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More "Impish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cupid himself, he could not have hit upon a more impish arrangement than that. To place a girl like Beatrice beside a fellow like Keith—a fellow who is tall, and browned, and extremely good-looking, and who has hazel eyes with a laugh in them always—a fellow, moreover, who is very much in love and very much in earnest ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... had now filled from the stage and the tiring-rooms; and all gathered gleefully about to see what next the impish Nell would do, for avenged she would be they all knew, though the course of ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... a big sting-ray so full of his impish darts that it resembled an animated pincushion of monstrous proportions. It, too, realised the futility of kicking against so many pricks. On the other hand, Tom, with his heavy shaft and barbed point, relied on a single weapon. It seldom failed, for his ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of these were women, who mocked at and reviled the unfortunate Englishman, screaming like so many furies, spitting at him, and gloating over his miserable plight, as is the custom of a certain grade of womankind all over the world. Inspired by the example of their elders, a swarm of impish children added their shrill cries to the tumult, let fly an occasional blunt-headed arrow at the helpless captive, or darted between the legs of the guards in their efforts to strike him. Finally the exasperated warriors ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... have been happy for hours together watching the great stones grind, or the corn poured by golden showers into the hopper on its way to the stones below. Many a time had he crept up and hidden himself behind a sack; but George seemed to have an impish ingenuity in discovering his hiding-places, and would drive him out as a dog worries a cat, crying, "Come out, thee little varment! Master Lake he don't allow ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wrappers of pink blotting-paper. Much the most capable helpers whom the lonely printer had in his first years were two one-time compositors who had turned sailors and who, tiring of foc'sle life under Yankee captains, made up their minds to resume the stick and apron in the cannibal islands. Impish Maori boys made not inappropriate "devils." With such assistants Colenso, working on, had by New Year's Day, 1838, completed the New Testament and was distributing bound copies to the eager Maoris, who sent messengers for them from far and near. Pigs, potatoes, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... "Boloo!" they cried. "Baayah. Boloo!" They were the children of the men folk, the smoke of whose encampment rose from the knoll at the river's bend. Wild-eyed youngsters they were, with matted hair and little broad-nosed impish faces, covered (as some children are covered even nowadays) with a delicate down of hair. They were narrow in the loins and long in the arms. And their ears had no lobes, and had little pointed tips, a thing that still, in rare instances, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... hours of afternoon when the children are once more upon the street, you regret your illness. Here they come trooping by threes and fours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One would think that they were in fear lest some impish fact might get outside the covers to spoil the afternoon. Until the morrow let two and two think themselves five at least! And let Ohio be bounded as it will! Some few children skip ropes, or step carefully across the cracks of the sidewalk for fear they spoil their suppers. Ah!—a bat goes by—a ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... had dropped in upon. The water flew in all directions, and Migwan fled over the rocks to avoid being drenched. Medmangi and Nyoda also came up thirsting for vengeance, but Sahwah escaped by swimming under water around the dock and clambering out on the rocks. She made an impish grimace at Migwan, who was standing on the rock where she came up. Migwan leaned over and put a streak of soap on her face, Sahwah promptly caught Migwan by the feet and pulled her off the rock into the water. Struggling, they ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta's corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh, old boy? Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too? Come along and let us make a night of it. To the Devil with sleep. We'll go together down to the cellar and find a bottle of Pommery, and we will drink to Life and Youth and Love ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Mace. Try, for the next half hour, to keep as cool as an iceberg. Trust the treatment of the impish plebe to us. Greg, old fellow, will you be the one to go down and tell Mr. Briggs that his presence in this ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... that was a fortune to such a man, I persuaded him. Anne helped. She would have done anything for me. And she knew the Dorans. She knew Jack could never feel the same to me, as the mother of that impish girl. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... avowed with a chuckle, was to convey fear to the beholder of his work. It was an impish trick, and it brought him unwittingly into ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... much less than old brocade and lighted wax candles, which inspired him with a solemnity that widened his eyes and narrowed his features. He looked on a new, and never-before-imagined, life. And he was grave to excess, though, later, I found plenty of the London child's impish ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... moment several impish figures sprang out of the dense brush and fell upon him with vicious blows, as though ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... I watched them fall with the utmost care and was so sure of them that I felt that I could walk blindfold and pick them up. But when I came to the spot the ball was not there. This experience became so common that at last the conclusion forced itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it, it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... to set up the button as rival to the safety pin in service to humanity. But our homage bends toward the former. Not only was it our shield and buckler when we were too puny and impish to help ourselves, but it is also (now we are parent) symbol of many a hard-fought field, where we have campaigned all over the white counterpane of a large bed to establish an urchin in his proper gear, while he kicked and scrambled, witless of our dismay. It is fortunate, pardee, that human memory ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... her there and went out. It was cold and still; the stars glittered, the earth was white. He walked far on the frozen snow, with a feeling as hard and cold as the bitter air. Some impish sprite seemed to mock him with the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... "I may take them indeed; but how believe they have been given me?" quoth he to the Warden with a tilt of one eyebrow. Whereat the Warden, aghast, wrote him off as a youth unreasonable, impracticable, and impish. Many others had the same opinion of Harry Boyce before the world was done with him. Few of them saw in his antics the uncertain spasms of too tender a conscience. But you ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... alternative was awful enough to quiet even the impish Hughie, who knew the tone carried no idle threat, and who loved a spelling-match with all the ardor of ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... capybara. It fears the peccari. The night air is alive with bats of many species, the most prominent one being the Dysopes perotis, which measures two feet from tip to tip of the wings. If these Cheiropters are as impish as they look, and as blood-thirsty as some travelers report, it is singular that Bates and Waterton, though residing for years in the country, and ourselves, though sleeping for months unprotected, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... voice. An Indian woman, not yet of middle age but already inclining to the stoutness which overtakes women of her race early in life, appeared in the doorway. She spoke sharply to the boy in the deep, throaty language of her people. The boy, with a last impish grin, gave the man's leg a final shake and scuttled indoors. