas or French beans, and the kind of salad stuff ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... deadened, but did not altogether exclude the roar of the people outside. "Wards! Wards! Wards!" they seemed to be saying. Through it there were visible the beams and supports of metal scaffoldings that rose and fell according to the requirements of a great crowd of workmen. An idle building machine, with lank arms of red painted metal stretched gauntly across this green tinted picture. On it were still a number of workmen staring at the crowd below. For a moment he stood regarding these things, and ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... general shiftlessness. Some of these cases are inexcusable, and the only reason for their connection with the industry is the fact that they were brought from the South, where they were voluntarily idle, by agents of employers. The importation merely shifted the scene of their deliberate loafing and spasmodic contact ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... the seals of its authenticity: the natural conceptions of divinity reveal them. No mythologies are so crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the philosophic mind, for they are never the empty fictions of an idle fancy, but rather the utterances, however inarticulate, of ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... contest. Such a condition of things would not be tolerated on the European continent. Why should it be on this? A war of desolation, such as is now threatened by Mexico, can not be waged without involving our peace and tranquillity. It is idle to believe that such a war could be looked upon with indifference by our own citizens inhabiting adjoining States; and our neutrality would be violated in despite of all efforts on the part of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... among the Marshpees, a small tribe who have their hunting-grounds on the shores of the Great Lake, near the Cape of Storms, a woman whose name was Awashanks. She was rather silly, and very idle. For days together she would sit doing nothing. Then she was so ugly and ill-shaped that not one of the youths of the village would have aught to say to her by way of courtship or marriage. She squinted very much; her face was long and thin, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... sugar-plums, With candy canes and baskets, balls and drums And trumpets, whistles, candles, pop-corn strings, And countless kinds of gilt and tinsel things! Beneath its shade I'll sit me down a while And read, an idle moment to beguile, These tender letters penned by suitors three Who seek my hand—What can they see in me? (Seating herself, she takes out three letters, opening one.) That sailor doll! He talks of foreign lands And sings; but I can't bear his tarry ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... he is in other populous rural neighborhoods. The ruffian tramp, of course, is the most constant of the class, but now and then appears one of the fraternity who displays something like genius in his attempts to impose himself upon people as a being of a higher order than an idle, worthless vagabond. A fellow of this description came into the editorial room of the Patriot one day while I was sitting there, and announced in a loud voice that he was a professor of pisciculture and an aspirant for ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... war taxes are falling with hideous pressure upon a people whose hands are empty, whose workshops are closed, whose fields are idle, whose cattle have been taken, or ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... account of the proceedings and result of the British Embassy to the court of China, by the late Sir George Staunton (who was no less amiable for liberality of sentiment, than remarkable for vigour of intellect) it would be an idle, and, indeed, a superfluous undertaking, in any other person who accompanied the embassy, to dwell on those subjects which have been treated by him in so masterly a manner; or to recapitulate those incidents and transactions, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... which way to help him; and while I grant you that the being idle at home just now is a terrible trial, whether it might not be better to be patient under it, than to disqualify yourself for a line in which you might do more—that is if it ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Suppled by long slavery, softened by mixture of blood, the black man seems to pass at one bound, as women do, from cowering pusillanimity to the topmost height of daring. The giddy laugh vanishes, the idle chatter is hushed, and the buffoon becomes a hero. Nothing in history surpasses the bravery of the Maroons of Surinam, as described by Stedman, or of those of Jamaica, as delineated by Dallas. Agents ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... Restor'd them to their hearths, and old abodes; This is thy happy home, the clime where fate Ordains thee to restore the Trojan state. Fear not! The war shall end in lasting peace, And all the rage of haughty Juno cease. And that this nightly vision may not seem Th' effect of fancy, or an idle dream, A sow beneath an oak shall lie along, All white herself, and white her thirty young. When thirty rolling years have run their race, Thy son Ascanius, on this empty space, Shall build a royal town, of lasting fame, Which from this omen shall ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... on the low settle beside the window and lighted his long pipe, puffing thoughtfully and gazing into the smoke as he spoke. "I would not have you repeat this, son, for it may be but idle gossip. But it is reported that since her mother's death the child has become the idol of the governor's hard, old heart. He is filled with foolish fears that he may lose her as cruelly as he lost her mother before her. ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... John Mangles. "We shall be forced to come to that, and I think it is useless to waste our time in idle discussion." ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... his Colin, carelesse Colin Cloute, 225 Care now his idle bagpipe up to raise, Ne tell his sorrow to the listning rout Of shepherd groomes, which wont his songs to praise: Praise who so list, yet I will him dispraise, Untill he quite* him of this guiltie blame. 230 Wake, shepheards boy, at length awake ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... doom, and the evil Karma may be expiated in various ways. Accordingly, O good Brahmana, I am charitable, truthful, assiduous in attending on my superior, full of respect towards regenerate Brahmanas, devoted to and free from pride and (idle) excessive talk. Agriculture is considered to be a praiseworthy occupation, but it is well-known that even there, great harm is done to animal life; and in the operation of digging the earth with the plough, numberless creatures lurking ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... person taking up such runaway, shall have and receive $6,' to be paid by the master or owner. It was also determined to have put in force the act of 1825, chap. 161, and the act of 1839, chap. 320, relative to idle, vagabond, free negroes, providing for their sale or banishment from the State. All persons interested, are hereby notified that the aforesaid laws, in particular, will be enforced, and all officers ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... minutes are not full. The man who learned five languages while going to and from his business on the street cars of Boston finds time always to crowd in one thing more. Despite his multitude of other cares, Dr. Conwell's pen is not idle. It started to write in his boyhood days and it ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... is a flavour of adventure, a sansgene, a—in short everything in the world that I like. I shall wear my cotton frocks, and give myself up to enjoyment, lie on the deck and look up at the blue sky, too deliciously idle even to read the last ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... hound was not idle, for standing over the astonished ruffian, with his powerful jaws in close proximity to his face, he showed such a set of strong teeth that the bushranger manifested many symptoms of terror, and endeavored to move from such a dangerous neighborhood ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... had been a thief and a scoundrel all his life, and had wormed himself into Lord George's confidence by flattery. He easily fooled his master into believing that the rabble who flocked to hear him, and the idle loungers who yelled themselves hoarse at what he said, were crowds of honest citizens who believed as he did, and were ready to follow his leadership. Gashford had added to his followers even Dennis, the hangman of London, and the foolish nobleman ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... well or as ill journey alone as with a boor. But "thou shalt speak of them by the way," says Deuteronomy of the commandments, and this (to say nothing of the danger) was one of the reasons why solitary travelling was disapproved. A man walking alone was more likely to turn his mind to idle thoughts, than if he had a congenial partner to converse with, and the Mishnah is severe against him who turns aside from his peripatetic study to admire a tree or a fallow. This does not imply that the Jews were indifferent to the beauties of nature. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... when so profoundly disheartened, and when in idle hopes and plans I had lost sight of my higher goal, by her firm belief in me she imparted to me augmented self-respect. Her confidence in me gave me increasing confidence in myself, and a vehement gratitude awoke in me for the good ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... out a few isolated instances from service records and shout: "There is the proof of general efficiency, of courage, of—" whatnot—that would be idle. These were not taken from the service records. Officers and men in the turret explosion, in the destroyer accident, in the raft incident, are mentioned here because the writer, at different times, has cruised ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... delayed the execution of our sentence, and calls us unto repentance and forgiveness, that we may escape the condemnation of angels? His patience is not slackness and negligence, as men count it, 2 Pet. iii. 9. He sits not in heaven as an idol, and idle spectator of what men are doing; but he observes all wrongs, and is sensible of them also. And if we were mindful and sensible of them also, he would forget them. He is long-suffering. This is extended and stretched-out patience beyond all expectation, beyond ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... golden-pulped, as if trying to be oranges, and are richly bitter, with a dark hint of prussic acid, fascinating the taste like some enchantress of Venice, the pursuit of whom is made piquant by a fancy that she may poison you. The farther you penetrate this huge idle peninsula, the more its idiosyncrasy is borne in on your mind. Infinite horizons, "an everlasting wash of air," the wild pure warmth of Arabia, and heated jungles of dwarf oaks balancing balmy plantations of pine. Then, toward the sea, the wiry grasses that dry into "salt hay" begin ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... when the mistress of Storm sat idle in her eyrie, her household—children, negroes, even the motley assortment of dogs that claimed her for their own—had learned to go their ways softly. The morning after Mag's affair, three collies, a hound or so, and several curs waited in a respectful ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... law says that a licence-holder or supervisee shall produce a license when called upon, shall not habitually associate with persons of bad character, shall not lead an idle or dissolute life, shall report themselves monthly to the nearest police station (this regulation does not apply to women), and ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... learning, memorably fell off in reputation and industry. Their communities by the donations of the pious grew wealthy; and the monks themselves inhabited splendid palaces, and became luxurious, dissipated and idle. Upon the ruins of their good fame rose a very extraordinary race of men, called Friars. The monks professed celibacy, and to have no individual property; but the friars abjured all property, both private and in common. They had no place where to lay their heads, and subsisted ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... probabilities would be the expulsion of the enemy from the Mississippi Valley and the recovery of New Orleans. After the fifteenth of this month, operations must cease on the Carolina and Georgia coasts—Charleston and Wilmington being still in our possession. But we should not be idle. Lee, in disdaining the sheltered army of the invaders, would be likely to invade in turn; and the public demand of retaliation for the cruelties and destruction of private property perpetrated by the enemy could not be resisted. His men would probably apply the torch ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... evidently has reference to the contents of his own work, Schmidt then meets numerous objections. Here vigorous epithets are bandied about, as, for instance, "absolute nonsense," "muddler," "foolish and senseless prattle," "idle talk," etc.; and from Dodel he copies the words with which the latter once sought to annihilate me: Job, verse 10, "Thou hast spoken like one of the foolish women." And he ventures to express indignation at Loofs' "invectives." ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... form, we have said that they differed in temper. The elder was peaceful, studious, and silent; the younger was warlike and noisy. He was quick at learning when he began, but very slow at beginning. No threats of the ferule would provoke Harry to learn in an idle fit, or would prevent George from helping his brother in his lesson. Harry was of a strong military turn, drilled the little negroes on the estate and caned them like a corporal, having many good boxing-matches with ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reproached himself for his idle and dissolute life, and realized that, if he had been industrious, and had saved his money, he might have owned the place with no encumbrance at the present time. It was about sunset, and Mrs. Taylor and her son seated ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... old hat! ne'er repine at thi lot, If thart useful what moor can ta be? Better wear cleean away nor be idle an rot, An remember thart useful to me. Though its hard to give up what wor once dearly prized, Tha but does what all earthly things must, For though we live honored, or perish despised,— We're at last but a handful ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... work soon's us could toddle. First us gather firewood. Iffen it freezin' or hot us have to go to toughen us up. When us git li'l bigger us tend de cattle and feed hosses and hawgs. By time us good sprouts us pickin' cotton and pullin' cane. Us ain't never idle. Sometime us git far out in de field and lay down in de corn row and nap. But, Lawdy, iffen dey cotch you, dey sho' wore you out! Sunday de onliest rest day and den de white folks 'low ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... convince yourself of it, open your eyes, look round you and try to understand what you see. You will then come to the conclusion that what I tell you is not an idle theory, offspring of a sick brain but the simple expression ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... Helen appears splendidly dressed, Andromache is mounted on a car laden with spoils; and I doubt not but that at the conclusion the entire scene was in flames. The trial of Helen painfully interrupts the train of our sympathies, by an idle altercation which ends in nothing; for in spite of the accusations of Hecuba, Menelaus abides by the resolution which he had previously formed. The defence of Helen is about as entertaining as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... perhaps," replied Haviland, contemptuously; "but I looked upon them only as the silly vaporings of a few disaffected creatures, who, having heard of the rebellious movements in the Bay State, have thrown out these idle threats with the hope of intimidating our authorities, and so prevent the holding of a court, which they fear might bring too ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... winters did this sorrow continue; for so long a time was Hrothgar plunged in grief; for so many years did this beautiful mead-hall, destined for joyful things, stand idle. ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... January the troops took their position opposite Vicksburg. The water was very high and the rains were incessant. There seemed no possibility of a land movement before the end of March or later, and it would not do to lie idle all this time. The effect would be demoralizing to the troops and injurious to their health. Friends in the North would have grown more and more discouraged, and enemies in the same section more and more insolent in their ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... O'Gallagher's surprise I said them all without one mistake. Instead of commendation I received abuse. "By all the powers," exclaimed my pedagogue, "but everything seems to go wrong to-day; my hand has been completely idle; this will never do; didn't you tell me, Mr Keene, that you didn't ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... unspoken language he must learn "in its main radicals." It is only by reason of this bond that external nature, the manifestation of Natura naturans, lends itself to the artist so that he too may manifest himself. To attain this end the artist will imitate nature but not copy her. ("What idle rivalry!" he exclaims. Is not a copy of nature like a wax-work figure, which shocks because it lacks "the motion and the life which we expected?") The artist imitates what he perceives to be essential in nature; ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God a tenth of our time; and yet we think that with our good works we can merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two hours, I have been at meals three hours, I have been idle four hours; ah, enter not into judgment ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... went by she was never idle. Nor was Billy forgotten. When the cold weather came on she knitted him wristlets, which he always religiously wore from the house and pocketed immediately thereafter. The two sweaters she made for him, however, received a better fate, as did ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... condition of affairs at Blugsey's, it seemed rather strange one morning, hours after breakfast, to see, sprinkled in every direction, a great number of idle picks, shovels and pans; in fact, the only mining implements in use that morning were those handled by a single miner, who was digging and carrying and washing dirt with an industry which seemed to indicate that he was working as a substitute for ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... boy. The glad light was gone from his heart. His heart was in the chest with his treasures—his treasures denied him as too precious for every day and Sunday too. Barefooted and out of sorts, he dragged along through the idle hours. He should have been hoeing corn; and, when the night was come and the jay-bird went to his nest with a thankful heart, Sprigg went to his with nothing of the kind, and, therefore, had no pleasant dreams. Nor was this all. That night, ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... matter, and outlives the body in which it is educated."—"Matter is full of spirit. This spirit is brought out of matter by vegetation. By means of vegetation, it is conveyed into animal frames, in which its purest essence centres in the brain.... This is no idle theory," he adds, "no vain hypothesis, for making matter think. It is a clear proposition, showing how matter is employed by the Supreme Intelligence for evolving, training, and educating spirit."—"We ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the fact that King Edward VII had driven in a car from Pall Mall to Windsor Castle in sixty minutes was beautifully present. Then, he was slightly worried concerning the Mediterranean Fleet. He knew nothing about it, but as a good citizen he suspected in idle moments, like a number of other good citizens, that all was not quite well with the Mediterranean Fleet. As for the war, he had only begun to be interested in the war within the last six months, and already he was sick of it. He knew that the Boers had just wrecked a British military train, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... by it. But an excuse of the same kind will serve for the common liar, that he is known, and therefore disbelieved. It behoved him to be the more scrupulous in this particular, because he knew that Boswell took minutes of his ordinary conversation. Some of his idle sophisms, which thus became current, have, I fear, led to serious mischief; such as the opinion that an author may be at liberty to deny his having written a book to which he has not affixed his name; his extenuation of incontinence in the ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... study the Theory of Chances—that philosopher's stone of all gamblers! And a gambler, in the strict sense of the word, I had never been. I was heart-whole from the corroding passion for play. My gaming was a mere idle amusement. I never resorted to it by necessity, because I never knew what it was to want money. I never practised it so incessantly as to lose more than I could afford, or to gain more than I could coolly pocket without being thrown off my balance by my good ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... the Red Un looking for revenge and in idle moments lurking about the decks where the girl played. He washed his neck under his collar ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... which might be traced in England from the low-minded frivolities of the court of Charles the Second, was widely spread among the weak, whose minds flinched from all earnest thought. They swelled the number of the army of bold questioners upon the ways of God to Man, but they were an idle rout of camp-followers, not combatants; they simply ate, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... widely from our English authors, who generally slightly despise their own art, and think that, in providing amusement for our idle hours, they are rather derogating from their dignity. Instead of claiming our attention as a right, they try to entice us into interest by every possible artifice: they give us exciting glimpses of horrors to come; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... sabotage, assassination, and civil war. These can neither be outlawed nor even effectively guarded against if there are individuals enough who are disposed to wield them. And it is not by any means idle speculation that a country which can sit calmly by and face such evils as are perpetrated by this vast commerce in violence, by this class use of the State, and by such monstrous outrages as were committed in Homestead, in Chicago, and in Colorado, will find one day its composure interrupted ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... to the front porch and sat down on the step to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him and began to knit busily. It was one of the few Old World customs she had kept up, for she could not bear to sit with idle hands. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... silent, and he also a while; then she said: But why tarry we here in idle talk when he is yet bound, and in torment of body and soul; he the valiant, and the kind and the dear brother? Come, tarry for no question. And she stepped out swiftly along the green road going westward, and Arthur beside her; and as they went by Viridis, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... Wynne, but hurried to her chamber to collect her thoughts and to examine her toilet before she descended to her visitor. Some inward personality seemed to be trying properly to frame the speech by which she should make Stanford understand that it was idle for him to hope longer; while all the time she was thinking of the man whom ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... dry grass, where the tiny yellow stars of the creeping potentilla gleamed up at him through the soft dusk, and lay almost too idle for thought. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... subject of the southern buildings to the marquis, he carefully avoided mentioning the hidden door. The marquis listened for some time to the relation in gloomy silence, but at length assuming an air of displeasure, reprehended Ferdinand for yielding his confidence to those idle alarms, which he said were the suggestions of a timid imagination. 'Alarms,' continued he, 'which will readily find admittance to the weak mind of a woman, but which the firmer nature of man should disdain.—Degenerate boy! Is it thus you reward my care? Do I live to see my son the sport of every ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... Wondershoot. "What I always say. Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do. At any rate among the labouring classes. We bring up our under-housemaids on that principle, always. What shall ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... dedicating my unpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your Honour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take advantage of all idle houres, till I have honoured you with some great labour. But if the first heire of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorie it had so noble a god-father: and never after eare so barren a land, for feare it yield me still so bad a harvest, I leave it to your Honourable Survey, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... again a group of roughly clad horsemen would flash into view and disappear again as if by magic, with shells hurtling in their wake. Our artillery could not locate their main force with any degree of certainty, nor could they place us properly. They were not idle; their guns, of which they had a decent number, sought for our position with dauntless perseverance. Their shells soon began to drop amongst us, but they did no harm at all. They fell close enough to our troops in many instances, but they were so badly made ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... the baize-covered table with her spectacles on, looked decidedly formidable, and each of the children gazed at their governess with anxious eyes. Mary and Lucy were always good little girls, but Philip and Conrad were as idle as boys could possibly be, and did their utmost to evade Miss Ramsay's endeavors to instill learning into their small heads. Orion sat between his two little boy cousins, but for some reason or other Orion did not look well that morning. His little ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... of her imagination, she pictured herself in some new country with Bertie. An adventurous, reckless nature such as his, she thought, turned every gift to evil in the commonplace life where his idiosyncrasy had no play; but detached from his idle mess-room habits, and launched into a new career, when to live at all involved exertion of mind and body, would metamorphosize her hero into all ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... haven't been after them Irishers again?' exclaimed the owner of the red face. 'The idle vagabonds! I vow to goodness that all our money, and food and clothing, too, I believe, go to feed a ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... sanctified premises and deck them with timber as a solace for coming generations. Let them go! The undiluted Orient is still wide enough; and no one will appreciate the metamorphosis more than the native citizens themselves, who love, above all things, to play about and idle in the shade of trees; perhaps, in the course of time, they will realize that not only Allah, but also man, is able to plant and take care of them. Your Arab often has a love of nature which is none the worse for ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... obvious way, then, of contriving a three wheeler is to drive one wheel, steer with another, and leave the third, which must be opposite the driver, idle. The next in simplicity is to drive with one wheel, and steer with the other two, having one in front and the other behind. So far then, the single driving rear-steerer and the Coventry rotary pattern are easily understood. The evils of single driving, minimized, it is true, to a large ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... granted to him he would devote a son to the service of the god. After this he had several children, one of whom he consecrated to the deity, calling him Dasan (the obedient servant). Dasan and his offspring made their livelihood by begging. This order, like that of the Satanis, is reinforced by idle members of the lower Sudra castes, who become Dasaris by being branded by the Guru of Tirupatti and other shrines. In the Central Provinces the Dasaris are stated to be recruited from the impure Mala caste of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... my studies, to win by my exemplary conduct the encomiums of the sisters Dulorre—all this made no impression upon cruel Georgette. She made no secret of her preference for a dull, idle, blustering fellow of nine years old, who won all the races, who could fling a ball farther than anyone else, carry two huge dictionaries under his arm, and ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... de Fleury's brother to the heiress had been too marked and open for his suit and its rejection to remain a secret. Gaston de Bois heard Bertha's refusal commented upon, and there was a buzz in his ears of idle speculations concerning the origin of her caprice. Was it some blissful, internal suggestion, which diffused such a glow of happiness over his expressive countenance when he next saw Bertha? Was it some hitherto uncertain ground of encouragement ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... by, for there were many there. The sailing ships were there with their sails all furled and their masts straight and still like a wintry forest; the steamers were there, and great liners, puffing up idle smoke into the twilight. He answered he had come by none of them. I asked him what line he worked on, for he was clearly a sailor; I mentioned well-known lines, but he did not know them. Then I asked him where he worked and what he was. And he ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Peter or Stimson idle. To assist Stetson in his press-work, and to further the idea that all Europe was now clamoring for the "Rise and fall," Peter paid an impecunious but over-educated dragoman to translate it into five languages, and Stimson officially wrote of ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... keeping up a reputation as a school terror. It had meant being constantly on the alert for an opportunity to misbehave; it meant thinking up plots, living up to an exacting standard of wickedness. The reaction had come with these idle days ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... Roman do without a cigar? How idle through the day? How survive his interminable post-coenal potations?