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More "Observer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accustomed to observe the stars—the catoptron, the dioptron, the eisoptron and the enoptron." He supposes the catoptron to have been the same with the astrolabe. "The dioptron seems to have been so named from a tube through which the observer looked. Were the other two instruments named from objects being reflected in a mirror placed within them? Aristotle says that the Greeks employed mirrors when they surveyed the celestial appearances. May we not conclude from ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... owing to the receipt of incorrect orders, did not arrive in time to assume the command. Up to this point, and for some time previously, matters had been conducted in a manner so careless by the War Department, that the mere casual observer might reasonably presume some parties connected with it courted failure. Arms and ammunition had been despatched to the frontier without due precaution, and to parties to whom they ought not have been ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... aeroplane coming up from the east. It was flying high, but as I looked it dropped several hundred feet and began to circle round the knot of hill in narrowing circles, just as a hawk wheels before it pounces. Now it was flying very low, and now the observer on board caught sight of me. I could see one of the two occupants ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... should be made as exact as possible.Thus in dealing with the triads of colour said to be most frequently employed in the best period of Italian painting the observer should note and record as far as this is possible not only the precise tints, but also the precise degrees of their several luminosities. With regard to elements of form in art, the judicious use of photography and careful measurement would probably help us to understand the practices ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... habitation frequently watching me with more than ordinary attention. He was handsome in person, and his countenance was overcast by a sort of languor, the effect of sickness, which rendered it peculiarly interesting. Frequently, when I approached the window of our drawing-room, this young observer would bow or turn away with evident emotion. I related the circumstance to my mother, and from that time the lower shutters of our windows were perpetually closed. The young lawyer often excited my mirth, ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... the modesty of Tazewell confined to the bar. It pervaded his whole life; and when his fame was coextensive with the Union, and when his presence inspired awe in companies of able men, a close observer could detect in his tones or in his manner that he was not wholly at ease. It was only when the ice of a gathering party was fairly broken, that he was thoroughly self-possessed. Like Judge Marshall, he had a profound sense of respect for the female sex; ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... an observer, so energetic a leader, and so determined a fighter, could not long be left in retirement, and in February, 1862, General Sherman was ordered to assume command of the forces at Paducah, Ky. Desperate fighting soon followed. The ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... three dramas in which Mr. Fechter especially shines as a lover, but notably in the first—this remarkable power of surrounding the beloved creature, in the eyes of the audience, with the fascination that she has for him, is strikingly displayed. That observer must be cold indeed who does not feel, when Ruy Blas stands in the presence of the young unwedded Queen of Spain, that the air is enchanted; or, when she bends over him, laying her tender touch upon his bloody breast, that it is better so to die than to live apart from her, and that she is ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... to hear what thoughtful men had to say with regard to his race, Ensal leaned back in his chair, determined to give earnest attention to this observer of American life, whose very hostility assured the acuteness ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... Australian Company, and married a fellow passenger, Charlotte Hudson Beare, and died two years after, and then Edward, manager of the South Australian Bank, and later, John Stephens who founded The Weekly Observer, and afterwards bought The Register. These all ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... communications, and invites consideration of the fragments, as suggestive of much that concerns the welfare of mankind, the question as to their source being provisionally left open. The man of science, the poet, the metaphysician, the philanthropist, the musician, the observer of manners, even the general reader who merely seeks to be amused, will, it is hoped, find something interesting in the following pages. Let all, therefore, taste the fruit and judge of its flavour, though they do not behold the tree; profit by the diamonds, though they know not how they were extracted ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... revealed its secrets to observant men? Dr. Donne sauntered about among graves, and saw a sexton turn up a skull. He examined it, found a nail in it, identified the skull, and had the murderess hung. She was safe from the sexton and the rest of the parish, but not from a stray observer. Well, the day you were blown up, I observed something, and arrived at ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... to pass eight days at Versailles, in the palace of that king and queen whose throne she was one day to sap. Lodged in the attics with one of the female domestics of the Chateau, she was a close observer of this royal luxury, which she believed was paid for by the misery of the people, and that grandeur of things founded on the servility of courtiers. The lavishly spread tables, the walks, the play, presentations—all ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... To the casual observer in a town of this character there was nothing specially noticeable in three horsemen driving a pack-horse, but to those whose eyes were keen the true relationship of the ranger to his captives was instantly apparent, and ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... Square or Kensington Gardens. Not seldom even you may see one of them making her way alone, book in hand, towards one of the picturesque rocks—No. 363, for example, or No. 364, if you like it better—which seems to be making signs to her with its white ticket, in a manner which, to the uninitiated observer, might seem even ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... to home-keeping folk who have never broken their ignorance of London that one can venture to speak with confidence from the cumulative misgiving which seems to sum the impressions of many sojourns of differing lengths and dates. One could have used the authority of a profound observer after the first few days in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks stretching to months in 1882 and 1883, clouded rather than cleared the air through which one earliest saw one's London; and the successive pauses ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... to a fiercer heat. No sooner was the coast clear than the street-door opened, and my stranger was joined by a mantled form, that glided into Poll's emporium. The new-comer doffed a swart sombrero, and disclosed historic features that were not unknown to the concealed observer—meaning me. Yes, David, that aquiline beak, that long and waxed moustache, that impassible mask of a face, I had seen them, Sir, conspicuous (though their owner be of alien and even hostile birth) among England's special chivalry. The foremost he had charged on the Ides of April (I mean against ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... see that we did many silly things, very well calculated to awaken suspicion. We were,{215} at times, remarkably buoyant, singing hymns and making joyous exclamations, almost as triumphant in their tone as if we reached a land of freedom and safety. A keen observer might have detected ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... But that is because He offers the most intelligible approach to that very "otherness" in the person of the godhead. His healing and reconciling influence over the heart of man—the way the human spirit expands and blossoms in His presence—is moving beyond expression to any observer, religious or irreligious. Each new crusade in the long strife for human betterment looks in sublime confidence to Him as its forerunner and defense. To what planes of common service, faith, magnanimous solicitude could He not lift the embittered, worldlyized men and women of this ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... one end blown away, but the two sloping thatched sides remained. I cut a hole in one of these with my pocket-knife, and thus obtained a view of the German trenches without committing the error of looking out through the blown-out end, which would have clearly shown an observer that the house was occupied. Looking out through the slit I had made I obtained a panoramic view, more or less, of the German trenches and our own. The view, in short, was this: One saw the backs of our own trenches, then the "No man's land" space ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... dignified serenity, which savored only delicately of a snub. "I do not myself approve of the way in which Mrs. Jennings dresses her daughter," said she, "and I do not consider that the child presents to a practical observer as good an ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... only can determine whether the fire fight is being properly conducted. If the enemy's fire is losing in accuracy and effect, the observer realizes that his side is gaining superiority. If the enemy's fire remains or becomes effective and persistent, he realizes that corrective measures are necessary to increase either ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... bone-crushing slams and gut-wrenching twists that less skillful skippers were giving their ships as they flicked back and forth between threespace and Cth. Our scouting line must have been a peculiar sight to a threespace observer with the thousand or so scouts flickering in and out of sight across a ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... of the storm easily drowned any sounds the observer might make, and he moved with considerable freedom, now that the woman could not see him. Plainly, the air-holes had been made by other hands than hers, for they were higher than her head; in fact Donald himself would have to stretch to look ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... formidable organism was shown to me by M. Pasteur in Paris last July. His recent investigations regarding the part it plays pathologically certainly rank amongst the most remarkable labours of that remarkable man. Observer after observer had strayed and fallen in this land of pitfalls, a multitude of opposing conclusions and mutually destructive theories being the result. In association with a younger physiological colleague, M. Joubert, Pasteur struck in amidst the chaos, and soon reduced ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... by the currents of the winter rains; and here and there the gullies draw heavy lines and wrinkles. And when the wind is fresh and the clouds scud before it, in the motion of their shadows the face will seem to mow at the observer, until the belief comes very readily that it is the exact counterpart of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the disadvantage of all concerned—but take the opportunity to give the continent a general survey, both to keep in view the utilization of the weed, whether or not it could be conquered; and whatever possibilities a lay observer might see as to the Grass ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... consequently provincial to the last degree. The types of character which developed under such conditions were not wanting in amiable or admirable traits. The well-to-do provincial was often a scholar, a connoisseur in art and literature, a polished letter-writer and conversationalist, a shrewd observer of his little world, an exemplary husband and father, courteous to inferiors, warm-hearted to his friends. Sometimes he found in religion or philosophy an antidote to the pettiness of daily life, and was roused into rebellion against the materialism ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... 