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... stepmother completely, but tormented his sister Maud in a thousand impish ways. He disarranged her neatly combed hair. He threw mud on her dress and put carriage grease on her white stockings on picnic day. He called her "chiny-thing," in allusion to her pretty round cheeks and clear complexion, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... a perfect army of fairies which overran the whole land, and the myths concerning which would have filled volumes could they ever have been gathered. The gnome-like spirits of the mountains had peaked heads, and were of a vicious, impish disposition, but were powerless to injure any one who carried a ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... were my people! all I had, I gave— They snatched it thankless (was it not their own? Wrung from their veins, returning all too late?); Or in the new delight of rare possession, Forgot the giver; one did sit apart, And shivered on a stone; beneath her rags Nestled two impish, fleshless, leering boys, Grown old before their youth; they cried for bread— She chid them down, and hid her face and wept; I had given all—I took my cloak, my shoes (What could I else? 'Twas but a moment's want Which she had borne, and borne, day after day), And ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... no need to experiment with any new tricks," replied Mrs. Fabian, warningly. "There are enough sighing young men already, waiting to break their hearts and necks, for a mere glance from those impish ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... sore; until his eyes were red with the tears he had shed; until he was so weak he staggered when he first crawled out from under the plane and stood up. But it did him good, for all that, to have laughed so hard and so long over an impish trick that came from ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... herself presently, for she did not have to appear until the second act, and as she sat there, reading over her part, the call boy put in his head with an impish grin. ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... thoroughly enjoy the life amid the sylvan scenes about them. It is a curious sight to see these big anthropoids, almost as large as human beings, swing themselves deftly up among the festooned creepers at my approach—to see their queer, impish black faces peering cautiously out of their hiding-place, and to hear their peculiar squeak of surprise and apprehension as they note the strange character of my conveyance. Sometimes a gang of them will lope ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... their treasuries. Now, as we passed out, I saw others in a throng enter the Sarrasin's presence chamber, but I could scarce see them clearly, and beside this throng of visitors leapt, I thought, that very impish ugly devil, the ape that men called the familiar of the Lord of Rouen, that he named Folly, the which I had set eyes on at the house at Blanchelande. Yea, it ran chattering with many a mow and grimace, ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar
... blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies that "whickered" at you as you passed;—the place teemed with beliefs in them still, and they formed an impish ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... from which a pair of good-humoured eyes peered out at her, through the shining glasses of his copper-rimmed spectacles, like two little lights in the dark. She had gone down those three steps, looking round shyly, afraid of getting dirty; had explained her business to that impish little chap; and had then hastily fled from that hell. Now it seemed to her that those two eyes had looked at her so kindly; and she wondered how any one could live in such a hole and be a Christian creature ... and yet that smith looked as if he ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... ground floor to the upper story, visible above the wide staircase. After four years of legal tenebration it was obvious that the ambassador's intention was to celebrate the Armistice as well as the visit of his King to Paris with an almost impish demonstration of the recaptured right to extravagance, obliterate the dry economical past. The ambassador's country might be intolerably poor after the war, but like many other prudent nobles he had invested money in North and South America, and was able to entertain his ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... completely, but tormented his sister Maud in a thousand impish ways. He disarranged her neatly combed hair. He threw mud on her dress and put carriage grease on her white stockings on picnic day. He called her "chiny-thing," in allusion to her pretty round cheeks and clear complexion, and yet he loved her and would instantly fight for her, and no one else ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... up an impish face at her as she retreated. Then he entered the church himself to inspect progress, returning immediately to take up his position of sentry again. About noon Anderson passed on his way to ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ha!" laughed the impish little fellow, beginning to caper about with the sponge. "You touch me again and I'll get Belton to give you your gruel. You nasty great coward, you've got ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... not until he went to bed and lay staring into the darkness that the mental tumult subsided and the moral tumult began. The questions that he had resolutely kept in abeyance all evening began to dance in impish insistence before him. What right had he to take Shields's place, when he had said exactly the things that Shields had been fired for saying? Did he want to go the way Shields had gone, compromising with his conscience in order to keep his job, ashamed ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... account of their ways, innocent, crafty, angelic, impish, witching and impulsive; also a partial record of their actions during ten ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... serious look of high purpose that marked his face in repose. It was as though Puck had turned poet and then had turned preacher. One looked at the fleshy lower lip and the jutting ears, and thought of a careless, impish creature; one looked at the shapely, pointing nose and the kindly, unflinching eyes, and thought of a man reckless of himself in the pursuit of some fine purpose. One saw immediately that he was a man who could ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... in an entirely opposite direction to Mo?" I argued, seeing that a crowd of grinning impish-looking carriers had gathered around us, enjoying ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... one of those faces in which the angles of the eyes and eyebrows, of the nostrils, mouth, and sharply-defined jaw, all tend upward—showed his small regular teeth in an impish but not ill-natured grin, as he let go Tessa's hands, and stretched out his own backward, shrugging his shoulders, and bending them forward a little in a half-apologetic, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... it that he could not for a moment get Mrs. Arlington out of his mind. More than once, stealing a covert glance across the table, it seemed to him that Malvina was regarding him with a mocking smile. Some impish spirit it must have been that had prompted him. For thousands of years Malvina had led—at all events so far as was known—a reformed and blameless existence; had subdued and put behind her that fatal passion of hers ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... little rooms at the back of Frau Erlin's house, and one of them, arranged as a parlour, was comfortable enough for him to invite people to sit in. After supper, urged perhaps by the impish humour which was the despair of his friends in Cambridge, Mass., he often asked Philip and Hayward to come in for a chat. He received them with elaborate courtesy and insisted on their sitting in the only two comfortable chairs in the room. Though he did not drink himself, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... crevice, burying him to the eyes in a snow drift, throwing him on jagged boulders, or lacerating him on sharp lava jaws. But he held fast to his hiaqua. The blackness grew ever deeper and more crowded with perdition; the din more impish, demoniac, and devilish; the laughter more appalling; and the miser more and more exhausted with vain buffeting. He at last thought to propitiate exasperated Tamanous, and threw away a string of hiaqua. But the storm was renewed blacker, louder, crueler ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... the quaint friendship between our hard-worked, bluff, knightly-hearted practitioner, and the impish and lovable little store-girl. Also another of the innumerable tilts between him and ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... have been such a one when she was eighteen? No, in spite of the haunting, almost impish likeness, I'm sure she cannot. But I think Somerled wonders, and that now and then the relationship and the resemblance creep between him and his instinctive perception of ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... busily engaged in tearing down the larger trees. One of the females had a young one following her. I had an excellent opportunity of watching the movements of the impish-looking band. The shaggy hides, the protuberant abdomens, the hideous features of these strange creatures, whose forms so nearly resemble man, made up a picture like a vision in some morbid dream. In destroying a tree, they ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... quantity