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More "Knack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... missed Aunt Olivia greatly; she had been so merry and companionable, and had possessed such a knack of understanding small fry. But youth quickly adapts itself to changed conditions; in a few weeks it seemed as if the Story Girl had always been living at Uncle Alec's, and as if Uncle Roger had always had a fat, jolly housekeeper with a double chin ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... blameless model; but his middle style, that in which the typical plays of his second period are written, would be, if it were possible to imitate, the most absolute pattern that could be set before man. I do not speak of mere copyist's work, the parasitic knack of retailing cast phrases, tricks and turns of accent, cadences and catchwords proper only to the natural manner of the man who first came by instinct upon them, and by instinct put them to use; I speak of that faithful and fruitful discipleship of love with ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... pass them and proceed. You have heard of the sins of his youth, of his apprenticeship, and how he set up, and married, and what a life he hath led his wife; and now I will tell you some more of his pranks. He had the very knack for knavery; had he, as I said before, been bound to serve an apprenticeship to all these things, he could not have been more cunning, he could not have ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... me at the time, and I did not like then to have it known; but now it may as well come out at once. Speck, as everybody knows, lives in the market-place, opposite his grand work of art, the town pump, or fountain. I bought a large sheet of paper, and having a knack at drawing, sat down, with the greatest gravity, before the pump, and sketched it for several hours. I knew it would bring out old Speck to see. At first he contented himself by flattening his nose against the window-glasses ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from twenty-one years of age to fifty. I know no husbandry-work (mowing hardly excepted) that is not equally within the power of all persons within those ages, the more advanced fully compensating by knack and habit what they lose in activity. Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man's labour and that of another, from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure, from my best observation, that any given five men will, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... it presently, some of it bursting into fluffy pods, for cotton growing is one of the most extensive and profitable of Egyptian industries. The twigs and branches are used as fuel by the people, who have a happy knack ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... elements of disquiet. Lady Bridget noticed with surprise that Ninnis seemed to defer to Maule, which was not his usual attitude towards strangers. She attributed this to a community of experiences in South America, and also to Maule's undoubted knack ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... cook and have a natural knack for it. Others hate it. If you are one of the former, select a propitious moment to suggest that you will cook, if the rest will wash the dishes and supply the wood and water. Thus you will get first crack at the fire in the chill of morning; and at night you can squat on your heels doing light ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the knack of making friends with any one, but I am more reserved and ideal in nature, so I simply cannot accommodate myself to such ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... a knack, Haul away, yo ho, boys, Of hauling down a Frenchman's jack 'Gainst any odds, you ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... say the most of it—the substance—is English. The Irish are hard workers, but generally spendthrifts, though there are some excellent exceptions. The Irish hold together in religion, politics, and drink. The Scotch are not so numerous as the Irish, but somehow they have a knack of getting on. They are not clannish like the Irish. Each hangs by his own hook. Then there are the Germans, who are pretty numerous, a very respectable body of men, with a sprinkling of Italians and Swiss. The Germans keep up their old country ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... new and hitherto unheard of in the kite line. Rigidity and strength, without too much weight, are the prime essentials of the Hargrave. It may be made by a boy with a knack for mechanics in the following way: Take eight stiff, slender pieces of bamboo, eighteen and three-quarter inches in length, such as are sometimes used for fishing poles. These pieces must be of uniform weight ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... songs, interspersed with the maddest, most whimsical patter, step-dances, ventriloquism, recitations. He kept us in roars for a long time. Blended with the simplicity of a baby, he has the wisdom of the serpent, and has the knack of getting hold of odd delicacies, with which he regales the ward. He is perfectly well, by the way, but when the doctor comes round he assumes a convincing air of semi-convalescence, and refers darkly to his old wound. The doctor is not in the least taken in, but is indulgent, and not too curious. ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... amidships, but my father, who had a happy knack of turning almost everything to a good account, unless irredeemably hopeless, was struck with a capital idea in this instance. Instead of selling her as a worthless hulk, he had her cut in two, the damaged timbers removed, a new length of keel laid down, and had her lengthened about ten feet; after ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... Moral-Plays had vigour enough, it appears, to propagate themselves into the drama of comedy and tragedy after the main body of them had been withdrawn. An apt instance of this is furnished in A Knack to know a Knave, entered at the Stationers' in 1593, but written several years before. It was printed in 1594, the title-page stating that it had been "acted sundry times by Edward Alleyn and his company," and that it contained ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... dine on Henry's wine and L. F. Austin's wit. This dear, brilliant man, now dead, acted for many years as Henry's secretary, and one of his gifts was the happy knack of hitting off people's peculiarities in rhyme. This dreadful Christmas dinner at Pittsburg was enlivened by a collection of such rhymes, which Austin called a "Lyceum ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... and the three of them set forth into the golden October day. It was Philip's first experience in evaluating an entire village, but he had a knack for estimating the worth of property, and by the time noon came around, he had the job half done. "If you people had made even half an effort to keep your places up," he told Judith over cold-cut sandwiches and ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... used to form a most important item in every set of Oriental writing implements. Even long after adhesive envelopes had become common in European Turkey, their use was considered over familiar, if not actually disrespectful, for formal letters, and there was a particular traditional knack in cutting and folding the special envelope for each missive, which was included in the instruction given by every competent Khoja as the present writer well remembers in the quiet years that ended with the disasters ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and to my chamber to set some papers in order, and then, to church, where my old acquaintance, that dull fellow, Meriton, made a good sermon, and hath a strange knack of a grave, serious delivery, which is very agreeable. After church to White Hall, and there find Sir G. Carteret just set down to dinner, and I dined with them, as I intended, and good company, the best people and family in the world I think. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... him! God reigns and the government at Washington still lives!" Years after, some one referring to that, said that it was a beautiful sentence, that the reference to "clouds and darkness" was a beautiful symbolism, but that Garfield had a great knack in the building-up of fine phrases! He lacked utterly the background of the great Psalm which was in Garfield's mind, and which gives that phrase double meaning. If we go back to Tennyson again, some one has proposed the inquiry why he should have called one of ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... yet known, is, I Believe, a meer PLINYISM; How far it may be obtained by a Magical Sacrament, is best known to the Dangerous Knaves that have try'd it. But our Witches do seem to have got the knack: and this is one of the Things, that make me think, Witchcraft will not be fully understood, until the day when there shall not be one ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... insufflation should be taught to every interne in every hospital. The emergency or accident ward of every hospital should have the necessary equipment and an interne familiar with its use. The method is simple, once the knack is acquired. The patient being limp and recumbent on a table, the larynx is exposed with the laryngoscope, and the bronchoscope is inserted as hereinafter described. The oxygen is turned on at the tank and the flow regulated before the rubber tube ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... parents were of rank and fame; Our JUDGE herein had little wisdom shown, And sneering friends around were often known To say, his children ne'er could fathers lack: At giving counsel some have got a knack, Who, were they but at home to turn their eyes, Might find, perhaps, they're ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... is a sly fellow, and he had a knack of turning up whenever one wanted to do a civil thing by that poor ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bound to be a failure," I pointed out. "Rather let him fail at us, who are known to be beautiful, than at the garden, which has its reputation yet to make. Afterwards, when he has got the knack, he will be able to do justice to ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... and love of luxury, this seems as hellish a place and existence as even you deserve. When I saw you last night"—and here Ledyard laughed—"it was all I could do to control myself. You play your part well; but you always had a knack for theatricals. I know I'm a hard, unforgiving man, but there is just one phase of human nature that I will not stand for, and that is the refusal to take the medicine prescribed for the disease. What incentive have people for better ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... distance from the other, making the whole number of strings, in the middle of the bow sometimes amount to sixty. These being put on with the bow somewhat bent the contrary way, produce a spring so strong as to require considerable force as well as knack in stringing it and giving the requisite velocity to the arrow. The bow is completed by a woolding round the middle and a wedge or two, here and there, driven in to tighten it. A bow in one piece is, however, very rare; they generally consist of from two ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... camaraderie of Edith herself checked any adventure of that kind. She checked it in two ways; by her own frank acceptance of him much as she would have accepted a brother in the household, and by her uncanny and unconscious knack of reminding him in almost every word and gesture of Reenie Hardy. She was of about the same figure as Reenie Hardy; a little slighter, perhaps; and about the same age; and she had the same quick, frank eyes. And she sang wonderfully. He had never heard Reenie sing, but in some ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... question before him, which had been entertained by another set of tutors—those of Christchurch—where Selwyn had many friends, and where, probably enough, he indulged in many collegian's freaks. This knack of bringing up a mere suspicion, is truly characteristic of the Oxford Don, and since the same Head of this House—Dr. Newton—acknowledged that Selwyn was, during his Oxford career, neither intemperate, dissolute, nor a gamester, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... wonder some men wish to be pilots," he had said. "It's great to have a big steamer do just as you want her to." Then he had run the vessel around in the form of the figure 8, just to "get the knack of ...
— The Rover Boys in Southern Waters - or The Deserted Steam Yacht • Arthur M. Winfield
... fine,—a word that has crept into general use among the lower classes in London, without ever gaining promotion. The fate of new words in this respect is curious. Often, if they are convenient, or have knack of lodging easily in the memory, they work slowly upward. The Scotch word flunky is a case in point. Our first knowledge of it in print is from Fergusson's Poems. Burns advertised it more widely, and Carlyle seems fairly to have transplanted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... like her, but of course it is considered by her friends in society that since she went in for business she can't refuse to meet anyone. Dick sat next to her, and had on the other side of him Mrs. ——, who likes celebrities without the knack of selection, and whose invitations nowadays I believe are never accepted at once, but are kept open as long as possible to see if something better won't turn up. Then came Mrs. Romedek and Mr. Westington; he looking bored ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... school for a would-be dramatist. And my first accepted play had been written in collaboration with him. It had not been a great success, but I had gained invaluable experience, and, after that, success had come to me rapidly and easily. I found that I had the knack of writing pleasant little artificial comedies. None of them had run for longer than eight months, and I had only written five in all, but they had made me comparatively rich. At that time my investments alone were bringing me in nearly two ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... comradeship which extends to the officers' wives. Frequent removal from one part of the country to another prevents anything like vegetating. The ladies, I am told, do not become overmuch engrossed in housekeeping, and acquire something of a soldier's knack of doing without many things which would naturally occupy their time and thought if they looked forward to a settled life. Thus they have more time for reading and society. Those that I have met have certainly been very ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... his friends would have run after him and fetched him back. You have no idea how full of fun he was. Poor Peter! with all his faults I could not help liking him, for he was charming at times. He could set you off into a fit of laughter with a word. He had a knack of his own for springing a joke upon you in the most unexpected way. I shall never forget the evening when they came to tell me that he had been found dead on the road to Langoat. I went and had him properly laid out. He was buried, and the priest spoke in consoling terms about ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... I can scarce promise you one adventure, as my account is rather of what I saw than what I did. The first misfortune of my life, which you all know, was great; but tho' it distrest, it could not sink me. No person ever had a better knack at hoping than I. The less kind I found fortune at one time, the more I expected from her another, and being now at the bottom of her wheel, every new revolution might lift, but could not depress me. I proceeded, therefore, towards London in a fine ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... that of Alexander Weyer, who, either by superior strength or by a peculiar knack, could hold a nail between the middle fingers of his right hand with the head against the palm, and drive it through a one-inch board. But since this act did not get him very far either on the road to fame, ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... imagination also has its products and the themes of a symphony may certainly be considered its children. The public often seems to have slight idea of the sanctity and mystery of a musical idea. Composers are considered people with a kind of "knack" in writing down notes. In reality, a musical idea is as wonderful a thing as we can conceive—a miracle of life and yet intangible, ethereal. The composer apparently creates something out of nothing, pure fancy being wrought into terms of communication. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... of this county, sir," the old gentleman said, smiling at the man's knack of mimicry. "My home, Arden, is but a few ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... first night of it in great uncertainty of the event, till we were very much encouraged by overhearing the Duke of Argyle say, "It will do—it must do! I see it in the eyes of them!" This was a good while before the first act was over, and so gave us ease soon: for that duke has a more particular knack than any one now living in discovering the taste of the publick. He was quite right in this, as usual: the good-nature of the audience appeared stronger and stronger every act, and ended in a clamour of applause.' Spence's Anec. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... a wary mind to his work. For though the old master of Lennon House has not lain twenty years in his grave, he is already swollen into a legendary character. Anecdotes have grown upon his memory like barnacles, and any man in those parts with a knack of invention has only to foist his stories upon Dermod to ensure a ready credence. There are, however, definite facts. He practised an ancient and tyrannous hospitality, keeping open house upon the road to Letterkenny, and forcing bed and ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... gave his leisure to his grandchildren. He carved for us with his knife, with an especial knack for willow whistles. He showed us the colors that lay upon the world when we looked at it through one of the glass pendants of the parlor chandelier. He sat by us when we played duck-on-the-rock. He helped us with our kites and gave a superintendence ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... autumn trip to an unhackneyed land is much better worth reading than many more pretentious volumes.... The authoress has an eye for what is worth seeing, a happy knack of graphic description, and a literary style which is ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... comic talent. The poet, accustomed to stilts, moves awkwardly in a species of the drama the first requisites of which are ease and sweetness. Scarron, who only understood burlesque, has displayed this talent or knack in several comedies taken from the Spanish, of which two, Jodelle, or the Servant turned Master, and Don Japhet of Armenia, have till within these few years been occasionally acted as carnival farces, and have always been very successful. The plot of the Jodelle, which belongs to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... to rear up children (to be just); They know a simple, merry, tender knack Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, And stringing pretty words that make no sense, And kissing full sense into empty words; Which things are corals to cut ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... ease in that position; and at length, having made friends with a travelling company of actors, come to London to earn a living in any tolerable way by means of his moderate education, his "small Latin and less Greek," his knack of fluent rhyming, and his turn for play-acting. To know him as he began we must measure him narrowly by his first performances. These are not to be looked for in even the earliest of his plays, not one of which ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... to avoid the ludicrous; another to shun the pathetic; a third assured him that he was tolerable at description, but cautioned him to leave narrative alone; while a fourth declared that he had a very pretty knack at turning a story, and was really entertaining when in a pensive mood, but was grievously mistaken if he imagined himself to possess a ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... was by nature deep, and he had a knack of deepening it when he wished to be impressive. His articulation was extremely deliberate, so that every word told; and his habitual manner was calm, but not stolid. I say "habitual," because it had variations. When Gladstone, just the other side of the Table, was thundering his ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Tadamichi and his younger brother, Yorinaga, who held the post of sa-daijin, there existed acute rivalry. The kwampaku had the knack of composing a deft couplet and tracing a graceful ideograph. The sa-daijin, a profound scholar and an able economist, ridiculed penmanship and poetry as mere ornament. Their father's sympathies were wholly with Yorinaga, and he ultimately went so far as to depose Tadamichi ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... choice of articles, apart from their usefulness, is an appetising occupation, and to exchange bald, uniform shillings for a fine big, figurative knick-knack, such as a windmill, a gross of green spectacles, or a cocked hat, gives us a direct and emphatic sense of gain. We have had many shillings before, as good as these; but this is the first time we have possessed a windmill. Upon these principles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Next morning I accompanied Mr Waugh to Kildwick, whither we walked on the canal bank. On the way, the Lancashire poet proved himself an intensely interesting and instructive companion. He had a large stock of funny stories, and possessed quite a knack of imparting his sensible advice to one in an inoffensive and almost unnoticeable manner. During the journey I said little, but thought much. At Kildwick we inspected the "Lang Kirk," and other places of note in the locality, and then parted. It was soon after this visit ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... give their chief interest to the English newspapers. They are allowed to gossip about everything, and the writers have the knack of making the merest trifles seem amusing. Happy is the nation where anything may be written ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... She had a knack of monopolising Hubert, and since his return from London, her desire to do so had become almost a determination. Hubert showed no disinclination, and after breakfast they were to be seen together in the gardens. Hubert was a great ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... their mischievous, or, as the early English eighteenth century would have put it, "unlucky" childhood, to their most undeserved reward with a good and pretty wife (whom one sincerely pities), and more or less of a fortune. There is, however, more vigour in Jerome than in most, and, if one has the knack of "combing out" the silly and stale Voltairianism, and paying little attention to the far from exciting sculduddery, the book may be read. It contains, in particular, one of the most finished of its author's sketches, of a type which he really did something ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... poor. Pictures like these, dear madam, to design, Asks no firm hand, and no unerring line; Some wandering touches, some reflected light, Some flying stroke alone can hit 'em right: For how should equal colours do the knack? Chameleons who can paint in white and black? "Yet Chloe sure was formed without a spot"— Nature in her then erred not, but forgot. "With every pleasing, every prudent part, Say, what can Chloe want?"