16th.—I received the 'Edinburgh Review' yesterday, and read your article at once. It is excellent—the language of a profound observer, and of a true friend of France. There are pages I should like all my countrymen at all able to understand them to learn by heart, among others from these words (p. 22): 'The life of man is so short,' to these: 'the collective strength of a nation may ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... brotherhood appeared to pass their time on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs seven blocks to ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... recall the case of Brother Huber, the celebrated observer of the bee, who, having out of simple curiosity undertaken to verify certain experiments of Raumur's, was so completely and immediately fascinated by the subject that it became the object of the rest ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... friend, and the sound of their voices might easily have been heard in his dwelling, if one had been listening intently there. And one was listening with every sense strung to the acutest perception. Just as Wilkinson moved away, an observer would have seen the door of his house open, and a slender female form bend forth, and look earnestly into the darkness. A moment or two, she stood thus, and then stepped forth quickly, and leaning upon the iron railing of the door steps, fixed eagerly her eyes upon ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... the fact was there—plain, distinct, and incontrovertible, and she knew that no chance of impunity or acquittal remained for any one of his creed guilty of such a violation of the laws—we say, she knew all this—but it was not of the fate of Reilly she thought. The girl was an acute observer, and both a close and clear thinker. She had remarked in the Cooleen Bawn, on several occasions, small gushes, as it were, of unsettled thought, and of temporary wildness, almost approaching to insanity. She knew, besides, that insanity was in the family ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... new environment, so strange, so ruthless, swallowed them; and, in the welter of their toil, the black men became so intermingled that all tribal distinctions soon vanished. Here and there, however, a careful observer may still find among them a man of superior mien or a woman of haughty demeanor denoting perhaps an ancestral prince or princess who once exercised authority ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... Starmidge met his companion of the night before at nine-thirty next morning, it was to find him in conversation with the other man, and to see dissatisfaction on the countenances of both. And Starmidge, a naturally keen observer, knew what had happened. He frowned as ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... ye do, Ned? God bless ye!" said Battersleigh a moment later, after things had become more tranquil, the horse now falling to cropping at the grass with a meekness of demeanour which suggested innocence or penitence, whichever the observer chose. "I'm glad to see ye; glad as ivver I was in all me life to see a livin' soul! Why didn't ye tell ye was coming and not come ridin' like a murderin' Cintaur—but ay, boy, ye're a rider—worthy the ould Forty-siventh—yis, ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... friend—in time, stuck our legs under the mahogany, and gazed upon the open prospect for a supper superb enough in all its details to tempt a jolly old friar from his devotions. We got along very nicely. An old chap who sat above us some seats, and whose rotund developments gave any ordinary observer reason to suppose his appetite as unquenchable as the Maelstrom, kept reaching about, and when tempting vessels were too remote, he'd ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... circle in which he practised, which was rather fond of boasting that it possessed the "brightest" doctor in the country, he daily justified his claim to the talents attributed to him by the popular voice. He was an observer, even a philosopher, and to be bright was so natural to him, and (as the popular voice said) came so easily, that he never aimed at mere effect, and had none of the little tricks and pretensions of second-rate reputations. ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... of the pitiable miser, finding that they could not entirely harmonize, the merchant cited another case, that of the negro cripple. But his companion suggested whether the alleged hardships of that alleged unfortunate might not exist more in the pity of the observer than the experience of the observed. He knew nothing about the cripple, nor had seen him, but ventured to surmise that, could one but get at the real state of his heart, he would be found about as happy as most men, if not, in fact, full as happy as the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... is a skilled observer, and has confidence in the observations he has made, the land in sight should be the island of Coiba; or an island that covers it, called Hicaron. Both are off the coast of Veragua, westward from Panama Bay, and about a hundred miles from its mouth; into which ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... quiet, resolute manner, he professed the fullest confidence. Cavagnari was a remarkable man. Italian and Irish blood commingled in his veins. Both strains carry the attributes of vivacity and restlessness, but Cavagnari