thereof hath been blown into their eyes." This fungus has been called Molly Puff, from its resemblance to a powder puff; also Devil's Snuff Box, Fuss Balls, and Puck Fists (from feist, crepitus ani, and Puck, the impish king of the fairies). In Scotland the Puff Ball is the blind man's e'en, because it has been believed that its dust will cause blindness; and in Wales it ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... for a few days she must trump up some explanation of his absence; but her mind refused to work, and the only thing she could think of was to take Strefford into her confidence. She knew that he could be trusted in a real difficulty; his impish malice transformed itself into a resourceful ingenuity when his friends ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... the lonely printer had in his first years were two one-time compositors who had turned sailors and who, tiring of foc'sle life under Yankee captains, made up their minds to resume the stick and apron in the cannibal islands. Impish Maori boys made not inappropriate "devils." With such assistants Colenso, working on, had by New Year's Day, 1838, completed the New Testament and was distributing bound copies to the eager Maoris, who sent messengers for them from far and near. Pigs, potatoes, flax were offered for ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... of the affair was not brought before the Court. But perhaps it was suppressed out of delicacy for Fionn, for if Goll could be accused of ostentation, Fionn was open to the uglier charge of jealousy. It was, nevertheless, Goll's forward and impish temper which commenced the brawl, and the verdict of time must be to exonerate Fionn and to let the blame go ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... impish frolic gives a new turn of saucy gait. In the jovial answer, chorussed in simple song, seems a revel of all the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... Merton if he had been willing to take Holy Orders, "I may take them indeed; but how believe they have been given me?" quoth he to the Warden with a tilt of one eyebrow. Whereat the Warden, aghast, wrote him off as a youth unreasonable, impracticable, and impish. Many others had the same opinion of Harry Boyce before the world was done with him. Few of them saw in his antics the uncertain spasms of too tender a conscience. ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... necklace around her lovely throat. She was dressing for dinner, really dressing. An impish mood filled her with the irrepressible desire to shine in all her splendor to-night. Covertly she would watch the eyes of mediocrity widen. Hitherto they had seen her in the simple white of travel. To-night they should behold the woman who ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... if to present his misery in embodied form, he produced a note-book and tried to concentrate his attention upon the items therein recorded. Line after line of wavering figures danced in impish glee before him, defying inspection. But at the foot of the column, like soldiers waiting to shoot a prisoner, stood four formidable units unquestionably ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... Lou Lacey seemed in no momentary need of sympathetic understanding. She was pursuing a hapless frog with well-directed shots of small pebbles, and there was an impish grin upon ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... the peasant sought the advice of his neighbours, who suggested that he should take it on a pilgrimage to a neighbouring shrine of the Mother of God. While he was crossing a brook on the way an impish voice from under the water called out to the infant, whom he was carrying in a basket. The brat answered from within the basket, "Ho, ho!" and the peasant was unspeakably shocked. When the voice from the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she asked with ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... before that he hadn't turned up. This was a bit disconcerting. I secretly thought him the most dangerous competitor. He has a quiet, impish twinkle in his eye, and an unobtrusive way of getting what he wants. However, the others scoffed at ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... but already inclining to the stoutness which overtakes women of her race early in life, appeared in the doorway. She spoke sharply to the boy in the deep, throaty language of her people. The boy, with a last impish grin, gave the man's leg a final shake and scuttled indoors. Carr ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... disputants with evident interest. To the left a large space was devoted to three or four bulky casks, and here an aproned drawer sat astride of a rush-bottomed chair, grinning delightedly and exchanging nods and winks from time to time with an impish, undersized lad who lay on his stomach on a wine-butt with his head craning ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... antagonistic to Christianity. Before that holy rite was performed, the child lay exposed to all their machinations. Baptism was the armour of the infant against the assaults of Satan and his angels, against the cunning of the wanderers from elfin-land, the fairy-sprites, with their changelings and their impish tricks. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... reality a sob, Loustalot abandoned his primal impulse to hurl himself upon Farrel and attempt to throttle; instead, he ran back to the customers' desk and started scribbling another check. Thereupon, the impish Farrel removed the ink, and when Loustalot moved to another ink-well, Farrel's hand closed over that. Helpless and desperate, Loustalot suddenly began to weep; uttering peculiar mewing cries, he clutched at Farrel with the fury of a gorilla. Don Mike merely dodged round the desk, and continued ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... also a certain lightheartedness, eminently Gallic, which forms a leading trait in my character, and leads me to throw myself into new circumstances with the spirit of a schoolboy. It is possible that I sometimes allow this impish humour to carry me further than good taste approves: and I was certainly punished ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a chuckle, was to convey fear to the beholder of his work. It was an impish trick, and it brought him unwittingly into peril of ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... writing!" Winsome said at once. Ralph had the same thought. So in a few moments they traced the whole plot to its origin. It was a fit product of the impish brain of Jess Kissock. Jess had sent the false note of appointment to Ralph by Andra, knowing that he would be so exalted with the contents that he would never doubt its accuracy. Then she had despatched Jock Gordon ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... own clear judgment. It was the world-old battle of sex, of woman against woman for the winning of the man to do her will. Margaret, using all the charm of her lovely personality to uphold standards of right, truth, purity, high living, and earnest thinking; Rosa striving with her impish beauty to lure them into any mischief so it foiled the other's purposes. And one day Margaret faced the girl alone, looking steadily into her eyes with sad, searching gaze, and almost a yearning to try to lead the pretty ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... almost roguish, his lips parted in an alert smile, his blue eyes sparkling. He seemed to enjoy the game in which he was engaged, to be brimming over with self- confidence, to anticipate success, to relish his foretaste of combat with a sort of impish delight. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... was over, the colts, startled into flight by some impish spirit amongst them, galloped and frisked away over the green turf, until, curious again, they circled back, halted at gaze, and then, led by one particularly saucy chestnut filly, drew up in half a circle before the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... grim sort of fellow, black from his trade, with big rollicking eyes. At times he was not easy to please, but if he took a liking, he was for joking at once. He approved of Parpon, and never lost a chance of sharpening his humour on the dwarf's impish whetstone of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... flames of pauseless industries are here and there marked on the distance. Vast factories stand close to the track, and reaching chimneys emit roseate flames. At last one may see upon a wall the strong reflection from furnaces, and against it the impish and inky figures of workingmen. A long, prison- like row of tenements, not at all resembling London, but in one way resembling New York, appeared to the left, and then sank out of sight like ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... the bracken, singing softly to herself, with a wreath of rice lilies on her hair as if she were some wild divinity of the shadowy places, was latest of all. Anne could run like a deer, however; run she did with the