—She wants a heart. She speaks, behaves, and acts ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... any of his knack for surprises," muttered Danny. "And if we, who know his old tricks, can't fathom him at all, what are the other seven of us going ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... "You've got a knack," he said, almost graciously, "of putting a fellow in a good humour ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... came to himself, Wamba and the lieutenant of his lances were leaning over him with a bottle of the hermit's elixir. "We arrived here the day after the battle," said the fool; "marry, I have a knack of that." ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... know what is doing in the art world, who is painting what, and why, then get yourself invited to tea—China tea only. The gathering is picturesque, for the model has, of course, the knack of the effective pose, not only professionally but socially. It is a beautiful club, and it is one more answer to the eternal question Why Girls Don't Marry. With a Models' Club, the Four Arts Club, the Mary Curzon Hotel, and the Lyceum Club, why ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... question of knack," Jimphy continued. "You get into the way of it and you can't stop. Sometimes a tune gets into my head and I have to keep on humming it or whistling it. I'm not what you'd call a sentimental fellow at all, but that song ... you know, about the honeysuckle and the ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... style, over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the longer because some of the characters are supposed to represent schoolboys, and a girl of thirteen. The adapter is Mr. BUCHANAN—a poet and a playwright. This gentleman, I believe, has made many other pieces (more or less) his own, with (more or less) success. He seems to have a knack of turning old plays into new ones. I live in hope that when I next visit this great Metropolis I shall find that he has re-written the School for Scandal, and brought ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... the boys at Montreal, Shag a little shy at first amidst all the grandeur and wealth of Hal's home, but covering that shyness with a quiet dignity that sat very well on his young shoulders. With a wonderful knack of delicacy, Hal would smooth out any threatened difficulty for the Indian boy—little table entanglements, such as new dishes or unaccustomed foods. But Shag was at times surprisingly outspoken, and the first night at dinner seemingly won Sir George's heart by remarking when ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... He was one of the old school, rode with longer stirrups than the modern jockeys, although he had in a measure conformed to the crouching seat. Alan's friends wondered why he stuck to Tommy, some of them considered he was getting past it, but Alan had a knack of keeping to old hands who had done him good service. In business this caused many a split with the ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... hadn't I been overwhelmed and choked with sentiment all day long? Sentiment? Of all the bosh—but, never mind. Louie at least didn't bother me in that way. Yes, it's a fact, Macrorie, she's got an awful knack of giving comfort to ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... that is temporary. A lot of us are unfaithful for the moment—it's a symptom of our illness. You said something a little while ago about trying to regain one's lost years by violence—that's what he's doing. He's mislaid the knack of happiness with Phyllis; he's trying to recover it with some ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... for this reason, really very much distressed. Feng Tzu-ying then explained that he knew a young doctor who had made a study of his profession, Chang by surname, and Yu-shih by name, whose learning was profound to a degree; who was besides most proficient in the principles of medicine, and had the knack of discriminating whether a patient would live or die; that this year he had come to the capital to purchase an official rank for his son, and that he was now living with him in his house. In view of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... under-study. She was not so clever, so daring, or so altogether reckless, but she came in a very good second-best in most of the harum-scarum escapades. She could always be relied upon for support, could keep a secret, and had a peculiarly convenient knack of baffling awkward questions by putting on an attitude of utter stolidity. When her eyes were half-closed under their heavy lids, and her mouth wore what the girls called its "John Bull" expression, not even Miss Beasley herself ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... that!" said Grace, absent-mindedly. "There has to be a knack, or something, and you have it. I haven't. I couldn't do it, even if I wanted to, and I don't think ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... the day before, enemy guns, trained with lesser accuracy, did their best to inflict an equal punishment. The effect was a combination of the solemnity and the littleness of man which defies every knack of human ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... did not think all mischief fair, Although he had a knack of joking; He did not make himself a bear, Although he had a taste for smoking: And when religious sects ran mad, He held, in spite of all his learning, That if a man's belief is bad, It will not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... Her cooking knack Would conquer fifty Catos— The Queen of tarts, and tuck, and tack, And ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... experts. Meanwhile his imagination enabled him to understand the exact extent of a novice's ignorance, the precise details which I did not know and must know, the essential apparatus I had to be shown the knack of, before he ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... students through kindergarten methods. Likewise he can guard against being oracular and pedantic by letting out his superior stores of information through free discussion in the Socratic fashion. Nothing is more important to good teaching than the knack of apt illustration. While to a certain extent it can be taught, just as the art of telling a humorous story or making a presentation speech can be communicated by teachers of oral English, yet in the long run it is rather a matter of spontaneous upwellings ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... a merit quite unique, His gift of mixing Latin up with Greek," Unique, you lags in learning? what? a knack Caught by Pitholeon with his hybrid clack? "Nay, but the mixture gives the style more grace, As Chian, plus Falernian, has more race." Come, tell me truly: is this rule applied To verse-making by you, and ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... have more love of it and knack for it than any one of her sex I've seen yet. It really looks like a case of art for art's sake, at times. But you can't tell. They're liable to get married at any moment, you know. Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... several times in private theatricals; you know we Jews have a knack for the stage; you'd be surprised to know how many pros are Jews. There's heaps of money to be made now-a-days on the boards. I'm in with lots of 'em, and ought to know. It's the only profession where you don't want any training, and these law books are as dry as ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... years ago, and Shep is an old man now and Shooshan older, and many mouths have bit with the teeth of Shep (for he has a knack of getting them back whenever his customers die), and they have written again to Ali away in the country of Persia with ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... honest judgment upon the great king! In thirty years more—1. The invincible had been beaten a vast number of times. 2. The sage was the puppet of an artful old woman, who was the puppet of more artful priests. 3. The conqueror had quite forgotten his early knack of conquering. 5. The terror of his enemies (for 4, the marvel of his age, we pretermit, it being a loose term, that may apply to any person or thing) was now terrified by his enemies in turn. 6. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... knack kneel knot knap sack knob knave knife knock knowledge knucks knead knight knoll knuckle knarl ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... general Lee was extremely splenetic, other than which, such a miserable old bachelor and infidel could hardly be, yet he certainly had a knack of telling people's fortunes. By virtue of this faculty he presently discovered that general Gates was no Fabius; but on the contrary, too much inclined to the fatal ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... eye of the man that measures only visible things, will seem sheer insanity—is sobriety for a Christian. The world is perfectly right when it says: 'If you believe you can do a thing, you have gone a long way towards doing it.' The expectation of success has often the knack of fulfilling itself. But the world does not know our secret, and our secret is that our humble faith brings into the field the reserves with the Captain of our salvation at their head. Therefore a self-distrusting Christian can say, and say without exaggeration ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... casually acknowledged that the motive for one or two of the minor songs in the famous operas was not entirely of Arthur's own unaided invention. And so, from one subject to another, they passed on so quickly, and hit it off with one another so exactly (for Hilda had a wonderful knack of leading up to everybody's strong points), that long before lunch was ready, the Progenitor had been quite won over by the fascinations of the brazen hussey, and was prepared to admit that she was really a very nice, kind, tender-hearted, intelligent, appreciative, and discriminating ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... assured him that there was nothing the matter with him. The doctor dresses well, and has an air; he has the use of an automobile, and sometimes escorts good looking young nurses, or other young ladies, about the prison grounds. He has a knack at surgical operations, and urges prisoners to be operated upon; they sometimes recover, and sometimes do not. His use of drugs in his practise seems to have been mainly restricted to prescribing salts, and the hole, both effective in their ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... have a more wonderful knack of getting into scrapes, and out of them again, than any man I ever met with," ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... rather, as public appointments chanced to be scarce, and his genius, during his earlier manhood, was of that exclusively agricultural character which applies itself to the cultivation of wild oats. At last he had declared that he would become a Painter; partly because he had always had an idle knack that way, and partly to grieve the souls of the Barnacles-in-chief who had not provided for him. So it had come to pass successively, first, that several distinguished ladies had been frightfully shocked; then, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers (who, as King of Prussia, brought into being a military and skeptical genius—and therewith, in reality, the new and now triumphantly emerged type of German), the problematic, crazy father of Frederick the Great, had on one point the very knack and lucky grasp of the genius: he knew what was then lacking in Germany, the want of which was a hundred times more alarming and serious than any lack of culture and social form—his ill-will to the young Frederick resulted from the anxiety of a profound instinct. MEN WERE ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... his knowledge in the household and the courts, there was little else for any one to do than engage in farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians, or turn carpenter and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a farmer, though still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and expended his skill and his muscle in subduing a ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... Tiny ones are best, because with them you can make the flowers go farther. Strawberry baskets—the old-fashioned ones with a handle—are nice, especially if you paint or gild them. Burr baskets are pretty too; and those made of fir cones. Joe has a knack of putting such things together. He made some elegant ones for ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... Chesterton is one of the best conversationalists of the day. Conversation is a queer thing; so many people talk without having anything to say; others have a great deal to say and never say it. Chesterton can undoubtedly talk well; he has a knack of finding subjects suitable to the company; though he does not talk very much of things of the day; he is naturally mostly interested in books. Given a kindred soul the two will talk and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... doubtful whether la reggeva diritta should not rather be rendered "kept it upright." Boccaccio has a knack, very trying to the translator, of constantly using words in an ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... dear, free your mind, and then we'll fix things up right smart. Nothin' I like better, and Lisha says I have considerable of a knack that way," replied Mrs. Wilkins, with a smile, a nod, and an ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... different laws; he makes his will in other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scots accent ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as though he thought me a mind-reader, but I fancy the knack of divining when people need a confidant is preternaturally developed ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... with the cold face of the missionary, who suddenly appeared to me as a great bird of prey. I hated him instinctively, for he was like a schoolmaster; and yet his words had weight, for I was young to judge, and schoolmasters, though hateful, have a knack of being in ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... says Johnson, "and knowing himself in no great danger, spoke of Pope with very little reverence. 'He has,' said Curll, 'a knack at versifying; but in prose I think myself a match for him.' When the Orders of the House were examined, none of them appeared to have been infringed: Curll went away triumphant, and Pope was left to seek some other remedy." The fact, not mentioned by Johnson, is, that though Curll's ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Whose ordures neither plague nor fire can purge? Nor sharp experience can to duty bring, Nor angry Heaven, nor a forgiving king! 190 In gospel-phrase, their chapmen they betray; Their shops are dens, the buyer is their prey. The knack of trades is living on the spoil; They boast even when each other they beguile. Customs to steal is such a trivial thing, That 'tis their charter to defraud their king. All hands unite of every jarring sect; They ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... sir," began Sanny, not knowing how else to open up the subject. "But I'm gaun to tell you the hale story just in my ain way, so I want you to sit quate and no' interrupt me; for I hinna jist the knack of puttin' things maybe as they should be put. But I'll tell you the hale story an' then leave you to do as you like, an' ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Imperial troops. It was a day of rest, our first for weeks, but Raffles and I spent no small part of it in seeking high and low for a worthy means of quenching the kind of thirst which used to beset Yeomen and others who had left good cellars for the veldt. The old knack came back to us both, though I believe that I alone was conscious of it at the time; and we were leaving the house, splendidly supplied, when we almost ran into the arms of an infantry officer, with a scowl upon his red-hot face, ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... it is about the strength of the bows we use at home," Roger said. "The stringing them is a matter of knack, as well ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... child; that is, in the "one-two-three" style with accelerated motion. Neither did I depend upon mere brilliancy of technique, a trick by which children often surprise their listeners; but I always tried to interpret a piece of music; I always played with feeling. Very early I acquired that knack of using the pedals, which makes the piano a sympathetic, singing instrument, quite a different thing from the source of hard or blurred sounds it so generally is. I think this was due not entirely to natural artistic temperament, ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... so we'll knack'n, and try the higher mine to-morrow." Having come to this conclusion Uncle David threw down the mass of rock which he held in his brawny hands, and, picking up his implements, said, "Get the tools, booy, and lev us go ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was not quite awake to some of the finer sensibilities. But he was a kindly man and doing well. He was the sort you could depend on. Business was cruel. You had to overlook certain things, for instance—Maida. But Joe! Well, it was too bad. He just didn't have the knack. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... question asked by a good many. He was one of the best-known figures in society, a general favourite in sporting circles, and universally looked upon with approval if not admiration wherever he went. He had the knack of popularity. He came of an old family, and his rumoured engagement to Lady Violet Calcott had surprised no one. Lord Culverleigh, her brother, was known to be his intimate friend, and the rumour had come already to be regarded as an accomplished fact when, like a thunder-bolt, ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... It's more the knack of it than anything else. Come, let us hurry!" and Dan set off at a gallop. He was thinking altogether of the mustang, and never dreamed of the other odd adventure in store for him,—an adventure which was to make a soldier of him ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer
... sickness which I have so often seen shown by strong men. The skipper said: "We'll heave her to again. You'd better get below. Your pluck's all right, but an unlucky one might catch you, and you ain't got the knack of watching for an extra drop o' water ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... treatment Ravenscroft has met with at the hands of the critics it may be worth while emphasizing Genest's opinion that his 'merit as a dramatic writer has been vastly underrated'. Ravenscroft has a facility in writing, an ease of dialogue, a knack of evoking laughter and picturing the ludicrous, above all a vitality which many a greater name entirely lacks. As a writer of farce, and farce very nearly akin ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... think that she could catch the knack of educating children, as she had surreptitiously learnt, from a fashionable hairdresser, the art of dressing hair. Ever since Mrs. Harcourt had spoken in such a decided manner respecting Mad. de Rosier, ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... dancer. Conceding the necessity of his extinction, I am yet indisposed to attach much weight to the Davidian precedent, for it does not appear that he was acting under divine command, directly or indirectly imparted, and whenever he followed the hest of his own sweet will David had a notable knack at going wrong. Perhaps the best value of the incident consists in the evidence it supplies that dancing was not forbidden—save possibly by divine injunction—to the higher classes of Jews, for unless we are to suppose the dancing of David to have been the mere clumsy capering ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... that!" she said, with gay imperiousness. "You pale-eyed folk have a horrible knack of making one feel as if one is under a microscope. Your worthy uncle is just the same. If I weren't so deeply in love with him, I might resent it. But Nick is a privileged person, isn't he, wherever he goes? Didn't someone once say of him that ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... tackler, but relied too much on his feet while defending goal, instead of using the breast and head. His individuality consisted in meeting the charge of an opponent with bended knees, and he had the knack of taking the ball away and making a brilliant return in a style that roused the cheers of the spectators. He was a very hard worker to the last, and only retired from football to go abroad some years ago. He has, however, returned to Glasgow, and ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... scape-grace nephew and me to know you and your daughter. I have had my nose at the grindstone of business for so many years that I feared it had grown out of my power to make new friends; but I begin to see that I have not lost the knack. Perhaps my somber presence is tolerated because of my gay, jolly boy," and Mr. Kinsella gazed rather wistfully after Pierce, who had crossed the deck to meet Elise O'Brien, just ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... call a knack! How well she looks at her work, and with that cheerful, friendly face! Everything that she touches is well done;—everything improves and flourishes under her eye. If she were only not so violent and passionate!—but it is not in her heart, there never was a better ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... it the business of his benevolent ministry to guide others into it. Though not the truth, an illustration is a stepping-stone towards it; an indentation in the rock which makes it easier to climb. No man had a happier knack in hewing out these notches in the cliff, and no one knew better where to place them, than this pilgrim's pioneer. Besides, he rightly judged that the value of these suggestive similes—these illustrative stepping-stones—depends very much on their breadth and frequency. ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... In the drawing-room." She watched the servant carry the discarded containers around the house, then turned to Rand. "You know, not the least of your capabilities is your knack of finding servant-replacements on short ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... French painter knew the art of modulation, while his transitions are bold; he enveloped his objects in atmosphere and gave his shadows a due share of luminosity. He placed his colours so that at times his work resembles mosaic or tapestry. He knew a century before the modern impressionists the knack of juxtaposition, of opposition, of tonal division; his science was profound. He must have studied Watteau and the Dutchmen closely. Diderot was amazed to find that his surpassing whites were neither black nor white, but a neuter—but by a subtle transposition of tones looked white. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... is at Felpham, and his epitaph by Mrs. Opie may be read by the industrious on the wall of the church. Among the many epitaphs on his neighbours by Hayley himself, who had a special knack of mortuary verse, is ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... this order has a knack of cutting rather deeply, of ceasing, in some minds, to be comedy at all; and it may be said that this is what has happened in the present instance. Luckily it is equally true that certain matters are less painful, because less actual, in print ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... Indiarubber Man when the corporal had withdrawn. "Really, Phillips has a knack of disclosing great truths as if they were ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... but, being poor, I have taught myself to do without them. An occasional model would only disturb my ideal conception of the figure, and be a positive impediment in my career. As for painting by an artificial light," he would continue, "that is simply a knack I have found it necessary to acquire, my days being engrossed in the work ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with the maddest, most whimsical patter, step-dances, ventriloquism, recitations. He kept us in roars for a long time. Blended with the simplicity of a baby, he has the wisdom of the serpent, and has the knack of getting hold of odd delicacies, with which he regales the ward. He is perfectly well, by the way, but when the doctor comes round he assumes a convincing air of semi-convalescence, and refers darkly to his old wound. The doctor is not in the least taken in, but is indulgent, and ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... place, to put the people upon their guard, took occasion to point out to them the pernicious tendency of Whitfield's wild doctrines and irregular manner of life. He represented him as a religious impostor or quack, who had an excellent knack of setting off to advantage his poisonous tenets. On the other hand, Whitfield, who had been accustomed to bear reproach and face opposition, recriminated with double acrimony and greater success. While Alexander Garden, to keep his flock ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... used to take his turn without much demur or complaint, and he had a knack of getting through with it quickly as a rule, especially in summer. None of us had much trouble during the warm season. It was in November, December and January, when cold cream did not properly "ripen" and the cows were long past ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... hostility increasing from day to day, the old city losing a little of its life each season, and assuredly destined to disappear,—to be choked, assassinated, by the young town. Ah! their dirty Grotto! He would rather have his feet cut off than tread there. Wasn't it heart-rending, that knick-knack shop which they had stuck beside it? A shameful thing, at which a bishop had shown himself so indignant that it was said he had written to the Pope! He, Cazaban, who flattered himself with being a freethinker and a Republican of the old days, who already under the Empire ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... transmitted to the son—it needed only the hardening of use to develop them. The lad found that it came quite naturally to him to swing through the trees. Even at great heights he never felt the slightest dizziness, and when he had caught the knack of the swing and the release, he could hurl himself through space from branch to branch with even greater agility than ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... apart from their usefulness, is an appetising occupation, and to exchange bald, uniform shillings for a fine big, figurative knick-knack, such as a windmill, a gross of green spectacles, or a cocked hat, gives us a direct and emphatic sense of gain. We have had many shillings before, as good as these; but this is the first time we have possessed a windmill. Upon these principles of human ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... platform. Dear to me as the bugle-note to any war-horse, as the first twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your seats please!' or—better still—'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does not stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron road. There is one who describes, with accuracy ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... doubt about it? No! "Schelim, King of the Hills, and his four sons," was one of Aunt Judy's very, very, very, best inventions. But they had the happy knack of always thinking so of the ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... speaking of shooting now, and not at a tin can. You have to allow for the jump of the muzzle. Unless you hold it down with your wrist, you over shoot; and it's the first shot that counts. Of course, there's a feel, a knack. But don't aim with your eyes. You won't have time. Men file off the front sight—it sometimes catches, in the draw. And it's useless, anyway. They fire as they point with the finger, by the feel. You see, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... tasks Were furbished up to seem like rituals. She baked and brewed as one who only asks The right to serve. Her daily manuals Of prayer were duties, and her festivals When Theodore praised some dish, or frankly said She had a knack in making ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... Thomas, the dressmaker. She is going to teach me to sew. She says I have quite a knack. I'm through with the farm. There ain't any end to the work on a farm, and always so much trouble happens. I'm going to be ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... advanced, Bowers, aided by Cherry-Garrard, sorted out the rations, which he weighed and packed in the most business-like manner. Bowers was always well served, for he had the happy knack of enlisting volunteers for ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... What happiness to meet again, to renew the pleasant friendship that was broken off by the fault of the events of life rather than by our own! How many things we shall have to tell each other! You, who alone had the knack of driving the frowns from my terrible grandpapa's brow, will bring us gayety, and I assure ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... author has a knack of intricate plot-work which will keep an intelligent reader at her books, when he would become tired over far better novels not so strongly peppered. For even the 'wisest men' now and then relish not only a little nonsense, ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... his sketch-book. "I am glad to know," he said thoughtfully, "that you please yourself, Miss Columbine. In doing so, you have the happy knack of pleasing—others." ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... kindly advised him to avoid the ludicrous; another to shun the pathetic; a third assured him that he was tolerable at description, but cautioned him to leave narrative alone; while a fourth declared that he had a very pretty knack at turning a story, and was really entertaining when in a pensive mood, but was grievously mistaken if he imagined himself to ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... which, in spite of their ingenuity, hardly ever succeeded, and always cost him a great deal of money. He was a voracious reader, and was always hard on the heels of every new idea in philosophy, art, science, and politics: he had an amazing knack of finding out men of originality and independence of character: it was as though he answered to their magnetism. He was a sort of connecting-link between Olivier's friends, who were all as isolated as himself, and ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Stack! Of wives that to the Wind have been allotted There is no lack; You've spurned my love as though I were a worm; But next September when I see thy form, I'll woo thee with an equinoctial storm! I have that knack!' ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Captain Bream, after a brief but careful look round, "it'll do. With a little cuttin' and carvin' here an' there, we'll manage to squeeze in, for you must know, ladies, that we sea-farin' men have a wonderful knack o' stuffin' a good deal ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... peculiarities of human speech. Not that they all do it—oh, no, many have only their own beautiful natural song; every Mockingbird has not the power of imitation, but certain members of the tribe acquire a knack of mockery of which they seem ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... to you, ma'am, and pleased to hear the kinship acknowledged. A good family, as families go, though I say it. We have held on to Dangan since Harry Fifth's time; and to our name since Guy of Welswe was made a thane by Athelstan. We have a knack, ma'am, of staying the course: small in the build but sound in the wind. It did me good, to-day, to see that son of yours step out for the ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Schaunard and later on with Marcel, became more intimate; each of the young fellows hoisted the flag of his artistic opinions, and all four recognized that they had like courage and similar hopes. Talking and arguing they perceived that their sympathies were akin, that they had all the same knack in that chaff which amuses without hurting, and that the virtues of youth had not left a vacant spot in their heart, easily stirred by the sight of the narration of anything noble. All four starting from the same mark to reach the same ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... a perilous gun to handle. Owing to some undiscoverable flaw of construction or imperfection in the alloy, the monster soon developed a disconcerting knack of back-firing, hazardous to life and limb. It stands to reason that the Good Duke attached no undue importance to any trifling disaster accruing therefrom. On the contrary, in order to be sure of a thunderous ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... chapel for the pensioners, in the classic style, over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak a life-long abhorrence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... bit sooner than that," suggested the elder woman. "One can't always stop oneself just where one wants to when sliding down a slope. It has a knack of getting steeper and steeper as ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... being just right which a good London tailor knows how to give. She wore no ornaments, but Imogen, who had felt rather well-dressed when she left home, suddenly hated her gown and hat, realized that her belt and ribbon did not agree, and wished for the dozenth time that she had the knack at getting the ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... your fault," Mrs. Caldwell rejoined. "You have an unhappy knack of separating yourself from every one. Look at your Uncle James. He can hardly ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a certain knack which I had the opportunity of employing in Africa on more than one occasion. Hence my nickname of Arsene Lupin. It was soon after the death of the man himself, you know, and he was much spoken ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... his men there could be no doubt. Had it been otherwise not a suspicion of a smile would have appeared upon their faces. The subaltern had the knack of handling African troops, and without that knack an officer might just as well transfer elsewhere. Firmness, strict impartiality, and consideration for the welfare of the men under his orders had been rewarded by a whole-hearted devotion on the part of the blacks to "Massa Wilmst," ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... telepathically was not, even for him, an easy job. He had the knack and the training but, in addition, there was the necessity of establishing a rapport with the other mind. Since he was a physicist and not a politician, it was much easier to get information from the mind of Sonya Malekrinova than to get it from the Premier. The only person with whom ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... therefore vain; nor could I hope to purchase my discharge, unless any charitable soul would lend me a large sum of money; for, though I made a good deal, as I have said, yet I have always had through life an incorrigible knack of spending, and (such is my generosity of disposition) have been in debt ever ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... friendship and its comforts, nor the abrupt change for the better in her class-fortunes, could counterbalance Laura's luckless knack of putting her foot in it. This she continued to do, in season and out of season. And not with ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... present time competent to set up a photographic ambulance or to hang out a sign in any modest country town. We should, no doubt, over-time and under-tone, and otherwise wrong the countenances of some of our sitters; but we should get the knack in a week or two, and if Baron Wenzel owned to having spoiled a hat-full of eyes before he had fairly learned how to operate for cataract, we need not think too much of libelling a few village physiognomies before considering ourselves fit to take the minister and his deacons. After ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... themselves—Winton knowing a trick worth two of the field's at-large. They had slipped there, luckily unseen, for the knowing were given to following the one-handed horseman in faded pink, who, on his bang-tailed black mare, had a knack of getting so well away. One of the whips, a little dark fellow with smouldery eyes and sucked-in weathered cheeks, dashed out of covert, rode past, saluting, and dashed in again. A jay came out with a screech, dived, and doubled back; a hare made off across the fallow—the light-brown ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... happened that day to dine with him: his visits, indeed, were more properly to the aunt than the nephew; and many of the intelligent ladies in the parish, who, like some very great philosophers, have the happy knack at accounting for everything, gave out that there was a particular attachment between them, which wanted only to be matured by some more years of courtship to end in the tenderest connection. In this conclusion, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... must suppose the Instructions were given by her, as well as the Reward, to the Composer. Who that is, though you so earnestly require of me, I shall leave you to guess from that Ciceronian Eloquence, with which the Work abounds; and that excellent Knack of making every Character amiable, which he lays his ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... Scripture, and with the hopes and powers that are treasured in Jesus Christ, so that our minds are made up upon a great many thorny questions as to what we ought to do, and that when crises or dangers come, as they have a knack of coming, very suddenly, and are sprung upon us unexpectedly, we shall be able, without much difficulty, or much time spent in perplexed searching, to fall back upon the principles that decide our conduct—that is essential to all successful and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... seem sometimes that he has an artistic rule over his 'accidents,' for 'surprises' have a wonderful knack of falling into the general plan of his life, as though but waited for. Our first meeting with him was a singular instance of this. I say 'our,' for Narcissus and I chanced to be walking a holiday together at the time. It fell on this wise. At Tewkesbury ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... knowledge in the household and the courts, there was little else for any one to do than engage in farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians, or turn carpenter and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a farmer, though still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and expended his skill and his muscle in subduing a ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... are able to perform the full work of a man; that is, what can be done by a person from twenty-one years of age to fifty. I know no husbandry-work (mowing hardly excepted) that is not equally within the power of all persons within those ages, the more advanced fully compensating by knack and habit what they lose in activity. Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man's labour and that of another, from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... The knack of mixing evenly without producing air bubbles, is not always easily acquired, by this method. An alternative plan is to hold the inoculated tube vertically upright between the opposed palms and to rotate it between them ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: "It's from UNdoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take. He was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. I remember the time he invented his Goliath Glue he sat up all night over the Bible to get the name... No, father didn't start IN as a druggist," she went on, expanding with the signs of Marvell's interest; "he was educated for an undertaker, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... tingled, and he drew closer. Beasley always had a knack of so blending truth with his personal venom that it stung far more than downright insult. He wondered what the Padre's generosity had been, and wherein lay its connection with their present purpose. The explanation was not long in coming, for Montana Ike took up the challenge ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... a letter to Garrick, of the 29th of March in this year, says—"I met Mr. Gray at dinner last Sunday: he spoke handsomely of your happy knack of epilogues; but he calls the Stratford Jubilee, Vanity Fair." See Garrick Correspondence, vol. i. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... began to songs and spinning yarns. And it was now that my friend Tom Lokins came out strong, and went on at such a rate, that he quite won the hearts of our guests. Tom was not noisy, and he was slow in his talk, but he had the knack of telling a good story; he never used a wrong word, or a word too many, and, having a great deal of humour, men could not help listening when he began ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... that she possesses extraordinary talent as a mimic. She has the flexible face, the manageable voice, and the dramatic knack which fit a woman for character-parts and disguises on the stage. All she now wants is teaching and practice, to make her sure of her own resources. The experience of her, thus gained, has revived an idea in my mind which originally occurred to me ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... furbished up for the benefit of the Republicans who now control the Third French Republic. However true it may, or may not, have been of the Comte de Provence and the Comte d'Artois, Henri IV., who was certainly a Bourbon of the Bourbons, had a quick wit at learning, and upon occasion also a neat knack of forgetting. He thought Paris well worth a mass, heard ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... an increase in the tips, that came my way. With the increase in my earnings and the experience I was gaining I came to have a liking for the service, which is in no wise diminished at this time. I soon learned the knack of pleasing the greater number of my passengers, and this reported to the superintendent by the special agents raised me in the official's favor with the result that I was given more extensive and more profitable runs and soon became one of the most popular porters in ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... his mind not to go back to school. He was equally determined not to let himself be forced into any sort of manual work. Besides having no knack for it, he had come to look upon it as a social disgrace. Some other work must be found, for well enough he knew that his father would not let him stay ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... she had the knack of making herself more charming than Venus. How she did it nobody knew; but men left the prettiest creatures for her; and she ruined us, I think, at the rate of ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Gaudissart was faithful to the article Paris. In his close relation to the caprices of humanity, the varied paths of commerce had enabled him to observe the windings of the heart of man. He had learned the secret of persuasive eloquence, the knack of loosening the tightest purse-strings, the art of rousing desire in the souls of husbands, wives, children, and servants; and what is more, he knew how to satisfy it. No one had greater faculty than he for inveigling ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... and pullies can be easily come by," answered Will; "and with a saw and a plane, I can manage that business in half a day. I love the knack of clean and secret conveyance—thou knowest it was the foundation ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Neither did I depend upon mere brilliancy of technique, a trick by which children often surprise their listeners; but I always tried to interpret a piece of music; I always played with feeling. Very early I acquired that knack of using the pedals, which makes the piano a sympathetic, singing instrument, quite a different thing from the source of hard or blurred sounds it so generally is. I think this was due not entirely to natural artistic temperament, but ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... laughing now, with a clear ripple of joyousness, at some passing quip between our host and sharp-tongued Lady Berenicia, both of whom employed pretty liberally their Irish knack of saying witty, biting things. The sound came strangely to my ears, as if it were some other ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... it seems, had for the last few years been in a state of chronic discontent with the policies of the neighbouring chiefs. Formerly a pagazi for an Arab, he had now assumed regal power, with the usual knack of unconscionable rascals who care not by what means they step into power. When the chief of Uyoweh died, Mirambo, who was head of a gang of robbers infesting the forests of Wilyankuru, suddenly entered Uyoweh, and constituted himself ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... REMEDY.—Come in contact with the other sex. You are infused with your lover's magnetism, which must remain till displaced by another's. Go to parties and picnics; be free, familiar, offhand, even forward; try your knack at fascinating another, and yield to fascinations yourself. But be honest, command respect, and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... to use a steel properly. It is difficult to describe the process,—so easy to a natural mechanic and so awkward to others,—or to instruct one in the knack of it, by mere description. Hold the steel firmly in the left hand. Let the edge of the knife near the handle rest on the steel, the back of the knife raised slightly at an angle of about 30 deg.. Draw the knife along lightly but steadily, always at the same angle, the ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... was Eliza Pollard, who had red hair and a kind heart, but was continually falling out with her last young man and getting another. She told Hester all about it. Hester had a special knack of being told about the servants' young men, for she knew also all about those of Eliza ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... that I am truly sensible of all your love and affection, which is reciprocal. You have, from the variety of incidents passing before you, much to tell me; and, besides, you have that happy knack of making every thing you write interesting. Here I am, one day precisely like the other; except the difference of a gale ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol. I. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson
... When Mrs. Brandeis was able to come back to the store Sadie left to marry, not one of her traveling-men victims, but a steady person, in the paper-hanging way, whose suit had long been considered hopeless. After that Fanny took her place. She developed a surprising knack at selling. Yet it was not so surprising, perhaps, when one considered her teacher. She learned as only a woman can learn who is brought into daily contact with the outside world. It was not only contact: it was the ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... exquisite. He illustrated all his scientific papers, made his own woodcuts, and carved the reredos that is at present the chief feature of interest in the church at Borlsover Conyers. He had an exceedingly clever knack in cutting silhouettes for young ladies and paper pigs and cows for little children, and made more than one complicated wind instrument ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... the Count. "So-and-so must have a fine private fortune, or else he must have the knack of fingering large bribes." ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... a genius for corruption," said the Baron, who had listened to Asie in admiring silence, "just as I hafe de knack of de banking." ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... a great pity that he had not settled himself ashore in a good city practice," continued Dr. Ferris. "He had a great knack at pleasing people and making friends, and he was always spoiling for want of work. I was ready enough to shirk my part of that, you may be sure, but if you start with a reasonably healthy set of men, crew and officers, and keep good discipline, and have no accidents on the voyage, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... commercial model. Inside is an ultra-slow fine-wire recorder holding a spool that runs for a week. The clock lets you go to any place on the 7-day wire and record a message. The buttons give you variable speed in going there, so you don't waste too much time making a setting. There's a knack in fingering them ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... Croly, her husband, long a newspaper man of admitted power and executive force, Mrs. Croly was a constant help, as he too was to her. From him she learned not a little of her topical discernment and technical knack. He was never afraid of ability in whomever found, and he rejoiced that the sex of his wife, and the novel fact that she was the first woman in America to write daily for publication, gave to her and her subjects a vogue he and his could not command in a world of more and mainly ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... Remembering what you once were, your pastimes and love of luxury, this seems as hellish a place and existence as even you deserve. When I saw you last night"—and here Ledyard laughed—"it was all I could do to control myself. You play your part well; but you always had a knack for theatricals. I know I'm a hard, unforgiving man, but there is just one phase of human nature that I will not stand for, and that is the refusal to take the medicine prescribed for the disease. What incentive have people for better living and upright thinking if every devil of a fellow ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... dear Mr. Atlantic, and you, my confidential friends of the reading public, that there is a certain magic or spiritualism which I have the knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue of which my wife and daughters never hear or see the little personalities respecting them which form parts of my papers. By a peculiar arrangement which I have made with the elves of the inkstand and the familiar spirits ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... breath of air stirred about them faintly; all seemed keyed to that tense furtive quiet of the doomed Jews. Not a child cried, not a woman sobbed; they had learned, direfully enough, the piteous art of the oppressed—the knack of ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... though Luis de Leon had, in an eminent degree, the knack of success in all open competitions, the students took part in the elections of professors at Salamanca, and this ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... to time during the next day Leon came into the cabin to look at his tiny charge, for whom an impromptu cradle had been made with some pillows in an easy chair, and who seemed to have the happy knack of adapting herself to circumstances, for she slept quietly on, with a smile on her little face, all unconscious of the waves from which a ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... observation is keenly developed, languages—or, in fact, anything else—can be learnt with amazing facility. The "knack" of learning languages is only due to observation; the greatest scientific discoveries have been due to mere observation; the greatest commercial enterprises are based on the practical results of observation. But it is astounding how few people do really observe, not only ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... while always boldly and continuously outlining the course of historical events, has the knack of seizing upon incidents which reveal the true character of historical personages. These histories are attractive as romance and possess a peculiar power of impressing the memory, being written from a Christian standpoint they are ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... Paris have a mysterious knack of enlarging a hole in a man's purse. They cannot give the price of anything upon inquiry; and as the paroxysm of longing cannot abide delay, orders are given by the feeble light of an approximate estimate of cost. The same people never send in the bills at once, but ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... of effort he was scarcely more advanced than at the start. There was no chance to delude himself with vain pretences: it was quite plain to everybody that the rhetorician Augustin was not a success. Now, why was this? Was it that he lacked the gift of teaching? Perhaps he had not the knack of keeping order, which is the most indispensable of all for a schoolmaster. What suited him best no doubt was a small and select audience which he charmed rather than ruled. Large and noisy classes he could not manage. At Carthage, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... round knobby face as he has to-day, the same bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment, the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch all things became memorable and rare. From him I first heard tell of love, but only after its barbs were already sticking in ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... and David who was not allowed to have a knife wore a pirate-string round his waist. Irene in her usual interfering way objected to this bauble and dropped disparaging remarks about wrecked islands which were little to her credit. I was for defying her, but David, who had the knack of women, knew a better way; he craftily proposed that we "should let Irene in," in short, should wreck her, and though I objected, she proved a great success and recognised the yucca filamentosa by ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... wrote his life, and had the highwayman, standing under the gallows, send for a copy and deliver it as his "last speech and dying confession." There is a certain breadth and originality in this stroke, hardly to be paralleled in modern journalism. Defoe had the knack of singling out from the mass of passing events whatever would be likely to interest the public. He brought out an account in some newspaper, and if successful, made the occurrence the subject of a longer article in pamphlet or book form. He was always on the lookout for ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... he had swept out a "candy store." He had had a few years at the public school, and a few months at a business college, to which he went at night, after work hours. He had been "up against it good and plenty," he told them. He seemed, however, to have had a knack of making friends and of giving them "a boost along" when such a chance was possible. Both of his listeners realised that a good many people had liked him, and the reason was ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wether; after all, she had been with him a long time, and worked for little pay. And Oline had not been so bad with the children; she was not stern and strictly righteous and that sort of thing, but had a knack of dealing with children: listened to what they said, and let them do more or less as they pleased. If they came round while she was making cheese, she would give them a bit to taste; if they begged to be let off washing their ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... without ever fluttering those who dwell in them, and, in course of time, he comes to be known and accepted everywhere as a useful man. As might be supposed, he is never obtrusively manly. The rough pursuits of the merely athletic repel him, yet he has the knack of assuming an interest where he feels it not, and is able to prattle quite pleasantly about sports in which he takes little or no active part. At the same time it must be admitted that he holds a gun fairly straight, and does not disgrace ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... author that he should sprinkle his next edition with a few less righteous examples, thereby both purging his book of its monotony and somewhat justifying its sub-title. Like most people who are in the habit of writing things to be printed, I have not the knack of writing really good letters. But let me crudely indicate the sort of thing ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... joyously refutes a few anti-Christian arguments by means of his extraordinary knack of seeing the large and obvious, and therefore generally overlooked things. He believes in Christianity because he is a rationalist, and the evidence in its favour has convinced him. The arguments with which he deals are these. That ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... seemed inordinately so as it emerged from it, like the necks of the plaster cats which pedlars carry about on their heads. And something was always sticking to his uniform, either a bit of hay or some trifle. Moreover, he had a peculiar knack, as he walked along the street, of arriving beneath a window just as all sorts of rubbish was being flung out of it; hence he always bore about on his hat scraps of melon rinds, and other such articles. Never once in his life did ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... profitable. But I was saying Madame Bill was a handsome woman, and valuable, and Flannagan himself hadn't a better eye for giving the public sensations. She expanded his ideas. Yet Flannagan had a knack. He was grand at speech-making, and sudden ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... it differs from common drawing only by the difficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a careless habit of thinking that engraving is a mere business, easy enough when one has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form of drawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it is more difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It is true that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce it at certain stages either to pure ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... instant, he replied, "to beat Field and Thompson bowling." This was in the days before bowling was the fashionable winter sport it has since become. The alleys in Chicago in 1885 were neither numerous nor in first-class condition; but after Field once discovered that he had a special knack with the finger-balls we hunted them up and tested most of them. After a while we settled down on the alleys under Slosson's billiard-room on Monroe Street for our afternoon games and on the Superior Alleys on North Clark Street on the evenings when it was ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... introducing her to barack, the Hungarian national spirit, in the way of a digestive. The apricot brandy, distilled to the point of losing all sweetness and fruit flavor, required learning. It must be tossed back just so. By the time Catherina had the knack, neither of them were feeling strain. In fact, it became obviously necessary for him to be given a guided tour of Prague's ...