—The thought is not our own. It occurs somewhere in De Quincey, we believe. It is one of those self-evident propositions you wonder had not occurred to you before.—What an accessory of luxury the pipe would have been ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... awful hush and its mysterious movements makes a strange, dread habitation for the spirit—such waking is a grim trial of human fortitude. The blood flows sluggishly, yet subject to sudden tremors that chill the veins and for an instant choke the heart. Purpose is idle, the will impure; over the past hangs a shadow of remorse, and life that must yet be lived shows lurid, a steep pathway to the hopeless grave. Of this cup ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... every Sunday he preached, and he resided in his parsonage ten months every year. His wife and daughters went among the poor—and he smoked cigars in his library. Though not yet fifty, he was becoming fat and idle—unwilling to walk, and not caring much even for such riding as the bishop had left to him. And to make matters worse—far worse, he knew all this of himself, and understood it thoroughly. "I see a better path, and know how good it is, but I follow ever the worse." ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... work in order to provide a modicum of food and the semblance of a shelter, then it occurs to me, and I am sure it will to any one who thinks seriously upon the matter, that these men and women, who are harking back to the life of the idle savage, are treated better in Christian England than the industrious, self-respecting but unfortunate poor. But come with me to see another sight! It is again afternoon, and we take our stand at 3.30 p.m. outside a ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... anchor, one or more of the "ocean greyhounds," with dead slow engines, are steaming out between the forts; tenders, whale-boats, small steamers, tugs, and every craft that sails the sea, down to the familiar Munster "hooker," are hurrying to ports far and near, or lying "idle as painted ships upon a painted ocean." Most of the Atlantic liners have offices here. Tenders convey the mails from the deep-water quays at the Great Southern and Western terminus out to the steamers, which usually ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... sign All my nature, easily as it were wax, With its dear image; but after that impress I would all harden, so that nought could raze The minting of that seal from off my being. And yesterday it fell. An idle whim To see the rebels on the Scottish Gate,— And there was the face of him I was made to love, There,—ah God,—on the gate, my murder'd lad! Did any girl have first-sight love like this? Not to have ever ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... highly cultivated as this. Interest being the greatest spring which animates the hand of industry, few would toil in cultivating and planting the land, if they did not expect to reap the fruit of their labour: Were it otherwise, the industrious man would be in a worse state than the idle sluggard. I frequently saw parties of six, eight, or ten people, bring down to the landing place fruit and other things to dispose of, where one person, a man or woman, superintended the sale of the whole; no ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... with Margaret, Richard's attitude had undergone no appreciable change. Her chance visits to the studio through the week and those pleasant, half-idle Saturday afternoons had become to both Richard and Margaret a matter of course, like the sunlight, or the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... never a government favorite. If the Indian wards of the nation had a few million acres of idle land, "Let it lie idle," said the guardian. Some of these civilized tribes maintained a fine system of public schools from the rental of unoccupied lands. Nations, like men, revive the fable of the dog and the ox. But the guardian was supreme—the ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... finished. She sat upright in her straight-backed chair before the table, her eyes half closed. It seemed so odd to see those little work-worn hands idle ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... snapped. Then, realizing that denial in this regard was fatal, he added more genially: "What do you mean by memorandum? If you mean that recapitulation of old-time mysteries and their accompanying features with which I once whiled away an idle hour, I own to it, of course. Why shouldn't I? It is only a proof of my curiosity in regard to this old mystery which every member of my family must feel. That curiosity has not been appeased. If it would not be indiscreet on your part, may I now ask if you have found out what ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... qui sera une autre paire de manches." (In case you don't understand this joke, Remenyi must explain it to you.) So be of good courage and among good things! However things may be, never make capitulation with what is idle, cowardly, or false—however high your position may become-and preserve, under all ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... his spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... chief of police and those just under him. I also knew Braga, the bank manager, by sight. They, of course, did not know me, and I could, unsuspected, be a looker-on in Vienna. Soon the passengers, their friends and many idle visitors came off in boatloads, while I, of course, scrutinized every boatload as it came up ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... much labor lost in continually quarrying new sepulchers in our diamond ridges, and why should there be so much dust lying idle in the old graves? Come, let us have a law that the dust in all graves over one hundred years old shall be sold at auction, unless the graves are redeemed by a certain amount of soil. Then these empty tombs can ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... society. I thought he seemed to wish for some companion whose ideas had not been developed exclusively in barrack atmosphere; and I, on my side, was not unwilling to listen to the chatter of a lively, good-natured young fellow, at intervals, during my long idle days. ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... of the people of Naples against their Government would lead to a Revolution or not, as apprehended by the French Government and disbelieved by Lord Palmerston, must be so entirely a matter of chance that it would be idle to predict the exact consequences. If 99 out of every 100 Neapolitans, however, are dissatisfied with their Government (as Lord Palmerston states), it is not unreasonable to expect that our demonstration ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... the innocence of his boy that was beyond all valuation. "Perfectly satisfied?" Impossible! He was not perfectly satisfied. How could he be? The look thrown upon Frank when he entered the bar-room, and saw him "hale fellow, well met," with three or four idle, profane, drinking ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... the sight of Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. 'Why,' he asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the event? And does that again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have cause, and will, and strength, and means, to act?' A man irresolute merely because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience secretly condemned the act which his ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... a sliver of salmon lodged between his teeth, and the men and women, with idle hands and heads craned ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... 'I suppose, Bessie, you know that Miss Pew has especially forbidden us all to indulge in idle talk about courtship ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... pass through them; in short, nothing but the topmost turrets of the castle could be seen, and these were only discernible at a distance. So that it seemed the fairy was determined the princess's slumber should not be disturbed by idle curiosity. ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous
... the year the Bellevite remained on duty as a blockader off Fort Morgan. It was an idle life for the most part, and Christy began to regret that he had caused himself to be transferred from the command of the Bronx. The steamer occasionally had an opportunity to chase a blockade-runner, going in or ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... otherwise it is not different from other meets. As for the Roman mountains, they are so totally unlike any other hills in the world, and so extremely beautiful in their own peculiar way, that to describe them would be an idle and a useless task, which could only serve to exhibit the vanity of the writer and ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... consequences of dropping his character of an ignorant Siberian peasant so far as to speak to a group of sailors, first in French and then in German; they understood neither: the idlers on the quays began to gather round in idle curiosity, and he had to desist. In vain, despite the icy coldness of the water, he tried swimming in the bay to approach some vessel for the chance of getting speech of the captain or crew unseen by the sentinel. In vain he resorted to every device ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... are the oldest sport known. From the beginning of his history man, like the kitten and the puppy, has delighted to play with the round thing that rolls. The men who came with Columbus to conquer the Indies had brought their Castilian wind-balls to play with in idle hours. But at once they found that the balls of Hayti were incomparably superior toys; they bounced better. These high bouncing balls were made, so they learned, from a milky fluid of the consistency of honey which the natives ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... of the brigade had not been idle. They had formed two lines, one for the empty and one for the filled pails, and the end man at the latter line was kept busy tossing gallon after gallon of water on the fire. But his was slow work compared with that of even the primitive hand engine. He had to stop, momentarily, ...
— The Young Firemen of Lakeville - or, Herbert Dare's Pluck • Frank V. Webster
... oh Senators, be too severe in marking every idle word which the mob may utter amidst the general rejoicing. If there is any insult which requires notice, bring it before the "Praefectus Urbis"—a far better and safer course than taking the law into your ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... do things, maybe, if we lived by ourselves, amongst other people in small houses. We can't be two things, Mr. Sherrett, rich and poor; and it seems to me that is what we should be trying for, if we got into a boarding-house. We should have to be idle and ashamed. I want to take right hold. I'd like to earn ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... million miles in circumference, while only eight thousand miles of this path are at any one time occupied by the earth's mass. Through these eight thousand miles the sun's radiated energy is doing work, but through the remainder of the five hundred million it is idle and wasted. But the case is far more striking when we reflect that it is not in the plane of the earth's orbit only that the sun's radiance is being poured out. It is not an affair of a circle, but of a sphere. In order to utilize all the solar rays, we should need to have an immense number ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... sordidness and the commonplace. She could imagine positively nothing less romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March mornings with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and herself wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition, an effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers and chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother plaintively and weariedly ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... had been grandmother or Aunt Isobel I shouldn't have been in the least surprised; they are just a bunch of prejudices and believe every idle story they hear. But Rose is different. She's known about Harold and me for months. She forwarded his letters to me when I was in Baltimore. And now for her to turn against me ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... mis'rable idle an' shiftless, this yere Grief is, that once he starts huntin' an' then decides he won't. Grief lays down by the aige of the branch, with his moccasins towards the water. It starts in to rain, an' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... the pupils, and learning something about their individual characters. In fact, so important is this, that it is the plan of some teachers, whenever they commence a new school, to let the boys have their own way, almost entirely, for a few days, in order to find out fully who the idle and mischievous are. This is perhaps going a little too far; but it is certainly desirable to enjoy as many opportunities for observation as can be secured on the first ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... are compelled to leave it according to our habit when we are at fault, and much as the poet leaves it here. In the case of the man, we think we understand. In that of the dog, our difficulty appears to defy solution: it is no question of argument, assertions are idle, dogma has no place. On the one hand we have those principles that come to man's aid, but of which it would be unbecoming now to speak. The vast majority of Christian men are enabled to ride out the storms of life without confidence ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... Union, in the work of its preservation, from the beginning of the war; and whatever may be the disposition of the authorities toward him, his strong convictions and his active temperament will hardly permit him to remain idle during the deadly peril ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... their hands dealt out great store. Wherefore one beheld many strangers riding to their realm. Four hundred sword-thanes (4) were to put on knightly garb with Siegfried. Many a fair maid was aught but idle with the work, for he was beloved of them all. Many precious stones the ladies inlaid on the gold, which together with the edging they would work upon the dress of the proud young warriors, for ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... obscurity, darkness. obscuro obscure, dark. observar to observe. obstruir to obstruct. ocasion f. occasion, opportunity. ocaso occident, setting (of sun). occidente m. occident, west. oceano ocean. ocio leisure, idleness. ociosidad f. leisure, idleness. ocioso idle. octubre m. October. ocultar to hide. oculto hidden. ocupar to occupy. ocurrir to occur, suggest itself. ochenta eighty. ocho eight. odalisca odalisk, beautiful Oriental woman. odiar to hate. odioso odious, hateful. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... smaller party which desired peace had not been entirely idle. On July 28th the Social Democrats held thirty-two mass meetings in Berlin to protest against war. "The attendance was in every case enormous, but the meetings were all orderly and calm. The police had taken extensive precautionary ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... vanquished, and, by creating strife, perpetuates the possibilities of renewed strife—war, which at this moment keeps Europe in the condition of an armed camp, millions of men leading comparatively idle lives, with long hours on their hands which they cannot fill, with the inevitable results, the nauseating record of filth, disease and abominations too utterly loathsome even to think about—war, which is the curse of the poor ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... not to visit her, but to dwell with her that day, because also our landlady had got strangers come from London. So having framed this orderly lie, I pulled some work out of my pocket, and added I did not come to be idle. ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... not remain long idle in their new position. In the First Month, 1827, they received a "minute" for visiting the meetings in their Monthly Meeting; and in the Second Month they commenced a tour amongst the meetings in some ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... witnessed under this sky before; and, one would humbly expect, cannot last long!—What is to be done? asks every one; incapable of hearing any answer, were there even one ready for imparting to him. "Blacklead these two million idle beggars," I sometimes advised, "and sell them in Brazil as Niggers,—perhaps Parliament, on sweet constraint, will allow you to advance them to be Niggers!" In fact, the Emancipation Societies should send over a deputation or two to look at these immortal Irish "Freemen," the ne plus ultra ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of girls, till their fourteenth year, is singing, dancing, amusements, attending on children, and fetching water; [57] after which they are taught, by their mothers, to sew, cook, tan the skins of animals, construct houses, and navigate boats. It is common for the men to stand by as idle spectators, while the women are carrying the heaviest materials for building; the former never attempting to do any thing but the carpenter's work. Parents frequently betroth their daughters in infancy, and never consult their ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... opposed by Jacob Alter from Cumberland, who declared that although there were a great many public schools and colleges and places of that kind scattered over the State, he never knew any good they did, except to breed up a set of idle and odious lawyers to ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... deliver to James White in the course of the winter, two hundred pounds of Beaver, or as many moose skins, in lieu thereof, towards making good the damage sustained by individuals. They added that they were poor and had been kept from hunting by the idle stories of ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... had full quivers with them, and Warrenton and Robin felt themselves in a manner to be pitted one against the other. The battle raged so furiously below, however, that for a minute these allies were compelled to remain idle—not daring to loose their shafts for fear of slaying friends as well ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... and as it was a dead calm the anchor had been let go, so that the cutter should not be swept along the coast by the racing tide. The night had come on very dark since the moon had set, and the watch scanned the surface of the sea in an idle mood, that task being soon done, for there was very little sea visible to scan, and, coming to the conclusion that it was a night when they would be able to watch just as well with their ears, they made themselves comfortable and ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... say no more," he rejoined, still using the self-command which of all men an autocrat requires, "till I find how you do in your class. That you are the best scholar in it, is no reason why you should be allowed to idle away hours in which you might have been laying up store for the time to come."—It was a phrase much favoured by the master—in present application foolish.—"But perhaps your father does not mean to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... As I was an idle spectator on this occasion, and, perhaps, as I showed some inclination more than once to return to the prohibited, and apparently the puzzling subject of Mr. Campbell, Mr. Jarvie dismissed me with little formality, with an advice to "gang up the gate to the college, where I ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... during that period of intense excitement which followed the murder of Charles Lavender, and when the public eye was fixed searchingly upon Lord Arthur Skelmerton, probing all the inner details of his idle, useless life. ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... it, but I should have become accustomed to it in time. But this vile action of yours makes all the difference. When you and I part after this painful conversation, we part for good. We shall be talked about; there will be a lot of idle gossip, but I care nothing for that. And if you raise a hand, if you try to use the law on your side, I produce that telegram ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... to pass I heard from the priests of that Hephaistos who dwells at Memphis; 2 but the Hellenes relate, besides many other idle tales, that Psammetichos cut out the tongues of certain women, and then caused the children to live with ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... but knew it, an American's too spry, And he takes his spirit with him when he condescends to die; Any way the "spooks" have vanished, and the spectres of old time Only live in cheap romances and the poet's idle rhyme. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... good—remains. Therefore buy land, which none can carry away, near to a market or a growing town if may be, and hire it out to fools to farm, or sell it to other fools who wish to build great houses and spend their goods in feeding a multitude of idle servants. Houses eat, Hubert, and the larger they are, the more ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... being exchanged, the populace were not idle. With enthusiastic vigor they had removed the horses from the equipages meant for the royal party, and now, through a spokesman, begged permission to draw the carriages themselves as a token of their devoted allegiance. Stovik ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... is all limestone, which is found only along the coast or at a great depth. It has been brought here from a considerable distance. Indians may have done the work, but they never did it willingly. If they did it at all, it was as slaves. But we have no time for idle speculation. Let's walk along it and see how ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... very happy,—more happy perhaps in that she had been a joint minister with Kate to her cousin George's idle fantasies, than she would have been hurrying about with him as her slave. They had tacitly agreed to spoil him with comforts; and girls are always happier in spoiling some man than in being spoiled by men. And he had taken it all well, doing his despotism pleasantly, exacting much, ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... the young men began to gird themselves for war. The swords that had rested for many a day were drawn from their idle places; and the women worked together, that their brothers and their sons might be ready for the field; but at their work, instead of the ancient lilts, they sung psalms and godly ballads. However, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... judgment, frame bills and present them through their Chairman. Besides these, there are the talking members who take part in every debate, often without knowing anything of the question, save what they learn while the debate is proceeding, and the idle members, who do nothing but vote—generally I believe, without knowing anything of the question whatever; but to neither of these classes did Verplanck belong. He was a diligent, useful, and valued member of the Committee of Ways and Means, ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... education. They founded fresh professorships—professorships of Polite Latin, professorships of Philosophy, Divinity, Canon Law, Natural Sciences—above all of the dreaded Greek; confiscating funds to support them. For the old threadbare text-books, some real teaching was swiftly substituted. The idle residents were noted down, soon to be sent home by parliament to their benefices, under pain of being compelled, like all other students, to attend lectures, and, in their proper persons, "keep sophisms, problems, disputations, and all ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... that Mrs. Callendar was but a shallow woman; for, after a moment of excitable interest in Justine, she rather naively turned the talk upon the charms of Europe. And, I fear, not without some slight cynicism, I followed her where she led; for, as I said to myself, it did not matter what direction our idle tongues took, so long as I kept my mind upon the two beside that grave: but it gave my speech a spice of malice. I dwelt upon Mrs. Callendar's return to her native heath—that is, the pavements of Bond Street and Piccadilly, although ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in any way by the sudden popularity which she gained; nor did it cause her to be other than what she had always been—a simple, modest maiden. She could be dignified in the presence of those who sought her out of idle curiosity, and were rude enough to bore her with prying questions. But ever to strangers, whom she felt she could trust, she was always pleasant and kind. Her words were sensible, wise, and good. She told the ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... that neither party was sincere in the conclusion of this peace, at least neither could entertain any hope of its duration; yet a period of seven years elapsed before the mutual enmity of the two powers broke out into open hostilities. Meanwhile, Perseus was not idle; he secured the attachment of his subjects by equitable and popular measures, and formed alliances not only with the Greeks and the Asiatic princes, but also with the Thracian, Illyrian, and Celtic tribes which surrounded his dominions. The Romans naturally ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... suddenly, breaking a rather long silence, "I feel sometimes that I have had enough for once of the trammels of town life. I am weary of the slavery of levee, and gaming table, and playhouse. There are better things in life than foppery and idle dissipation. What do you think of ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... chance to cool off—she would not have invited Harold Jones to sit and sing with her during the opening hour. But probably all that happened had to happen in the course of things; so speculation is idle. But when it did happen, it seemed to be a hopeless case. Young Mr. Pennington had lived through the day, a week before, when the teacher changed his seat so that he could not see his Heart's Desire smile; but he knew that she was sorry with him, and that helped a little. But when he saw Harold Jones ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... therefore the inference had been drawn that the pottery was made purely for pleasure by some one who had an abundance of leisure. Perhaps this very Bernard, the librarian, who may have become interested in the art as a recreation, and done the work in his idle hours." ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... be the feelings evoked, it is that of the principal of a school. When a man of enlarged heart and mind comes among boys, when he allows his spirit to stream through them, and observes the operation of his own character evidenced in the elevation of theirs,—it would be idle to talk of the position of such a man being honourable. It is a blessed position. The man is a blessing to himself and to all around him. Such men, I believe, are to be found in England, and it behoves those who busy themselves with the mechanics of education at the present day, to seek ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... there would be a trifle to do in the way of amusing her; but though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play. Think of the company and the life you'd lead, miss; the gaiety you'd see, and the gentleman you'd marry. My uncle is to inquire for a trustworthy young lady from the country, as ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... either nation is inferior to the other; it is because they are different. The two peoples represent two civilizations which, although in many respects equally high, are so totally distinct in their past history that it is idle to expect in one or two generations to overcome this difference. One civilization is as old as the other; and in neither case is the line of cultural descent coincident with that of ethnic descent. Unquestionably the ancestors of the great majority both of the modern Americans and the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the busy of constitution and the idle, would desire to follow the impulses of their own minds, unbroken in upon by harsh necessity, or the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... time we begin to think that madam would have been just as well off if she had not kept so many servants, and to wonder what they could have had to do. Perhaps it was the idle man's playmate that made the trouble. But a little farther reading in the old diary dissipates this illusion. If anybody thinks that our grandmothers must have been cursed with ennui because they did not attend three parties a night three times a week, with operas and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... zorn!" cried Mrs Marion, who declared that the dinner was spoiled; "then it was all the fault of that great idle Josh ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... crack troops to join the army of the Crown Prince fronting Verdun. Ludendorf promptly resigned as Chief of Staff to von Hindenburg and suggested that the Field Marshal also resign. That grim old warrior declined to take this action, preferring to remain idle in East Prussia and watch what he predicted would be a useless effort on the western front. His warning to the General Staff was explicit, but von Falkenhayn coolly ignored ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... however, for a young mestizo had been witness of the whole proceeding. Juan, the seventeen year old son of a Mexican laborer, who had married one of the mission Indian women, united in himself the bad qualities of both races, as has so often been the result of such crosses. He had grown up idle, indifferent to his parents, vicious and cruel, leading astray the other youths of the mission, among whom he was easily the master, and causing his parents and Father Zalvidea no end of anxiety. The Father, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... was opened cautiously, and the head of Mrs. Pill, in a frilled nightcap of gigantic size, was thrust out. "Is that you, Thomas, coming home at this late hour the worse for drink, you idle wretch, and me almost dead ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... basket of clothes, go out at a side door, and he felt as if a black shadow like a menace had passed across the floor. But it was only for an instant. He dismissed it promptly, as one of those thoughts that come out of nothing, like idle puffs of summer air. He and Dalton bade a brief farewell to their new friends and left for the headquarters of General Winder. An elderly and childless couple named Lanham had volunteered to take two officers in their house near Capitol Square, and there ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... neglected. Mrs. Mathieson's heart was so heavy that her work dragged; and when Nettie came out and sat down to her Sunday-school lesson, her mother kept watching her for a long time with a dull, listless face, quite still and idle. The child's face was busy over her Bible, and Mrs. Mathieson did not disturb her, till Nettie lifted her head to glance at the clock. Then the bitterness of her ...