impish result that she overtook the boys at the door and was swept into the schoolhouse among them just as Mr. Phillips was in the act ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... laughed until his sides were sore; until his eyes were red with the tears he had shed; until he was so weak he staggered when he first crawled out from under the plane and stood up. But it did him good, for all that, to have laughed so hard and so long over an impish trick that came from the boy ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... with shouts of laughter by the impish creatures and one seized the Scarecrow's arm and was astonished to find the straw man whirl around so easily. So the Tottenhot raised the Scarecrow high in the air and tossed him over the heads of the crowd. Some one caught him and tossed him back, and so with ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Blackburd, bo'!' cried a dozen voices to an impish, dark-eyed gipsy boy, of some thirteen ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... "You are positively impish in your mood to-day!" exclaimed Lady Engleton. "What should we do without our Great Majority, as you call it? It is absolutely necessary to put some curb on the wild impulses of pure reason"—a sentiment that Hadria greeted with chuckles ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... an impish grin. "I reckon me aunt would say some of yer buttons was missin'. Youse can't be right in the upper story," and she pointed to her own head ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... The bishops may have been good shepherds of their flocks, but the primary qualification for the office was, I imagine, the gift of aggressive political leadership. The Turkish government now favored one nationality and now another as the interests of the moment seemed to suggest. With an impish delight in playing off Slav against Greek and Servian against Bulgarian, its action on applications for bishoprics was generally taken with a view to embarrassing the rival Christian nationalities. And it could when necessary keep the propagandists ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... upon Poe's limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination fled from the daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest, man going forth to his toil and returning to his hearthstone, the America that ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... said, rather loftily. He did not want to hear any more. The conversation had become displeasing to him, though he could have given no reason for his displeasure. But Poppy suddenly turned mischievous and naughty. She patted her hands gently together between her knees and swayed with rather impish merriment. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... could talk, if she wanted to, for she certainly hears quick enough. She's real impish, witch-like, and she fair gives me the creeps," complained Norah to a stable lad early on that Sunday morning. "And I don't half like for Miss Dolly to 'point me special nurse to the creatur'. I'd rather by far be left to me bedmakin' an' dustin'. She may be one of them 'little people' lives ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... song Will Shakespeare sang, The music that through Sherwood rang And Arden and that forest glade Where Hermie and Lysander strayed, And Puck cried out with impish glee, Lord, what fools these mortals be! Though the masquerade was mute Of Quince and Snout and Snug and Flute, And Bottom with his donkey's head Decked with roses, white and red, Though the fairies had forsaken Sherwood now and faintly shaken The forest-scents from off ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... him. She smiled, an impish, naughty little smile, and then Sunny Boy knew he had guessed right. Jessie had unscrewed the lead ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... him; and from being his good friend, with established intimacies, she had turned before his very eyes into an alien, almost an enemy, more beautiful than ever, to be true, but perverse, mocking, impish. She flouted him for his youth, his bluntness, his guileless transparency. But hardest of all to bear was the delicate derision with which she treated his awkward attempts to express his passion for her, to speak of the fever which had ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... like the impish devils that Michael Angelo sculptured, putting out their tongues in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... "How dare you, sir?" and gave him a shake and blow. Robin stood with a sullen look on his face, and hands in his pockets, and his brothers followed suit. Armine hid his face in his mother's dress, and burst out crying; but Jock stepped forth and, with that impish look of fearlessness, said, "I did it, Uncle Robert! I wanted to make Aunt Ellen laugh. Did she laugh, mother?" he asked in so comical and innocent a manner that, in spite of her full consciousness of the heinousness of the offence, and its general ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... into the world with him,"—that is, "reverence"—reverence for our great past as well as, I hope, a due estimation of the vigorous activity of the present. So our sweet-natured muse smiles benignly upon the impish gambols of the "new boy" who has the supreme advantage of not having been to school, for any appreciable length of time at least, and who seems to derive considerable satisfaction from his endeavors to improve the education of those who have never ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... and burst aside the hanging tapestry. The light of the lamp in the circular room poured in through the gap. The creature in the chair checked his furious wheels, and looked back over his shoulder with an impish ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... thrown into utmost prominence. But it is better not to do so. Panurge has some Yahooish characteristics, but he is not a Yahoo—in fact, there is no misanthropy in Rabelais.[104] He is not merely impish (as in his vengeance on the lady of Paris), but something worse than impish (as in that on Dindenault); and yet one cannot call him diabolic, because he is so intensely human. It is customary, and fairly correct, to describe his ethos ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... began its circling motions, whipping the snow into the traveller's face, blinding and choking him, lashing him mercilessly and with a sudden impish delight, as if all the evil spirits of the air ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... through a rift in the trees. He told his Houssa to wait where he was in charge of the two guns and birds, and started off with his net in pursuit of the butterfly. The creature fluttered away with Frank in full pursuit. Hither and thither it flitted, seemingly taking an impish delight in tantalizing Frank, settling on a spot where a gleam of sunlight streamed upon the bark of a tree, till Frank had stolen up within a couple of paces of it, and then darting away again at a pace which defied ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... that precedes the dawn was blowing, a freakish and impish wind though not a vicious one. One might imagine it animated by those sportive and capricious nature-spirits an old Father of the church used to call the monkeys of God. Every now and then a great deluge of piled-up clouds broke into tossing billows and went rolling and tumbling across ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... forbidden to mention the wonderful book at this stage of its development? Though even if it were," she added, with a rather impish laugh, looking down at and fingering the little bunch of trinkets, attached to a long gold chain, which rested in her lap—"Carteret would hardly succeed in holding his peace. Speak of everything, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... crescent-shaped silver ear-rings studded with coral and turquoise; a necklace of the same barbaric magnificence was about his neck, and his arms were covered with bracelets. His deep-set eyes, his flat nose, his mouth set in a thousand fine wrinkles, the whole aspect of him, breathed a sly and impish drollery. He glanced from Alicia to me with the smiling malice of a jinnee delighted to mystify mortals. Then with a rapid movement he shifted the umbrella he carried over a large linen-covered tray, eased the latter upon the ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... his power be on the water, and no water will drown that ere imp, so it's no use trying no more in that way, for he be a sea-devil. But I thinks this: he goes on shore and he comes back with one of his impish eyes knocked out clean by somebody or another somehow or another, and, therefore, I argues that he have no power on shore not by no means; for if you can knock his eye out, you can knock his soul out of his body, by only knocking a little more ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Alston Choate, though she did not take his outstretched hand. He was receiving such professional insult, Anne