— Freedom • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... good- looking—nay, handsome; she had the manners which Mrs. Furze knew that she herself lacked, and Charlie Colston, aged twenty-eight, was still disengaged. It was Mrs. Furze's way when she proposed anything to herself, to take no account of any obstacles, and she had the most wonderful knack of belittling and even transmuting all moral objections. Mr. Charlie Colston was a well-known figure in Eastthorpe. He was an only son, about five feet eleven inches high, thin, unsteady on his legs, smooth-faced, unwholesome, and silly. He had been taken ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... and, upon one pretext or another, appropriated to himself everything on which he could lay his hands. My father, however, was himself pretty shrewd in money matters, having inherited along with his fortune a rare knack at keeping it. His father was a goldsmith in the time of King Edward, and enjoyed the marked favor of that ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... tablets which you hold in your hand? Give me leave to look at them. They might suit my pedantic way of life. But," added he, as he examined their delicate workmanship, "came you honestly by this toy, my lord? What fair frailty have you cheated of this knack, that never, I will be sworn, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... close debate. 'The art of dealing with human beings,' 'the art of behaving in society,' 'the science of human happiness,' were various modes of expressing the final end of conduct.[5] Sokrates clearly indicated the difference between an unscientific and a scientific art; the one is an incommunicable knack or dexterity, the other ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... The night was fearfully dark, and the roads were altogether unworthy of the name. Yet there is an immense traffic on this route, which is the highway from East to West. The Americans, with all their "smartness," have not the knack of making either good roads or good streets. About 11 P.M. we arrived at Uniontown, 12 miles from Brownsville. There the horses were to be changed, an operation which took about an hour to accomplish. Three coaches were there together. ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... failings as could be desired. For one of no extreme views, he could count an extraordinary number of adherents. Without being particularly agreeable or instructive, he possessed a rather imposing readiness and rotundity of speech, and had a knack of turning his arm-chair into a pulpit somewhat oftener than was quite in good taste. However, I suppose the best of us will talk "shop" when we see a fair opening. He had a large wife and several small children. No one admired him ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... of the very gutters all the human waste and rubbish that the others, the wise business men, threw there and with the town's worst drunkard and half a dozen mistreated, misborn, misunderstood boys he's playing the business game and winning. He's got the knack of making his help feel like partners and he's so square and sensible in his dealings with them that they are all ready to die for him. Now if that isn't the greatest kind of a business gift ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... had many opportunities of knowing officials, both of high and low degree, who were, quite unconsciously to themselves, tools in the hands of their servants, the latter being permitted a freedom of speech that would never have been tolerated in equals. Such servants have always had the knack of making themselves indispensable, while preserving an outward appearance of the deepest humility; and thus it has often come to pass that a lord has been made to discharge a shaft aimed by ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... race-horses which have an unlucky knack of losing,' said Mary, dubiously. 'I suppose if his horses won, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... herself as she sealed the letter, and looked at it with admiration, "I really have a knack for doing those things. I should think Aspasia Corfield would ask him by return—me, too, if she has any decency, though she has dropped me for fifteen years. She has a tribe of daughters.—Why I should ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... enough to see that, in order to attempt this, he ought to read Bolingbroke for a year, and then practise for another year. In 1838 he thought nothing of undertaking, amid all the demands of active life, such a bagatelle as a History of the French Revolution. "I have some little knack of narrative," he says, "the most difficult by far of all styles, and never yet attained in perfection but by Hume and Livy; and I bring as much oratory and science to the task as most of my predecessors." But what sort of science? And what has oratory to do with it? And how could he deceive himself ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... posterity, his happy-go-lucky life is amply redeemed by the work he has left behind him, for it is pure and good. His river of speech flows ever on shining like molten gold. No man of his time possessed the adroit knack of bright writing in a more eminent degree. The pawky humour of his side-hits, the blending of light and shade in the process of the narrative, the beauty and melody that can be noted even in the sound of the sentences, combine to delight the judgment, the ear, and the fancy. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Dutch headsman, that he would do his office with so much ease and dexterity, that the head after execution should stand upon the shoulders. Pray God Sir William be not probationer for the place; for as if he had the like knack too, most of those whom the diurnal hath slain for him, to us ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the last praise and causes the purest benefit of books, comes not of any manner of writing; no mere vivacity, though that of a French writer of memoirs, though that of Arsene Houssaye himself, can compass it; by no knack or talents is it to be attained. Perfect style has, indeed, many allurements, and is of exceeding price; but it is no chariot of Elijah, nevertheless. Was ever style more delightful, of its kind, than Dryden's? Was ever style more heavy and monotonous than that of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Lord! hadn't I been overwhelmed and choked with sentiment all day long? Sentiment? Of all the bosh—but, never mind. Louie at least didn't bother me in that way. Yes, it's a fact, Macrorie, she's got an awful knack of giving comfort ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... it hasn't the knack of altering much," Dick thought, as he tramped from the Docks westward. "Now, what must ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... dislodged. I do not want our town laid in ruins; yet I truly believe the English rule would be a benefit to this distracted realm. Their own colonies, if report speaks truth, are far more flourishing and strong than any France has ever planted. You have the knack of it, you Britons. Sometimes I doubt whether we shall ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... steps, along the hill side. And he would struggle, as of old, to keep the front place, though by this time his "wind" had greatly failed. He would occasionally invite an old friend to take a quiet wrestle with him on the lawn, to keep up his skill, and perhaps to try some new "knack" of throwing. In the evening, he would sometimes indulge his visitors by reciting the old pastoral of "Damon and Phyllis," or singing his favourite song of "John Anderson my Joe." But his greatest glory amongst ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... handy water bucket for quenching fires. Whatever the floor, eternal vigilance was the price of safe bacon—you looked at the smokehouse fires first thing in the morning and last at night. They were put out at sundown, but had a knack of burning again from some hidden seed of live coal. Morning smoke could not well be too thick, provided it smelled right—keen and clean, reminiscent of sylvan fragrance—a thick, acrid smoke that set you sneezing and coughing, was "most tolerable and not to ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... sir," said Hilderman cheerily. "You scientist fellows have a knack of making your difficulties a little greater than they really are, in order to get more credit for surmounting them. I know your little ways. I'm an American, you know, professor; you ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... got a knack," he said, almost graciously, "of putting a fellow in a good humour with himself, ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... down in comparative peace. Fortunately for the author, nothing untoward happened, but travelers are warned not to be too sanguine. Wrecks have happened within a few miles of the destination, generally to be accounted for by the unhappy knack the Chinese boatman has of taking all precautions where the dangerous rapids exist, and leaving all to chance elsewhere. Some two years later, as I was coming down the river from Chung-king in December, I counted no less ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... a frank intimacy in this little circle into which whim had led her. She spent most of her time with the children. She gave Elsie two hours' lessons a day, and, since she had a knack of making them interesting, Tinker often enjoyed the benefit of her teaching. After lessons she shared most of their amusements, and learned to be a pirate, a brigand, an English sailor, a Boer, and every kind of captive and conspirator. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... Japan any more than in, say, Cheltenham. The form was English, the furniture was English, the pictures and books were English; photographs of school and college cricket elevens gave it the final home touch. Only in the garden were there exotic indications. The English certainly have the knack of carrying their atmosphere with them. I had noticed that often in India; but this Yokohama villa ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... reason, really very much distressed. Feng Tzu-ying then explained that he knew a young doctor who had made a study of his profession, Chang by surname, and Yu-shih by name, whose learning was profound to a degree; who was besides most proficient in the principles of medicine, and had the knack of discriminating whether a patient would live or die; that this year he had come to the capital to purchase an official rank for his son, and that he was now living with him in his house. In view of these circumstances, not knowing but that if, perchance, the case of our daughter-in-law were ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... caught up to Jack, and had left Tom far behind. The same talent which had induced him to mend his ragged clothes, made him do, with rapidity and neatness, everything else he undertook, while he showed a peculiar knack of being quick at understanding and executing the ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... my arms about her to console her, but she wept so that, for all my seventeen years and pride of manhood, it set me weeping also, and with such a hiccoughing noise, since I had not a woman's knack of quiet tears, that it finally turned her ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... vein— (We know we have a happy knack that way. We have observed, moreover, that young men Are fond of good advice, and so are girls; Especially of that meandering kind, Which winding on so sweetly, treats of all They ought to be and do and think and wear, As one may say, from creeds to comforters. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... extends to the officers' wives. Frequent removal from one part of the country to another prevents anything like vegetating. The ladies, I am told, do not become overmuch engrossed in housekeeping, and acquire something of a soldier's knack of doing without many things which would naturally occupy their time and thought if they looked forward to a settled life. Thus they have more time for reading and society. Those that I have met have certainly been very bright and companionable, and many who in girlhood were accustomed ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... from the Paris of then; and the whole of the doings of Bohemia are not written in the sugar-candy pastorals of Muerger. It is really not at all surprising that a young man of the fifteenth century, with a knack of making verses, should accept his bread upon disgraceful terms. The race of those who do so is not extinct; and some of them to this day write the prettiest verses imaginable.... After this, it were impossible for Master Francis to fall lower: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his leisure to his grandchildren. He carved for us with his knife, with an especial knack for willow whistles. He showed us the colors that lay upon the world when we looked at it through one of the glass pendants of the parlor chandelier. He sat by us when we played duck-on-the-rock. He helped us with ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... parsons came up from every part of the country, and as "The Return from Calvary" is the latest thing in religious art, they think themselves bound to put their names down for proofs. How could they refuse? The canvasser dipped the pen in the ink for them, and he has a knack of making a refusal ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... perceiving, abolished differences; and the poet would confess that his creative imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one that he could express himself and the other could not; that his advantage was a knack, which might impose on indolent men but could not impose on lovers of truth; for they know the tax of talent, or what a price of greatness the power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction of ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I had a knack of writing verses and things, and I wrote a few vaudeville songs. Then I came across a man named Bevan at a music-publisher's. He was just starting to write music, and we got together and turned out some vaudeville sketches, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... he made reply. "Look here! Could any man resist the temptation to use it when he was endowed by Nature with the power to do this?" His features seemed to writhe and knot and assume in as many moments a dozen different aspects. "I've had the knack of doing that since the hour I could breathe. Could any man 'go straight' with a fateful gift like that if the laws of Nature said that he ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... that time, and his habits of business and order were very remarkable for one so young. At twenty, he took the direction of affairs, and with the help of experienced advisers, has managed them admirably for fifteen years. He and I have met but rarely, as my knack of mastering languages easily had caused me to be employed chiefly in the service of the house abroad, but I think our friendship is such as to stand the test of absence, ay, and of calumny too. I do not, cannot, believe he will endorse his brother's ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... ladies of the house of Gaunt were also compelled into submission. Once or twice they set people at her, but they failed. The brilliant Lady Stunnington tried a passage of arms with her, but was routed with great slaughter by the intrepid little Becky. When attacked sometimes, Becky had a knack of adopting a demure ingenue air, under which she was most dangerous. She said the wickedest things with the most simple unaffected air when in this mood, and would take care artlessly to apologize for her blunders, so that all the world should ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for the book it was embellished with "blowing whales and sailing ships; and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and elaborately forged the signature of Captain Flint and the sailing ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... present customers went not. He was the father of the Moonbeam, Mr. Horsball himself having come there since the days in which Fred Pepper first became familiar with its loose boxes. No one knew how he lived or how he got his horses. He had, however, a very pretty knack of selling them, and certainly paid Mr. Horsball regularly. He was wont to vanish in April, and would always turn up again in October. Some people called him the dormouse. He was good-humoured, good-looking after a horsey fashion, clever, agreeable, and quite willing ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... Varvara Pavlovna took upon herself the labour of ordering and purchasing the trousseau, even of choosing the bridegroom's gifts. She had a great deal of practical sense, much taste, much love for comfort, and a great knack for securing for herself that comfort. This knack particularly astonished Lavretzky when, immediately after the wedding, he and his wife set out in a commodious carriage, which she had bought, for Lavriki. How everything which surrounded him had been planned, foreseen, provided for by ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... arrange the planks, slip the ropes, and lower the body, disputing in undertones, for it is not so easy as one might think to be a grave-digger. One must have the knack of it. And the night is very dark and the ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... that the Auto-Comrade hates a flabby brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demands of his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is one reason why so many more Auto-Comrades are to be found in crow's-nests, gypsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upper Fifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swaying masthead, taking light-heartedly to the open road, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the laborers had Sutton's pride or Mamise's piety in the work. Just as she began to get the knack of catching and placing the rivets Pafflow began to register his protest against her sex. He took a low joy in pitching rivets wild, and grinned at her dancing ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... believe that there is no remedy for its unevenness and dishevelment, or that the remedy is a secret. The idea, also, that some few men, by happy chance or happier temperament, have been given the secret—as if there were some sort of knack or trick of it—is wholly incredible. Religion must ripen fruit for every temperament; and the way even into its highest heights must be by a gateway through which the peoples of the world may pass. Pax ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... as she stood by the dressing-table, took up one knick-knack after another and put it down. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as if to bar the passage; but Jackson, with great activity, seized him by the wrist of the left hand, and, all powerful as the ruffian was, sent him dancing some few yards in front of the threshold before he was aware of his intention, or could resist the peculiar knack with which it was accomplished. The Aid-de-Camp, meanwhile, had deposited his saddle in a corner near the fire, and on his return to the door, met the inhospitable woodsman advancing as if to court a ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... of such sporting meetings, as the common guns of the people, which are constantly missing fire when required to shoot, have an awkward knack of going off when least expected; my mind was somewhat relieved when the tactics were explained, that we (nine guns) were to form a line of skirmishers about two hundred yards apart, commanding a mile ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... visitor in preparation for a French interview which lay ahead, and Miss Farnborough, laying down her book, had listened with smiling interest. Then the Englishwoman left the room, and Miss Farnborough had said, "You did that very cleverly; very cleverly indeed! You have a very happy knack of putting things simply and forcibly. I've noticed it more than once. Have you ever done ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sound, but the Abbess, taking into account the King's susceptibility, decided that it would not do for me to write myself about a matter so important as this. The Marquise de Thianges, in some way or other, had got the knack of plain speaking, so that a letter of hers would be more readily excused. Thus it was settled that she should write; and write she did. I give her letter verbatim, as it will please my readers; and they will agree with me that I could never ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... on the other. It is always hard enough to manage such elements, but let them get out of hand and a miracle is needed for salvation. Also you have to find the miracle, and I composed myself to search for it in the little things, the natural things of the situation. They have a knack of conducting you to the heart of a problem, if you will only have simple faith and follow them, and be not otherwise, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... don't hate him—But I have been so much accustomed to treat him like a fool, that I can't help thinking him one. He should not have been so tame to such a spirit as mine. He should have been angry when I played upon him. I have got a knack of it, and shall never leave it off, ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... Fresh comers are they from the Saal and Mayne; Much booty they bring of the rarest sort— 'Tis ours, if we cleverly drive our sport. A captain, who fell by his comrade's sword, This pair of sure dice to me transferred; To-day I'll just give them a trial to see If their knack's as good as it used to be. You must play the part of a pitiful devil, For these roaring rogues, who so loosely revel, Are easily smoothed, and tricked, and flattered, And, free as it came, their gold is scattered. But we—since by bushels our all ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... cream of her conservatories. Mrs. Rockerbilt has volunteered to take charge of the refreshments. The duchess of Snarleyow is dressing a doll that is to be named by Senator Defew and raffled at five dollars a guess. Mrs. Gushington-Andrews is to take entire control of the fancy knick-knack table, where we shall sell gold match-boxes, solid silver automobile head-lights, cigar-cutters, cocktail-shakers, and other necessities of life among the select. I don't see how the thing can fail, ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... begged her to be seated. "Repose all confidence in me, Madam," he said, "for I am not without experience in husbands. Good fellows on the whole, with their gladstone bags and their pince-nez and their unmistakable respectability. But somehow they have not acquired the knack of arriving when they are expected. Yours is the seventh who has failed us by this train. True, the other six were coming from Liverpool, whereas the 6.30 has come from London, but that is no excuse for them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... opinion, lying only, and, which is of something a lower form, obstinacy, are the faults which are to be severely whipped out of them, both in their infancy and in their progress, otherwise they grow up and increase with them; and after a tongue has once got the knack of lying, 'tis not to be imagined how impossible it is to reclaim it whence it comes to pass that we see some, who are otherwise very honest men, so subject and enslaved to this vice. I have an honest lad ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the poets," and the like. Epidius himself, a pedagogue of the progressive style, had doubtless proved an adept at this sort of thing. Claiming to be a descendant of an ancient hero who had one day transformed himself into a river-god, he must have had a knack for these tales. At any rate we are told that he wrote a book on metamorphosed trees.