— The Carpenter's Daughter • Anna Bartlett Warner
... the exception, perhaps, of those around certain towns, had neither voice nor part in the change; the nobility, sunk in sloth and smothered by incapacity, looked on as idle spectators; and a vast many of the restless and excitable spirits who got up the revolution, were mere instruments in the hands of a faction, and knew not what they did. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... nearly drove him mad. He made a thousand resolutions as to reading, writing, and employment for his mind. He attempted to learn whole pages by rote, and to fatigue himself to rest by exercise of his memory. But his memory would not work; his mind would continue idle; he was impotent over his own faculties. Oh, if he could only sleep while these horrid weeks were ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... was by no means an idle one, or a life to be envied. Many persons, misled by the magnificent pedestal that the stage gives to a woman, suppose her in the midst of a perpetual carnival. In the dark recesses of a porter's lodge, beneath the tiles of an attic ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... for private circulation among friends; it was not written to cheer and instruct a diseased relative of the author's; it was not thrown off during intervals of wearing labor to amuse an idle hour. It was not written for any of these reasons, and therefore it is submitted without ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... criminal. You ought to see the folly of attacking a man in my position. For years I have been the most prominent man in Lakeville, owner of the large shoe factory that gives employment to fifty hands. It is no idle boast—and your wife will confirm my words—that I am the most influential and ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - or, Jacob Marlowe's Secret • Horatio Alger
... administration of the Advocate, in which he was accused of having received bribes both from Spanish and French sources and to have betrayed the interests of his country. The chief instigator of these attacks was Oldenbarneveldt's personal enemy, Francis van Aerssens, whose pen was never idle. The defenders of the Remonstrant cause and of the principles of provincial sovereignty were not lacking in the vigour and virulence of their replies; and the Advocate himself felt that the accusations which were made against him demanded a formal ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... of this sickness is due to inaction—and now the Dardanelles Committee "quite understand" I am "adopting only a purely defensive action at present." I have never adopted a defensive attitude. They have forced us to sit idle and go sick because—at the very last moment—they have permitted the French offensive to take precedence of ours, although, on the face of it, there was no violent urgency in France as there is here. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... a rich, idle fellow; De Rochemont, and we want rich, idle fellows to come and look into all this and do something for us. You must let me take you ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... minutes past nine he stopped a car some four miles from Oxford. Twenty minutes later he was robbing a lonely motorist midway between Thame and Aylesbury. Then for forty minutes he appeared to have been idle, his next two exploits taking place within five minutes of each other, just after ten, in the neighbourhood of Amersham. King's Langley was the scene of his next adventure, the time given being about a quarter of an hour before he had overtaken us. In addition to the particulars ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... after is to be happy, and I care very little what form it takes or what kind of happiness mine may be. I've ceased to be particular about the details even—if Billy Lancaster is my happiness I'll devour him and never waste an idle moment in regret. Why should ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator. Lambay Island. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well, let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it smacks of wenching. Come, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... said, "no one must be idle here, even for a moment; you will have riding practice enough hereafter; dismount and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... did the G.C.B. play this trick on him? It happened in this way. Having nothing better to do during Watson's absence and at a critical moment of the War, these idle elderly well-fed lawyers solemnly deliberated upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... we find an eminent man, whose public services were so notorious that it was impossible to avoid rewarding them; but putting aside those who were in a manner forced upon the Sovereign, it would be idle to deny that the remainder and, of course, the overwhelming majority, were marked by a narrowness and illiberality of sentiment, which, more than anything else, brought the whole order into contempt. No great thinkers, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... And this is only 42; the odd numbers are on the other side. I must cross. What a lot of rubbish on the road; and do you think I would let my girl stand out bareheaded like that, gossiping with a lot of idle young chaps?" Thus thinking and moralizing Mrs. Rowles went down the street towards the eastern ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended— That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear; And this weak and idle theme No more yielding but a dream; Gentles, do not reprehend; If you pardon we will mend. And, as I am honest Puck, If we have unearned luck, How to escape the serpent's tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call, So good night unto you all, Give me your ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... us first here, or they may make an effort upon the cattle at the same time that they attack here. They will not begin with the animals. They will find it a very difficult business to break down the fence, which they must do to drive them out; and while they are about it we shall not be idle, depend ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... tea trade not because of necessity, but because he considered it a bad thing for a man to lead an idle life. Nevertheless, the chief object of his existence had always seemed to be the unravelling of mysteries of police and crime. Surely few men, even those professional investigators at Scotland Yard, held such a record ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... Kenyon in this line that he won for himself the title of "The Feeder of Lions." Now, John Kenyon—rich, idle, bookish and generous—saw in the magazines certain fine little poems by one Elizabeth Barrett. He also ascertained that she had published several books. Mr. Kenyon bought one of these volumes and sent it by a messenger with a little note ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... the sitting-room; 'or talking with young ladies in shady bowers, or turning your talents to account in some way? What was a bachelor like you asked here for? Don't you mean to earn your cold chicken and champagne? Were I you, I should be ashamed to be so idle.' ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... by a thousand sleepy citizens, was sent down here to my managing editor, and I was requested to come away. Thus was my Milwaukee career ended, but it ended in a blaze that dazzled the eyes of the old-timers." He cut a scallop. "But papa was not long idle. The solid South wanted him. They knew that papa was the man to quiet a disturbance or compel a drowsy municipality to get up and rub its eyes. Well, I went to Memphis. What was the cause of the great excitement that followed?" He tapped his forehead. "Papa's nut. But ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... the household, 55 to tell me the truth, who is really and truly my father. For Leotychides spoke in his contention with me, saying that thou didst come to Ariston with child by thy former husband; and others besides, reporting that which is doubtless an idle tale, 56 say that thou didst go in to one of the servants, namely the keeper of the asses, and that I am his son. I therefore entreat thee by the gods to tell me the truth; for if thou hast done any of these things which ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business. Out of the way, Commodore! cried one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened to swamp us. Hard down with ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... back into the pit from whence he had been delivered he could tell a very interesting story of what he had experienced, from which it was evident that he had not been an idle observer of what had passed relative to the Peculiar Institution; especially was it very certain that he had never seen anything lovely or of good report belonging to the system. So far as his personal relations were concerned, he acknowledged that a man named Mr. Robert Hollan, had assumed ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... no longer indulge her laziness—no breakfasting in bed, and coming down in curl-papers. The long gossiping visits of her thousand-and-one acquaintances subsided into frigid morning calls, at which the grim phantom of the husband frowned from a corner and suppressed all idle chatter. Sybilla's favourite system of killing time by half-hours in various idle ways, at home and abroad, was terminated at once. She had now to learn how to be a duteous wife, always ready at the beck and call of her husband, and attentive to ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... cannot be. Who hath brought thee such an idle tale? Day and night have I stood here watching for him, but he came not, and much I fear me the ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... worthless, are still, in patches, cultivated to the very top; but for the most part they are clothed in restful green. Overhead, in the summer haze, turkey-buzzards wheel gracefully, occasionally chased by audacious hawks; and in the woods, we hear the warble of song-birds. Shadowy, idle scenes, these rustic reaches of the lower Ohio, through which man may dream in Nature's lap, all regardless of the ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... had heard enough. The flame had been applied to the dry acreage of his too arid and idle existence. He had remained passive too long. It was change that brought chance. And even though that change meant descent, it would, after all, be only the momentary dip that preceded the upward flight again. And as he gazed thoughtfully landward, where Monte Carlo lay vivid ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... of Verney Manor, white or black, felon or indented, need all their eyesight for their work. They have none to waste in idle gazing at their ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... sessions of the Council of Trent the Archbishop of Armagh had taken a leading part. When the Council opened for its final sessions in January 1562 Ireland was represented by O'Herlihy of Ross, McCongail of Raphoe, and O'Harte of Achonry. Nor were these mere idle spectators of the proceedings. They joined in the warm discussions that took place regarding the Sacrifice of the Mass, Communion under both kinds, the source of episcopal jurisdiction and of the episcopal obligation of residence, the erection of seminaries, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... shower Crowding over the withered flower For as if they had done some grievous wrong, The sun, that had nursed them and loved them so long, Grew weary of loving, and, turning back, Hastened away on his southern track; And helplessly hung each shrivelled leaf, Faded away with an idle grief. And the gusts of wind, sad Autumn's sighs, Mournfully swept through their families; Casting away with a helpless moan All that he yet might call his own, As the child, when his bird is gone for ever, Flingeth the cage on the wandering river. And the giant ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... all in vain. At last a small key was found to open the padlock, which put an end to the poor girl's lamentation, and restored peace and tranquillity among all her friends. Her adventure had, however, this good effect, that it cured her, and some of her forward country-women, of this idle ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... kind, or doing some manufacturing work. But so long as a people live unto themselves only, each nation can practically make and use all the machinery needed within its borders, and still not employ all the idle hands; and when the population becomes dense, employment must be sought in making goods to sell beyond the sea. The return comes back, sometimes in money, sometimes in the products of the soil and the mine and the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... might as well have struck a baby! How helpless he lay, with his eyes shut, and his idle hands folded: they had no more work to ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... be remembered that Sir Thomas Underwood had declined to give his late ward any advice at that interview which took place in Southampton Buildings;—or rather that the only advice which he had given to the young man was to cut his throat. The idle word had left no impression on Ralph Newton;—but still it had been spoken, and was remembered by Sir Thomas. When he was left alone after the young man's departure he was very unhappy. It was not ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... study of physic, he inquired, as he says, of Dr. Sydenham, what authors he should read and was directed by Sydenham to "Don Quixote": "which" said he, "is a very good book; I read it still." The perverseness of mankind makes it often mischievous to men of eminence to give way to merriment; the idle and the illiterate will long shelter themselves under this foolish apophthegm. Whether he rested satisfied with this direction, or sought for better, he commenced physician, and obtained high eminence ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... for me to be idle. Think of me lying still all day with nothing to do but read! That's what knocked me out. I wouldn't have minded the pain if I could have gotten about.... ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean: Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... not idle. After subduing the revolt of the mercenaries in 237, she formed the project of obtaining SPAIN as compensation for the loss of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. Hamilcar Barca, by energetic measures, established (236-228) a firm foothold in Southern ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... her, she exclaimed at it and then stopped short. Already she had envisaged the situation. But it was idle, she thought, to ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Charity and Jim as perfect examples of the idle rich, too stupid to work, too pampered to be worthy of sympathy. But whether these two had a right to suffer or not, suffer ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the other, in a tone of disappointment. "Ay, the sturdy despot is to be found in every sea; and hundreds of ships, and ships of size too, are to be seen scorching in the calms of the equator. It was idle to give ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... not to pay, in this world, his father's debt incurred for spirituous liquor,[107] or, for gratification of lust, or in gambling, nor a fine, nor what remains unpaid of a toll; nor [shall he make good] idle gifts.