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More "Madcap" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the other hand, lustily declared that the planks would not bear such a weight of Romish sin, and that God was displeased with their pulpits and altars, their doctrine and sacrifice. One zealot remembered that, at the return of Prince Charles from the madcap expedition to Spain, a Catholic had lamented, or was said to have lamented, the street bonfires, as there would be never a fagot left to burn the heretics. "If it had been a Protestant chapel," the Puritans cried, "the Jesuits would have called the calamity an omen of the speedy ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... recover with the prettiest little foot in the world pointed out. Her mother came in as she was in this attitude; my lady had been in her closet, having taken poor Frank's conversion in a very serious way; the madcap girl ran up to her mother, put her arms round her waist, kissed her, tried to make her dance, and said: "Don't be silly, you kind little mamma, and cry about Frank turning Papist. What a figure he must be, with a white ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... organized playful insubordination. The school had two parties: the sages or good girls, and the diables, their opposites. Among the latter Aurore conscientiously enrolled herself and became a leader in their escapades, acquiring the sobriquet of "Madcap." These outbreaks led to nothing more heinous than playing off tricks on a tyrannical mistress, or making raids on the forbidden ground of the kitchen garden. But the charm that held together the confraternity of diables was a grand, long-cherished design, to which their ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Touraine, and they were talking together after dinner, behold her little boy, who was at that time about thirteen and a half, and resembled Rene more than it is allowable for a child to resemble his father, and had nothing of the Sire Bruyn about him but his name—behold the little one, a madcap and pretty like his mother, who came in from the garden, running, perspiring, panting, jumping, scattering all things in his way, after the uses and customs of infancy, and who ran straight to his well-beloved mother, jumping into her lap, and interrupting ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... he has taken this madcap freak of turning painter," the uncle continues, "there is no understanding the chap. Did you ever see such a set of fellows as the Colonel had got together at his party the other night? Dirty chaps in velvet coats and beards? ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blushing, and shaking her pretty little fist at Claude, 'that madcap! how he has betrayed me! When he is at his easel, he is so in the seventh heaven, that he sees nothing, thinks of nothing, but his ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... among the wood-wind over the rushing strings is especially effective; a very whimsical Andante with frequent changes of tempo, and soli for the English horn in antiphony with the first oboe; and a madcap Presto that whisks itself out in ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the rules provide! This is scandal, this is a shame, This madcap prank in Our Lady's name. Out of the doors with him; back to the street: He has no place at Our ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... think,' she said, catching my arm. 'That big mill down yonder hasn't ground the originality altogether out of you. I adore originality. It was clever of you to catch at the suggestion of this arrangement. Lois Cayley, you say; any relation of a madcap Captain Cayley whom I used once to know, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... generous testimony to the private character of this accomplished actress, whose part in real life, says Fielding, was that of "the best Wife, the best Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend." The words are more than mere compliment; they appear to have been true. Madcap and humourist as she was, no breath of slander seems ever to have tarnished the reputation of Kitty Clive, whom Johnson—a fine judge, when his prejudices were not actively aroused—called in addition "the best player ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... who was an eye-witness of this madcap Paris, wrote in detail about the dance and the dress of these people. He told how they dressed in the brightest clothes they could obtain, for maddened with happiness as they were, they instinctively felt that bright clothes ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... big thing," Mrs. Tully accepted with a smile of enthusiasm. "She is a splendid, unusual woman, very unspoiled, very natural. And after all, what does doing things amount to? I'd give more for one of Paula's madcap escapades—oh, I heard all about swimming the big stallion—than for all her pictures if every one was a masterpiece. But she was hard for me to understand at first. Dick often calls her the girl that never grew up. But gracious, she can ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... to talk to anybody or hear himself questioned as to his absence from lectures the day before. But it was difficult to repulse rudely a very good comrade with a smooth pink face and fair hair, bearing the nickname amongst his fellow-students of "Madcap Kostia." He was the idolized only son of a very wealthy and illiterate Government contractor, and attended the lectures only during the periodical fits of contrition following upon tearful paternal remonstrances. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Livia. She is bent upon my worldly advantage, and that is plain even to the person rejecting it. How much more so must it be to papa, though he likes you, and when you are near him would perhaps, in a fit of unworldliness, be almost as reckless as the creature he calls madcap and would rather call countess. No! sooner with a Will-o'-the-wisp, my friend. Who could ever know where the man was when he himself never knows where he is. He is the wind that bloweth as it listeth—because it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... would be guilty of such an outrage, Frank only remembered that Peg was in a white heat of indignation, and fully capable of doing some madcap prank in order to frighten off the two saddle boys. He was also not a little worried about the rustlers, supposed to be ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... you to come now, for if I am a little madcap as papa says, I'm not quite so unreasonable as that," Lucy answered, seating herself upon an ottoman. "Here I am your humble servant to command what orders for your slave, most noble Isabel of Leicester. You have but to speak ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... my dear brother, that I have been not a little amused, I may even say instructed, by a trick played by your madcap nephew, for the honor and glory, I suppose, of his scepticism, or for some other motive, not easily divined. He promised me significantly an entertainment, in which I should enjoy the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," by which I little thought that he was going to collect a rare party ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... unknown to me. At last I said, "Who are these people, Black? I don't know one of them." "You soon will know them, though, my boy," he answered. "Just wait and see if you don't." And sure enough, when "Madcap Violet" appeared, all the unknown personages of that night-walk at Camberwell ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... I'd like that ever so much." And then the irrepressible madcap burst out, to the great ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... sights. Her sisters had no love for such shows, and nobody would be greatly troubled at her hardihood in escaping from the escort of her servants. She was always doing the like, and no harm had ever befallen her. Her father was wont to call her his Madcap, and her mother sometimes chided, and feared she would come to ill by her wild freaks; but she had always turned up safe and sound, and her independent ways had almost ceased to excite comment or uneasiness. On May ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... A madcap scheme danced before me. The time, I must know the time! Crouching low and cloaking the flame with my jacket I struck a match; 2.30 a.m.—the tide had been ebbing for about three hours and a half. Low water about five; they would be aground till ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... madcap young, who drove Through clouds of dust at postal pace, By the decree of Mighty Jove, Inheritor of all his race. Friends of Liudmila and Ruslan,(1) Let me present ye to the man, Who without more prevarication The hero is of my narration! Oneguine, O my gentle readers, Was born beside the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... some attention, of course, when he descended down among the steerage passengers and then crawled up the iron rungs of the ladder to the windy height. But that did not trouble him. All at once such a madcap spirit had come over him, he felt so happy and refreshed; as if he had never had to suffer dull cares, or put up with the whims of a hysterical wife, or practise medicine in a musty, out-of-the-way ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... as one of the most attractive houses in Rue Prony. Since the flight of the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad notice: Residence to let. Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy appearance of a deserted boudoir. Complete silence succeeds feverish bustle! Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift. Through the old windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape snatches of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles. Vanda's horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable hour for the Bois, through the great ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... broken in spirit and utterly cast down by grief and shame as had been confidently predicted, he, much to the disgust of his congregation, went calmly about his duties as though nothing unusual had occurred, referring jocosely to this lark of his madcap ward as he was pleased to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... she and her sister were considered to be Southern Unionists—and were greatly petted in governmental circles for their sacrificing fidelity to the flag. His informant, an official in the State Department, added that Miss Matilda might have been a good deal of a madcap at the outbreak of the war—for the sisters had a brother in the Confederate service—but that she had changed greatly, and, indeed, within a month. "For," he added, "she was at the White House for the first time last week, and they say the President talked ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... I was riding down the river road and just as I came to the end of the clearing a man jumped out from behind some bushes and grasped Madcap's bridle. Imagine! For a moment I was frightened out of my wits. I instantly thought of the Girtys, who, I have heard, have evinced a fondness for kidnapping little girls. Then the fellow said he was on guard and ordered me, actually ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... of village maids Goes gaily tripping to the brook, For water-nymphs they mean to be, And seek some still, secluded nook. Here Laura goes, my own delight, And Colin's love, the madcap Jane, And half a score of goddesses Trip over daisies in the plain: Already now they loose their hair And peep from out the tangled gold, Or speed the flying foot to reach The brook that's only summer-cold; The lovely locks ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... to see the Meet, But the horse thought he would compete With horses, hounds and fox for place, And led the man this madcap race. ...
— A Horse Book • Mary Tourtel
... to be your guide in a matter in which your own instinct should have guided you—your womanly instinct! But you have always been an unwomanly girl. You have put me to shame many a time by your hoydenish tricks; but I bore with you, believing that your madcap follies were at least harmless. To-day you have gone a step too far, and have been guilty of absolute impropriety, which I shall be very ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... threat Ward made when he found himself caught in any of his madcap pranks. His rich father was a man of considerable influence in Stanhope, and many a man dared not treat the banker's son to the whipping he so richly deserved simply because it might be that his bread and butter depended in a measure on the good will ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... And now a madcap humour came upon me. It was plain Bellairs had been communicating with his principal; I knew the number, if not the name. Should I ring up at once? It was more than likely he would return in person to the telephone. "Why should not I dash (vocally) into the presence of this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... make a perfect salad, there should be a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a wise man for salt, and a madcap to stir the ingredients up, and mix ...
— My Pet Recipes, Tried and True - Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec • Various
... fabulous perils of his imagination. Trouble enough thereafter encountering the sea's real assault, to subdue the reasonable terrors of those parts. Trouble enough, too, by and by, to devise perils beyond the common, to find a madcap way, to disclose a chance worth daring for the sheer exercise of courage. But from all these perils, of the real and the fanciful, of the commonplace path and the way of reckless ingenuity, Terry Lute emerged at last with the reputation ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... saints in the calendar watch over her ladyship! But I wish she had never taken you at your hot-headed word. Then we would not have launched upon this madcap adventure." ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... A Madcap Thrush, in Miller, True Bird Stories; Antics in the Bird Room, in Miller, True Bird Stories; Fate of the Children of Lir, in Grierson, Children's Book of Celtie Stories; Halcyone, in Brown, Curious ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... CUPIDINUM. ...he sprang out of bed, surfeited with disgust.... And she rose also, and ran off to her room, laughing like a madcap, and carrying her dress and ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... a good girl ... a trifle of the wilful. She must have it that many things are hurtful to me ... reading in particular ... it makes people so odd. Tina is a small matter of the madcap ... in her own particular way ... but exceedingly discreet, I do assure you, if they will only leave ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... talent beyond the ordinary. He could write fairly well, make an excellent speech, and had a keen sense of wit. When he went to Paris, the British Ambassador, Lord Stair, took it upon himself to give this madcap some sound advice. He extolled the virtues of the late Marquess of Wharton, and, "I hope," he said, "you will follow so illustrious an example of fidelity to your Prince and love to your country." "I thank your Excellency ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... older date. It protected one section of the oldest overland route, when the islet formed the key of the Gulf-head. It subsequently became an eyrie whence its robber knights and barons—including possibly "John, the Christian ruler of 'Akabah" (A.D. 630), and, long after him, madcap Rainald de Chatillon (A.D. 1182)—could live comfortably and sally out to plunder merchants and pilgrims. The Saracenic buildings may date, as the popular superstition has it, from the reign of Salh el-Dn (Saladin) who, in A.D. 1167, cleared his country ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... in the elderly, lame, one-eyed, sober-looking man, recognised the wild jovial Willy, who had tamed the most unruly fillies, taken the most frantic leaps, carolled forth the blithest song—madcap, good-fellow, frolicsome, childlike darling of gay and grave, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that secret retreat. In the profound silence we heard the sigh that came forth form his breast; he removed the most beautiful of the rings with which his skeleton fingers were laden, and placed it in Marianina's bosom. The young madcap laughed, plucked out the ring, slipped it on one of her fingers over her glove, and ran hastily back toward the salon, where the orchestra were, at that moment, beginning the ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... flower called that—noli me tangere—or some such name. Well, that's Vicky Van. She'd laugh and jest with you, and then if you said anything by way of a personal compliment or flirtatious foolery, she was off and away from your side, like a thistle-down in a summer breeze. She was a witch, a madcap, but she had her own way in everything, and her friends did ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... that death, at whatever age it may overtake her, will find the Little Countess just as she left the cradle, if it were possible to suppose that she has preserved its innocence as well as she has retained its profound puerility. Has that madcap a soul? The word nothingness has escaped me. It is indeed difficult for me to conceive what might survive that body when it has once lost the vain fever and the frivolous breath that seem ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar counting ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... a genial explosion of madcap humour. Not so another succession of scenes produced about the same time. The subject of them is that Leuchsenring whose acquaintance, we have seen, Goethe had made under the roof of Sophie von la Roche. Since then, apparently, Leuchsenring's proceedings had provoked a repugnance in Goethe ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... bribed by promises of as many 'goodies' as she could eat, and being a regular madcap, she was ready ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... therefore shawled and bonneted once more, escorted to the front door by a giggling and excited quartette, and set off forthwith to tramp half a mile of muddy high road, half abashed at finding herself abroad in such a strange guise, altogether delighted at the madcap nature ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... too madcap for Peachy to undertake. She revelled in anything venturesome or bizarre. The Camellia Buds did as she decreed, and resigned the courts that afternoon to Bertha, Mabel, Elsie, Ruth, Rosamonde, Winnie, Monica, and Callie, who fell readily into the trap prepared for them. Leaving this double set busy ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... you madcap, I'll to the alehouse with you presently; where, for one shot of five pence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes. But, sirrah, how did thy master ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... state of dumb bewilderment that eclipsed all she had experienced before. Truly the world was topsyturvy this madcap night! What ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... this little madcap married next Sunday; there will be a supper and a ball, and we shall be delighted if you will honour us with your presence. My name is Gilbert. I am comptroller of the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... qualities that underlaid that courage that drew him to the young man; certain it was that in two weeks Myles was the acknowledged favorite. He made no protestation of virtue; he always accompanied the Prince in those madcap ventures to London, where he beheld all manner of wild revelry; he never held himself aloof from his gay comrades, but he looked upon all their mad sports with the same calm gaze that had carried him without taint through the courts of Burgundy and the ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Koenigsberg, and France would have carried her frontier eastward to the Rhine, dismembering Germany. Such, I doubt not, would have been the attempt. The conception is entirely worthy of that Imperial levity with which the war began. But the madcap menace of the French Empire cannot be the measure of German justice. It is for Germany to show, that, notwithstanding this wildness, she knows how to be just. Dismemberment on this account would be only another form of retaliation; but retaliation ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... down; before she knew it the little girl's arms were about her neck and the child was telling her about the dance at the stone house across the way. The sister smiled as she listened to the rush of eager words, but she was so glad to find this madcap telling her openly her heart's one desire, that she did what she had never done before in all her life of beautiful child-consecrated work: she said "Yes, and I will go with you. Wait for me outside the chapel door ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... them both on the veranda, enjoying the evening breeze that came laden with sweet scents from off the prairie. Blue Bonnet clapped her hands over Uncle Joe's eyes in her old madcap fashion. ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... honest poet once on earth Who beat all other bardies at a canter; Rob' Burns his mother called him at his birth. Though handicapped by rum and much a ranter, He won the madcap race in Tam O'Shanter. He drove a spanking span from Scottish heather, Strong-limbed, but light of foot as flea or feather— Rhyme and Reason, matched and yoked together, And reined them with light hand and limber leather. He wrote to me once on a time—I mind it— A bold epistle and ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... were startled by strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... his son, The nimble-footed madcap, Prince of Wales, And his comrades, that daft the world ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "He's a madcap, that boy, monsieur. Would you believe it, drunk as he is, he has just mounted his master's thoroughbred, a horse that can do twenty miles an hour, and started for Troyes with a letter in order that it may reach Paris to-morrow! ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... and one of the staidest and most serene. Who would have thought it of the merry madcap of other days! They are coming here, John, to say good-bye to you. They have only a few days' leave. She is in France, too, you know. She was married ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... and added, "Yes, sire, it is insupportable for me to think that I am supposed not to possess your friendship, and that I only play the part of a temporary friend. It makes me wretched: you must not be angry if I complain of you to your royal self." "Well, well, you madcap, what must I do? Whom must I banish?" "Oh, sire, no one: with your august support I fear no person; nothing but appearances." "You are an excellent creature; in your place madame de Pompadour would have imprisoned half France." "That was because ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... from the mountain to the stream-side, where, by a hickory bush under a knoll, her mare Madcap stood at tether. Slipping behind the bush—though no living soul was near to spy on her— she slid off her short skirt and indued a longer one more suitable for riding; rolled the discarded garment into a bundle which she ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... another illustration of his character and of the strange, turbulent age in which he lived; and it went far to embitter the hatred of the duke and the bishop against him. This poor fellow was the jester, song-singer and epigrammatist of the madcap patriots who were associated under the title of "Sons of Geneva." Under a trumped-up charge of plotting the death of the bishop he was kidnapped and carried away to one of the castles in the neighborhood, and there tortured until a false confession ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... experiments in which Du Maurier was interested in his youth, the book will doubtless be bought. But he must be a dull person who does not find another charm in Mr. Moscheles's artless narrative, mostly about nothing at all, or about the nothings that make up the joy of living to madcap boys.—N. Y. Mail ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... dismay she grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate, accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To bill her in her present state as the Madcap ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it all, I see it all! Now God be thanked, I am indeed awake at last! Come, joy! vanish, sorrow! Ho, Nan! Bet! kick off your straw and hie ye hither to my side, till I do pour into your unbelieving ears the wildest madcap dream that ever the spirits of night did conjure up to astonish the soul of man withal! . . . Ho, Nan, I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dark nights, foul ways, and runaway horses! a mettlesome madcap, to start at the lightning and plunge with me head over heels in the brushwood; in scrambling out of that thicket, I certainly turned wrong, and have missed my road—how to regain it? 'sdeath! I could ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... whom I found at the encampment were a couple of insane fellows, determined to follow us—perhaps to show "by one satiric touch" what kind of madcap enterprise was ours. The first was a Neapolitan, who had dogged me all the while I was at Tripoli, pestering me to make a contract with him as servant. To humour his madness, I never said I would not; and the poor fellow, taking my silence for consent, had come out asking for his master. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... hidden that evening behind thick dark clouds, but the boats full of guests glided over the black water to the accompaniment of music and laughter. The young madcap of a lawyer was there, again sitting on the lap of someone else's wife, and playing a concertina, till people in the farms on shore opened their windows and put ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... much simpler and pleasanter plan of my own, but of that, as I knew, she would hear nothing. I did not smile at hers, however; though I confess it was not easy to imagine madcap Nina in the role of a landlady, regulating the accounts and presiding at the table of a boarding-house. I can't pretend that I believed there was the slightest likelihood of her filling it with success. But I said nothing to discourage her; and the fact that she is rich to-day proves how little ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... thou art too noble not to bear with his ignorance and pardon his offence." When the Barmaki heard my brother's words he laughed his loudest and said, "Long have I been wont to make mock of men and play the madcap among my intimates, but never yet have I come across a single one who had the patience and the wit to enter into all my humours save thyself: so I forgive thee, and thou shalt be my boon companion in very sooth and never leave me." Then he ordered the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... one morning sprang up from sleep, Saying, 'Now for a frolic! now for a leap! Now for a madcap galloping chase! I'll make a ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... to say, Madcap, in Italian. It appears that a very mixed language is spoken in the kingdom ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... away while the sea is tumbling about in this terrible fashion; and, pray, who has gone in her? Ah, Mr Paget, I am glad to see you have not risked your life. But where is Charles Dicey? Just like him, to do such a madcap trick. My dear girls, your brother jumped into the boat to pick up a silly man who tumbled overboard, and they cannot find him or any of ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... times were extraordinary, and he rightly judged that when a Continental war was brewing, the most daring course was also the most prudent, namely, to go to Paris. Thither Paoli allowed him to proceed, doubtless on the principle of giving the young madcap a rope wherewith to ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... walls were adorned with old family portraits. The place was in charge of an old man and his wife and a negro boy, who were the sole occupants, except when the nine would sally forth from New York and enliven its solitudes with their madcap pranks and orgies. ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... went as a sort of "mother's helper" to a lady residing in Elizabeth, whose brother was in a New Jersey College. Upon one of his visits to his sister he had brought Peyton Stewart home for a visit: Peyton, the happy-go-lucky, irresponsible madcap. Kitty Snyder's buxom beauty had turned all that was left to be turned of his shallow head and she had become Mrs. ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Phil, a handsome creature, young enough to have been in the school-room, but with the face and figure of a Greek goddess, and a pair of eyes lovely enough to haunt one's dreams as a memory for a lifetime, and as to the rest, an inconsistent young madcap, whose beauty and spirit seemed only a necessary part of the household arrangements, and whose son and heir, in the person of the enterprising Tod (an abbreviate of Theodore), was the source of unlimited domestic enjoyment and the object of much indiscreet adoration. It was just ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Lopez. In Barnes' expurgated, "Washingtonian" version (be not shocked, O spirit of good Master Tobin!) the countryman responded reprovingly: "Fie, my noble Duke! Have you no water from the well?" An answer diametrically opposed to the tendencies of the sack-guzzling, roistering, madcap ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... indifference to it would, as Grace felt, have been requiring mere stupidity. Indeed, there was forbearance in not pushing Rachel further at the moment; but proceeding to tell the tale at Myrtlewood, whither Grace accompanied Bessie, as a guard against possible madcap versions capable of misconstruction. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... detonation, rush, eruption, displosion^, torrent. turmoil &c (disorder) 59; ferment &c (agitation) 315; storm, tempest, rough weather; squall &c (wind) 349; earthquake, volcano, thunderstorm. berserk, berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone^, Megaera, Alecto^, madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c (blusterer) 887. V. be violent &c adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the friendship that was fancied!" I cried. "What kind of justice do you call this, to blame me for some words that a tomfool of a madcap lass has written down upon a piece of paper? You know yourself with what respect I have behaved—and would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ill-lighted apartment they are pleased to call their club; and the skipper had to recommission his boat, get in provisions for the voyage, engage his crew, pay off debts, and attend to a thousand and one minute details—all to be done after the contract to carry the madcap passengers had been signed and sealed, added to the more practical triviality of three-fourths of the charge being paid down. And then our captain, to add to the dilemma, vociferously yelled to us, in some unknown jargon which got on our nerves terribly, that he was waiting for a ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... up my kirtle to-day behind," said she, "so we couldn't go dancing the Halling-fling[3] together on the green sward. But the homestead in the Blue Mountains is my lawful property, and tell the old man that it was madcap Gyri thou wast running after to-day, because thou art so madly fond of dancing ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... Black Prince's nephew, and he came to be king of England. His son was Henry the Fifth, the greatest of the Plantagenet kings. When he was a young man, and only Prince of Wales, he was very wild and fond of games and jokes. They used to call him Harry Madcap. ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... blot upon Lyly's Oxford life. From the hints thrown out by his contemporaries, and from some allusions, doubtless personal, in the Euphues, we learn that, as an undergraduate, he was an irresponsible madcap. "Esteemed in the University a noted wit," he would very naturally become the centre of a pleasure-seeking circle of friends, despising the persons and ideas of their elders, eager to adopt the latest fashion whether in dress or ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... was drawing nigh when we had to present ourselves before that company of men of genius, each with his own crow; and I was still unprovided; and yet I thought it would be stupid to fail of such a madcap bagatelle; [3] but what particularly weighed upon my mind was that I did not choose to lend the light of my countenance in that illustrious sphere to some miserable plume-plucked scarecrow. All these considerations made me ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... Song of the Open Road, throbbing with the exhilaration of young life and madcap impudence. We must imagine that two vagabond students are drinking together before they part upon their several ways. One addresses the other as frater catholice, vir apostolice, vows to befriend him, and expounds the laws of loyalty which bind the brotherhood ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... Juan Manuel Nunez makes a regular fortune and marries a native and has two daughters: Augusta and Margarita. Augusta, the younger, marries my father, Ricardo Hasting, who was a madcap and ran away from his home; Margarita weds a soldier, colonel Buenavida. They all come to Spain with plenty of money; my father plunges into disastrous business schemes, and after he has been utterly ruined he learns, I don't know how, that the fortune ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... Solomon. I wished to honor in you the wisdom of your father; but another time avoid meddling with his highness's name; it is not safe to sport with the lion's paws. The matter is settled. The necklace is worth a hundred thousand piasters, is it not, Mansour? This madcap, shall give you, therefore, a hundred thousand piasters, and all parties will ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... let us go there; and there we go accordingly. Out of this there arises on New Year's Day a successful skirmish, in the account of which the name of De Montmorency is mentioned. In Egypt the name was associated with madcap courage. Here they talk of prudent skill. The double reputation should ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... optimistic youth. I never breathed a word concerning my marriage with Jean. Indeed, I came to look upon it as something that was utterly illegal, and that I could never be expected to stand by what was only, after all, a mere farcical thing, the act of a madcap boy." ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... naughty old man, who would give his weak stomach frightful attacks of indigestion by stealing out to the pantry and devouring a whole mince pie because he had been refused two pieces at the table—this rebellious, unreasonable, whimsical old madcap was an electric element in our quiet, orderly life. He insisted on going to every picnic and church sociable, where he ate recklessly of all the indigestible dainties he could lay his hands on, stood in drafts, tired himself to the verge of fainting ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... three should not be enough. Then Robin turned to the Bishop and swore that he should marry these two forthwith. The gown was given back to him, and my lord of Hereford commenced the service. He thought it more polite to obey, remembering his last experience with this madcap outlaw. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... — N. madman, lunatic, maniac, bedlamite[obs3], candidate for Bedlam, raver[obs3], madcap, crazy; energumen[obs3]; automaniac[obs3], monomaniac, dipsomaniac, kleptomaniac; hypochondriac &c. (low spirits); crank, Tom o'Bedlam. dreamer &c. 515; rhapsodist, seer, highflier[obs3], enthusiast, fanatic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... "Madcap schemes?" ejaculated de Marmont. "Nothing more or less, my dear Clyffurde, than complete revenge for the humiliation those de Cambrays put ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... excuses of Francis's conduct, is the recovery of Henry's rights to the crown of France; and if this were the real object, it reduces both King and Cardinal to the level of political charlatans. To conquer France was a madcap scheme, when Henry himself was admitting the impossibility of raising 30,000 foot or 10,000 horse, without hired contingents from Charles's domains;[414] when, according to Giustinian, it would have been hard to levy 100 men-at-arms or 1000 light cavalry in the whole island;[415] ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... animation, harshly, her lip curling in fierce disdain. The other laughed a false laugh and assumed an airy, condescending tone. "Ah! madcap! madcap!" And his glance, anxious and imploring, rested upon the Nabob, as if to beseech his forgiveness for that flood ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... turn him away as soon as she arrived. There was no help for it. She dared not keep him after that in the face of society. But she might take the bold, and perhaps a little dangerous measure of adopting the flight as altogether her own madcap idea. Her thoughts went floundering in the bog of expediency, until she was tired, and declined from thought ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... I see," said Dr Nettleby. "You're afraid of some of your nice messmates getting hauled over the coals? I bet that madcap Larkyns is at the bottom of it; I saw him with you close to one of the ports just now, as I passed by on my way down here, and I wondered what mischief you were up to! Well, well, I respect you, my boy, for not telling tales out of school, as the old saying ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... life that Fate, leading a traveler in easy gradients upwards along a road of triumph, suddenly assumes a madcap mood and with wanton hand throws a tiny obstacle in his way; an obstacle at times infinitesimal, scarce visible on that way towards success, yet powerful enough to trip the unwary traveler and bring him down to earth with sudden and ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... attracted by the flame of her beauty and charm, only to complain that it froze and did not burn. Longarine is discreetly unhappy for her dead husband, but appears decidedly consolable; Ennasuite is a haughty damsel, disdainful of poor folk, and Nomerfide is a pure madcap, a Catherine Seyton of the generation before Catherine herself, the feminine Dioneo of the party, and, if a little too free-spoken for prudish modern ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... those madcap April days of that Coniston country, Jock descended from his work on the steeple to perceive the ungainly figure of Jethro Bass coming toward him across the green. Jethro was about thirty years of age, and he wore a coonskin cap even in those days, and trousers tacked into his boots. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her honour. Listen, but tell nobody—four days ago, the King, passing her to go to supper, approached her, under the pretence of tickling her, and tried to slip a note into her hand. D'Amblimont, in her madcap way, put her hands behind her back, and the King was obliged to pick up the note, which had fallen on the ground. Gontaut was the only person who saw all this, and after supper, he went up to the little lady, and said, 'You are an excellent friend.' 