felt, from one of her kin that she could scarcely expect from him the further grace of shaking hands with her. Lydia, looking at her, saw with an impish glee that Anne, the irreproachable, was angry. There was the spark in her eye, decision in the gesture with which she made ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... she turned to me with a twinkle in her eye that was hardly less than impish. Indeed, I may say that she flew at me much like an angry wasp when a chance of your walking-stick ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... were in such a rush to catch trains for their Main Line suburbs that they seldom remained long enough to give conductor and orchestra a well-deserved ovation. So nobody ever quite knew whether the dead-pan Stoky was in earnest or moved by an impish sense of humor when, following the usual thin smattering ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... "Ave!" hail'd the lady to the place, The impish band, each with his hand conceal'd his ugly face, And Satan stared as though ensnared, but speedily regain'd His wonted air of confidence, and still his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... still sat huddled up on the foot of the bed, watching her mother's face intently. Naomi appeared to sleep. The candle burned long, and the wick was crowned by a little cap of fiery red that seemed to watch Eunice like some impish goblin. The wavering light cast grotesque shadows of Sarah Spencer's head on the wall. The thin curtains at the window wavered to and fro, as if ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to exercise her impish arts of tantalisation and her wiles of fascination on Don Carlos during the remainder of her stay at Auchinleven. Sometimes she would seem, metaphorically, to throw herself at his head and appear to be eager to surrender herself, at other times she would completely ignore him, ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... the place with something of sphinxlike mystery. The very faces of the gargoyles, impenetrable and calm, or grinningly grotesque, gave the fancy visible outward expression. One monster in particular, with twisted horns and impish tongue lolling forth between wide, inhuman teeth, seemed to look upon him with peculiar and malicious amusement. He experienced the spiritual depression which sometimes seems to emanate from inanimate things, that mood of self-distrust, that assurance of being unwelcome, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Creole. "We combad the fiah fiend. You fine that building ve'y pitto'esque, Mistoo Itchlin?" He jerked his thumb toward the prison, that was still pouring forth its clouds of impish wings. "Yes? 'Tis the same with me. But I tell you one thing, Mistoo Itchlin, I assu' you, and you will believe me, I would 'atheh be lock' outside of that building than to be lock' inside of the same. 'Cause—you ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... vilification which was poured on Luther and his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous. It was declared that his father was not his mother's husband, but an impish incubus, who had deluded her; that, after ten years' struggling with his conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the immortality of the soul; that he had composed hymns in honor of drunkenness, a vice to which he ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the love of this unknown woman. It had seemed, in Paris, an insolently boyishly possible, plausible adventure; but now, in his new knowledge and in this distant, lonely place, his enterprise, that, after all, was little more than an impish vision, seemed no other than a tragi-comical impertinence. All that he had known of Gabrielle de Caylus was that she was reported fair, and that she was loved by his enemy. All that he knew of her now was that she was his enemy's wife, that she had a gracious voice, and that she loved ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... amazement, and a scream almost rose to her lips, when she entered and saw, curled up snugly in Jane's bed, no less a person than Irene Ashleigh. Irene's exceedingly bright face peeped up above the clothes. She gave a low, impish ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... his imagination which is usually exercised over those who behold Chance presented to them with spectacular piquancy without advancing far enough in its acquaintance to suffer from its ghastly reprisals and impish tricks. He beheld a hundred diametrically opposed wishes issuing from the murky intelligences around a table, and spreading down across each other upon the figured diagram in their midst, each to its own number. It was a network of hopes; which at the announcement, 'Sept, Rouge, Impair, et Manque,' ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the sense of dull despair and unwarranted disaster which hung over the place. It was as though impish and pagan forces, or malign ones outside life, had committed a crime of the ugliest character. On Monday, the day he saw me, he was well. On Tuesday morning he had a slight cold but insisted on running out somewhere ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... prophetess of English legend, whose preternatural knowledge revealed in her prophecies, published after her death, was ascribed to an alliance with the devil, by whom it was said she became the mother of an ugly impish child. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... like it. The lady smiled in a decidedly disagreeable manner. I am not timid, but I would rather write a vaudeville in three acts than to be obliged to make a declaration to her if she had that impish smile on her lips. She has a way of protruding her under lip-ugh! do you know you are terribly slender? Will you let me cut the band of your trousers? I never could dance with my stomach compressed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... breathlessly: "There, Doctor, I shall leave you with royalty; do not let your republican ignorance forget her proper title. Mr. Arnold, Mrs. Merrill is beckoning to us; will you come?" and with a naive, superbly impish look at Ruth, she drew Arnold away before ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... and again their lives were threatened. Often after tramping twenty miles through the sleet-soaked, snow-drifted spring forests, arriving at an Indian village foredone and exhausted, the Jesuit was met with no better welcome than a wigwam flap closed against his entrance, or a rabble of impish children hooting and jeering him as he sought ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the stump, and capered foolishly. He looked with ape-like curiosity at Heeley's horse, then made an impish jump at the animal, grinning and growling savagely. The horse threw up his head, snorted in terror, and pulled back, dragging Heeley with him, broke free, and bolted into the night. Cursing wildly, Heeley ran for his revolver. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... amid the sylvan scenes about them. It is a curious sight to see these big anthropoids, almost as large as human beings, swing themselves deftly up among the festooned creepers at my approach—to see their queer, impish black faces peering cautiously out of their hiding-place, and to hear their peculiar squeak of surprise and apprehension as they note the strange character of my conveyance. Sometimes a gang of them will lope awkwardly along ahead of the bicycle, looking every inch ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... the boy gleefully. "Losh! but it was fun!" His blue eyes danced with impish delight; a noiseless laugh showed all his strong white teeth. "We went straight to the spot where you and Mistress Patricia saw him by the lightning. There the dogs struck his trail and the fun commenced. Over streams and fallen trees, and chinquepin ridges; through bogs and myrtle ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... cried, and partly by working on his feelings and partly with the bribe that was a fortune to such a man, I persuaded him. Anne helped. She would have done anything for me. And she knew the Dorans. She knew Jack could never feel the same to me, as the mother of that impish girl. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... the shape, I may say, of a smallish man, grotesquely pot-bellied, with very thin legs and arms. The eyes were disproportionately large and quite circular, with an expression that was at once both impish and pathetic. The ears were immense, and set at right angles to the head; the rest of the features indefinite. He was dressed rather in the fashion of a ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford
... feared, and that was the great St. John's wort. Therefore, all who wished to guard house and home from the unwelcome visitors, who pinched the maids, turned the milk sour and plagued their victims with a thousand impish tricks, planted it freely about their gardens; and thus it is that you see its golden flowers amid their shining rich green leaves and crimson shoots round nearly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... knowing that that great ball of fire was somewhere in the vault above her and yet unlocated in the sinister pall that spread over the skies. Her fancy ofttimes pictured him sailing in the west when he should be in the east, dodging back and forth in impish abandon behind the screen, and she wondered at such times if he would be where he belonged ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... of afternoon when the children are once more upon the street, you regret your illness. Here they come trooping by threes and fours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One would think that they were in fear lest some impish fact might get outside the covers to spoil the afternoon. Until the morrow let two and two think themselves five at least! And let Ohio be bounded as it will! Some few children skip ropes, or step ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... tea, which she proceeded to do forthwith, while the Old Un, seated at her right hand, kept a wary eye roving between jam dish and angel cake. And by reason of the unwonted graciousness of Mrs. Trapes, of Ravenslee's tact and easy assurance, and the Old Un's impish hilarity, all diffidence and restraint were banished, and good fellowship reigned supreme, though the Spider was interrupted in the midst of a story by the Old ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... trotted to the gymnasium in his excitement, and, though his pockets bulged with grease paint, mustaches, wigs, and other paraphernalia, he forgot almost half of his material. At the door he had to push his way through a wriggling, impish mass of small boys who blocked the steps and the sidewalk. Inside the hall, young faces packed the place to the window-sills. To the old man the newsboys seemed as so many antagonistic bits of the younger generation, the generation ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... tightened; there was a cheery "Yo-ho!" and up came a black, impish-looking boy of about my own age, kicking, struggling, and tearing at the rope round ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... uniformity. Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks flew in clusters like birds ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Kit had milled around and around many times in the brief while he had ranged La Partida. A new deal was needed and needed badly, else Wilfreda Bernard would have debts instead of revenue if Singleton let things drift much longer. Her impish jest that she was a damsel in distress in need of a valiant knight was nearer to truth than she suspected. He had an idiotic hungry desire to be that knight, but his equipment of one horse, one saddle, and one sore head ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... adieu to merriment, adieu to good stories. Wear mourning for her, weep and fancy her dead, groan. Then she raises her head, her merry laugh rings out again; she spreads her white wings, flies one knows not wither, turns in the air, capers, shows her impish tail, her woman's breasts, her strong loins, and her angelic face, shakes her perfumed tresses, gambols in the rays of the sun, shines forth in all her beauty, changes her colours like the breast of a dove, laughs until she cries, cast the tears of her eyes into the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... came to see him; Bloxford full of impish delight and satisfaction at Derrick's recovery, and full also of threats of what he, Bloxford, would do if ever he came across ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... intentions were strictly creditable, by some malignancy of fate, possessed no influence whatever. She came to regard herself as a peculiarly unlucky girl, being ignorant of the fact that Fortune, an impish hierophant, imposes identical tests upon every candidate who aspires to the throne ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... at each clause, and scribbled his impish small scribble on the bit of paper which rested on ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... suddenly appeared one day in the noble old house by the Weiss Thor, from which Graetz the wizard and his wife had been burned out by the fury of the populace. Twenty years of artistic labor had made this place what it now was. And the little impish maid who used to break unexpectedly upon the workmen of Thorn from behind doors, or who clapped hands upon their shoulders in dusky recesses, scaring them out of their wits with suggestions of witch-masters long dead ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... mighty glad that we've come just in the nick of time, and that we shouldn't have done, I'm after thinking, if it hadn't been for falling in with old Isaac Sass, and his impish follower, Master Greensnake," exclaimed Maloney, as he shook Hector's hand. "He told us if we wanted to save you, to put our best feet foremost while he showed us the course to take. It's my belief, too, that he afterwards managed to fall in with Allan Keith and his party, or it's possible they ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... which those nearest to him, and most ignorant of him, formed of the young lion cub in the domestic litter; in the strange promise which the great career fulfilled. There was a kind of madness in the impish pranks which the boy Clive played in Market-Drayton, scaring the timid and scandalizing the respectable. He climbed to the top of the lofty steeple of that church, which dated from the days of Stephen, and perched himself upon a stone spout near the dizzy summit with a cool courage ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... you, are there? Well, you shall share the same fate till I think fit to release you. I'll teach you to stop playing such impish tricks on decent folk.' ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... a cheer of delight and amazement at beholding his father in such a woeful plight; and he spent the remainder of the evening in a state of impish triumph; for, had not his own father come home in the same wet and draggled condition as that in which he himself had presented himself to Mrs Brown earlier in the day, and for which he had received a sound whipping? "Hooray!" ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... genuine unpaid sobs and tears. They will weep even yet at the story of his edifying death,—this monkish vampire breathing his last with his eyes fixed on the cross of the mild Nazarene, and tormented with impish doubts as to whether he had drunk blood enough to fit him for the company of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... sketch of the group under the awning, but the dread apparition of his aunt's husband had twisted his nerves like wires struck by lightning, and he could do nothing. His is essentially the artistic temperament, and he is a creature of moods, impish in some, poetic in others; an extraordinary fellow, like no one I ever saw, yet curiously fascinating, and I find myself growing oddly fond of him, in an ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... serving to stop gaps, taking the same place a washer does that makes a loose screw fit, and contriving to get driven in like a wedge between any two chairs where there is a crevice. I shall not call that boy by the monosyllable referred to, because, though he has many impish traits at present, he may become civilized and humanized by being in good company. Besides, it is a term which I understand is considered vulgar by the nobility and gentry of the Mother Country, and it is not to be found in Mr. Worcester's Dictionary, on which, as is well known, the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... peculiar about them all is, that they help the good and wise people to do things better; but they love to plague and punish the dull folks, that are stupid, or foolish or naughty. In impish glee, they lure the blockheads, or in Dutch, the ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... with that heavy burden of news. He whispered it to Irene, but Drury heard him, and a shriek of despair went from him like a flash of fire. New blazes sprang up with an impish merriment. Crosson, fearing for Irene's safety, fought at them with earth and with water that boys fetched from distances, and at last ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... mayhap, to set up the button as rival to the safety pin in service to humanity. But our homage bends toward the former. Not only was it our shield and buckler when we were too puny and impish to help ourselves, but it is also (now we are parent) symbol of many a hard-fought field, where we have campaigned all over the white counterpane of a large bed to establish an urchin in his proper gear, while he ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... things before him, concealed whatever was disagreeable. A poor old man he was indeed in those concluding years, weakly rebellious against the firm kindliness of my cousin, his housekeeper and nurse. He who had once been so alert was now at times astonishingly apathetic. At times an impish malice I had never