[108] ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... looked more like lurking-places for robbers and dens of wild beasts, than dwellings of men," upheld the traditions of the Columban houses for piety, asceticism, and studious occupations. Thither repaired one Owini, not to live idle, but to labour, and as he was less capable of studying, he applied himself earnestly to manual work, the while better- ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... lugger lay becalmed. While the breeze lasted, the smugglers had been in good humour, but as the watch below turned out, they swore and grumbled at finding their craft lying idle on the smooth surface of the ocean. No sail was in sight, and as long as the calm continued they could not come to harm; but an enemy might bring down a breeze which would enable her to get close up to them before their sails were filled. This was what they dreaded. ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... frightened her, but she was consoled by the thought that it would be a new world to conquer. On her return to the chateau, the daring words uttered by Fanfar dwelt in her memory: "Make yourself beloved." She had entered the booth where the exhibition had taken place, in a moment of idle curiosity, and was surprised at the impression made on her by the place and the people. She was greatly irritated withal. This mountebank, this rope-dancer, had taken a great deal upon himself, certainly. ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... to allow me to lessen them by being a silent Auditor of their Discourses: to suffer me to be at which I could present them no motive, save that their instructions would make them in me a more intelligent Admirer. I added, that I desir'd not to be idle whilst they were imploy'd, but would if they pleas'd, by writing down in short hand what should be delivered, preserve Discourses that I knew would merit to be lasting. At first Carneades and his two friends utterly rejected this motion; and all that my Resoluteness ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... each part, it seems, in particular for himself, and in the name of the whole, took exception to the conduct of the Belly, and were resolved to grant him supplies no longer. They said they thought it very hard that he should lead an idle, good-for-nothing life, spending and squandering away, upon his own ungodly guts, all the fruits of their labor; and that, in short, they were resolved, for the future, to strike off his allowance, and let him shift for himself as well as he could. The Hands protested they would ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... that Satan is so busy with you, but God is greater than Satan. Did you ever hear of Jesus Christ? That he came into the world to save sinners? He does not demand, as a condition, any merit of your own, he only says, 'Come and be healed!' Leave your idle speculations: forget your vain philosophy. Come as you are. Come and be healed. He only requires you to be sensible of your need of him, to give him your heart, to abandon with penitence, every evil practice, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... knew that that must not happen here; for all her self-absorption, she could not visit with such cruelty the one heart that loved her. And thinking of him, she understood that her father's tenderness was not wholly the idle thing that it had been to her at first; her love could never equal his, had never done so in her childhood, but she grew conscious of a soothing power in the gentle and timid devotion with which he tended her. His appearance of an evening was something more than ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... ports should be carrying bully beef, grain, and munitions, are lying idle at a rent per day of many hundreds of thousands of pounds, in the harbors of Moudros, Salonika, Aden, Alexandria, in the Persian Gulf, and scattered along both coasts of Africa. They are guarded by war-ships withdrawn from duty in the Channel and North ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... reached the flat monotony of the dark prairie soil. The leaves of the soft maples were beginning to show over there, near the village church. A dog crossed the street, pausing midway of the crossing to scratch his ear. The cart of the leading grocer was hitched in front of his store, and an idle citizen or two paused near by to exchange a morning greeting. All the little, uneventful day was beginning, as it had begun so many times before here in this little, uneventful town, where the world was finished, never more to ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,'" he mused. "It's good, even for me, to be alive this morning.... These violets, the birds, the fresh smells, the bursting green! Oh, well, regrets are idle. But just to think—I had to go through all I've known—right down to this moment—to realize how ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... that has yet settled upon the earth. In the midst of the most extravagant superstition, there have been individuals who have disowned the popular belief, and considered it a mark of wisdom and true philosophy to discard the idle fancies and absurd schemes of faith that possessed the minds of the great mass of their contemporaries. This was the case with Horace, as appears from lines thus ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... way, listening as the horse listened. It seemed to Helen May as though he had become again earthy and material and modern, with the desert love song but the fading memory of a dream. He listened, and she received the impression that something more than idle curiosity held ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... mean time the lesser craft had been by no means idle. In addition to the regular square and fore and aft sails of a brigantine, she had a mizzen-mast stepped well aft not more than four feet from her taffrail, upon which she had hoisted a spanker and gaff-topsail, thus completing a most graceful and effective rig, and spreading a ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... land-wind and sea-wind with mouths that blow slaughter [Ant. Should gird them to battle against thee again, New-born of the blood of a maiden thy daughter, The rage of their breath shall be vain. For their strength shall be quenched and made idle, And the foam of their mouths find a bridle, And the height of their heads bow down At the foot of the towers of the town. 1130 Be blest and beloved as I love thee Of all that shall draw from thee breath; ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... may fall into the trade, and prepare the same for Turkie: for the more kinds of cloth we can deuise to make, the more ample vent of our commoditie we shall haue, and the more sale of the labour of our poore subiects that els for lacke of labour become idle and burdenous to the common weale, and hurtfull to many: and in England we are in our clothing trade to frame our selues according to the desires of forren nations, be it that they desire thicke or thinne, broad or narrowe, long or ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... been, surrounded by a multitude of projects, and full of ardour to labour in fulfilling them. But Schiller's labours and triumphs were drawing to a close. The invisible Messenger was already near, which overtakes alike the busy and the idle, which arrests man in the midst of his pleasures or his occupations, and changes his ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... eleven, and to all the rest. [24:10]And they were the Magdalene Mary, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and the others with them, who told these things to the apostles. [24:11]And their words appeared to them like idle talk; ...
— The New Testament • Various
... up, for she wanted a box that she could not allow to have opened. The clerk then went up to the Sieur Picard's bedroom, but came back saying that what the marquise demanded was for the time being an impossibility, for the commissary was asleep. She saw that it was idle to insist, and went away, saying that she should send a man the next morning to fetch the box. In the morning the man came, offering fifty Louis to the commissary on behalf of the marquise, if he would ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... tears round the arena, to the accompaniment of the delighted roar of the crowd. This scene is repeated again and again, until perhaps several pairs of banderillas are depending from the shoulders of the maddened animal. The capeadores have not been idle, and the bull, repeatedly charging them and meeting only the empty flapping of the capas—the scarlet cloaks which the bull-fighters charged with this office wield—works himself into a paroxysm of rage, which must be seen to be understood. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... nearly all the differences which divide the two churches, without reckoning the numerous idle tales which they have as well as ourselves, and which are by no means the least cherished ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... from these three sources that I most hope for leading now. Of the new Pope and his influence I know nothing. But in the present situation of the world's affairs it behooves us ill to wait idle until leaders clear the way for us. Every man who realizes the broad conditions of the situation, every one who can talk or write or echo, can do his utmost to spread his realization of the possibilities ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... tell. Why should they bring the laurel-wreath,—why crown the cup with wine? It was not Frenchmen's blood that flow'd so freely on the Rhine,— A stranger band of beggar'd men had done the venturous deed: 115 The glory was to France alone, the danger was their meed. And what cared they for idle thanks from foreign prince and peer? What virtue had such honey'd words the exiled heart to cheer? What matter'd it that men should vaunt and loud and ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... go thither, Illo. I must stay And wait here for the Countess Tertsky. Know 70 That we too are not idle. Break one string, A second ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... walls; Then silence very slowly lifts his head. The starling with impatient screech has flown The chimney, and is watching from the tree. They thought us gone for ever: mouse alone Stops in the middle of the floor to see. Now all you idle things, resume your toil. Hearth, put your ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... surprise I said them all without one mistake. Instead of commendation I received abuse. "By all the powers," exclaimed my pedagogue, "but everything seems to go wrong to-day; my hand has been completely idle; this will never do; didn't you tell me, Mr Keene, that ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... novel sensation the zest that had been wanting to its jaded powers of enjoyment. Nor was it awakened from its illusions by the first eruption from below. In a transport of delirium it threw away, as if they had been idle gems, of use only when cast into the public treasury, the privileges and prerogatives that had formed the basis of the monarchy. Thenceforth the only effort was to secure a tabula rasa on which to rear that new and perfect state of which the model ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... "Let us send a message through all our realm, and go against them, neither let any who is fain of fight sit idle at home; let us send word to the sons of Ring, and to King Hogni, and to Alf the Old, for ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... village, and Sam had planted with potatoes for home consumption. It certainly was annoying, for a ditch had been cut round it, a bank made, and, on the top, a neat little hedge of hawthorn planted; but some idle people were in the habit of jumping across the ditch, trampling down the little hedge, and then making a track right across the corner of the field to the other side, where, in getting out, they trampled the hedge ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... was neither so brave nor so wise as his father; on the contrary, he was a weak prince, fond of idle amusements and worthless favorites. It was lucky for Scotland that such was his disposition. He marched a little way into Scotland with the large army which Edward the First had collected, and went back again without ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... term. I asked Alex to explain the principles of this particular organization and she was very voluble and rather cryptic. It appears to embrace the rights of man, the elevation of the masses, the relations between landlord and tenant, the psychological deterioration of the idle rich—" ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... lesson—never to be deceived by high-sounding names and pompous designations. I have not visited their schools for nothing. The French talk; the English act. A steady plodding Englishman will build an house, while a Frenchman is laying down rules for it. There is more of this idle pedantry in France than in any country on the face of the globe: every thing is done with science, and nothing ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... of opinion as to the necessity and utility of parks, and their ultimate payment for their full cost, the only open question is the time to begin. We say that time is now,—now, while thousands of unwillingly idle hands are waiting for work, and money is cheap; cheap, because labor is unemployed. We say to you, gentlemen of the city government, respectfully but earnestly, Act ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... sewing, and whittling can all go on without disturbing the reading, or a tired mother can lie on the lounge and listen; but if any one must sit idle, reading may grow tedious, though good plays in which each can take his part are generally enjoyed. I was once in a home in Switzerland where the family spent most of the evenings in reading ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... grown at any time that the soil is not occupied by other crops, provided other conditions are suitable. Land which is used for spring and summer crops often lies bare and idle during fall and winter. A hardy green manure crop planted after the summer crop is harvested will make considerable growth during the fall and early spring, and this can be plowed under for the use of the following summer crops. If there is a long interval of time ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... and several letter of Natalie and Theodosia was received yesterday, and will be answered to-morrow or next day. It seems that you write once a fortnight. Two such idle sluts might find half an hour daily to give a sort of journal ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... at poor Bellerophon, and sometimes take him pretty severely to task. They told him that an able-bodied young man like himself ought to have better business than to be wasting his time in such an idle pursuit. They offered to sell him a horse if he wanted one, and when Bellerophon declined the purchase they tried to drive a bargain with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... "Is this the time to speak of corn? Our Manitou has sent this Great Mountain into our country. He has placed him in our hands so that we may strike, so that we may tell the white man with our muskets that our Manitou is stern and just, and that no Iroquois will listen to the idle ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... suggest, in order to mark that due gradation which in every well regulated society must necessarily exist in the scale of rewards to be accorded to such as may be subordinate or refractory,—industrious, or idle; that these latter encouragements should only be extended in this double ratio to those who might quit the establishment with a certificate of good conduct ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... the strength?... And he would have liked to busy himself in the department of writing also,—he knew how to do that beautifully, as you are aware; but his hands shook so, and he could not hold the pen properly.... He was always reproaching himself: 'I'm an idle dog,' he said. 