[4] When Octavius read the Culex, did he recognize in the quaint passage describing the shepherd's grove of metamorphosed trees ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... though!" he exclaimed, swerving the plane in a long, ascending spiral. All the art, the knack of flight came back to him, at the touch of the wheel, as readily as swimming to an expert in the water. Fear? The thought no more occurred to him than ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... exactly, I suppose, but he's just as good as the real. He's a natural knack at putting bones in their places, and all that sort of thing. There was a man broke his leg horribly at Thirlwall the other day, and Gibson was out of the way, and Marshchalk set it, and did it famously, they said. So go, Ellen, and bring us ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... Poole had the happy knack of turning every trifling incident to valuable account. I remember his telling me an anecdote in illustration of this faculty. I believe he never printed it. Being at Brighton one day, he strolled into an hotel to get an early dinner, took his seat at a table, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... a draughtsman, now, I could do something much better for you. I intend to set up a shop for ornamental carving, and I want some one to draw patterns. If you had a knack at designing, if ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a fashion were simply an edition de luxe of the views of everybody else. But his wife had made that discovery long ago. He smiled at the views of everybody else: his own were put forth as something choice and superior. He had the happy knack of being bourgeois with the air of an artist. If one could picture one's grocer weighing out sugar in a Spanish cloak and brigand's hat, it would afford an excellent symbol of his spiritual estate. To be perfectly ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... order to keep up with it. In its passage from tree to tree the animal showed caution and foresight, selecting only those branches that interlaced with other boughs, so that it made uninterrupted progress, and also had a knack of always keeping masses of thick foliage underneath it so that for some time no opportunity was found of firing another shot. At last, however, it came to one of those Dyak roads of which we have made mention, so that it could not easily swing from one tree ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... should 'prentice himself at fourteen And practise from morning to e'en; And when he's of age, If he will, I'll engage, He may capture the heart of a queen! It is purely a matter of skill, Which all may attain if they will: But every Jack He must study the knack If he wants to ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... eagerly seconded by Gregory, who always enjoyed the social parties that his sister had a peculiar knack in getting up at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cutting out pretty shapes in thin cardboard with the point of a penknife. But when, at his suggestion, Brotteaux gave him some string and a bodkin, he showed himself very apt in endowing with motion the little creatures he had failed to make and teaching them to dance. He had a happy knack, by way of trying them afterwards, of making them each execute three or four steps of a gavotte, and when they rewarded his pains, a smile would flicker on his ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... badly cooked, cold rations. Many a meal was lost altogether, and once or twice a poor cook who could not swim was drowned by the boat filling and capsizing. The frail craft of this kind were of curious shape, and only a person who had the knack could row them. No more comical sport could be witnessed than the lurky race which was held every season. Many of the cooks never acquired the art of rowing straight, and whenever they put a spurt on the lurky would run amuck in consequence of being ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... this year a year of sorrow Gridley!" he quivered indignantly. "I'll hang on, and make believe I'm meek as a lamb, but I'll spoil Gridley's record for this year! There was in olden times a chap who had a famous knack for getting square with people who used him the wrong way. I wish I could remember his name ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... as we are, you and I must do it, Bigot. Zounds! I learned to dig and delve when I was a stripling at Charlebourg, and in the trenches at Louisbourg, and I have not yet forgotten the knack of it! But where to get spades, Bigot; you are master here and ought ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the Indiarubber Man when the corporal had withdrawn. "Really, Phillips has a knack of disclosing great truths as if ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... mastic dust is required to produce a nice frosting is only to be determined by practice. The way to obtain the knack is to frost a few scraps to "get your hand in." Nitric acid of full strength is used, dipping the piece into a shallow dish for a few seconds. A good-sized soup plate would answer very nicely for frosting the bottom plate, which, it will be remembered, ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... through myself? Yes, sir, I did that little thing. And moreover, I never paid a dollar for any man's vote and never promised one. There are some ways of doing a thing that are as good as others which other people don't happen to think about, or don't have the knack of succeeding in, if they do happen to think of them. My dear sir, I am obliged to knock some of your expenses in the head—for never a cent was paid a Congressman or Senator on the part of ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... this. He was joyous and healthy, charmed with life and content with his daily work. He had been placed in the easiest and most interesting branch of the business, and, with his quick brain and his knack of making himself agreeable, he ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... tests to his writings. Professor Beers has nevertheless made it a profitable and interesting study to follow him through his career, which was, upon the whole, singularly fortunate. Few authors have possessed so happy a knack of making the present moment both enjoyable and profitable. His personal endowments were all in his favor, and no sooner was he launched in Europe than he gained a great social success. England, in particular, opened some of its pleasantest circles to him. Not only did Lady Blessington take ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... shapes in thin cardboard with the point of a penknife. But when, at his suggestion, Brotteaux gave him some string and a bodkin, he showed himself very apt in endowing with motion the little creatures he had failed to make and teaching them to dance. He had a happy knack, by way of trying them afterwards, of making them each execute three or four steps of a gavotte, and when they rewarded his pains, a smile would ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... talked more with her, too, when by himself, and was less boastful and rough. And the one boy would climb trees and get spruce gum for her, while she would seek scouring rush for him. Scouring rush is something that requires a special knack in the one who is to discover it, and the boys had never seen Lisbeth's equal in spying it out. Peter said that if there was a single spear growing anywhere, you might be sure that she would find it; to which Ole jokingly responded that, for his part, he believed she could ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... on Henry's wine and L.F. Austin's wit. This dear, brilliant man, now dead, acted for many years as Henry's secretary, and one of his gifts was the happy knack of hitting off people's peculiarities in rhyme. This dreadful Christmas dinner at Pittsburg was enlivened by a collection of such rhymes, which Mr. Austin called ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... would stretch out their little arms to come to me; when I was a girl, I was half my leisure time nursing in the neighbouring cottages; but I don't know how it was, when I grew sad and grave—which I did a year or two after this time—the little things drew back from me, and I am afraid I lost the knack, though I am just as fond of children as ever, and have a strange yearning at my heart whenever I see a mother with her baby in her arms. Nay, my dear" (and by a sudden blaze which sprang up from a fall of the unstirred coals, I saw that her eyes were ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... was a kindly man and doing well. He was the sort you could depend on. Business was cruel. You had to overlook certain things, for instance—Maida. But Joe! Well, it was too bad. He just didn't have the knack. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... for a patrol should be selected for their trustworthiness, experience and knack of finding their way ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... pray, then!" And Punch would get out of bed with raging hate in his heart against all the world, seen and unseen. He was always tumbling into trouble. Harry had a knack of cross-examining him as to his day's doings, which seldom failed to lead him, sleepy and savage, into half a dozen contradictions—all duly reported to Aunty ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... nothing, and is as superficial as the smile, as hollow as the noise it causeth. Nothing certainly in nature is more ridiculous than a self-conceited wit, who deemeth himself somebody, and greatly pretendeth to commendation from so pitiful and worthless a thing as a knack of trifling. ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... to put it in his peppery reproof, I always did have a knack of tumbling head first the instant an opportunity offered. This time I had gone in heels and all, and now came up in as fine a confusion as any bashful bumpkin ever displayed before his lady. Frances Sutherland had regained her composure and ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... or two of the minor songs in the famous operas was not entirely of Arthur's own unaided invention. And so, from one subject to another, they passed on so quickly, and hit it off with one another so exactly (for Hilda had a wonderful knack of leading up to everybody's strong points), that long before lunch was ready, the Progenitor had been quite won over by the fascinations of the brazen hussey, and was prepared to admit that she was really a very nice, kind, tender-hearted, intelligent, appreciative, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... attention only because I have been sometimes thought an ingenious or pleasant essayist upon it. For I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call the misfortune, to set my words sometimes prettily together; not without a foolish vanity in the poor knack that I had of doing so: until I was heavily punished for this pride, by finding that many people thought of the words only, and cared nothing for their meaning. Happily, therefore, the power of using such pleasant language—if ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... at Washington still lives!" Years after, some one referring to that, said that it was a beautiful sentence, that the reference to "clouds and darkness" was a beautiful symbolism, but that Garfield had a great knack in the building-up of fine phrases! He lacked utterly the background of the great Psalm which was in Garfield's mind, and which gives that phrase double meaning. If we go back to Tennyson again, some one has proposed the inquiry why he should have called ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... along the pond until they came to some small thorn bushes that grew on the bank. Bob showed her how to cast the bait by whirling it round and round and then let it fly out into the water. She tried several times until she got the knack of doing it, then threw in both lines and tied them ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... ma'am, and pleased to hear the kinship acknowledged. A good family, as families go, though I say it. We have held on to Dangan since Harry Fifth's time; and to our name since Guy of Welswe was made a thane by Athelstan. We have a knack, ma'am, of staying the course: small in the build but sound in the wind. It did me good, to-day, to see that son of yours step out for ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Christmas at the Castle. It was truly good to see her. Notwithstanding her celestial nose and very wide mouth, it would have been difficult to have looked at a happier face than hers. And, Irish as Biddy was, she had got the knack of coming round Mrs. O'Shanaghgan. She did this by her ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... to enable me to make a fresh start. It meant not only money, but employment, and congenial employment. It meant that after all, these years of leanness have not been wasted, that I have something to say if I can only retain the knack, the trick, of saying it in the way people will like, the public like. This alone would be much, but with it goes, you see, some money, so, as I said, one thing brings another; and money after all, Pauline, is what many a man as lost as I am ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... feelings, I must draw the mysterious veil of concealment over my, oh! too acute sufferings!" These, I must own, were, in no little degree, aggravated by the manner of my friend. Mark, as a sort of foil to his many excellent qualities, has one terrible failing: it is a knack of laughing at one's misfortunes; or, to use his own palliating phrase, he has a habit of looking at the ridiculous side of things. Ridiculous! Heavens! as if any one possessing a spark of humanity could perceive anything to excite his mirth in the circumstance of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... the best of them, day by day," she answered quickly. "What is left of either will be merely the scum. The people will come to us. Their discarded leaders can crawl back to obscurity. The people may follow false gods for a very long time, but they have the knack of recognising the truth when ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I recollected that ten years before, when I went up to Maine to visit my sister, I'd rented the place, just as it stood, to folks of the name of Marchant, a fine couple that didn't look beyond each other unless 'twas at their son. In past times my grandmother had an old-country knack of raising healing herbs and all sorts of sweet-smelling things, along with farm truck, so that folks came from all about to buy them and doctors too, for such things weren't sold so much in shops in those days as they are now, and so this place came to be called the ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... is a science that can only be learned by practice. You know that my grandfather was a doctor, but you havent got a drop of medical blood in your veins. These kind of things run in families. All my family by my fathers side had a knack at physic. There was my uncle that was killed at Brandywinehe died as easy again as any other man the regiment, just from knowing how to hold his breath naturally. Few men ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... bring of the rarest sort— 'Tis ours, if we cleverly drive our sport. A captain, who fell by his comrade's sword, This pair of sure dice to me transferred; To-day I'll just give them a trial to see If their knack's as good as it used to be. You must play the part of a pitiful devil, For these roaring rogues, who so loosely revel, Are easily smoothed, and tricked, and flattered, And, free as it came, their gold is scattered. But we—since ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to him. The music of 'Der Wildschuetz' is no less bright and unpretentious than that of 'Czar und Zimmermann'; in fact, these two works may be taken as good specimens of Lortzing's engaging talent. His strongest points are a clever knack of treating the voices contrapuntally in concerted pieces, and a humorous trick of orchestration, two features with which English audiences have become pleasantly familiar in Sir Arthur Sullivan's operettas, which works ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... humiliation much better than his sister, for he was ready to take for granted that he should one day restore the balance. He was a canny and far-seeing youth, with appetites and aspirations, and he had not a scruple in his composition. His mother's theory of the happy knack he could pick up deprived him of the wholesome discipline required to prevent young idlers from becoming cads. He had, abroad, a casual tutor and a snatch or two of a Swiss school, but no consecutive study, no prospect of a university ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... was particularly alive to a sense of the ridiculous in things, and whilst not lacking in the power of narration, she was, moreover, endowed with the peculiar knack of wounding everybody to the quick when ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... you have expected cider. She could walk on to one of those stage library sets that reek of the storehouse and the property carpenter, seat herself, take up a book or a piece of handiwork, and instantly the absurd room became a human, livable place. She had a knack of sitting, not as an actress ordinarily seats herself in a drawing room—feet carefully strained to show the high arch, body posed to form a "line"—but easily, as a woman sits in her own house. If you saw her in the supper scene of My Mistake, you ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... foundation for a study of Oriental languages, if I have time and opportunity that may be fairly given to them. Think what one hour a day is, and the pleasure to me is very great, and I feel that I have a knack rather (if I may say so) of laying hold of these things. Don't mention ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mixture of flour, shortening and water. Each grain of flour is thoroughly coated with shortening and then mixed to a dough with the water. Do I hear you say "Well I know that?" Surely you do. But do you know the real knack of putting it together? For here is the real rub. The minute you knead or squeeze pastry that is the ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... the costume nor led the life of a peasant. He wore sabots, as hundreds of other artists have done, before and since, when living in the country in France. Sabots are very cheap and very dry and not uncomfortable when you have acquired the knack of wearing them. In other respects he dressed and lived like a small bourgeois, and was monsieur to the people about him. Barbizon was already a summer resort for artists before he came there, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... to like to do as you ought. Besides, the path which looks attractive, and tempts to the indulgence of many appetites and habits which a Christian man must rigidly subdue, does not continue so attractive. Earthly pleasures have a strange knack of losing their charm, and, at the same time, increasing their hold, with familiarity. Many a man who has plunged into some kind of dissipation because of the titillation of his senses which he ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... wheel did not exist in the western world, but it was almost invented. Time and muscle, knack and touch, a trained eye and brain and an unlimited array of patterns hanging on fancy's walls, aided by a box of dry sand, were competent to give the charming results. No more striking contrast can be found ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... alone for livin'," said Doane. "He can ketch more fish than any other two men in the place—allers seemed to kind o' hev a knack o' whistlin' 'em right into the boat. And then Nelson Briggs, that settled up his mother's estate, allows he 's got over a hundred and ten dollars for him, after payin' debts and all probate expenses. That and the place is all he ...