'I did my duty,' said ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Ryland to clear up this difficulty. As he points out, Lady Lucy's elder sister, Olive, married George Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury, and left a daughter Mary,—Swift's "Moll Stanhope,"—a beauty and a madcap, who married, in 1712, William Burnet, son of Bishop Burnet, and died in 1714. Mary, another sister of Lady Lucy's, married Augustine Armstrong, of Great Ormond Street, and is the Mrs. Armstrong mentioned by Swift ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Petruchio told him his daughter had received him kindly and that she had promised to be married the next Sunday. This Katharine denied, saying she would rather see him hanged on Sunday, and reproached her father for wishing to wed her to such a madcap ruffian as Petruchio. Petruchio desired her father not to regard her angry words, for they had agreed she should seem reluctant before him, but that when they were alone he had found her very fond and loving; and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... plantation who had studied Spanish. "Mariposa" meant butterfly, she told the baby's mother, who gratefully accepted the compliment to her newly born daughter. The mother and her mates called her "Mary Posy." The mistress, who was fond of the madcap sponsor, retained the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... taken the wind out of Ada's sails and gained a feather in your cap, I can assure you. It all seems too good to be true. The queen dethroned at last!" and Winnie catching Nellie round the waist, danced her up and down the schoolroom in a regular madcap whirl. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... one wheel, sometimes even scraping the corners of houses, and causing those pedestrians in their line of flight to skip like young unicorns. Then, recovering, the startled wayfarers would hurl their choicest blessings after the cab. To these, the madcap driver would reply with a shrill and fiendish yell, belabouring his frantic cattle with a view to attempting fresh feats. They succeeded. It only wanted a bullock-waggon coming down the street to afford them the opportunity. The bullock-waggon came. Then a dead, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... was an accomplished person of an exquisite distinction. She loved everything that in any way is elegant and ornate in society: names, manners, talents, titles. Madcap as I assuredly was, I looked upon all this as vanity, and went in quest of intimacy and simplicity combined with poesy. Thanks to God, I found them in Zoe, who was really a person of merit, and, moreover, a woman with a heart ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... was years agone— The madcap now hath sober grown And hose is better wrought, And neither now would run alone ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... told of Henry—Prince Hal, as he was called—leading a wild, merry life, as a sort of madcap; playing at being a robber, and breaking into the wagons that were bringing treasure for his father, and then giving the money back again. Also there is a story that, when one of his friends was taken before the Lord Chief Justice, he went and ordered him to be released and that when the justice ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... about that. You are all false! My sweet little lark, my sunshine, my little madcap, lay your head on my knee, I want ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... them became noticeable, gossip ran fast and furious; partly for the reason that no human being seemed to understand just where the cause of the difficulty lay. Whispered mention of the Grand-Duke Constantine, madcap-libertine, hero of a thousand escapades, tended in no way to lessen the interest, though of evidence there seemed none. The climax proved to be a fitting one, however; for, early in March, the Princess, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... then, people found themselves in presence of a new Gregoire. The madcap had become wise, only retaining of his youthful follies the audacity which is needful for successful enterprise. And it must be said that he was admirably seconded by the fair and energetic Therese. They were both enraptured at now being free to love each other in the romantic old ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... "Hush, madcap! the wardroom holds long ears, and our bulkheads grow thin by wear. I must keep you and myself to our duty. This is no children's game that we play; it seems the commissioners at Paris have thought proper to employ ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have suspected these two very graceful and pleasant-looking girls of being madcap creatures at home. The elder was a tall and slightly-built blonde, with large gray eyes set wide apart; the younger a gentle little thing, with brownish eyes, freckles, and a ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... and he spoke as naturally and outspokenly as Walter himself. He seems to have got rid of the Puritanical twang altogether. At any rate, he will do Walter no harm; and, indeed, I should say that there was a solid good sense about him, which will do Master Walter, who is somewhat disposed to be a madcap, much good. Anyhow, he is a better companion for the boy than the lads down in the village; and there is no saying, wife, how matters may go in this unhappy country. It may be that we may come to our ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... eyes. It must be so nice under the willows, lying flat on one's stomach, in the fine grass! I felt a languid feeling creeping over me, and, slowly, taking short steps, holding my breath, I reached the door. I went downstairs, and began running like a madcap in the delightful, warm ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Bellaise, I mean—imitate me while my mother presents me,' he ran on in English, making such a grotesque reverence that nobody except Mademoiselle could help laughing, and his mother made a feint of laying her fan about his ears, while she pronounced him a madcap and begged her niece to ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thinking of such a madcap as Katy in Jenny Baynor's sick-room. But that is just my reason. I've talked with Mrs. Raynor, and she is quite willing to try Katy, if we can only get her there to be tried. If there's any one in this world who can tame Katy's wild humors and turn them to good uses, it is Mrs. Raynor. And ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... From her madcap craving for new sensation, Ann was destined to evolve an inspiration which with customary energy and Diane's interested connivance she swept through to fruition, unaware that Fate marched, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... "Is it so? For this I'll like you all the more!" Then, writhing to evade the bore, I quicken now my pace, now stop, And in my servant's ear let drop Some words, and all the while I feel Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel. "Oh, for a touch," I moaned, in pain, "Bolanus, of thy madcap vein, To put this incubus to rout!" As he went chattering on about Whatever he descries or meets, The crowds, the beauty of the streets, The city's growth, its splendour, size, "You're dying to be off," he cries; For all the while I'd been stock dumb. "I've seen it this half-hour. But come, Let's ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... you know, Father," said Kitty, nestling quietly to her father's side as her madcap brother and sister whirled round the room. But they brought up with a round turn, though a little dishevelled-looking, to hear Mr. Maynard's ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... was a young travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections at the beginning of the discussion showed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Master Edward, snatching the feathers out of the tail of a splendid parroquet that was screaming on its gilded perch, in order to make a plume for his hat. Madame de Villefort merely cried,—"Be still, Edward!" She then added,—"This young madcap is, however, very nearly right, and merely re-echoes what he has heard me say with pain a hundred times; for Mademoiselle de Villefort is, in spite of all we can do to rouse her, of a melancholy disposition and taciturn habit, which frequently injure the effect of her beauty. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... connection with the Morning Star; has written several novels, over 30 in number, about the West Highlands of Scotland, rich in picturesque description; the best known and most admired, "A Daughter of Heth," the "Madcap Violet," "Macleod of Dare," "The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton," and "A Princess of Thule." "But when are you going to write a book, Mr. Black?" said Carlyle to him ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... caution, was silent. But the impulsive Marraby—Madcap Marraby, as they called him in B.N.C.—said "It's because I won't lie!" and, leaping up, raised his glass aloft and cried "I give you Zuleika Dobson, the fairest witch that ever ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... held on and blazed, pealed, and smoked on, begrimed and gory. Here was Tracy borne away to field hospital leaving Avendano and McStea groveling in anguish under the wheels, and brave Converse and young Willie Calder, hot-headed Fusilier and dear madcap Jules St. Ange lying near them out of pain forever. Yet here their fellows blazed on and on, black, shattered, decimated, short of horses, one caisson blown up, and finally dragged away to bivouac, proud holders of all their six Callender guns, their silken flag shot-torn but unsoiled ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... intolerance of contradiction, with two men who accompanied him, while his sleek claybank mare also argued loudly with her colt. She had much ado to pace soberly forward, even under the coercion of whip and spur, while her madcap scion galloped wildly ahead or lagged far in the rear, and made now and then excursions into the woods, out of sight, to gratify some adolescent curiosity, or perhaps, after the fashion of other and human adolescents, to relish the spectacle of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the haps and mishaps, the trials and triumphs, of a delightful New England family, of whose devotion and sturdiness it will do the reader good to hear. From the kindly, serene-souled grandmother to the buoyant madcap, Berty, these Graveleys are folk of ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... courage, lofty bearing, courtesy, but an unsoaped, ill-clad, turbulent, high-tempered young fellow, looked up to by his crowd very much as the champion of the heavy weights is looked up to by his gang of blackguards. Alexander himself was not much better,—a foolish, fiery young madcap. How often is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that he served to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... difficulty," suggested the lawyer, "would be getting the consent of your parents to any such madcap scheme as going off into the woods to camp, day after ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... Review (Oct. 1871), and evoked replies from Rossetti (The Stealthy School of Criticism), and Swinburne (Under the Microscope). Among his novels are A Child of Nature (1879), God and the Man (1881), and among his dramas A Nine Days' Queen, A Madcap Prince, and Alone in London. His latest poems, The Outcast and The Wandering Jew, were directed against certain aspects of Christianity. B. was unfortunate in his latter years; a speculation turned out ruinously; he had to sell his copyrights, and he sustained a ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... had to get used to the strange idea of the dead unknown wife, and the little son for whose sake they were to grow up into wise sober women before they had done with being little girls. What wonder that Angel looked pale and grave after a wakeful night, and that Betty felt that madcap ways and tumbled curls must cease from ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... would not leave her. When death had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in prison or a madhouse ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... scrub ere they decided to take him at his madcap word, and let his blood be on the chuckle-head of the new-chummiest new chum that ever came out after the rain! Was it pluck or all pretence? It was rather plucky even to pretend in such proximity to the terrible Stingaree; ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... about them. Fingal, as they conceitedly term Fin-Mac-Coul, should have disappeared before my search, rolling himself in his cloud like the spirit of Loda. Such an opportunity can hardly again occur to an ancient and grey-haired man; and to see it lost by the madcap spleen of a hot-headed boy! But ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the lawyer, "would be getting the consent of your parents to any such madcap scheme as going off into the woods to camp, ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... a secret though,' said a young officer; 'which is, that we are to have a dance after all, and a rare madcap and riotous one it will he. Everything is already arranged; the musicians are come secretly, and quartered out of sight. Roderick has managed it all; for he says, one ought not to let him have his own way, or to humour his ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... both on the veranda, enjoying the evening breeze that came laden with sweet scents from off the prairie. Blue Bonnet clapped her hands over Uncle Joe's eyes in her old madcap fashion. ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... precipitate, overhasty, indiscreet, inconsiderate, impulsive, temerarious, madcap, headlong, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... said Sir Ralph, "to view her more nearly. That madcap earl found me other employment than to remark her in ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... sable tyrant Death, nipped in the very bud of youth, while yet the sparkling jest was ripe upon the merry lip, and the ruddy glow of health upon the cheek gave earnest of a lengthened life———But, soft! methinks I hear my reader exclaim, "How now, madcap, moralizing Mr. Spy? art thou, too, bitten by the desire to philosophize, thou, 'the very Spy o' the time,' the merry buoyant rogue who has laughed all serious scenes to scorn, and riding over hill, and dale, and verdant plain upon thy fiery courser, fleet as the winds, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... author's ear, tickling her lips with her feathers, dancing sarabands, and making the house echo with her laughter. If by chance the writer, abandoning science for pleasure, says to her, "Wait a moment, little one, till I come," and runs in great haste to play with the madcap, she has disappeared. She has gone into her hole, hides herself there, rolls herself up, and retires. Take the poker, take a staff, a cudgel, a cane, raise them, strike the wench, and rave at her, she moans; strap her, she moans; caress her, fondle her, she ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... it so? For this I'll like you all the more!" Then, writhing to evade the bore, I quicken now my pace, now stop, And in my servant's ear let drop Some words, and all the while I feel Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel. "Oh, for a touch," I moaned, in pain, "Bolanus, of thy madcap vein, To put this incubus to rout!" As he went chattering on about Whatever he descries or meets, The crowds, the beauty of the streets, The city's growth, its splendour, size, "You're dying to be off," he cries; For all the while I'd been stock dumb. "I've seen it this half-hour. But come, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... those tissue-paper hats; the surprise and horror of good Mrs. Ramsey when she beheld Alene Dawson among that madcap crowd, skipping along gaily intent on her play, unobserving the pained expression of the portly lady who was coming up the other side of the street. Mrs. Ramsey had stopped suddenly, "so flustrated by the sight," as she said later, that she had not the strength to ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... wind, one morning sprang up from sleep, Saying, 'Now for a frolic! now for a leap! Now for a madcap galloping chase! I'll make a commotion ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... said, blushing, and shaking her pretty little fist at Claude, 'that madcap! how he has betrayed me! When he is at his easel, he is so in the seventh heaven, that he sees nothing, thinks of nothing, but ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... a madcap young, who drove Through clouds of dust at postal pace, By the decree of Mighty Jove, Inheritor of all his race. Friends of Liudmila and Ruslan,(1) Let me present ye to the man, Who without more prevarication The hero is of my narration! Oneguine, O ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... There was a tang of the swift, immoral, fascinating 'seventies in Claire's still cautious reference to champagne and cigarettes. It was impossible for any San Franciscan who had lived through those splendid madcap bonanza days to deny the lure of gay wickedness. At least it was hard to keep one's eyes on a prayer-book while the car of pleasure rattled by. And a coffee-and-cake social was, after all, a rather tame experience in the face of beverages more sparkling and eatables ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Pretender, and went to pay his respects at Avignon. The Duke had talent beyond the ordinary. He could write fairly well, make an excellent speech, and had a keen sense of wit. When he went to Paris, the British Ambassador, Lord Stair, took it upon himself to give this madcap some sound advice. He extolled the virtues of the late Marquess of Wharton, and, "I hope," he said, "you will follow so illustrious an example of fidelity to your Prince and love to your country." "I thank your Excellency for your good ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... the staidest and most serene. Who would have thought it of the merry madcap of other days! They are coming here, John, to say good-bye to you. They have only a few days' leave. She is in France, too, you know. She was married in her ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... had heard my kind voice yet," mimicked Miss Madcap. "And are you thinking of holding Aileen's ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... thee, yes; and to Holly here I must seem as some madcap girl blown to and fro by every wind of fancy, and building me a palace wherein to dwell out of dew and vapours, or from the substance of the sunset fires. Thinkest thou then that I would enter on this war—one ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... The nimble-footed madcap, Prince of Wales, And his comrades, that daft the world aside And let ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... is sometimes the friendship that was fancied!" I cried. "What kind of justice do you call this, to blame me for some words that a tomfool of a madcap lass has written down upon a piece of paper? You know yourself with what respect I have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... introduction to the wild young madcap Prince of Wales, afterwards the famous Henry ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... anger. I saw my success, and added, "Yes, sire, it is insupportable for me to think that I am supposed not to possess your friendship, and that I only play the part of a temporary friend. It makes me wretched: you must not be angry if I complain of you to your royal self." "Well, well, you madcap, what must I do? Whom must I banish?" "Oh, sire, no one: with your august support I fear no person; nothing but appearances." "You are an excellent creature; in your place madame de Pompadour would have imprisoned half France." "That was because she loved revenge better than she ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... this signal victory, Gallows Walsh now harangued his followers, and proposed to break open Newgate, or the Black Dog, as the prison was called, and effect a general jail delivery. He was answered by shouts of concurrence, and away went the throng of madcap youngsters, fully bent upon putting an end to the tyranny of law. They were joined by the mob of the city, and made an attack upon the prison with true Irish precipitation and thoughtlessness, never having provided themselves with cannon to batter its stone ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... came such a thought into a madcap's brain; and, what is more extraordinary—but that you already know—it was so far successful, that the marriage ceremony was performed between us in the presence of a servant of mine, Clara's accommodating companion, and the priest.—We ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of dumb bewilderment that eclipsed all she had experienced before. Truly the world was topsyturvy this madcap night! ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... with Scotch caution, was silent. But the impulsive Marraby—Madcap Marraby, as they called him in B.N.C.—said "It's because I won't lie!" and, leaping up, raised his glass aloft and cried "I give you Zuleika Dobson, the fairest witch that ever ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... of the oldest overland route, when the islet formed the key of the Gulf-head. It subsequently became an eyrie whence its robber knights and barons—including possibly "John, the Christian ruler of 'Akabah" (A.D. 630), and, long after him, madcap Rainald de Chatillon (A.D. 1182)—could live comfortably and sally out to plunder merchants and pilgrims. The Saracenic buildings may date, as the popular superstition has it, from the reign of Salh el-Dn (Saladin) who, in A.D. 1167, cleared his country of the Infidel ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... remedies. He was a young travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... did you manage it, dear? You have taken the wind out of Ada's sails and gained a feather in your cap, I can assure you. It all seems too good to be true. The queen dethroned at last!" and Winnie catching Nellie round the waist, danced her up and down the schoolroom in a regular madcap whirl. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... hour was drawing nigh when we had to present ourselves before that company of men of genius, each with his own crow; and I was still unprovided; and yet I thought it would be stupid to fail of such a madcap bagatelle; [3] but what particularly weighed upon my mind was that I did not choose to lend the light of my countenance in that illustrious sphere to some miserable plume-plucked scarecrow. All these considerations made me devise a pleasant trick, for the increase of merriment and the ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... we have the haps and mishaps, the trials and triumphs, of a delightful New England family, of whose devotion and sturdiness it will do the reader good to hear. From the kindly, serene-souled grandmother to the buoyant madcap, Berty, these Graveleys are folk of fibre and blood—genuine ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Squatting Member in the principle of his argument if not in the violence of his remedies. He was a young travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... long as my mother lived he would not leave her. When death had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in prison or a madhouse could have stayed his going; but ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... shudder with a learned semi-madcap, who waiteth in darkened rooms for spirits to come to him—and the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in the scrub ere they decided to take him at his madcap word, and let his blood be on the chuckle-head of the new-chummiest new chum that ever came out after the rain! Was it pluck or all pretence? It was rather plucky even to pretend in such proximity to the terrible Stingaree; ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... becoming a madcap," the astrologer said, as he led Guy into the room. "I cannot blame her altogether; I have made a boy of her, and I ought not to be shocked at her acting like one. But she gave me a rare fright last night when she did not return until close on midnight. Still, it was natural for her ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... France would have carried her frontier eastward to the Rhine, dismembering Germany. Such, I doubt not, would have been the attempt. The conception is entirely worthy of that Imperial levity with which the war began. But the madcap menace of the French Empire cannot be the measure of German justice. It is for Germany to show, that, notwithstanding this wildness, she knows how to be just. Dismemberment on this account would be only another form of retaliation; but ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... daughters growing up in the Destournier household, Helene, who should have been a devotee, was a merry madcap, who exceeded her mother in daring feats, a dark-eyed, laughing maid the Indian girls adored. She could manage a canoe, she could fly, they said, she took such wonderful leaps. Rose could sing like a bird and had a fondness for all ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the play. And then he flew out about his boy, and said that my wife insulted him! I used to like that boy. Before his father came he was a good lad enough—a jolly, brave little fellow. But since he has taken this madcap freak of turning painter there is no understanding the chap. I don't care what a fellow is, if he is a good fellow, but a painter is no trade at all! I don't ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Father," said Kitty, nestling quietly to her father's side as her madcap brother and sister whirled round the room. But they brought up with a round turn, though a little dishevelled-looking, to hear Mr. Maynard's reply to ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... sometimes the friendship that was fancied!" I cried. "What kind of justice do you call this, to blame me for some words that a tomfool of a madcap lass has written down upon a piece of paper? You know yourself with what respect I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tissue-paper hats; the surprise and horror of good Mrs. Ramsey when she beheld Alene Dawson among that madcap crowd, skipping along gaily intent on her play, unobserving the pained expression of the portly lady who was coming up the other side of the street. Mrs. Ramsey had stopped suddenly, "so flustrated by the sight," as she said later, that ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... that day contain accounts of many a mad prank which [Lord Warwick, Addison's step-son] played ... [like] the lawless freaks of the madcap prince ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... latest escapade. Instead of being overwhelmed, broken in spirit and utterly cast down by grief and shame as had been confidently predicted, he, much to the disgust of his congregation, went calmly about his duties as though nothing unusual had occurred, referring jocosely to this lark of his madcap ward as he was pleased to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... fidelity to her friends, and for her honour. Listen, but tell nobody—four days ago, the King, passing her to go to supper, approached her, under the pretence of tickling her, and tried to slip a note into her hand. D'Amblimont, in her madcap way, put her hands behind her back, and the King was obliged to pick up the note, which had fallen on the ground. Gontaut was the only person who saw all this, and after supper, he went up to the little lady, and said, 'You are an excellent friend.' 'I did my duty,' said ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... young person in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad notice: Residence to let. Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy appearance of a deserted boudoir. Complete silence succeeds feverish bustle! Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift. Through the old windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape snatches of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles. Vanda's horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable hour for the Bois, through ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... date. It protected one section of the oldest overland route, when the islet formed the key of the Gulf-head. It subsequently became an eyrie whence its robber knights and barons—including possibly "John, the Christian ruler of 'Akabah" (A.D. 630), and, long after him, madcap Rainald de Chatillon (A.D. 1182)—could live comfortably and sally out to plunder merchants and pilgrims. The Saracenic buildings may date, as the popular superstition has it, from the reign of Salh el-Dn (Saladin) who, in A.D. 1167, cleared his country of the Infidel invader by carrying ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... very well for a time, although Teddy did not make any very rapid progress at his studies, his mind being more turned to outdoor sports than book lore; but the association with others made him, if more manly, less tractable, developing his madcap propensities to a very considerable extent, if merely from his desire to emulate ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... Prime Minister of Persia in past time, Haji Mirza Aghasi, was a well-known but rather eccentric dervish. My knowledge of this was the means, on one occasion, of averting a disagreeable display of violence by a gay sort of madcap, the relative of a post-house master, who had attached himself as groom to the stable establishment. My smart Armenian servant, who was equally good as groom or table attendant, had taken off his warm pea-jacket ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... her eyes, the witching play of her dimples, the madcap air intensified by her attitude and the excitement of the violent exercise just ended—something compounded of all these and more—affected the good priest strangely. Involuntarily he crossed himself, as if against a ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... can—" cried Mrs. Gantry. But Dolores had vanished. "Really, Genevieve, that madcap girl—! About yourself, my dear. Promise me now, if you cannot say 'yes,' at least you'll not make it ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... gave her the name of Fly, nor why it was given her, but it suited her very well, and stuck to her, and our yawl every week carried five merry, strong young fellows on the Seine between Asnieres and Maison Lafitte, who were ruled from under a parasol of colored paper, by a lively and madcap young person, who treated us like slaves whose business it was to row her about, and whom we ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to her, make her your friend. Coax her secret out of her, and you will find that she is some madcap actress from a travelling company of mountebanks, who has done this thing in order to have the story told by the gazetteers and bring people to look at her. Get her to confess, and then let her story spread among the crowd—and the whole uprising that ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... turbulent, high-tempered young fellow, looked up to by his crowd very much as the champion of the heavy weights is looked up to by his gang of blackguards. Alexander himself was not much better,—a foolish, fiery young madcap. How often is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that he served to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,—in very bad ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it is whom we give you. What a madcap you are never to listen to anything but your own ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere (Poquelin)
... matter in which your own instinct should have guided you—your womanly instinct! But you have always been an unwomanly girl. You have put me to shame many a time by your hoydenish tricks; but I bore with you, believing that your madcap follies were at least harmless. To-day you have gone a step too far, and have been guilty of absolute impropriety, which I shall ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... lawyer, "would be getting the consent of your parents to any such madcap scheme as going off into the woods to camp, day after day, ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... certainly no plan too madcap for Peachy to undertake. She revelled in anything venturesome or bizarre. The Camellia Buds did as she decreed, and resigned the courts that afternoon to Bertha, Mabel, Elsie, Ruth, Rosamonde, Winnie, Monica, and Callie, who fell readily into the trap prepared ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... Meanwhile our little madcap remained quite unconscious of the honors designed her. She had cried every day of the first week of Herbert's absence; every alternate day of the second; twice in the third; once in the fourth; not at all in the fifth, and the sixth week she was ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... of them there, and also many other people, noblemen, farmers and a few "madcap fellows" showing different German tricks. At first he could not recognize anybody, because the windows of the inn being made of ox bladders, did not let in a good light; but when the servant put some resinous wood on the fire, he noticed ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... nineteenth-century country parish at all. I was tempted to try to persuade myself that all that had happened, since I rose to look out of the window in the old house, had been but a dream. For how could that wooded dell have come there after all? It was much too large for a quarry. And that madcap girl—she never flung herself into the pond!—it could not be. And what could the book have been that the lady with the sea-blue eyes was reading? Was that a real book at all? No. Yes. Of course it was. But what was it? What had that to do with the matter? It might turn out to be a very commonplace ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... prince that afterward Belied his madcap youth and proved A greatly simple warrior lord Such as our ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... you, my dear brother, that I have been not a little amused, I may even say instructed, by a trick played by your madcap nephew, for the honor and glory, I suppose, of his scepticism, or for some other motive, not easily divined. He promised me significantly an entertainment, in which I should enjoy the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," by which I little thought that he was going to collect a ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... heart, to my Aunt Gainor's amusement and Mrs. Ferguson's, who would have Dr. Rush set up a ward in the new hospital for the broken-hearted lovers of Darthea. When first Jack Warder was thus badgered, he fell into such a state of terror as to what the madcap woman would say next that he declined all society for a week, and ever ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... about half-an-hour ago, saying he would soon be back. He is off on some madcap expedition, you may be sure. He ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... picture of a life robbed sufficiently of puritanism to be properly piquant. There was a tang of the swift, immoral, fascinating 'seventies in Claire's still cautious reference to champagne and cigarettes. It was impossible for any San Franciscan who had lived through those splendid madcap bonanza days to deny the lure of gay wickedness. At least it was hard to keep one's eyes on a prayer-book while the car of pleasure rattled by. And a coffee-and-cake social was, after all, a rather tame experience in the face ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... they had been accustomed to pay little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle young mistress, lay dead, side by side in ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... keep his mind easy on that point," replied the warders. "We had tried everything we could think of to get rid of her majesty the queen, but without effect. So a young madcap Shadow, half against the will of the older ones of us, slipped upstairs into the nursery; and has, no doubt, succeeded in appalling the baby, for he is very lithe ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... of that? From time to time I feel the need of breathing the atmosphere of such a life as this. My madcap existence is like a song; each of my love-episodes forms a verse of it, but ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... behold her little boy, who was at that time about thirteen and a half, and resembled Rene more than it is allowable for a child to resemble his father, and had nothing of the Sire Bruyn about him but his name—behold the little one, a madcap and pretty like his mother, who came in from the garden, running, perspiring, panting, jumping, scattering all things in his way, after the uses and customs of infancy, and who ran straight to his well-beloved mother, jumping into her lap, and interrupting ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... went by, and Elfinhart outgrew The madcap antics of the younger crew, (For fairies age but slowly: don't forget That at two hundred they are children yet!) But still she frolicked with them, though scarce of them, And learned each year more tenderly to love them. ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... clickety-click. She looked cautiously round,—she was all by herself; Like a mischievous elf, She took from a shelf A mistletoe spray with its berries like pearls; Then tossing her head and shaking her curls, In a manner half daring and yet half afraid, The madcap maid, with a smile that betrayed Expectant thoughts of her lover dear, Fastened the ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... turning to Scharnhorst with a significant glance, "madcap Blucher cannot refrain from talking all the time about battles and politics. Now, indulge him in his whim, general, and talk a little with him about ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... SAEVA CUPIDINUM. ...he sprang out of bed, surfeited with disgust.... And she rose also, and ran off to her room, laughing like a madcap, and carrying her dress ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... national cautiousness or good defensive arrangements. Since they don't want Dordrecht, let us go there; and there we go accordingly. Out of this there arises on New Year's Day a successful skirmish, in the account of which the name of De Montmorency is mentioned. In Egypt the name was associated with madcap courage. Here they talk of prudent skill. The double ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Three gentlemen were seated at one of the tables in a low, smoky room. They had already emptied several bottles, and one of them seemed to have just suggested some madcap scheme to the others, the thought of which sent them ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I, a madcap child, now childlike In the dark to sing am fain; If my song be not delightsome, It at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the diggings in this guise, however. You did not know me as the chief performer in that little comedy with Brigalow on Diamond Gully. You did not recognise me in the dark man who talked with you and Burton while the madcap from Kyley's was leading the troopers a merry dance along the lead. By the way, I admire your taste in women, Jim. She's a fine, unshamed barbarian, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... gossiping smokers of the galley. The interior affairs of the frigate itself formed their principal theme. Rumours about the private life of the Commodore in his cabin; about the Captain, in his; about the various officers in the ward-room; about the reefers in the steerage, and their madcap frolickings, and about a thousand other matters touching the crew themselves; all these—forming the eternally shifting, domestic by-play of a man-of-war—proved inexhaustible topics ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... "knowing" as M. Debienne and M. Poligny would have made the mistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be. And they were already smiling rather too broadly upon Sorelli, who had begun to recite her speech, when an exclamation from that little madcap of a Jammes broke the smile of the managers so brutally that the expression of distress and dismay that lay beneath it became apparent to ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... persons, however, whom I found at the encampment were a couple of insane fellows, determined to follow us—perhaps to show "by one satiric touch" what kind of madcap enterprise was ours. The first was a Neapolitan, who had dogged me all the while I was at Tripoli, pestering me to make a contract with him as servant. To humour his madness, I never said I would not; and the poor fellow, taking my silence for consent, had come out asking for his ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... masters of their own lives. She quite captivated him by her simplicity and frankness; she washed her masses of brown hair and shook it loose in the sunshine, and she came in wet more than once, and