known in him before gleamed in little acts and speeches. His talk rambled, and for the most part was concerned with small, long-forgotten contentions. It was indistinct and difficult to follow ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... little Irish wife:—dead—and naked; the wasted white limbs gleamed in the lurid light; the unclosed eyes stared, as if reproachfully, at the husband whose drunkenness had brought her there to kill her with the pestilence; and on each side of her a little, shrivelled, impish, child-corpse,—the wretched man had laid their arms round the dead mother's neck—and there they slept, their hungering and wailing over at last for ever; the rats had been busy already with them—but what ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the night goes on and the dance is o'er, And the merry girls are homeward gone, But I see it all in my sleep once more, And I dream till the very break of dawn Of an impish dance on a red-hot griddle To the screech and scrape of ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of the approaching spring had penetrated even into these abodes of darkness, and aroused in the bats a little life after their long hibernation; and their weak, plaintive squeak, which had something impish in it withal, came from every shadowy recess, and from the dark vault overhead. This "Rotunda" should have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... hags who were put to death for witchcraft, without recognizing the well-marked features of the victims of cerebral disorder. In this way I have no doubt a considerable number of mad people were destroyed. Their very appearance suggested to their neighbours the notion of something weird and impish; the physiognomy of madness was mistaken for that of witchcraft, while the poor wretches themselves, conscious of unaccustomed sensations and singular promptings, referred them to the agency of demons. Strangely enough, even an ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... such a changeling is to surprise it in some manner so that it will betray its true character. Thus, on suspicion resting upon a certain Breton infant who showed every sign of changeling nature, milk was boiled on the fire in egg-shells, whereupon the impish youngster cried: "I shall soon be a hundred years old, but I never saw so many shells boiling! I was born in Pif and Paf, in the country where cats are made, but I never saw anything like it!" Thus self-revealed, the elf was expelled from the house. In most Northern tales where the changeling ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... keen-scented Pomposo in the hollow not only revealed the cause of his former terror, but decided me to take another direction. After a moment's hesitation, he concluded to go with me, although I am satisfied, from a certain impish look in his eye, that he fully understood and rather enjoyed the fright of Pomposo. As he rolled along at my side, with a gait not unlike a drunken sailor, I discovered that his long hair concealed a leather ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... its common prey is the capybara. It fears the peccari. The night air is alive with bats of many species, the most prominent one being the Dysopes perotis, which measures two feet from tip to tip of the wings. If these Cheiropters are as impish as they look, and as blood-thirsty as some travelers report, it is singular that Bates and Waterton, though residing for years in the country, and ourselves, though sleeping for months ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... sign of high spring. "Boloo!" they cried. "Baayah. Boloo!" They were the children of the men folk, the smoke of whose encampment rose from the knoll at the river's bend. Wild-eyed youngsters they were, with matted hair and little broad-nosed impish faces, covered (as some children are covered even nowadays) with a delicate down of hair. They were narrow in the loins and long in the arms. And their ears had no lobes, and had little pointed tips, a thing that ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... also always knew how to manage his delicate, nervous father. John Tosswill realised that Timmy might some day grow up to do him credit. Timmy really loved learning, and it was a pleasure to the scholar to teach his clever, impish, ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... and went out. It was cold and still; the stars glittered, the earth was white. He walked far on the frozen snow, with a feeling as hard and cold as the bitter air. Some impish sprite seemed to mock him with the closing strain of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... to be one of the people that all sorts of odd things happen to, and now fortune has played one of her impish tricks and Jean has become a very considerable heiress. And I was there, oddly enough, when the god in the car alighted, so to speak, at ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... good Cardinal. The barbiton, placed on a chair—a tall, high-backed chair—beside the musician, seemed to take a part in the festive meal. Its honest varnished face glowed in the light of the lamp; and there was an impish, sly demureness in its very silence, as its master, between every mouthful, turned to talk to it of something he had forgotten to relate before. The good wife looked on affectionately, and could not eat for joy; but suddenly she ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Nevertheless it had grown sensibly darker ere they debouched upon the frozen flats that bordered the bay; and now the wind bore down upon them in full-winged fury, shrieking in their ears, searing their eyes, tearing greedily at the very breath of their nostrils, and searching out with impish ingenuity the more ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... the armorer's smithy. Wilkes, Gosse, and one or two others of the squires were sitting on a bench looking on, and now and then applauding a more than usually well-aimed cast of the knife. Suddenly that impish little page spoken of before, Robin Ingoldsby, thrust his shock head around the corner of the smithy, and said: "Ho, Falworth! Blunt is going to serve thee out to-day, and I myself heard him say so. He says ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... spite of his impish naughtiness, had a way of looking such a perfectly innocent and delightfully kissable little person that one felt he really might be a good deal nearer to the sweet secrets of Nature than his elders. However, Daddy was in ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... over her shoulder as Trent called out, her blonde hair glinting in the warm afternoon sunlight. Blue eyes smiled an impish greeting at him. ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... having a fence built around it, bearing an inscription which would inform admiring tourists that here was the desk at which the brilliant author had been wont to sit when grinding out heart-throb stories for the humble Post. He took an impish delight in my struggles with my hero and heroine, and his inquiries after the health of both were of such a nature as to make any earnest writer person rise in wrath and slay him. I had seen little of Blackie of late. My spare hours had been devoted to the work in hand. On the ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... for hours together watching the great stones grind, or the corn poured by golden showers into the hopper on its way to the stones below. Many a time had he crept up and hidden himself behind a sack; but George seemed to have an impish ingenuity in discovering his hiding-places, and would drive him out as a dog worries a cat, crying, "Come out, thee little varment! Master Lake he don't allow ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of Mr. Casaubon's charity. Why should he be compared with an Italian carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed like a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... come to see the situation with her own eyes, fairly felt the clutch of it upon his own heart. She or some impish power acting through her agency had certainly made a mess of things. Her father's happiness destroyed; Rush's partnership broken; and the whole Hickory Hill project ruined unless some one could be found to buy into it in Graham's place; Graham humiliated, utterly cast adrift, irreparably ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... think he does," agreed Lady Arabella, who was deriving an impish, pixie-like enjoyment from the situation. Then, recognising that it might be more diplomatic not to press the matter any further at the moment, she skilfully drew the conversation into ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... nursing a lump on his jaw and a cut lip. The morning's battle, had not gone all his way, although he said to Janice with his usual impish grin when she commented upon his battered appearance: "You'd orter see the other feller! If Nelson Haley hadn't got in betwixt us I'd ha' whopped Sim Howell good and proper. I was some excited, I allow. If I hadn't been I needn't never run ag'inst Sim's fist a-tall. He's a clumsy kid, ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... window before going to bed showed him Monsieur Dudu on the terrace path, enjoying the moonlight apparently, but, Hugh strongly suspected, bent on mischief, for his head was very much on one side and his claw very much stuck out, in the way which Jeanne declared made him look like a very impish raven indeed. ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... like a fly, Victim of his own sport,—the jester's luck! He, whilst his fellows grieved, poor wight, had stuck His freakish gauds upon the Ancient's brow, And now his ear, and now his beard, would pluck; Whereas the angry churl had snatched him now, Crying, "Thou impish mischief, who art thou?" ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... feet planted firmly on the rug, and poured out a flood of pompous platitudes. Faith heard not a word. She was really not listening to him at all. But she was watching his long black coat-tails with impish delight growing in her brown eyes. Mr. Perry was standing VERY near the fire. His coat-tails began to scorch—his coat-tails began to smoke. He still prosed on, wrapped up in his own eloquence. The coat-tails smoked worse. A tiny spark flew up from the burning ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... demanded that disease should be more egotistic and less epidemic. Every organism ought to consume its own smoke, and not communicate its misfortunes to its neighbours. And this it does satisfactorily enough in organic disease; it is only when those impish germs, microbes and bacilli, mix themselves up with the matter that we get pathological socialism. I confess that the whole germ business seems to me an illogical element in the scheme of destruction, though 't is of a piece with the structure of things. And yet ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... music—a wild "Invitation to the Waltz" by some Archangel Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta's corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh, old boy? Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too? Come along and let us make a night of it. To the Devil with sleep. We'll go together down to the cellar and find a bottle of Pommery, and we will ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... I imparted a few plain truths—very pleasantly, Celia. He knew better; there's a sort of an impish streak in him—also an inclination for the pleasant by-ways of life. . . . He had better let drink alone, too, if he expects to remain in my office. I told ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... of Britt Block. The moonlight revealed the complacent features; the cocky pose of serene confidence presented by the effigy affected the disheartened original with as acute a sense of exasperation as he would have felt if the statue had set thumb to nose and had wriggled the stone fingers in impish derision. ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... looking up from his work, asked her what she was smiling at so quietly to herself. And she could not tell him, because it was at a horrible practical joke suggested to her by an impish spirit within. What if she should prepare a little surprise for the returning Milly? Let her find herself planted in Araby the Blest with Maxwell Davison? Mildred chuckled, wondering to herself which would be in the biggest rage, Milly or Max; for however ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... curling beard which he had grown since the first frost as a protection against cold. He picked up the mitten and laid it to dry on the slab mantel, and when he returned, Lovin Child was sitting in the pan, rocking back and forth and crooning "'Ock-a-by! 'Ock-a-by!" with the impish twinkle in his eyes. ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... walked to the neighbouring church. There Laura sat once more between the boys, Marina and Georgy stationed like sentinels at the ends of the pew, ready to pounce down on their brothers if necessary, to confiscate animals and eatables, or to rap impish knuckles with a Bible. It was a spacious church; the pew was in a side aisle; one could see neither reading-desk nor pulpit; and the words of the sermon seemed to come from a great ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... the jump. The boys cheered her from the corner of the house, having bashfully remained in the background. Even Margaret Llewellen and her impish brother, Bob, appeared ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... of the band seemed to lose their balance, and fared in the same fashion. The garland would topple over in a most impish way at every breath, although the arrows went through it. So Middle 'gan to feel better when he saw this one and that one ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... pipe back in her mouth and began to smoke fiercely. The candle wick burned long, and was topped by a little cap of fiery red that seemed to wink at us like an impish gnome. The most grotesque shadow of Peg flickered over the wall behind her. The one-eyed cat remitted his grim watch and went to sleep. Outside the wind screamed like a ravening beast at the window. Suddenly Peg removed her pipe from ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... celebration to-night: an unpremeditated, freakish, impish, essentially harmless celebration, with a faint flavour of mischief in it because he had Nan in the back of his head all the time. He played up to Mrs. Morrell with exuberance, with honestly no thought except that he was having a whacking good time, and that old Nan was being teased. It was characteristic ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the girl's own mind all of a piece. For, if she flaunted herself before him, as if with an impish resolve to be his undoing, there were still times when he awed her by his words of fire, and by his high, determined stand in some circle to which she knew she could never mount. That night when he walked with ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... nearly approaching complete darkness reigned in the room. But though promptly on entering his fingers closed upon the wall-switch near the door, he refrained from turning up the lights immediately, with a fancy of impish inspiration that it would be amusing to learn what move Roddy would make when the tension became too much even ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... always had a habit of writing to strangers on the subjects next his heart. Once he approached Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne (afterwards Mrs. Hemans), who had not been encouraging. Now half in earnest, and half with an impish desire for dialectical scores, he printed a pamphlet on 'The Necessity of Atheism', a single foolscap sheet concisely proving that no reason for the existence of God can be valid, and sent it to various personages, including bishops, asking for a refutation. It ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... that no maid will stay with her? That she shows no desire to improve? That she mimics and angers her teachers, refuses to study and plays impish tricks like some mischievous little elf? Am I to ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... swing of a powerful fist. And this last, failing to find a mark, threw its owner off his balance. Tripping awkwardly over the low curbing of the dooryard walk, he reeled and went a-sprawl on his knees, while his hat fell off and (such is the impish habit of toppers) rolled and bounded several ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... retorted Klara, who seemed to take an impish delight in teasing the young man, "you are not in love with Elsa, ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Then an impish sprite of mischief whispered in her ear and her eyes danced merrily. On that chance meeting with Cora and Linda in the hall Cora had told her and Grace that they were staying in a suite of rooms on the third floor, and had asked them to come to ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... long-suffering, neglected wife very unlike the radiant, condescending lady who patronised them from the start. She showed a tendency to address most of her conversation to the girl, despite the latter's evident disinclination to talk, or perhaps because of it; for the older woman seemed to take an impish delight in teasing her about her friendship with Wargrave and their relations as nurse and patient, although it was apparent that her malicious humour made the others uncomfortable. She paraded her authority over Frank and treated him like a hen-pecked ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... "Heavy Coach's" pupils as he crossed the Cathedral Close, where the calm silence of the old place ought to have quelled the angry throbbing in his veins; but it had an opposite effect, and the cries of the jackdaws which clung about the mouldering tower sounded like impish derisive laughter. ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
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