'I have done no one any good, I have helped no one, I have not toiled!' He was very much afflicted over that same.... He used to say, 'Our people toil, but what are we doing?...' Akh, Nikolai Nikolaitch, he was a fine ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... likewise seen in large numbers at Flicoteaux's; his whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture. By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux's you learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the state of the weather and good or bad seasons. He knows when it is a good year for peas or French beans, and the kind ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of that worthless ballast, honour and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Name and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... did not care for idle life among the gods on Mount Olympus. Instead he preferred to spend his time on the earth, helping men to find easier and better ways of living. For the children of earth were not happy as they had been in the golden days when ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... there would be no instruction, no talent, no genius—nothing to admire, nothing to copy, to respect—nothing to rouse emulation, or stimulate to praiseworthy ambition. Why, my dear father, what an idle, unprofitable, weary world would this be, if it were based ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... to the commons, but they must know what liberty they were entitled to; not a liberty for every one to speak what he listeth, or what cometh in his brain to utter; their privilege extended no further than a liberty of "aye" or "no:" that she enjoined the speaker, if he perceived any idle heads so negligent of their own safety as to attempt reforming the church, or innovating in the commonwealth, that he should refuse the bills exhibited for that purpose, till they were examined by such as were fitter to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... heard. He had intended her to hear it. She was certain of that. For immediately afterwards he glanced at her and then moved away, like a man who has carried out an intention and can relax and be idle. He sat down by a table a little way off, and a waiter brought coffee for him ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... the Largo, with much feeling. The windows were open. It was too warm for lamps, and the room was lighted only by the occasional roar of flames, breaking fan-like from the tops of the stacks in the Yards. Suddenly, in the midst of their idle talk, Mrs. Maitland came in; she paused for a moment before the dark oblong of canvas on the wall beside the door. Of course, in the half- light, the little dim Mother of ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... the correct speaker, is always able to command attention and doors are thrown open to him which remain closed to others not equipped with a like facility of expression. The man who can talk well and to the point need never fear to go idle. He is required in nearly every walk of life and field of human endeavor, the world wants him at every turn. Employers are constantly on the lookout for good talkers, those who are able to attract the public and convince ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... we came near Pentecost again on our cruise, we would spend another idle day in the pretty bay. Two months passed and then we kept our word. As we rounded the lofty headland the Correspondent said: "Say, I'm hankering after that baby!" But the Captain at the moment hoarsely cried: "God's love! but where are the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and yet prepared meals in such a way that our large family was always thoroughly satisfied. Sometimes we could get bananas from Mexico, cocoanuts and oranges, but not very often. Christmas eve came at last and such a busy place, no idle hands these days. Brother George and Mr. Lux brought with them two large sacks of the finest English walnuts. They were a windfall to us. We never had seen so many before. We were used to black walnuts, filberts and other nuts at home. This was ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... not frail, dear; but I have got into an idle habit of taking my outings in the carriage; and so ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... passed through Vincennes, the number of the French was reduced to a hundred individuals, most of whom were about to pass over to Louisiana or to Canada. These French settlers were worthy people, but idle and uninstructed: they had contracted many of the habits of savages. The Americans, who were perhaps their inferiors, in a moral point of view, were immeasurably superior to them in intelligence: they were industrious, well informed, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the incessant grinding of quartz mills. Yes, it was decidedly pleasant to have a whole summer—if he wanted it—in which to go where he liked, do what he liked. One might do much worse, he reflected, than find some such spot as this and idle to one's heart's content. There would be trout, as like as not, in that stony brook back there; sunfish, probably, in that lazy stream crossing the open meadow yonder. It would be jolly to try one's ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... days, as in these, idle persons seem to have troubled the Shakers with the question "What would become of the world if all turned Shakers," to which here is a ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... that ever was, he whose book about the English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits, brought to bay by certain great English ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... their being bridled! They never had a bit in their mouths. Before the war they ran wild, and now they ride rough-shod over decorum, decency, and Davis himself. But the dictator endures it like a philosopher. "He lets it pass," said Judge Ould to me, "like the idle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... any woman in the place," retorted Kemp. "There is no peace for a man when a woman is about. But let us have no more of this idle chatter. What's brought you over here? I ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... spring at Bellecour—the spring of 1789, a short three months before the fall of the Bastille came to give the nobles pause, and make them realise that these new philosophies, which so long they have derided, were by no means the idle ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... those last dispatches from Berlin, did not arrive during the battle. He would certainly have been captured by the pandours, and my dispatches lost. My friend, do you not see how Providence marks out for me the path of duty? A king dare not waste a moment in dreams or idle pleasures. I wished to live an hour for myself, when I should have been reading these dispatches. We will go to work; here is the key of the dispatch bag; open it and take ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... before. deleite m. pleasure, delight. delicado, -a delicate, sweet. delicia f. delight. delicioso, -a delicious, delightful. delirante adj. delirious, raving. delirar rave, dote. delirio m. delirium, madness, rapture, rant, idle talk. delito m. crime. demasa f. excess. demasiado, -a too much, too great. demonio m. devil, demon. denso, -a dense, thick. dentro adv. within; —— de prep. within. denuesto m. insult, abuse. derecho ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... shall lead to ruin and repentance. Nor, O King of the age" (added he), "is this story stranger than that of the Cheat and the Merchants." When the King heard these words, he said in himself, "Indeed, had I given ear to the sayings of my courtiers and inclined to their idle prate in the matter of my Minister, I had repented to the utterest of penitence, but Alhamdolillah—laud be to the Lord—who hath disposed me to endurance and long-suffering and hath vouchsafed to me patience!" Then he turned to the Wazir and dismissed him to his ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... worship, according to the institutes of its founders, consists of an appeal to the reason, rather than an attempt on the imagination through the instrumentality of rites and parade. "Salvation is made dependent, not upon the practice of idle ceremonies, the repeating of prayers or of hymns, or invocations to pretended gods, but upon moral qualifications, which constitute individual and social happiness here, and ensure it hereafter."[1] ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... regard for me, I conjure you to tell me all you know upon the subject." "And do you, my good madam, conceive that it would become my sacred calling to speak ill of my neighbour? besides, surely you would not attach any belief to the idle reports spread about the castle by ill-disposed persons?" "All this has nothing to do with my question, my lord," resumed I. "I ask you once again, whether you ever heard the duc de Villeroi assign his passion for one of my women as the reason for his visits to ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... to be informed of so much of the internal police of your State as relates to the laying, assessing, levying, and collecting taxes. I beg leave to assure your Excellency, that I am not prompted either by an idle curiosity, or by any wish to discover what prudence would dictate to conceal. It is necessary that I should be informed of these things, and I take the plain, open, candid method of acquiring information. To palliate or conceal any evils or disorders ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... mouths, it dashes huge waves against the shore, or banks up the flooded streams as they flow seaward, until, on a calm day, a man may drink sweet water a mile out at sea. During this season the people of the coast are mostly idle, though they risk their lives and their boats upon the fishing banks on days when a treacherous calm lures them seaward, and they can rarely be induced to own that the monsoon has in truth broken, until the beaches have been strewn with driftwood from a dozen wrecks. They long for ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... for he had risen early to perform the matin service for three peasant women, two beggars, a cat, and a paralytic nobleman, in the ancient and beautiful church to which he was attached. He had tried to go about his wonted occupations, but he was still sitting idle before his bench, while his servant gossiped from her balcony to the mistress of the next house, across a calle so deep and narrow that it opened like a mountain chasm beneath them. "It were well if the master read his breviary a little more, instead of always ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... ladies, with its idle attendants, was in waiting at a short distance; and the pale face but composed resignation of its mistress, indicated a struggle between ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... Never does a year pass without a certain number of them making off. Yet so gluttonous and idle are my serfs that they are simply bursting with food, whereas I scarcely get enough to eat. I will take any price for them that you may care to offer. Tell your friends about it, and, should they find even a score of the runaways, it will repay them handsomely, seeing ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... name, that of "Silvernail," we decided could only lawfully belong to a princess in a fairy tale. Such childishness as this, I may say, is of the essence of a walking trip, in which, from moment to moment, you take quite infantile interest in all manner of idle observation and quite useless lore. That is a part of the game you are playing, and the main thing is that you are out in the open air, on the open road, with a simple heart and ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... during which, with my lack of technical knowledge, I found myself often with nothing to do. Our camp was bustling with activity, but among the now idle girls and many of the young men, there was an air of gayety. They laughed, shouted, played games amid the rocks from which we had long since melted the snow. Once, in what would have been early evening had ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... it would be in vain, with his inferior force, to oppose the powerful army of the Christian monarch, but to remain idle and see his territories laid waste would ruin him in the estimation of his people. "If we cannot parry," said he, "we can strike; if we cannot keep our own lands from being ravaged, we can ravage the lands of the enemy." He inquired and learnt that most ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... on the grass outside, served as a messroom for his military family; and here for three long months, until near the end of March, he rested from the labour of his campaigns. The Federal troops, on the snow-clad heights across the river, remained idle in their camps, slowly recovering from the effects of their defeat on the fields of Fredericksburg; the pickets had ceased to bicker; the gunboats had disappeared, and "all was quiet on the Rappahannock." Many of the senior officers in the Confederate ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... of English Language and Literature has been founded, and has attracted a fair number of candidates. Naturally I rejoice in this change, knowing from experience the value of these studies; and knowing also from experience, if I may speak boldly, how idle is that dream which flits about in Oxford and whispers that the mastering of Old English, on the basis of Teutonic phonology, and the conquest of the worlds opened by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Swift ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... juncture I strolled carelessly along, pretending not to see any thing in particular; and so, taking up an easy attitude, I waited for the denouement. It was a terrible position too. That child-angel! I would have laid down my life for her, but I had to stand idle, and see her rush to fling her life away. And all because I had not happened to have the mere formality of ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... the ruins were real or not, the moments were evidently too precious to be lost in idle discussion. The great city of the Selenites soon disappeared on the remote horizon, and, what was of far greater importance, the distance of the Projectile from the Moon's disc began to increase so sensibly that the smaller details of the surface were soon lost in a confused ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... not tormented by useless contradiction. One night the servant, from an error in judgment, teazed her with idle expostulations, but she complained of it grievously, and it was corrected. "Pray, pray, do not let her reason with me," was her expression. Death itself is scarcely so dreadful to the enfeebled frame, as the monotonous importunity of ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... Generally idle and depraved; appearing to retain the bad qualities of the slaves, with whom they continue to associate, without acquiring any of the good ones of the whites, from whom (they) continued separated by