changed her shoes before the fire—just as she had years ago, when she was a madcap little girl running wild through ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... and as great a liar as ever," Marya Dmitrievna's son continued; "and only fancy, yesterday this madcap"—pointing to the school-girl, his wife's sister—"put some pepper in ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... empty-headed beauty, was General Leclerc, young and rich, but weak in body and mind, "a quiet, insignificant-looking man," who at least loved her passionately, and would make a pliant husband to the capricious little autocrat. And we may be sure Napoleon heaved a sigh of relief when his madcap sister was safely tied ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... life, I wandered about like a madcap, at the first coming of spring, with a handful of half-blown jessamines tied in a corner of my muslin scarf, and as I stroked my forehead with the soft, rounded, tapering buds, the touch of my mother's fingers would come back to me; ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... age it may overtake her, will find the Little Countess just as she left the cradle, if it were possible to suppose that she has preserved its innocence as well as she has retained its profound puerility. Has that madcap a soul? The word nothingness has escaped me. It is indeed difficult for me to conceive what might survive that body when it has once lost the vain fever and the frivolous breath that ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... a much simpler and pleasanter plan of my own, but of that, as I knew, she would hear nothing. I did not smile at hers, however; though I confess it was not easy to imagine madcap Nina in the role of a landlady, regulating the accounts and presiding at the table of a boarding-house. I can't pretend that I believed there was the slightest likelihood of her filling it with success. But I said nothing to discourage ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... to build the superstructure of his own fascinating imagination, and on which other writers more grave, though not more trustworthy as historians, have rested for conclusive evidence of the wild frolics and "madcap" adventures of Henry of Monmouth. Stowe's account is this: "In the year 1410, upon the eve of St. John the Baptist, (i.e. June 23,) the King's sons, Thomas and John, being in East-Cheap at supper, or ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Manuel Nunez makes a regular fortune and marries a native and has two daughters: Augusta and Margarita. Augusta, the younger, marries my father, Ricardo Hasting, who was a madcap and ran away from his home; Margarita weds a soldier, colonel Buenavida. They all come to Spain with plenty of money; my father plunges into disastrous business schemes, and after he has been utterly ruined ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... was even more popular in England. The performers had at their head a "boy bishop," and this diminutive prelate presided, with mitre on his head, over the frolics of his madcap companions. The king would take an interest in the ceremony; he would order the little dignitary to be brought before him, and give him a present. Edward II. gave six shillings and eight pence to the young John, son of Allan Scroby, who had played ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... to think, master, of you,' she began again, 'you are very sorry for me. But you mustn't be too sorry, really! I'll tell you one thing; for instance, I sometimes, even now.... Do you remember how merry I used to be in my time? A regular madcap!... So do you know what? I sing songs ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... enough at first, day by day, in fear, to confront the fabulous perils of his imagination. Trouble enough thereafter encountering the sea's real assault, to subdue the reasonable terrors of those parts. Trouble enough, too, by and by, to devise perils beyond the common, to find a madcap way, to disclose a chance worth daring for the sheer exercise of courage. But from all these perils, of the real and the fanciful, of the commonplace path and the way of reckless ingenuity, Terry Lute emerged at last with the reputation of ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... Protestants, on the other hand, lustily declared that the planks would not bear such a weight of Romish sin, and that God was displeased with their pulpits and altars, their doctrine and sacrifice. One zealot remembered that, at the return of Prince Charles from the madcap expedition to Spain, a Catholic had lamented, or was said to have lamented, the street bonfires, as there would be never a fagot left to burn the heretics. "If it had been a Protestant chapel," the Puritans cried, "the Jesuits would have called the calamity an ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had far other intentions towards the fair than absolving them from their peccadilloes, and entertained other ideas of foreign travel than that of going on distant Indian missions; whilst the youngest brother, Alphonse, was an unbroken colt and madcap, articled to one of the principal legal firms in the city. Although in years he was but ancle deep, he was already in potations full five fathoms; a worthy graduate of the licentiousness of the town, and boon companion of the dissolute Narcisse; whom, in a giddy moment ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... Madcap Amy, for once in her life, said nothing—being too much awed and astonished to reply. To think that I should actually enter the house, and be face to face with the formidable Mrs. Eylton? The idea was appalling; and for sometime I sat biting ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... one can. But, Mary, you must promise me one thing before we go ... you must agree to do what old Ernest tells you. You needn't be afraid. He is the most unconventional of men, capable of even approving this madcap ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... Miss Warren presented a picture to bring admiration into any eye, and although she was entirely lacking in poise and dignity, her constant restless vivacity and the witch-like spirit of laughter that possessed her were quite as engaging. She was a madcap, fly-away creature whose ravishing lace was framed by an unruly mop of dark hair, which no amount of attention could hold in place. Little dancing curls and wisps and ringlets were forever ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... him sad and sober, Merriest of months, October! Patron of the bursting bins, Reveler in wayside inns, I can nowhere find a trace Of the pensive in his face; There is mingled wit and folly, But the madcap lacks the grace Of a thoughtful melancholy. Spendthrift of the seasons' gold, How he flings and scatters out Treasure filched from summer-time!— Never ruffling squire of old Better loved a tavern bout ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... seems to have got rid of the Puritanical twang altogether. At any rate, he will do Walter no harm; and, indeed, I should say that there was a solid good sense about him, which will do Master Walter, who is somewhat disposed to be a madcap, much good. Anyhow, he is a better companion for the boy than the lads down in the village; and there is no saying, wife, how matters may go in this unhappy country. It may be that we may come to our own again. It may be that we ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... them. Fingal, as they conceitedly term Fin-Mac-Coul, should have disappeared before my search, rolling himself in his cloud like the spirit of Loda. Such an opportunity can hardly again occur to an ancient and grey-haired man; and to see it lost by the madcap spleen of a hot-headed boy! But ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... scorn. Jervaises and Banks alike seemed to me unworthy of any admiration. The members of those families were just a crowd of self-seeking creatures with no thought beyond their own petty interests. The Jervaises were snobs upset by the threat to their silly prestige. Brenda was a feather-headed madcap without a scrap of consideration for any one but herself. Banks was an infatuated fool, and the best I could hope for him was that he would realise the fact before it was too late. Frank, confound and confound him, was a ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... scolding him mildly about his extravagance and madcap frolics (though, in truth, she was charmed with him for both)—he replied that young men will be young men, and that it was in dutifully waiting in attendance on his aunt, he had made the acquaintance with whom he mostly lived at present. She then with some prelude, began ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... some one must have 'peached,' I suppose, to curry favor. Whatever made you go, Maggie? You know you have never mixed yourself up with that Day, and Merton, and Marsh set. As to that poor Polly Singleton, there's no harm in her, but she's a perfect madcap. What could have ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... pretty business,' said the admiral to his secretary. 'Young madcap! I sent him to look after a pirate, and he goes after the governor's daughter! By the Lord Harry, Mr. Templemore, but you and I shall have ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... you manage it, dear? You have taken the wind out of Ada's sails and gained a feather in your cap, I can assure you. It all seems too good to be true. The queen dethroned at last!" and Winnie catching Nellie round the waist, danced her up and down the schoolroom in a regular madcap whirl. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... handsome creature, young enough to have been in the school-room, but with the face and figure of a Greek goddess, and a pair of eyes lovely enough to haunt one's dreams as a memory for a lifetime, and as to the rest, an inconsistent young madcap, whose beauty and spirit seemed only a necessary part of the household arrangements, and whose son and heir, in the person of the enterprising Tod (an abbreviate of Theodore), was the source of unlimited domestic enjoyment and the object of much indiscreet adoration. It was ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... customary cowardly threat Ward made when he found himself caught in any of his madcap pranks. His rich father was a man of considerable influence in Stanhope, and many a man dared not treat the banker's son to the whipping he so richly deserved simply because it might be that his bread and butter depended ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... dress was there. Little preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old stomachers, more wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and boyish still, the weaker lines emphasized in its relaxation. Would that relentless spirit with which he had been born make him, too, a wanderer forever? And was it not the strangest of fates which had impelled him to join this madcap expedition of this other man ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... beauty and charm, only to complain that it froze and did not burn. Longarine is discreetly unhappy for her dead husband, but appears decidedly consolable; Ennasuite is a haughty damsel, disdainful of poor folk, and Nomerfide is a pure madcap, a Catherine Seyton of the generation before Catherine herself, the feminine Dioneo of the party, and, if a little too free-spoken for prudish modern taste, a very ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... ILF. Come, ye old madcap, you: what need all this? cannot a man have been a little whoremaster in his youth, but you must upbraid him with it, and tell him of his defects which, when he is married, his wife shall find in him? Why, my father's dead, man, now; who by his death has left me the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... long. In spite of the abuse of enemies, mostly those fellows who sought safety with women and children behind strong stockades, and the declaration of Mr. Meacham that I was responsible for the slaughter of men on the 17th of January, "when the brave, reckless, madcap, Col. Thompson, drove his men against the lines of the Modocs," I was again sent to the front. In my letters and newspaper articles I had severely censured Mr. Meacham and he took revenge in his "Wigwam and Warpath" by ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... the rosy glow of health upon her cheek, rather than the sickly imitations of art, which bloom on the surface alone, while the fruit withers and decays beneath—but zounds! don't speak so loud, here's somebody coming, and they'll think we are quarrelling. (Helen sings behind) So here comes our madcap. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... want you to come now, for if I am a little madcap as papa says, I'm not quite so unreasonable as that," Lucy answered, seating herself upon an ottoman. "Here I am your humble servant to command what orders for your slave, most noble Isabel of Leicester. You have but ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... letters of exchange; You travel as a count, it would appear, Going for pleasure and a little change; Once there, you play the rodomont, the queer Crack-brain good fellow, idle gamester, strange Spendthrift and madcap. Give yourself full swing; People are taken with that kind ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... disowning English literature and the past of American literature (as many a writer directly or by implication would have us) in order to become 100 per cent American, let us first take breath long enough to reflect that, first, such a madcap career is eminently undesirable, and, second, utterly impossible. It is a literature which by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than French, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... "My madcap brother," she said, "has left me, but I expect him back in a few minutes; for, fortunately, as anything pleases him for a minute, nothing has ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Pa, Ma, and daughters three, All drove in madcap hurry to the station, In fact, they might have tittered "Seven are we" Had they remembered the superb quotation; But Julia (housemaid) made some lamentation About some best back hair she'd left behind, But all was done ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... Chicoree. Did you ever see a happier fellow than he is? I'll venture to say that he has been having such a good time that he hasn't even yet thought of building a nest, and here half the people of the Old Orchard have grown families. I've a nest and eggs myself, but that madcap is just roaming about having a good time. ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... presented himself so well," said Christian frankly, "that your recommendation, my dear aunt, in spite of the respect I have for it, will not add to my gratitude. Only for Monsieur de Gerfaut, here is a madcap little girl whom we should be obliged to look for now at ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... agone— The madcap now hath sober grown And hose is better wrought, And neither now would run alone The risk of ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... music struck up, and festivity was soon in progress. What a display of neat ankles and deft feet in mocassins! What a clattering of sabots and shuffling of "beefs"! The perspiration rolled off the brow of the musician, and young Lecour was whirling round like a madcap with the daughter of the ferryman of Repentigny, when the latch was again lifted, and ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... of Henry—Prince Hal, as he was called—leading a wild, merry life, as a sort of madcap; playing at being a robber, and breaking into the wagons that were bringing treasure for his father, and then giving the money back again. Also there is a story that, when one of his friends was taken before the Lord ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with her in obedience to a passing whim. She was at Crawleigh, resting and building up her strength; he would be back in full harness within thirty-six hours, and there would be no room for her madcap incursions ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... little do the people of England know of him—even of him the barn-door and domestic owl—yea, even at this day—we had almost said the Poets! Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry fellow—quite a madcap—and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an owl complaining to ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... knot of village maids Goes gaily tripping to the brook, For water-nymphs they mean to be, And seek some still, secluded nook. Here Laura goes, my own delight, And Colin's love, the madcap Jane, And half a score of goddesses Trip over daisies in the plain: Already now they loose their hair And peep from out the tangled gold, Or speed the flying foot to reach The brook that's only summer-cold; The lovely ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... threshold of that secret retreat. In the profound silence we heard the sigh that came forth form his breast; he removed the most beautiful of the rings with which his skeleton fingers were laden, and placed it in Marianina's bosom. The young madcap laughed, plucked out the ring, slipped it on one of her fingers over her glove, and ran hastily back toward the salon, where the orchestra were, at that moment, beginning the prelude ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... expected to find the mythical Christian empire of Prester John, and to join hands with him in overthrowing the infidel. When Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Castile to supply the means for his madcap adventure, it was by a double inducement that he won her assent: she was to gain access to the wealth of the Indies, but she was also to be the means of converting the heathen to a knowledge of Christianity; and ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... bent down; before she knew it the little girl's arms were about her neck and the child was telling her about the dance at the stone house across the way. The sister smiled as she listened to the rush of eager words, but she was so glad to find this madcap telling her openly her heart's one desire, that she did what she had never done before in all her life of beautiful child-consecrated work: she said "Yes, and I will go with you. Wait for me outside the chapel ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... malevolence, the portrait he has given us of Bazzi has so far nothing unpleasant about it. The man seems to have been a madcap artist, combining with his love for his profession a taste for fine clothes, and what was then perhaps rarer in people of his sort, a great partiality for living creatures of all kinds. The darker shades of Vasari's picture have been purposely omitted from these pages. We only ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... you are even more of a madcap than he is. The other day both of you looked as if you had taken a bath. How is it that a big girl like you cannot remain two minutes seated? Lucien!" she continued directing her eyes on her son, "turn ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... question led a truly chequered life in the gay garrisons of the new world, varied by a couple of voyages to the gayer Court he had left behind, but through all the reckless episodes of his long and stirring career, Francois was by his side, patient, adroit, silent when necessary, at other times a madcap for freak and fantasy. Faith of a gentleman—Francois Gaillard was everything his noble master should have been, and that master too often such as the poorest lackey might have been ashamed to be, yet—faith of a gentleman—De Clairville atoned for much ere he died. Francois, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... anything, however hard, and it shall be done, but do not force me to go with you to the Circus. If my mother were only alive! Wherever I could go with her was right. But my father, not to speak of my madcap brother Alexander, do not know what befits a maiden, nor does anybody ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... perfect salad, there should be a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a wise man for salt, and a madcap to stir the ingredients up, and ...