— The Village Convict - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... deep, and he had a knack of deepening it when he wished to be impressive. His articulation was extremely deliberate, so that every word told; and his habitual manner was calm, but not stolid. I say "habitual," because it had variations. ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... these fine people were always in an agony to seem finer than they were; and the more airs a gentleman or a lady gave him or her self, the more important they became. Joe, the dog's-meat man, had indeed got into society entirely from a knack of saying impertinent things to everybody; and the smartest exclusives of the place, who seldom visited any one where there was not a silver teapot, used to think Joe had a great deal in him because he trundled his cart with his ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... well, her cousins all, Edmund very well, but in Mr. Crawford's reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. The King, the Queen, Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always alight at will on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity, or pride, or tenderness, or remorse, or whatever ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... her excellent cheer in peace and quietness. This favour was due, I think, to a little sly manoeuvring and a few whispered words from Saxon, who amongst other accomplishments which he had picked up during his chequered career had a pleasing knack of establishing friendly relations with the fair sex, irrespective of age, size, or character. Gentle and simple, Church and Dissent, Whig and Tory, if they did but wear a petticoat our comrade never failed, in spite of his fifty years, to make his way into their good graces by ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... yes! a woman could have done it easily," the Colonel declared, "only unfortunately there don't seem to have been any women about. Why, I've seen it done in Korea with a turn of the wrist. It's all knack." ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... long strings of questions and moving impracticable resolutions in sonorous harangues, often prepared for them by outside hacks, their own colleagues soon taught them that such methods were no longer likely to pay even for purposes of advertisement. The majority quickly acquired a knack of suppressing wind-bags and bores quietly and effectively. The Act of 1919 reserved to Government the appointment of the President of the Assembly for the first four years, after which he will be chosen by the Assembly itself. Not even the House of Commons could treat the Chair with more ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... contempt, madam—supposing I did feel anything like it—would, after all, be nothing but disguised envy. Or do you think I lack the desire to conduct my life as I see most other people conducting theirs? I simply haven't the knack. If I am to be frank, madam—the deepest yearning of all within me is just to be a rogue: a fellow who can dissemble, seduce, sneer, make his way over dead bodies. But thanks to a certain shortcoming in my temperament, I am condemned to remain a decent man—and ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... knowledge, for exquisite dyes, and for the manufacture of glass. There can be no doubt that the Phoenicians were a people of great practical ability, with an intellect quick to devise means to ends, to scheme, contrive, and execute, and with a happy knack of perceiving what was practically valuable in the inventions of other nations, and of appropriating them to their own use, often with improvements upon the original idea. But they were not possessed of any great genius or originality. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... I have been so much accustomed to treat him like a fool, that I can't help thinking him one. He should not have been so tame to such a spirit as mine. He should have been angry when I played upon him. I have got a knack of it, and shall never ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... dear sir," said Hilderman cheerily. "You scientist fellows have a knack of making your difficulties a little greater than they really are, in order to get more credit for surmounting them. I know your little ways. I'm an American, you know, professor; you can't ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... soul. And every time he returned home he was more restless. So the Boones moved from place to place and each time others went along with them. Daniel had a knack of leadership, but no sooner would everyone be settled around him than he'd pack up and go to another place. Daniel couldn't be crowded. He had to have elbow room no matter where he had ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... that he has an artistic rule over his 'accidents,' for 'surprises' have a wonderful knack of falling into the general plan of his life, as though but waited for. Our first meeting with him was a singular instance of this. I say 'our,' for Narcissus and I chanced to be walking a holiday together at the time. It fell on this wise. At Tewkesbury it was we had arrived, one dull September ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... she happened to be caught in a slight shower and he insisted on holding his umbrella over her on her way home;—once at a small party at one of the mansion-houses, where the quick-eyed lady of the house had a wonderful knack of bringing people together who liked to see each other;—perhaps at other times and places; but of this there is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... time went on found occasion to apply his knowledge in the household and the courts, there was little else for any one to do than engage in farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians, or turn carpenter and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a farmer, though still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and expended his skill and his muscle in subduing ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... being sick away from one's mother, but I have a knack at submitting myself to my fate; so my spirit was a contented one, and I was not for a moment unhappy, except for the trouble which I gave those who had to nurse me. I thought of you, at least two-thirds of the time. As my little pet, Lily L., said to me last night, when she had very nearly ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Snapshot him, and he appears as holding one leg stiffly in the air and yawning enough to swallow the audience. But it is in the prose narratives of the Press that we find most manifestations of this strange ineptitude; this knack of exhibiting your own favourites in an unlucky light. It is not so much that the party journalists do not tell the truth as that they tell just enough of it to make it clear that they are telling lies. One of their favourite blunders is an amazing sort ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... life and person, and was everywhere at home. In walking and riding, in skating and running, in games out of doors and in, no one of us all in the neighborhood was so expert, so agile as he. For, above all things, he had what we Yankees call faculty,—the knack of doing everything. If he rode with a neighbor who was a good horseman, Theodore, who was a Centaur, when he mounted, would put any horse at any gate or fence; for it did not occur to him that he could not do whatever was to be done. Often, after ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... crew, who, by degrees, become most expert in this most wonderful and awe-inspiring field of modern naval practice. The books are written by an expert and possess, in addition to the author's surpassing knack of story-telling, a great educational ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... associate them with his own Vauxhall; but the resemblance is very slight. At one of these entertainments in France, there is much less attempted, but considerably more effected, than in England; and all this is accomplished by that happy knack which the French possess of making much of a little. Of what did this fete consist—a few hundred lamps—a few score of fidlers, and about as much decoration as an English showman would waste on the exterior of his exhibition, or assemble within a few square yards. There were no ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... a better knack at lying than thou hast already. Hast gotten the weather into thy lodgings? When didst flit ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... him more than to go, for example, blackberrying, and he has a knack of never scratching his face or his fingers when doing so. And he finds blackberrying, whether he goes alone or with friends, an extraordinarily good time for planning something he wishes to do or working out the thought of a sermon. And fishing is even better, for in fishing he finds immense recreation ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... others when unsupported by the claims of wealth. Let me see, Hetty, I must have some employment aside from helping you to milk the cows and feed the pigs. Ah, I have it!" she cried, springing up and turning a pirouette—"listen—I will be a milliner! you know, aunt thinks I have a great knack at cap-making—O excellent idea—I will turn milliner for all the farmer's wives and daughters far and near." And catching up her embroidered mouchoir she began folding it into a turban, and then placing it gracefully on her little head, she turned to the laughing girl: "See there now—is not ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... The Major—so used was he to the phenomenon— accepted it as a matter of course. Hansombody (good soul!) had a wonderful knack of turning up when wanted. But what attracted him? Was it perchance that magnetic force of will which our Major, and all truly great men, unconsciously exert? No; the explanation was a simpler one, though the Major ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... has even Barham's fault—an occasional over-consciousness of effort, and calling on the reader to admire, as if the tour de force could not speak for itself. But Ingoldsby's rhymes will not give us a just idea of the Fable until we superadd Hook's puns; for the fabulist has a pleasant knack of making puns—outrageous and unhesitating ones—exactly of the kind to set off the general style of his verse. The sternest critic could hardly help relaxing over such a bundle of them as are contained in Apollo's lament over the 'treeification' of his Daphne.... The Fable is a sort of review ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... teacher, especially if he is a strict disciplinarian, to make his pupils retain the greater part of what they have been taught. To skim off and give back to the teacher (or examiner) portions of the floating films of information, is a knack which comes with practice, and which the average child easily acquires. The teacher will, of course, demand that his school shall be examined on a clearly-defined syllabus; and the examiner, in his own interest, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... faith. The fellow trims him silently, and has not the knack with his sheers or his fingers: and that continence in a barber he thinks so eminent a virtue, as it has made him ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... abnormal ability to do and then to undo a garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to her ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... and, which is of something a lower form, obstinacy, are the faults which are to be severely whipped out of them, both in their infancy and in their progress, otherwise they grow up and increase with them; and after a tongue has once got the knack of lying, 'tis not to be imagined how impossible it is to reclaim it whence it comes to pass that we see some, who are otherwise very honest men, so subject and enslaved to this vice. I have an honest lad to my tailor, whom I never knew guilty of one truth, no, not when it had been to his advantage. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... him for this service for two reasons. In the first place, because I know he will do it well, and even those who consider that I am rash and headstrong, admit that I have the knack of picking out good men. In the next place, I want to reward him for the service he has done for us. I cannot, at his age, make a colonel of him, but I can give him a chance of distinguishing himself in a service in which age does not count for so much, and Count ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... hot argument, and I never could follow even a mild one. I think you young, and you should be glad of it, as it is the one good thing I see about you. As a rule I prefer dark men,—but for their unhappy knack of looking old from their cradles,—and have a perfect passion for black eyes, black skin, black locks, and a general appearance of fierceness! Indeed, I have always thought, up to this, that there was something about a fair man almost ridiculous. ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... man's individuality, his whole character, is assailed and suborned on every side. There is but one life, one measure of days, that you or I know anything of. It doesn't last very long. The months and years have a knack of slipping away emptily enough unless we are always standing to attention. Therefore I think that it becomes our duty to consider very carefully, almost religiously, how best to use them. Come here for a moment, Borrowdean. I ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I have the knack of making something besides football signals stick in your memory," said she. "Have you been thinking about that girl I ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... to believe that there is no remedy for its unevenness and dishevelment, or that the remedy is a secret. The idea, also, that some few men, by happy chance or happier temperament, have been given the secret—as if there were some sort of knack or trick of it—is wholly incredible. Religion must ripen fruit for every temperament; and the way even into its highest heights must be by a gateway through which the peoples of the world may ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... to him to do for her, yet she could tell him of no good that would come to him from the doing. She should either have had less to say or have been willing to say more, and he asked himself why he should be the sport of her moods and her mysteries. He perceived her knack of punctual interference to be striking, but it was just this apparent infallibility that he resented. Why didn't she set up at once as a professional clairvoyant and eke out her little income more successfully? In purely ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... upon their guard, took occasion to point out to them the pernicious tendency of Whitfield's wild doctrines and irregular manner of life. He represented him as a religious impostor or quack, who had an excellent knack of setting off to advantage his poisonous tenets. On the other hand, Whitfield, who had been accustomed to bear reproach and face opposition, recriminated with double acrimony and greater success. While Alexander Garden, to keep his flock from straying after this strange pastor, expatiated ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... it known; but now it may as well come out at once. Speck, as everybody knows, lives in the market-place, opposite his grand work of art, the town pump, or fountain. I bought a large sheet of paper, and having a knack at drawing, sat down, with the greatest gravity, before the pump, and sketched it for several hours. I knew it would bring out old Speck to see. At first he contented himself by flattening his nose against the window-glasses of his study, and looking what the Englander was about. ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... covering the gamut of private emotions and international complications. In such narratives I demand three things: the first, that my author should combine a graphic (and grammatical) style with the professional knack of imparting an air of probability to his tale; the second, that things should go all wrong in the beginning and come all right in the end; the third, that if any German schemers are involved these should be eventually outwitted. Mr. SAVILE has abundantly satisfied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... new points of view; he finds a new definition of the cultivated man, who is not, in this Twentieth-Century reading of the term, to be "a weak, critical, fastidious creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities, responsive but independent, self-reliant but deferential, loving truth and candor, but also moderation and proportion, courageous but gentle, not ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Great A. Co.'s Tea from the circumstance of it's never having either odor or flavor. We find, after ample experience, that the presence of either of these qualities directly injures the sale. Give it plenty of Astringency (an easy knack) and it will be sure to go down in this country. It is our experience (and that of many other Operators of our kind—or upon our kind, if you prefer the phrase,) that people like to be imposed upon, and can always be taken with the Economical hook. If an article (of Tea, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... storks' nests on the chimneys; winking at the ya vrouws who showed their faces at the windows, and joking the women right and left in the street; all of whom laughed and took it in amazing good part; for though he did not know a word of their language, yet he always had a knack of making ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... connected with him was lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy poker into red black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the oak would die too. Mary had seen death more than once. She came of a family that had a knack of dying under, as she told Miss Fowler, 'most distressing circumstances.' She would stay where she was till she was entirely satisfied that It was dead—dead as dear papa in the late 'eighties; aunt Mary in eighty-nine; mamma in 'ninety-one; cousin Dick in ninety-five; Lady McCausland's housemaid ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... no, Sir; but they are, for the most part, what's as good, very proud and promising, Sir, most liberal of their Word to every fauning Suiter, to purchase the state of long Attendance, and cringing as they pass; but the Devil of a Performance, without you get the Knack of bribing in the right Place and Time; but yet they ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... the medal," he said. "It's all in the drill—every man knowing what he has to do, and doing it at the proper moment. I'd give something if I had Dick's knack in detail organizing." ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... success in life depends upon the knack—innate or acquired, and not to be highly rated—of outwitting one's neighbour under the rules of the game—the law; education is merely a cultural leaven within the reach of the comparatively few who can afford to attend a university. The business college ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... from observation, the novelist could be said to be. In London fortunately a clever man was just a clever man; there were charming houses in which a person of Ray's undoubted ability, even though without the knack of making the best use of it, could always be sure of a quiet corner for watching decorously the social kaleidoscope. But the kaleidoscope of the goose-green, what in the world was that, and what such delusive ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... the public school, and a few months at a business college, to which he went at night, after work hours. He had been "up against it good and plenty," he told them. He seemed, however, to have had a knack of making friends and of giving them "a boost along" when such a chance was possible. Both of his listeners realised that a good many people had liked him, and the reason ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... crop of the country and the labour of the farmer in his paddy field had been honoured by the State and dignified by ancestral blessings, there was luncheon in one of those deftly contrived reed-covered structures, of the building of which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us to say a few words. Then on a raised platform in the open there was enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in the Middle Ages. In the evening I was bidden to a ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... arms about her to console her, but she wept so that, for all my seventeen years and pride of manhood, it set me weeping also, and with such a hiccoughing noise, since I had not a woman's knack of quiet tears, that it finally turned her own grief ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... will pass them and proceed. You have heard of the sins of his youth, of his apprenticeship, and how he set up, and married, and what a life he hath led his wife; and now I will tell you some more of his pranks. He had the very knack for knavery; had he, as I said before, been bound to serve an apprenticeship to all these things, he could not have been more cunning, he could not have been more ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... she grew up tall, erect, with the pale, stately beauty of a lily, Lady Deyncourt's heart went out to her. None of her own daughters had been so distinguished-looking, so ornamental. Ruth's clothes always looked well on her, and she had a knack of entertaining people, and much taste in the arrangement of flowers. Though she had inherited the Deyncourt earnestness of character, together with their dark serious eyes, and a certain annoying rigidity as to right and wrong, these defects were counterbalanced by flashes ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... not now, there was a good deal of "the itching palm" about the officials, not excluding the Minister himself, through whose hands the granting of concessions passed, even the wives coming in for handsome presents and "considerations," without which events had a knack of not moving; and when the army of Empleados became Cesantes, this work, of course, began all over again. The railway engineers form a separate body, the country being mapped out into arbitrary divisions, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... knew of weapons which seemed to possess personal skill and ferocity. Later, workmen found that certain tools had a knack of fitting smoothly in the hand—seeming even to divine the grain of the wood they worked on. The individual characteristics of violins were notorious, so that a violin which sang joyously under the bow was ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... friends were but boys, nor had they had any experience in submarine boat construction. Yet they had shown the inventor that they knew much about machinery and marine engines in general, and Jack, with his handy knack of sketching machinery, had made a ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... within me lay the potentiality of a new Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Happy, foolish dreams, from cherishing which no man has ever been the worse! A hundred times I essayed to produce something worthy of being printed. But the stories, the essays, and—save the mark!—the poems I attempted had a knack of remaining unfinished, or, when finished, were so obviously bad, even to my untrained judgment, that they were promptly destroyed. When at last I did taste the fearful joys of a first appearance in print, it was on a very humble stage. A great controversy was ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... the school generally, his scowls and his sullenness, his deficiency in the daring and impudence that had warmed their hearts towards Dick, and, above all, his strange knack of getting them into trouble—for he seldom received what he considered an indignity without making a formal complaint—all this brought him as much hearty dislike and contempt as, perhaps, the ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... no popular knack; I lack the conjurer's instincts; and I don't mean to wait for Jean Walkingshaw till ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... her, the discredit of which extends to our ladies generally—in short, she exposes the country before foreigners. Then for the natives, she catches some poor boy just loose upon the world, dances with, flatters him—for she has a knack of flattering people without seeming to do so, especially by always appearing to take an interest in what is said to her,—keeps him dangling about her for a while; then some day he says or does something to make a fool of himself, and she extinguishes him. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... method of dealing with India. It is an able piece of descriptive writing. It is marked by a conscious and deliberate resolve that the "effect" shall be made. It shows us the Indian city from a high distance, as it appeared to an observer with a knack for vividly delivering his impressions. It is in no sense an inspired wrestle with the reality of India; and in that it is typical. Mr Kipling has never claimed to grasp or interpret his Indian theme. He has ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... "we were at school together, and I generally had the knack of getting on better than you, and ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... Rathie, michty queer," said Tammas Haggart, Bowie's brother, who was a queer stock himself, but was not aware of it; "but, ou, I'm thinkin' the wife had something to do wi't. She was ill to manage, an' Little Rathie hadna the way o' the women. He hadna the knack o' managin' them's yo micht say—no, Little Rathie hadna ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... dark, and the roads were altogether unworthy of the name. Yet there is an immense traffic on this route, which is the highway from East to West. The Americans, with all their "smartness," have not the knack of making either good roads or good streets. About 11 P.M. we arrived at Uniontown, 12 miles from Brownsville. There the horses were to be changed, an operation which took about an hour to accomplish. Three coaches ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... they sent out orders urging greatly increased efforts at hunting, capturing, caring for and rapidly transporting all sorts of creatures destined for the Colosseum. The Emperor's killing capacity and love of enjoying and exhibiting his knack so outran their measures that, by the time the increased supply began to come in, the royal sportsman's unerrancy and swiftness outran their best results, so that hasty messages had to be sent to Marseilles, Aquileia, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by this means we live; for man must work as well as wonder: and herein is Custom so far a kind nurse, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... so gay that old, dull tasks Were furbished up to seem like rituals. She baked and brewed as one who only asks The right to serve. Her daily manuals Of prayer were duties, and her festivals When Theodore praised some dish, or frankly said She had a knack in ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... Benjamin had sailed Richard Cleveland, another matured mariner of nineteen, who crowded into one life an Odyssey of adventure noteworthy even in that era and who had the knack of writing about it with rare skill and spirit. In 1797, when twenty-three years old, he was master of the bark Enterprise bound from Salem to Mocha for coffee. The voyage was abandoned at Havre and he sent the mate home with the ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... all was a griffin, who led all the others, skating more skilfully than any of them, and flitting like mad across the very thinnest places. It made one's head giddy to see him. His swiftness and dexterity, and a knack he had of knocking the other skaters into great black holes under the ice, whenever they crossed his path, greatly imposed upon them, and they all took care to follow straight behind, or to keep well out of his way. Now and then a bear would growl as he ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... plumpness. When in the country Colum rises early in order to stretch the pleasures of the day, and he walks about before breakfast from tree to tree to view his feathered tenants. He has even acquired, after much practice, the knack of chirping—a hissing conjunction of the lips and teeth—which he is confident wins the friendly attention ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... appear to have the knack of getting their wishes granted. Jack is one of that ilk. Just as he made the remark, Davenport sauntered in and, finding out what was going on, volunteered to tell a ghost story himself—something ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... are compared with the simple and stately facts. Who could have imagined such a heart-break as that? Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no more noise than a grave under foot. I doubt if fiction will ever get the knack of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... you,' he said. 'Harrington has the knack with you women. Why, you made eyes at him. It was a toss-up ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and hitherto unheard of in the kite line. Rigidity and strength, without too much weight, are the prime essentials of the Hargrave. It may be made by a boy with a knack for mechanics in the following way: Take eight stiff, slender pieces of bamboo, eighteen and three-quarter inches in length, such as are sometimes used for fishing poles. These pieces must be of uniform weight and length, and as nearly ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... virtues thou canst add, no doubt," said Varney, in a jeering tone, "the knack of seeming serious and religious, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... where exactly the limits of your patience are. With me they have withdrawn into infinite space—I've never been able to reach them. But every one else seems to have a knack—well, somebody must cook. You tell me Annalise won't. Perhaps she really can't. Anyhow I cannot mention it to her, because it would be too horrible to have her flatly refusing to do something I told her to do and yet ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... "That gift, or knack, or trick, or whatever it was, of one compelling the presence of the other by thinking or willing it, was as much mine as hers, and she tried sometimes to get me to say that I would use it with her if she died before I did; and if she were where the ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... at me like that!" she said, with gay imperiousness. "You pale-eyed folk have a horrible knack of making one feel as if one is under a microscope. Your worthy uncle is just the same. If I weren't so deeply in love with him, I might resent it. But Nick is a privileged person, isn't he, wherever he goes? Didn't someone once say of him that he rushes in where angels fear to tread? ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... which was rendered more acute by his long acquaintance with the world; and he did not always turn it to a righteous account. My father was a babe in these matters—a cunning child might deceive him. While my uncle had a knack of saving without appearing parsimonious, my father had an unfortunate habit of frittering his money away upon trifles. You would have imagined that the one had discovered the secret of the philosopher's stone; and the other ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... you I hadn't thought of doing it for a permanency. But just for a bit of adventure, if the chance should offer while I'm in the notion. I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony for fourteen years, but I don't believe I've lost the knack ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... generally spendthrifts, though there are some excellent exceptions. The Irish hold together in religion, politics, and drink. The Scotch are not so numerous as the Irish, but somehow they have a knack of getting on. They are not clannish like the Irish. Each hangs by his own hook. Then there are the Germans, who are pretty numerous, a very respectable body of men, with a sprinkling of Italians and Swiss. The Germans keep up their old country fashions, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... a lad and my party took me along only because I had a knack at cooking and was willing to do anything in order to see the place where such wonderful fortunes were made. It was a hot summer afternoon when, crossing a region of low, thinly wooded hills, we looked down upon American River; away to ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... seen a child of six years reach the top of a sixty-foot tree in a minute or so, and I have seen a man or woman stop on the way, fifty feet from the earth, and light a cigarette. Slim, fat, chiefs or commoners, all learn this knack in infancy. Men who puff along the road because of their bulk will attain the branches of a palm with the agility ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... rule, standing order, precedent, routine; red-tape, red-tapism^; pipe clay; rut, groove. cacoethes [Lat.]; bad habit, confirmed habit, inveterate habit, intrinsic habit &c; addiction, trick. training &c (education) 537; seasoning, second nature, acclimatization; knack &c V. be wont &c adj.. fall into a rut, fall into a custom &c (conform to) 82; tread the beaten track, follow the beaten track, tread the beaten path, follow the beaten; stare super antiquas vias [Lat.]; move in a rut, run on in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... away, as they had nothing with which to employ themselves. Fortunately, midshipmen, as O'Grady boasted, have a powerful knack of sleeping; and so they passed most of the time, in the intervals of their meals, lost in oblivion of all sublunary matters. As the shades of evening drew on, they roused up and were all animation. They had reconnoitred the path to the village, and found that it would ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... order, like so many towers, but towers that could repair their breaches, remained unshaken amidst all the rest of the rout, and delivered their fire on all sides. Thrice the young conqueror tried to break these fearless warriors; thrice he was driven knack by the valiant Count of Fuentes, who was seen carried about in his chair, and, in spite of his infirmities, showing that a warrior's soul is mistress of the body it animates. But yield they must: in vain through the woods, with his cavalry all fresh, does Beck rush down to fall upon our exhausted ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... succeeded in doing so ran in the same manner towards the opposite barrier, and was, of course, pursued in his turn. If in danger of being overtaken, he might throw it with his hurdle towards any of his associates who happened to be nearer the barrier than himself. They had a particular knack of throwing it a great distance in this manner, so that the best runners had not always the advantage; and, by a peculiar way of working their hands and arms while running, the ball never dropped out ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... said La Fleur. "I don't believe she's half as good a cook as you are, Michael, for I've heard that all colored people have a knack that way; and like as not she'd burn it to ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... the Youthful, Prudence for the Old, Scripture for the Godly, for the Miser Gold; Wit for the Ingenious, silence for the Grave, Flatt'ry for the Fool, and Cunning for the Knave: Compounded thus of such Varieties, } She had a knack to every Temper please, } And as her self thought fit was every one of these. } I lov'd, I sigh'd and vow'd, talk'd, whin'd, and pray'd, And at her Feet my panting Heart I lay'd; She smil'd, then frown'd, was now reserv'd, then free, And as ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... we saw no more of Corny until supper-time. Her mother was certainly good at cure, if she didn't have much of a knack at prevention. ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... with dear Mrs. Clark's beaming face and warm-hearted manner to disarm their shyness they were perfectly natural, and enjoyed themselves as entirely as if they were at a dormitory tea or a sorority supper. The best part about Mrs. Clark was that she had the happy knack of forgetting her age and throwing herself back into the mental environment of sixteen. She was certainly not a stiff hostess; indeed her treatment of her guests was less conventional than that adopted ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... of a leg wire in the bottom of the foot and pass it up along the back of the bone between it and the skin. A considerable knack is necessary to do this successfully and some force must be used. Passing the heel joint is difficult but having done this and emerged inside the skin continue to pass it until it is a little longer than ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... and flowers. Let us ever remember that the imagination also has its products and the themes of a symphony may certainly be considered its children. The public often seems to have slight idea of the sanctity and mystery of a musical idea. Composers are considered people with a kind of "knack" in writing down notes. In reality, a musical idea is as wonderful a thing as we can conceive—a miracle of life and yet intangible, ethereal. The composer apparently creates something out of nothing, pure fancy being wrought into terms of communication. Since ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
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