prejudices against their colour, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... can we expect to unravel the difficulties accumulated by ages of domestication? Who knows for a certainty the true prototype of the goat, the sheep, or the ox? To the unscientific reader such questions might appear idle, as having been settled from time immemorial; yet they have never been finally disposed of. The difficulty, as with the dog, may be connected with modifications of form and colour, resulting from the long-continued interference of man with the breed and habits of animals subjected ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... reconciliation. In a sermon in his church, October 29, 1865, he outlined with a master's hand the principles of reconstruction. The South should be restored at the earliest possible moment to a share in the general government. Idle to ask them to repent of secession; enough if they recognize that it is forever disallowed. The best guarantee for the future is the utter destruction of slavery. Let there be no further humbling: "I think it to be the great need of this ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... a large shaded pink rose in the working, had, contrary to her custom, fallen from idle hands, and instead of following the dart of the infinitesimal needle, Mrs. Jett's eyes were burningly upon Mrs. Peopping, following, with almost lip-reading intensity, that ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... for hire," said Hal, after looking up and down the Escolta. "Let's walk across the bridge over the Pasig. We'll be more likely to find an idle cochero on the other ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... for even so well-tried and whole-hearted a Non-Juror as Thomas Hearne, of Oxford, knew nothing about them, though a great friend of both the new Bishops, until long years had sped. It would be idle at this distance of time, and having regard to the events which have happened since February, 1693, to consider the nice questions how far the Act of Henry VIII. relating to the appointment of suffragans could have any applicability to such consecrations, or what degree of Episcopal ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... matters, Walsh and his friends had not been idle. Preparations for the second fete were commenced, and energetically urged forward. Guided by experience, the work was somewhat less laborious, but the dread of failure made the committee doubly anxious. Just before, there had been great rejoicing in London to celebrate the peace with Russia, and ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... experience: guided by his credulity, he was unable to fall back upon it; he became consequently inexperienced; from thence he gave birth to the most ridiculous opinions, or else adopted all those vague chimeras, all those idle notions offered to him by men whose interest it was to continue him in that lamentable ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... the Blackfoot while he was relating the legend of the Spirit Circle. He listened attentively. He had heard many such myths among his own people, and once they impressed him, but he had come to look upon them as idle tales not worth a thought. Instead of commenting upon the rude beauty of the story that had been told to his friend many years before, he asked the ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... too young to endure it," sobbed the by-product to her of the sketchy face. And that was no idle epigram, either. ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... several journeys to China and Malaca, but finally despatched him to Europe upon like undertakings, where he was well known at the court of Espana and afterwards at that of Roma. The three who were left behind did not remain idle. Father Antonio Sedeno, in addition to his ordinary occupation of preaching—in which he was so effective that he could move stones by his eloquence—in his capacity as superior attended to the temporal affairs of the residence and to the construction of buildings. He was all the more busy ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... emotional effects. Recognizing these limitations upon his work, he often finds it difficult to avoid one or the other of two dangers that beset all efforts to teach a vernacular literature; the student must not think his reading an idle pastime, nor, on the other hand, must he think it a repellent task. In the first case, he is likely never to read anything well; in the second case, the things best worth reading he will probably never read at all. Of the two dangers, the first is the more serious. The student ought early to ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... south latitude. It is about fifteen miles long, and five broad. After we had seen it in all directions, we agreed that it was indeed a pity that it was in the possession of those who were so little able to make a good use of it. I never saw a more idle set of people than the inhabitants who were not compelled to work. All the time we were on shore, they did nothing but walk about or lie down in the shade, wrapped ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... looked him straight in the eyes. "I have seen her. A fair toy vessel to amuse an idle young man's leisure! You are he that in that fool's hole of a Bosekop, is known as the 'rich Englishman,'—an idle trifler with time,—an aimless wanderer from those dull shores where they eat gold till they die of surfeit! I have heard of you,—a mushroom knight, a fungus of nobility,—an ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... and playfellows, this henbane and antimony, the nourishment of my health and vigour—that any one should write of these as pernicious, deadly, and fatal to existence! Is it error or malignity? or but the wanton freak of an idle imagination?" ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Union—nominated an able ticket. The latter party were soon conscious of defeat, and began to hint mysteriously at a power stronger than the ballot-box, that would be invoked in defence of 'Southern rights.' To many, indeed to most persons, this seemed an idle threat. Not so to Frank Blair. He had imbibed from Benton the invincible faith of the latter in the settled purpose of the 'nullifiers' to subvert and destroy the government. And in a private caucus of the leaders of the Union party, on an ever-memorable evening in the month of January, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is glad and merry; Let the requiems rest silent In the lull of deep thanksgiving. For the wrath of heaven is lifted, Lifted from the rescued city. Gone, the sound of rolling death-cart, Hushed, the ringing, tolling belfry, Still, the bier and gloomy shovel, Still, the idle, listless sexton. Other days of anxious watching Followed, one or two years later; Days when fierce, destructive fevers Darkened many homes with mourning.[2] Yet the citizens are happy In this season of glad respite; Now the people ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... somewhere, that as soon as a man has done anything remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from doing it again. He is feasted, feted, caressed; his time is stolen from him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found shattered by his labours. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... But when all idle people shall have visited all the bubbling fountains of Germany, where are they to go next? There are some very nice springs in Iceland not yet patronised; but although the springs there are hot, the Springs, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... had a hare and hound chase yet," remarked Gladys. It was merely an idle suggestion, but the others pounced upon ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... this in their system. These auguries and divinations therefore were the effect and invention of the ignorance, rashness, curiosity, and blind passions of man, who presumed to interrogate God, and to oblige him to give answers upon every idle imagination ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... lake hushed and tranquil, And I sit here with idle hands, And gaze at the frolicking fishes Which glide to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... appreciate good manners will be polite and courteous in the home, and will share cheerfully in all the little duties of the household. Some one has said that idleness is "the chief author of all mischief." And surely any individual who chooses to be idle rather than to be usefully employed, is exceedingly ill-bred. Children should be taught the nobility of labor, and to respect those who faithfully perform the humblest duties of life, just as much as those who accomplish the more ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... with only the slightest labor to occupy her hands and mind, gave her idle time—fertile soil for the raising of a dark crop of morbid thoughts. She brooded much, and, brooding, became restless, unhappy, and she could not conceal it from Bonbright when he came home eagerly for his dinner, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... the earl felt—and it would be almost sacrilegious to intrude upon them, or to venture on any idle speculation concerning them—one thing was clear; in losing Helen, the light of his eyes, the delight of his ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... their frontiers. Yet when the armistice was signed on November 11, the German armies still maintained cohesion, with an unbroken line on foreign soil. Surrender was made inevitable by internal breakdown and revolution, the first open manifestations of which appeared among the sailors of the idle High Seas ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... left was not being idle. For the past week our Artillery in the salient had fired a half-hour bombardment every morning at 2-45, and on the 9th this was repeated as usual. The Boche had become used to it, and retired to his dug-outs, where he was found a few minutes later by the 6th Division, who had relieved the 14th, ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... I went to the closet, and scribbled a little about this idle chit-chat. And she being importunate, I was forced to go to bed; but with some of my clothes on, as the former night; and she let me hold the two keys; for there are two locks, there being a double door; ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... through the garden. But few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... they might eventually get 70 horse power in a boat of that size, because the weight of the motor was not great. With regard to the formation of a film on the surface, no doubt a film of sulphate of lead was formed if the battery stood idle, but it did not considerably reduce its efficiency; as soon as it was broke through by the energy being evolved from it, it would give off its maximum current. They knew by experience that, with properly constructed accumulators, 80 per ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... subjects less agreeable to contemplate. On week-days the village, if we may thus designate the scattered groups of huts and tents, was comparatively quiet, but on Sundays it became a scene of riot and confusion. Not only was it filled with its own idle population of diggers, but miners from all the country round, within a circuit of eight or ten miles, flocked into it for the purpose of buying provisions for the week, as well as for the purpose of gambling and drinking, this ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... thou canst not save thy soul without,' he said, 'thou mightst go on some feast day, when there is such a concourse of folk that thou mightst not be noticed, and come away at once without halting for idle clavers, as they call ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very hard, and the electric light was on, Madame came into the workroom with another person. And this person was a young man with a grey, thin face, rather tall and stooping, with a hesitating manner, and a general air of weakness. He followed Madame Gala round the room in an idle way, nodding to several of the girls; and Sally thought he had a very attractive smile. She found him looking at herself with a pair of large soft brown eyes, like chocolate which has been in a warm place. It was a rather ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... just when all on board—sick of the calm, the listless monotonous roll of the ship, the flapping of the idle sails against the masts, and the sight of the same cloudless sky and endless expanse of tumid sea, with surface unbroken by the tiniest ripple, save when a dolphin leaped out of the water or a fairy nautilus glided by ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... guests, who with great relish were gorging themselves with pieces as big as their fists. The course of flesh being over, the goatherds spread on the skins a great number of parched acorns and half a cheese, harder than if it had been made of mortar. The horn in the meantime was not idle, but came full from the wineskins and returned empty, as though it had been a ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... time she was silent. Her eyes ranged the green circuit of the hollow—the water, the reeds, the rock, and that idle god among his handmaidens. Her attitude, her look expressed a moral agony, how strangely out of place amid this setting! Through her—innocent, unconscious though she were—the young helpless wife had come to grief—a soul had been risked—perhaps lost. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of her best boys; and many an eye gazed wistfully at his anchor buttons and dirk and smiling jovial countenance, as he laughed and chatted with wonderful ease with old Rowley, as if he was not a bit afraid of him; and some idle fellows envied him his emancipation from Virgil and Horace, and other classical authors, for whom they had so little affection themselves. Then he had to jump up and hurry off to catch the coach, in order to reach the mail, which was to carry him down that night to Northamptonshire. ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... children, who slowly grub beneath a burning sun through the broad grain fields. Irrigating streams will be made to flow by their own gravitation, while the wooden bucket and well-sweep will become idle and useless. Still, we are not among those who see only a bright side for the future of the republic, nor do we believe so confidently as some writers in her great natural resources. They are abundant, but not so very exceptional as enthusiasts ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... "You are very idle, Cashel; I am sure of that. It is too provoking to throw away so much money every year for nothing. Besides, you must soon be thinking of ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Sir Francis, who was in a great passion. "Why are you, my head gardener, not protecting my place with the idle scoundrels I pay? Here am I and my sons obliged to turn out of an evening to keep thieves from ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... remember the name of but one poet whose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of his own, though he may have chosen to annex—"annex the wise it call"; convey is obsolete—to annex whole phrases or whole verses at need, for the use or the ease of an idle minute; and this name of course is Marlowe's. So starting, Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesser poets born) some perceptible notes in his yet half boyish voice that were not borrowed; and ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
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