— My Pet Recipes, Tried and True - Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec • Various
... "Go, madcap, and take your idle fancies with you. There is certainly more of the bold Montespan in you than of ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... forgetful. I am ashamed of it, and honestly mean to improve, but, oh, poor Hector, how you would suffer if you had to put up with me during the process! You ought to marry a clever woman who would keep your house as you would like it kept, and help you on by her gracious ways, not a madcap girl who has not learned to manage herself, much less other people. Dear Hector, I thank you with all my heart for thinking so kindly of me and paying me such an honour, but, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... chance, 'Tis the first rigadoon they dance; With parted lips, right thirstily Each rustic tracks them as they fly, And the damsel sly Feels every eye, And lighter moves for each adoring glance. Holy cross! what a sight! when the madcap rears aright Her shining lizard's head! her Spanish foot falls light, Her wasp-like figure sways And swims and whirls and springs again. The wind with corner of her 'kerchief plays. Those lovely cheeks where ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... like many young men of the highest rank, too much given up to athletic sports—to that society which constitutes the aristocracy of the ring and the turf, and all that kind of thing. You see, I am putting all the worst points first. But I have known so many young men in my day, after a madcap career of a few years among prizefighters, wrestlers, and jockeys—learning their slang and affecting their manners—take up and cultivate the graces and the decencies. There was poor dear Newgate, many degrees lower in that kind of frolic, who, when he grew tired of ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... heavy footsteps overhead. A door opened, and his father's voice called sternly from the head of the stair: "What madcap folly art ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... Tortillas, chocolate, olives, and—the whiskey of the Americans! And supper's ready. But why Don Jose chooses to-night, of all nights, with this heretic fog lying over the Mission Hills like a wet serape, to take his supper out here, the saints only know. Perhaps it's some distrust of his madcap daughter, the Dona Jovita; perhaps to watch her—who knows? And now to find Diego. Ah, here he comes. So! The old story. He is getting Dona Jovita's horse ready for another madcap journey. Ah! ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... only one, was La Mettrie, whom we once saw transiently as Army-Surgeon at Fontenoy: he is now out of all that (flung out, with the dogs at his heels); has been safe in Berlin for three years past. Friedrich not only tolerates the poor madcap, but takes some pleasure in him: madcap we say, though poor La Mettrie had remarkable gifts, exuberant laughter one of them, and was far from intending to be mad. Not Zanyism, but Wisdom of the highest nature, was what he drove at,—unluckily, with open mouth, and mind all in tumult. La ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... I swore I could employ Thine absence well. But all my pride is o'er! Now am I lashed, as when a madcap boy Whirls a swift top ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... on, you madcap, I'll to the alehouse with you presently; where, for one shot of five pence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes. But, sirrah, how did thy master part ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... saint in the calendar—la Sainte Ferou! But what a madcap of a saint, then! My faith, she must have led them a dance when Francis ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... alleges, besides (p. 149) the ex post facto excuses of Francis's conduct, is the recovery of Henry's rights to the crown of France; and if this were the real object, it reduces both King and Cardinal to the level of political charlatans. To conquer France was a madcap scheme, when Henry himself was admitting the impossibility of raising 30,000 foot or 10,000 horse, without hired contingents from Charles's domains;[414] when, according to Giustinian, it would have been hard to levy 100 men-at-arms ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... once a madcap of a fellow, whose wife got on very well with him and did all the house work very nicely, but she would never speak a single word to him. As nothing he tried would make her speak, the madcap at last hit on a plan of taking her on a long journey. But even when he told his ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... her sister were considered to be Southern Unionists—and were greatly petted in governmental circles for their sacrificing fidelity to the flag. His informant, an official in the State Department, added that Miss Matilda might have been a good deal of a madcap at the outbreak of the war—for the sisters had a brother in the Confederate service—but that she had changed greatly, and, indeed, within a month. "For," he added, "she was at the White House for the first time last week, and they say the President talked ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... sprang up from sleep, Saying, "Now for a frolic! now for a leap! Now for a madcap galloping chase! I'll make a commotion in ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of the New Hampshire regiment, begged Whitefield to furnish a motto for the flag. The preacher, who, zealot as he was, seemed unwilling to mix himself with so madcap a business, hesitated at first, but at length consented, and suggested the words, Nil desperandum Christo duce, which, being adopted, gave the enterprise the air of a crusade. It had, in fact, something of the character ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... Rosebud was growing to womanhood, Seth's hands were very full. Those wonderful violet eyes belonged to no milk and water "miss." From the very beginning the girl proved herself spirited and wilful. Not in any vicious way. A "madcap" best describes her. She had no thought of consequences; only the delight of the moment, the excitement and risk. These were the things that plunged her into girlish scrapes from which it fell to the lot of Seth to extricate her. All her little escapades were in themselves healthy enough, but ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... grieve about that. You are all false! My sweet little lark, my sunshine, my little madcap, lay your head on my knee, I want ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... her lips, and called a tear to the eye of her calmer sister, not a moment would elapse before she would cast herself upon her neck and weep her sincere contrition, and be for hours an altered being; until her natural spirit would prevail, and she would be again the wild, mirthful madcap, whose very faults could call forth no keener reproach than a grave and thoughtful smile from the lips of those who loved her ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... sports—to that society which constitutes the aristocracy of the ring and the turf, and all that kind of thing. You see, I am putting all the worst points first. But I have known so many young men in my day, after a madcap career of a few years among prizefighters, wrestlers, and jockeys—learning their slang and affecting their manners—take up and cultivate the graces and the decencies. There was poor dear Newgate, many degrees lower in that kind of frolic, who, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... running off immediately to search, but I called my little madcap back, till we arranged our plans. I advised that two of us should remain to watch the coast, while the other two penetrated into the interior. The first thing necessary to ascertain was if the island was inhabited, which might easily be done, by climbing ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... foundation chosen by Shakspeare on which to build the superstructure of his own fascinating imagination, and on which other writers more grave, though not more trustworthy as historians, have rested for conclusive evidence of the wild frolics and "madcap" adventures of Henry of Monmouth. Stowe's account is this: "In the year 1410, upon the eve of St. John the Baptist, (i.e. June 23,) the King's sons, Thomas and John, being in East-Cheap at supper, or rather at breakfast, (for it was after the watch ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... and mind, "a quiet, insignificant-looking man," who at least loved her passionately, and would make a pliant husband to the capricious little autocrat. And we may be sure Napoleon heaved a sigh of relief when his madcap sister was safely tied to ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... but as long as my mother lived he would not leave her. When death had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in prison ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... guilty of such an outrage, Frank only remembered that Peg was in a white heat of indignation, and fully capable of doing some madcap prank in order to frighten off the two saddle boys. He was also not a little worried about the rustlers, supposed to be ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim, some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio—the madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids—rests for a moment in a pool, wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have made your plunge, of a most assertive chill. Now he was on his leisurely way home, to the presbytery and what ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... 'Madcap!' he said; 'but I suppose the first day of the holidays must be privileged. Ha! Fitzjocelyn, you're the right man in the right ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this was years agone— The madcap now hath sober grown And hose is better wrought, And neither now would run alone The ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... trouble between them became noticeable, gossip ran fast and furious; partly for the reason that no human being seemed to understand just where the cause of the difficulty lay. Whispered mention of the Grand-Duke Constantine, madcap-libertine, hero of a thousand escapades, tended in no way to lessen the interest, though of evidence there seemed none. The climax proved to be a fitting one, however; for, early in March, the Princess, with two maids, a valet, her entire wardrobe, and all save ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... good to be true. After all this waiting. And now I've got to keep my eyes on both the spider and the fly. Irma is such a tempestuous devil. If Leah only had her years and looks and dash, she would twist any man in the world around her finger. But I can never teach this Hungarian madcap, Leah's velvet softness ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... mind easy on that point," replied the warders. "We had tried everything we could think of to get rid of her majesty the queen, but without effect. So a young madcap Shadow, half against the will of the older ones of us, slipped upstairs into the nursery; and has, no doubt, succeeded in appalling the baby, for he is very lithe ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... tell you. I was riding down the river road and just as I came to the end of the clearing a man jumped out from behind some bushes and grasped Madcap's bridle. Imagine! For a moment I was frightened out of my wits. I instantly thought of the Girtys, who, I have heard, have evinced a fondness for kidnapping little girls. Then the fellow said he was on guard and ordered me, actually commanded ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... May, in 1848, found San Francisco a manless Eden. Stanley, struggling with a few elderly Indians and squaws to carry on his work, bemoaned the madcap folly bitterly. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... dear? You have taken the wind out of Ada's sails and gained a feather in your cap, I can assure you. It all seems too good to be true. The queen dethroned at last!" and Winnie catching Nellie round the waist, danced her up and down the schoolroom in a regular madcap whirl. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... quickly with her crochet work, and the boys with writing and schooling; they would not be altogether behindhand when the time came for them to go to school in the village. Eleseus in particular was grown a clever one, but little Sivert was nothing much, if the truth must be told—a madcap, a jackanapes. He even ventured to screw a little at Mother's sewing-machine, and had already hacked off splinters from table and chairs with his new pocket-knife. Inger had threatened to take it ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... the gossiping smokers of the galley. The interior affairs of the frigate itself formed their principal theme. Rumours about the private life of the Commodore in his cabin; about the Captain, in his; about the various officers in the ward-room; about the reefers in the steerage, and their madcap frolickings, and about a thousand other matters touching the crew themselves; all these—forming the eternally shifting, domestic by-play of a man-of-war—proved inexhaustible topics for ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... and frankness; she washed her masses of brown hair and shook it loose in the sunshine, and she came in wet more than once, and changed her shoes before the fire—just as she had years ago, when she was a madcap little girl running ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... thousand pounds for a live man. I appear as little as possible in the diggings in this guise, however. You did not know me as the chief performer in that little comedy with Brigalow on Diamond Gully. You did not recognise me in the dark man who talked with you and Burton while the madcap from Kyley's was leading the troopers a merry dance along the lead. By the way, I admire your taste in women, Jim. She's a fine, unshamed barbarian, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... do nothing of the sort," and Carter's honest old face showed that he felt great anxiety concerning his madcap charges. "Ye must promise to sit still, and not move hand or foot, or I'll go back to my work and leave ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... morning sprang up from sleep, Saying, 'Now for a frolic! now for a leap! Now for a madcap galloping chase! I'll make a commotion ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... had kept it so quiet, but some one must have 'peached,' I suppose, to curry favor. Whatever made you go, Maggie? You know you have never mixed yourself up with that Day, and Merton, and Marsh set. As to that poor Polly Singleton, there's no harm in her, but she's a perfect madcap. What could have possessed ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... for her honour. Listen, but tell nobody—four days ago, the King, passing her to go to supper, approached her, under the pretence of tickling her, and tried to slip a note into her hand. D'Amblimont, in her madcap way, put her hands behind her back, and the King was obliged to pick up the note, which had fallen on the ground. Gontaut was the only person who saw all this, and, after supper, he went up to the little lady, and said, 'You are an excellent friend.'—'I did my duty,' ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 1 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... said Dr Nettleby. "You're afraid of some of your nice messmates getting hauled over the coals? I bet that madcap Larkyns is at the bottom of it; I saw him with you close to one of the ports just now, as I passed by on my way down here, and I wondered what mischief you were up to! Well, well, I respect you, my boy, for not telling tales out of school, as the old saying goes; so, I won't ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Thus mused a madcap young, who drove Through clouds of dust at postal pace, By the decree of Mighty Jove, Inheritor of all his race. Friends of Liudmila and Ruslan,(1) Let me present ye to the man, Who without more prevarication The hero is of my narration! ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... lady residing in Elizabeth, whose brother was in a New Jersey College. Upon one of his visits to his sister he had brought Peyton Stewart home for a visit: Peyton, the happy-go-lucky, irresponsible madcap. Kitty Snyder's buxom beauty had turned all that was left to be turned of his shallow head and she had become Mrs. Peyton Stewart ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... nephew, and he came to be king of England. His son was Henry the Fifth, the greatest of the Plantagenet kings. When he was a young man, and only Prince of Wales, he was very wild and fond of games and jokes. They used to call him Harry Madcap. ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... hurried to poor Auntie Lu, sitting disconsolate beside the well with Dorothy clasping her hand in her own small ones, trying to comfort as best she could, and exclaimed: "Fear no more! We should have thought at once the prank that madcap would be at! She saw Anton ride away to the camp and she has followed him. The maid who was ill remembers. She is safe with her father long before this. Come in by, now, come in and have a cup of tea. A cup of tea will set you ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... antique furniture, and the walls were adorned with old family portraits. The place was in charge of an old man and his wife and a negro boy, who were the sole occupants, except when the nine would sally forth from New York and enliven its solitudes with their madcap pranks ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... of their occupants, all utterly unknown to me. At last I said, "Who are these people, Black? I don't know one of them." "You soon will know them, though, my boy," he answered. "Just wait and see if you don't." And sure enough, when "Madcap Violet" appeared, all the unknown personages of that night-walk at Camberwell ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... "You're a madcap!" said her mother. "You'll be brought home on a shutter some day! Mark my words, Bab! You'll see!—or at least I shall; you'll be past seeing! But it don't matter; it's what we're made for! Die or be killed, it's all ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... on the surface alone, while the fruit withers and decays beneath—but zounds! don't speak so loud, here's somebody coming, and they'll think we are quarrelling. (Helen sings behind) So here comes our madcap. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... in this kind, indeed properly the only one, was La Mettrie, whom we once saw transiently as Army-Surgeon at Fontenoy: he is now out of all that (flung out, with the dogs at his heels); has been safe in Berlin for three years past. Friedrich not only tolerates the poor madcap, but takes some pleasure in him: madcap we say, though poor La Mettrie had remarkable gifts, exuberant laughter one of them, and was far from intending to be mad. Not Zanyism, but Wisdom of the highest nature, was what he drove at,—unluckily, with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... as thick the crowd surged, beneath the blossomed ale-poles, Lifting up to Whittington a fair face afraid, Swept against his horse by a billow of madcap prentices, Hard against the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... insupportable for me to think that I am supposed not to possess your friendship, and that I only play the part of a temporary friend. It makes me wretched: you must not be angry if I complain of you to your royal self." "Well, well, you madcap, what must I do? Whom must I banish?" "Oh, sire, no one: with your august support I fear no person; nothing but appearances." "You are an excellent creature; in your place madame de Pompadour would have imprisoned ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... woods,—arguing loudly, and with a lordly intolerance of contradiction, with two men who accompanied him, while his sleek claybank mare also argued loudly with her colt. She had much ado to pace soberly forward, even under the coercion of whip and spur, while her madcap scion galloped wildly ahead or lagged far in the rear, and made now and then excursions into the woods, out of sight, to gratify some adolescent curiosity, or perhaps, after the fashion of other and human adolescents, to relish the spectacle ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... It might be said that death, at whatever age it may overtake her, will find the Little Countess just as she left the cradle, if it were possible to suppose that she has preserved its innocence as well as she has retained its profound puerility. Has that madcap a soul? The word nothingness has escaped me. It is indeed difficult for me to conceive what might survive that body when it has once lost the vain fever and the frivolous breath that seem alone ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... was at that time about thirteen and a half, and resembled Rene more than it is allowable for a child to resemble his father, and had nothing of the Sire Bruyn about him but his name—behold the little one, a madcap and pretty like his mother, who came in from the garden, running, perspiring, panting, jumping, scattering all things in his way, after the uses and customs of infancy, and who ran straight to his well-beloved mother, jumping into her lap, and ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... dancing sarabands, and making the house echo with her laughter. If by chance the writer, abandoning science for pleasure, says to her, "Wait a moment, little one, till I come," and runs in great haste to play with the madcap, she has disappeared. She has gone into her hole, hides herself there, rolls herself up, and retires. Take the poker, take a staff, a cudgel, a cane, raise them, strike the wench, and rave at her, she moans; strap her, she moans; caress her, fondle her, she ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... of that day contain accounts of many a mad prank which [Lord Warwick, Addison's step-son] played ... [like] the lawless freaks of the madcap prince ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... fresh May morning, I took my love to church, To see if Parson Primrose were safely on his perch. He scarce had got to Thirdly, or squire begun to snore, When, like a sun-lit sea-wave, A green and crimson sea-wave, A frolic of madcap May-folk ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... Some madcap boys with an appetite for the horrible plucked up courage to venture through the dried marsh by the cattle-path, and come before the house at a spectral hour when the air was full of bats. Something which they but half saw—half a sight was enough—sent them ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... to do so in what I considered the most agreeable and appropriate manner when the madcap broke away from me, and sprang upon a footstool ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... day—one of those days when young Spring in madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of summer. She could assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, but through all the travesty peeped her laughing youth, the little tender leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom of the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the more sterling qualities that underlaid that courage that drew him to the young man; certain it was that in two weeks Myles was the acknowledged favorite. He made no protestation of virtue; he always accompanied the Prince in those madcap ventures to London, where he beheld all manner of wild revelry; he never held himself aloof from his gay comrades, but he looked upon all their mad sports with the same calm gaze that had carried him without taint through the courts of ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... all dark nights, foul ways, and runaway horses! a mettlesome madcap, to start at the lightning and plunge with me head over heels in the brushwood; in scrambling out of that thicket, I certainly turned wrong, and have missed my road—how to regain it? 'sdeath! I could as soon compose an almanac as and a clue to this puzzle. Well, I was found in a wood when a baby, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... sisters had no love for such shows, and nobody would be greatly troubled at her hardihood in escaping from the escort of her servants. She was always doing the like, and no harm had ever befallen her. Her father was wont to call her his Madcap, and her mother sometimes chided, and feared she would come to ill by her wild freaks; but she had always turned up safe and sound, and her independent ways had almost ceased to excite comment or uneasiness. On May Day, when all the world was abroad and ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... all, I see it all! Now God be thanked, I am indeed awake at last! Come, joy! vanish, sorrow! Ho, Nan! Bet! kick off your straw and hie ye hither to my side, till I do pour into your unbelieving ears the wildest madcap dream that ever the spirits of night did conjure up to astonish the soul of man withal! . . . Ho, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... trouble—trouble enough at first, day by day, in fear, to confront the fabulous perils of his imagination. Trouble enough thereafter encountering the sea's real assault, to subdue the reasonable terrors of those parts. Trouble enough, too, by and by, to devise perils beyond the common, to find a madcap way, to disclose a chance worth daring for the sheer exercise of courage. But from all these perils, of the real and the fanciful, of the commonplace path and the way of reckless ingenuity, Terry Lute emerged at last with the reputation ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... sat down. She could not stand up nor think. All that was left of her excitement and recklessness was a fearful weakness, apathy, and dreariness. Her conscience whispered to her that she had behaved badly, foolishly, that evening, like some madcap girl—that she had just been embraced on the verandah, and still had an uneasy feeling in her waist and her elbow. There was not a soul in the drawing-room; there was only one candle burning. Madame Lubyantsev sat on the round stool ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... writhing to evade the bore, I quicken now my pace, now stop, And in my servant's ear let drop Some words, and all the while I feel Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel. "Oh, for a touch," I moaned, in pain, "Bolanus, of thy madcap vein, To put this incubus to rout!" As he went chattering on about Whatever he descries or meets, The crowds, the beauty of the streets, The city's growth, its splendour, size, "You're dying to be off," he cries; For all the while I'd been stock dumb. "I've seen it this ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... to you, my dear brother, that I have been not a little amused, I may even say instructed, by a trick played by your madcap nephew, for the honor and glory, I suppose, of his scepticism, or for some other motive, not easily divined. He promised me significantly an entertainment, in which I should enjoy the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," by which I little thought that he was ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... call him the parson. But now tell me what you think of my work during these fifteen years? Hasn't he grown a fine fellow? Who would recognise the madcap that ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... happy, now, in a larger house, with a study and book shelves, his mother a tender and tranquil woman, Faith a contented housekeeper with a servant, and hardly knowing which to adore the most, Polly Henry's merry madcap household, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... up for a while at Penderfield's—sort of cousin, I believe, him or his wife—till the district was sanitary again. Bad job for her, as it turned out! Nobody there to warn her what sort of fellow Penderfield was—and if there had been she wouldn't have believed 'em. She was a madcap sort of a girl, and regularly in the hands of about as bad a couple as you'll meet with in a long spell—India or anywhere! They used to say out there that the she Penderfield winked at all her husband's affairs as long as he didn't cut across her little arrangements—did more ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... something elegant in his manners and conversation; his countenance was expressive and agreeable, and he spoke with facility if not with modesty; in short, everything about him bore the mark of a young debauchee, who did not crave assistance like a beggar, but as a thoughtless madcap. He told us his name was Venture de Villeneuve, that he came from Paris, had lost his way, and seeming to forget that he had announced himself for a musician, added that he was going to Grenoble to see a relation that was ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... not bear such a weight of Romish sin, and that God was displeased with their pulpits and altars, their doctrine and sacrifice. One zealot remembered that, at the return of Prince Charles from the madcap expedition to Spain, a Catholic had lamented, or was said to have lamented, the street bonfires, as there would be never a fagot left to burn the heretics. "If it had been a Protestant chapel," the Puritans ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... was there. Little preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old stomachers, more wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... small table in the centre of the room with a settee and two or three chairs arranged close to it. Around this table now an eager little group had congregated: the Prince of Wales in the forefront, unwilling to interfere, scarce knowing what madcap plans were floating through Blakeney's adventurous brain, but excited in spite of himself at this momentous game of hazard the issues of which seemed so nebulous, so vaguely fraught with dangers. Close to him were Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, Lord Anthony Dewhurst, Lord Grenville ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... but it was the lure of the contrast that won him. Ever since he had landed in France he had, as it were, hung on to the old conventional position, and he had felt increasingly that it was impossible to do so. True, there seemed little connection between a dinner with a couple of madcap girls in a French restaurant and religion, but there was one. He had felt out of touch with men and life, and now a new phase of it was offered him. He ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... example "Madcap Moll," Eighth Duchess of Wapping, and her famous ride to Norwich—and compare it with Jabez Puffwater's ride to the succour of his old Aunt Topsy. Or E. Maxwell Snurge's celebrated national appeal in West Forty-Second street, and Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge's ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... that Maggot was a noted madcap, who stuck at nothing, and appeared to derive positive pleasure from the mere act of putting his life in danger. No human foot could, by climbing, have reached the spot where the nest of the daw, or Cornish chough, was fixed—for the precipice, ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... the London Embassy, virtually as Ambassador but without a staff. On this occasion he immediately startled us out of our senses by proposing that we should depose the Khedive and set up Prince Halim. He had converted Freycinet to this madcap view.' ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... bent upon my worldly advantage, and that is plain even to the person rejecting it. How much more so must it be to papa, though he likes you, and when you are near him would perhaps, in a fit of unworldliness, be almost as reckless as the creature he calls madcap and would rather call countess. No! sooner with a Will-o'-the-wisp, my friend. Who could ever know where the man was when he himself never knows where he is. He is the wind that bloweth as it listeth—because it is without an aim or always with a new one. And ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a perfect salad, there should be a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a wise man for salt, and a madcap to stir the ingredients up, and mix ...
— My Pet Recipes, Tried and True - Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec • Various
... said the admiral to his secretary. 'Young madcap! I sent him to look after a pirate, and he goes after the governor's daughter! By the Lord Harry, Mr. Templemore, but you and I shall ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... surrey swept even with the sidetracked tramp, the bright-eyed girl, seized by some merry, madcap impulse, leaned out toward him with a sweet, dazzling smile, and cried, "Mer-ry Christ-mas!" in a shrill, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... trees. "She'll break her neck some day;" and thinking someone must be in fault, her eyes would turn reprovingly upon Mrs. Jeffrey for having failed in subduing Maggie, whom the old governess pronounced the "veriest madcap" in the world. "There is nothing like her in all England," she said; "and her low-bred ways must be the result of her having been born on ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... are thinking of such a madcap as Katy in Jenny Baynor's sick-room. But that is just my reason. I've talked with Mrs. Raynor, and she is quite willing to try Katy, if we can only get her there to be tried. If there's any one in this world who can tame Katy's wild ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Sir John Oxon," said Warbeck. "And the beauty he makes his boast on is the Gloucestershire Wildairs handsome madcap—the one they call ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... whose brother was now with him, and who lives in Memmingen. His name is Herr Unhold, and he pressed me very much to come to Memmingen if possible. We sent a hundred thousand loves to papa by them, and to my sister, the madcap, which they promised to deliver without fail. This change of carriages was a great bore to me, for I wished to send a letter back from Waging by the postilion. We then (after a slight meal) had the honor of being conveyed ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... to get used to the strange idea of the dead unknown wife, and the little son for whose sake they were to grow up into wise sober women before they had done with being little girls. What wonder that Angel looked pale and grave after a wakeful night, and that Betty felt that madcap ways and tumbled curls must ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... very delightfully done into modern German by Ludwig Tieck; and "lady's service" is the highest occupation of knightly leisure, the subject of the immense bulk of mediaeval poetry. "Lady's service" in deeds of arms and song, in constant praise and defence of the beloved, in heroic enterprise and madcap mummery, in submission and terror to the wondrous creature whom the humble servant, the lover, never calls by her sacred name, speaking of her in words unknown to Antiquity, dompna, dame, frowe, madonna—words of which the original sense has almost been forgotten, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... said, reprovingly. "She is a spoiled madcap, Sir Everard, and I am afraid the fault is mine. She has been everywhere with me in her seventeen years of life—freezing amid the snows of Canada and grilling alive under the broiling sun of India. And the result is—what ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... person of an exquisite distinction. She loved everything that in any way is elegant and ornate in society: names, manners, talents, titles. Madcap as I assuredly was, I looked upon all this as vanity, and went in quest of intimacy and simplicity combined with poesy. Thanks to God, I found them in Zoe, who was really a person of merit, and, moreover, a woman with a heart as eager for ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... this willful child some good, you see. They had taught her to think—to know herself. She never could be the same crude, madcap ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... book-bindery. And just to show him that she did not notice the change, and did not care, she was so gay and hoidenish, so full of repartee and laughter, that she saw him open his eyes in wonder more than once; and Doctor Bryan gave her the soubriquet of "Madcap Dorothy," which seemed ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... eruption, displosion^, torrent. turmoil &c (disorder) 59; ferment &c (agitation) 315; storm, tempest, rough weather; squall &c (wind) 349; earthquake, volcano, thunderstorm. berserk, berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone^, Megaera, Alecto^, madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c (blusterer) 887. V. be violent &c adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush foremost; raise a storm, make a riot; rough house [Slang]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... true, the good rector's maiden sisters privately hinted to me their horror of the recklessness with which—sometimes with her sister, oftener without, but wholly unattended—she drove her little pony-chaise through the village, laughing like a madcap at pranks of a huge Newfoundland dog named Sergeant, the favourite of General Stanley, which, while escorting the young ladies, used to gambol into the cottages, overset furniture and children, and scamper out again amid a general uproar. For though ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... ex post facto excuses of Francis's conduct, is the recovery of Henry's rights to the crown of France; and if this were the real object, it reduces both King and Cardinal to the level of political charlatans. To conquer France was a madcap scheme, when Henry himself was admitting the impossibility of raising 30,000 foot or 10,000 horse, without hired contingents from Charles's domains;[414] when, according to Giustinian, it would have been hard to levy 100 men-at-arms or 1000 light cavalry in the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... Osbaldistone Hall went Frank once more, his heart not a little sore within him for the good days he had spent in it, and especially because of the thought that he would now find there no madcap Die Vernon to tease and torment him out of ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... your guide — if you will trust yourself with a madcap like me, in the solitudes of ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... observed. There is the owl. How little do the people of England know of him—even of him the barn-door and domestic owl—yea, even at this day—we had almost said the Poets! Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry fellow—quite a madcap—and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... they conceitedly term Fin-Mac-Coul, should have disappeared before my search, rolling himself in his cloud like the spirit of Loda. Such an opportunity can hardly again occur to an ancient and grey-haired man; and to see it lost by the madcap spleen of a hot-headed boy! But ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... make her your friend. Coax her secret out of her, and you will find that she is some madcap actress from a travelling company of mountebanks, who has done this thing in order to have the story told by the gazetteers and bring people to look at her. Get her to confess, and then let her story spread among the crowd—and the whole uprising that is now ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... of them was Marhar-Rarrar, the Bright-Eyed; and, in the second place, neither she nor the romps, her companions, ever dreamed of taking the voyage until the doctor and myself announced our intention; their going along was nothing more than a madcap frolic; in short, they were a parcel of wicked hoydens, bent on mischief, who laughed in your face when you looked sentimental, and only tolerated your company when making merry at ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... the mistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be. And they were already smiling rather too broadly upon Sorelli, who had begun to recite her speech, when an exclamation from that little madcap of a Jammes broke the smile of the managers so brutally that the expression of distress and dismay that lay beneath it became ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... families were just a crowd of self-seeking creatures with no thought beyond their own petty interests. The Jervaises were snobs upset by the threat to their silly prestige. Brenda was a feather-headed madcap without a scrap of consideration for any one but herself. Banks was an infatuated fool, and the best I could hope for him was that he would realise the fact before it was too late. Frank, confound and confound him, was a coarse-minded sensualist. The thought ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... say that he has been having such a good time that he hasn't even yet thought of building a nest, and here half the people of the Old Orchard have grown families. I've a nest and eggs myself, but that madcap is just roaming about having a good time. ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... olives, and—the whiskey of the Americans! And supper's ready. But why Don Jose chooses to-night, of all nights, with this heretic fog lying over the Mission Hills like a wet serape, to take his supper out here, the saints only know. Perhaps it's some distrust of his madcap daughter, the Dona Jovita; perhaps to watch her—who knows? And now to find Diego. Ah, here he comes. So! The old story. He is getting Dona Jovita's horse ready for another madcap journey. Ah! (Retires ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... think, master, of you,' she began again, 'you are very sorry for me. But you mustn't be too sorry, really! I'll tell you one thing; for instance, I sometimes, even now.... Do you remember how merry I used to be in my time? A regular madcap!... So do you know what? I sing ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... and Mrs. Ferguson's, who would have Dr. Rush set up a ward in the new hospital for the broken-hearted lovers of Darthea. When first Jack Warder was thus badgered, he fell into such a state of terror as to what the madcap woman would say next that he declined all society for a week, and ever after detested the ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... with the madcap wind, he walked up on the nearer hills, and saw that this island was narrow, lying between blue fields of sea, both bay and ocean filled with wave crests, ever moving. The outer sea beat upon the sandy beach with a roar and volume of surf such as he had never seen before, for under the water ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... recollections that came rushing into Macleod's head were of a sufficiently chaotic and bewildering character. He tried to separate that grave, and gentle, and sensitive girl he had met at Prince's Gate from this gay madcap, and he could not at all succeed. His heart laughed with the laughter of this wild creature; he enjoyed the discomfiture and despair of the old lawyer as she stood before him twirling her garden hat by a solitary ribbon; and when the small, white fingers ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... sea is tumbling about in this terrible fashion; and, pray, who has gone in her? Ah, Mr Paget, I am glad to see you have not risked your life. But where is Charles Dicey? Just like him, to do such a madcap trick. My dear girls, your brother jumped into the boat to pick up a silly man who tumbled overboard, and they cannot find him or any of those ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... his character and of the strange, turbulent age in which he lived; and it went far to embitter the hatred of the duke and the bishop against him. This poor fellow was the jester, song-singer and epigrammatist of the madcap patriots who were associated under the title of "Sons of Geneva." Under a trumped-up charge of plotting the death of the bishop he was kidnapped and carried away to one of the castles in the neighborhood, and there tortured until a false confession ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... value of pearls." Those who had seen her in the morning, superb, imperious, a queen in all the splendor of power, would find her in the evening, gay, whimsical, capricious, presiding over one of these petits soupers with all the exuberant and madcap gayety of an actress after the theater. The Abbe Soulavie, who saw her often, has left us a ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... right. No time for pettings now. There 's work to be done. Why didn't Jemima come? This is no place for a madcap ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Member in the principle of his argument if not in the violence of his remedies. He was a young travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... cried Mrs. Gantry. But Dolores had vanished. "Really, Genevieve, that madcap girl—! About yourself, my dear. Promise me now, if you cannot say 'yes,' at least you'll not make it ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... however, whom I found at the encampment were a couple of insane fellows, determined to follow us—perhaps to show "by one satiric touch" what kind of madcap enterprise was ours. The first was a Neapolitan, who had dogged me all the while I was at Tripoli, pestering me to make a contract with him as servant. To humour his madness, I never said I would not; and the poor fellow, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... she said, shaking her white-capped head; "maybe ye think that the fifth commandment says nocht aboot grandmithers; but ye'll be tamed some day, my woman. Mony's the gamesome an' hellicat [madcap] lassie that I hae seen brocht to hersel', an' her wings clippit like a sea-gull's i' the yaird, tethered by the fit wi' a family o' ten or ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... the name of Fly, nor why it was given her, but it suited her very well, and stuck to her, and our yawl every week carried five merry, strong young fellows on the Seine between Asnieres and Maison Lafitte, who were ruled from under a parasol of colored paper, by a lively and madcap young person, who treated us like slaves whose business it was to row her about, and whom we were ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... should have guided you—your womanly instinct! But you have always been an unwomanly girl. You have put me to shame many a time by your hoydenish tricks; but I bore with you, believing that your madcap follies were at least harmless. To-day you have gone a step too far, and have been guilty of absolute impropriety, which I shall be very ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... voyages to the gayer Court he had left behind, but through all the reckless episodes of his long and stirring career, Francois was by his side, patient, adroit, silent when necessary, at other times a madcap for freak and fantasy. Faith of a gentleman—Francois Gaillard was everything his noble master should have been, and that master too often such as the poorest lackey might have been ashamed to be, yet—faith of a gentleman—De Clairville atoned ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... in upon his brain. "There is the golden lure of the Misses Phenie and Genie Forbes, of Chicago, U. S. A. Those madcap girls will be easily gulled. They arrive to-morrow at nine. A few stage asides, as to the stock romance of every Polish upstart, will do ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... rode with Touchstone on a bus From Ludgate Hill to World's End. It was he! Despite the broadcloth and the bowler hat, I knew him, Touchstone, the wild flower of folly, The whetstone of his age, the scourge of kings, The madcap morning star of elfin-land, Who used to wrap his legs around his neck For warmth on winter nights. He had slipped back, To see what men were doing in a world That should be wiser. He had watched a play, Read several books, heard men ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... the hour was drawing nigh when we had to present ourselves before that company of men of genius, each with his own crow; and I was still unprovided; and yet I thought it would be stupid to fail of such a madcap bagatelle; [3] but what particularly weighed upon my mind was that I did not choose to lend the light of my countenance in that illustrious sphere to some miserable plume-plucked scarecrow. All these considerations made me devise a pleasant trick, for the increase of merriment and the diffusion ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... resented her presence, nor did anyone desire her departure, for she had made herself pleasant to all. In Mrs. Quirk's eyes she stood second only to Kathleen. Samuel Quirk regarded her as chief critic and adviser on the estate, and to Kathleen she was a cheerful, madcap companion, who reminded her that she was yet young. Denis Quirk's sentiments in regard to the girl he carefully concealed from the outside world, even from Sylvia herself. He was polite and deferential, yet humorous, with her; but she would have liked him to demonstrate ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... Fifth. You monstrous madcap, does your skin Itch for the third time to try that inn? I've had enough for my taste in ...
— Faust • Goethe
... but the care-free youngsters do, Is calling them to the fields and streams and the joys that once I knew. And if youth be wild desire for play and care is the mark of men, Beneath the skin that Time has tanned I'm a madcap ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... in fact there was no news, he would have only himself to blame if he re-established communications with her in obedience to a passing whim. She was at Crawleigh, resting and building up her strength; he would be back in full harness within thirty-six hours, and there would be no room for her madcap incursions ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... while yet the sparkling jest was ripe upon the merry lip, and the ruddy glow of health upon the cheek gave earnest of a lengthened life———But, soft! methinks I hear my reader exclaim, "How now, madcap, moralizing Mr. Spy? art thou, too, bitten by the desire to philosophize, thou, 'the very Spy o' the time,' the merry buoyant rogue who has laughed all serious scenes to scorn, and riding over hill, and dale, and verdant plain upon thy fiery courser, fleet as the winds, collecting ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... two, Pa, Ma, and daughters three, All drove in madcap hurry to the station, In fact, they might have tittered "Seven are we" Had they remembered the superb quotation; But Julia (housemaid) made some lamentation About some best back hair she'd left behind, But all was done to soothe her perturbation Till she became more quietly inclined; This nat'rally ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... is alive, and as great a liar as ever," Marya Dmitrievna's son continued; "and only fancy, yesterday this madcap"—pointing to the school-girl, his wife's sister—"put some pepper in ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... and shaking her pretty little fist at Claude, 'that madcap! how he has betrayed me! When he is at his easel, he is so in the seventh heaven, that he sees nothing, thinks of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... to shudder with a learned semi-madcap, who waiteth in darkened rooms for spirits to come to him—and the spirit runneth ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... interrupted Master Edward, snatching the feathers out of the tail of a splendid parroquet that was screaming on its gilded perch, in order to make a plume for his hat. Madame de Villefort merely cried,—"Be still, Edward!" She then added,—"This young madcap is, however, very nearly right, and merely re-echoes what he has heard me say with pain a hundred times; for Mademoiselle de Villefort is, in spite of all we can do to rouse her, of a melancholy disposition and taciturn habit, which frequently injure the effect of her beauty. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and your letters of exchange; You travel as a count, it would appear, Going for pleasure and a little change; Once there, you play the rodomont, the queer Crack-brain good fellow, idle gamester, strange Spendthrift and madcap. Give yourself full swing; People are taken ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... a picture to bring admiration into any eye, and although she was entirely lacking in poise and dignity, her constant restless vivacity and the witch-like spirit of laughter that possessed her were quite as engaging. She was a madcap, fly-away creature whose ravishing lace was framed by an unruly mop of dark hair, which no amount of attention could hold in place. Little dancing curls and wisps and ringlets were ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... perplexity I was one morning turning over his pages when I casually opened upon the comic scenes of Henry IV., and was, in a moment, completely lost in the madcap revelry of the Boar's Head Tavern. So vividly and naturally are these scenes of humor depicted, and with such force and consistency are the characters sustained, that they become mingled up in the mind with the facts and personages ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the fanciful title from a young visitor to the plantation who had studied Spanish. "Mariposa" meant butterfly, she told the baby's mother, who gratefully accepted the compliment to her newly born daughter. The mother and her mates called her "Mary Posy." The mistress, who was fond of the madcap sponsor, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... out just to see the Meet, But the horse thought he would compete With horses, hounds and fox for place, And led the man this madcap race. ...
— A Horse Book • Mary Tourtel
... inspires me with horror! You think that I would regret it? You think that some day I may again become the woman I have been, the madcap you have known?—you think so! And how can I help your believing it? And yet I know very well that I would never cause you that sorrow, nor any other—never! I have discovered in your eyes a new ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... who sought safety with women and children behind strong stockades, and the declaration of Mr. Meacham that I was responsible for the slaughter of men on the 17th of January, "when the brave, reckless, madcap, Col. Thompson, drove his men against the lines of the Modocs," I was again sent to the front. In my letters and newspaper articles I had severely censured Mr. Meacham and he took revenge in his "Wigwam ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
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