to the superficial observer appeared as phlegmatic as he was habitually taciturn. This sententious imperturbability was only on the surface; whether it was a natural characteristic or an acquired manner is not easy to decide. Below the surface of measured reticent composure there lay ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... the day was to be. When two hours had passed and the wagons carrying three hundred men had started for the Valley, Conniston had the two hundred and fifty men at Deep Creek working with a swiftness, an effectiveness which would have told a chance observer that they had been familiar many days with the work. He was to leave them before noon, to hurry on horseback to overtake the wagons that he might personally oversee the arrangements to be made upon their coming ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... not remember whether Lord Pembroke explained what these difficulties were. Certainly the English offer more peculiarities to the attentive observer ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church. The great law of impartiality too often obliges us to reveal the imperfections of the uninspired teachers and believers of the gospel; and, to a careless observer, their faults may seem to cast a shade on the faith which they professed. But the scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the Infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... frontier when the Baluchistan parties were formed. His chief work in connection with Baluchistan has been carrying a first-class series of triangles from the Indus, at Dehra Grhazi Khan to Quetta, which occupied him to the close of his career. His ability as an observer, his readiness of resource under unusual difficulties, and his power of attaching the frontier people to him personally, have been just as conspicuous throughout this duty as were his energy and success as a geographical topographer. Apart from his departmental career, he has won a lasting ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... also that of simple common sense. You will remember, therefore, that this is no mere theory or hypothesis, but a pretty fair and simple conclusion from palpable facts; that the probability lies with the belief that the glen is some hundreds of thousands of years old; that it is not the observer's business to prove it further, but other persons' to disprove it, if ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... remarked the observer of events and things, "when a reputable physician has to pay money for a certificate to practice, and a fourteen-year-old girl with a ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... precincts of the Tuileries, where Constitutional Royalty, let Lafayette water it as he will, languishes too like a cut branch; and august Senators are perhaps at bottom only perfecting their 'theory of defective verbs,'—how does the young Reality, young Sansculottism thrive? The attentive observer can answer: It thrives bravely; putting forth new buds; expanding the old buds into leaves, into boughs. Is not French Existence, as before, most prurient, all loosened, most nutrient for it? Sansculottism has the property of growing by what other things die of: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... stoicism. I say apparent stoicism, because I do not believe that true stoicism can ever become the characteristic of a whole nation, and also because some of our national manners and customs may seem to a foreign observer hard-hearted. Yet we are really as susceptible to tender emotion as any ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... lithe, and active, the brown ruddy face had none of the blank stare of vacant idiocy, but was full of twinkling merriment, the black eyes laughed gaily, and perhaps only so clear-sighted and shrewd an observer as Tibble would have detected a weakness of purpose about ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... elation on the day of the big offensive on the Somme when the British first used "tanks." I shall never forget the thrill I had when we read a telegram received at one of the headquarters repeating a wireless message from an aeroplane observer to the effect that he could see a tank wobbling into a village followed by cheering troops. It was the first time that engines of warfare had led the way to an attacking force and the picture of the enemy fleeing before these new engines of terror spouting fire ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... beauty, undimmed in the poor remnants of a wardrobe that has gone, with her trinkets, to the pawnbroker; we see a hundred examples of her courage and tenderness and generosity. There is nothing in Fielding's life that is more to his honour than the brief words in which so competent an observer as Lady Bute summed up his marriage with Charlotte Cradock, "he loved her passionately and ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... all ground of confidence in the result. For a mind not previously versed in the meaning and right use of the various kinds of words, to attempt the study of methods of philosophizing, would be as if some one should attempt to become an astronomical observer, having never learned to adjust the focal distance of his optical instruments so as to ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Clark, constructed upon philosophical consideration of the sun and moon, in their several positions respecting the earth, and confirmed by experience of many years actual observation, furnishes the observer without further trouble, with the knowledge of what kind of weather may be expected to succeed, and that so near the truth, that in a very few instances will it be found ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... station for scientific investigations, it offered a wider field than the casual observer would have imagined. So it came about that the Main Base was finally settled ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... called Rose her pupil, and was attentive to assist her in her studies, and to fashion both her taste and understanding. It might have been remarked by a very close observer, that in the presence of Waverley she was much more desirous to exhibit her friend's excellences than her own. But I must request of the reader to suppose, that this kind and disinterested purpose was concealed by the most cautious delicacy, studiously shunning the most distant approach to affectation. ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... long ago at Southampton, England; but no portrait gives the expression of the man. His smile and his light-blue eyes can not be painted by the sun. The rather small physique, and mild and gentle look, would not lead the ordinary observer to recognize in General Gordon a ruler and leader of men; but a slight acquaintance shows him to be a man of unusual power and great ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... subdued, familiar conversations, which otherwise so naturally arise when young ladies, acquaintances, or "friends," visit each other, and from the house slip out alone into garden or wood. An attentive observer meanwhile, by scrutinizing the physiognomy of both, would, perhaps, have come to the conclusion, that even if these two had been together on the most unobstructed road, no confidence would have arisen between them, and would have suspected ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... not often that nature takes the trouble to stir the heart of man into any emotion stronger than a quiet admiration or a peaceful wonder. Here and there on the face of the earth, however, the astonishing work of God gives pause to the most casual observer, the most thoughtless traveler. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau—some poet, as once Whittier, journeying to the Merrimac, or an old Brook-Farmer who remembered Miles Coverdale with Arcadian sympathy—went down the avenue and disappeared in the house. Sometimes a close observer, had he been ambushed among the long grasses of the orchard, might have seen the host and one of his guests emerging at the back door and, sauntering to the river-side, step into the boat, and float off until they faded in the shadow. The spectacle ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... shutter was closed, not for any penal reasons, but because only the opposite window had the luxury of glass in it: the weather was not warm, and a round hole four inches in diameter served all the purposes of observation. The hole was, unfortunately, a little too high, and obliged the small observer to stand on a low stool of a rickety character; but Tessa would have stood a long while in a much more inconvenient position for the sake of seeing a little variety in her life. She had been drawn to the opening at the first loud tones of the strange voice speaking ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... an Englishman settled at Bruges, was an observer in many subjects, but especially in meteorology. He communicated to the Astronomical Society, in 1848, the information that, in the registers kept by his grandfather, his father, and himself, beginning in 1767, new moon on Saturday ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... connotations, depending on how one defines a genius. Leaving aside the Greek, Roman and Arabic definitions, a careful observer will find that there are two general classes of genius: the "partial" genius, and the "general" genius. Actually, such a narrow definition doesn't do either kind justice, but defining a human being is an almost impossible job, anyway, so we'll have to do the best we can with ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... reasons, obvious reasons, for his presence in Paloma, so, as he would have expressed it, he let it go at that and left the observer to draw any conclusions he pleased as to his almost constant presence at the Gallito home, and yet, after all, his visits were only a little more frequent than those of a number of others, and no more so at all than those of ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... tablet of undrest hide which the Arabs are in the habit of tying beneath the feet of their camels. This primitive form, after all the modifications and improvements it has received, still betrays itself to an attentive observer, in the very-latest fashions of the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... the devil of mob ignorance and corruption, and the deep sea of genteel listlessness and superficiality? After all, Sir Henry Maine is only repeating in more sober tones the querulous remonstrances with which we are so familiar on the lips of Ultramontanes and Legitimists. A less timid observer of contemporary events, certainly in the land that all of us know best and love best, would judge that, when it comes to a pinch, Liberals are still passably prudent, and ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Scrupulously shaved, he presented a very short chin, large and good natured lips, and a nose disagreeably elevated, like the broad end of one of Sax's horns. His eyes of a dull gray, were small and red at the lids, and absolutely void of expression; yet they fatigued the observer by their insupportable restlessness. A few straight hairs shaded his forehead, which receded like that of a greyhound, and through their scantiness barely concealed his long ugly ears. He was very comfortably dressed, clean as a new franc piece, displaying ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... beautiful imbibed, which are essential to an accomplished and really useful writer of travels? Sulphuric acid and Optics, Anatomy and Mechanics, will do many things; but they will never make an observer of Nature, a friend of Man, a fit commentator on the world ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... and lower surface of the belly; fetid diarrhoea, dullness, debility, emaciation, rough coat, and the presence of worms in the feces. The worms when first passed are bright red in color but after being exposed to the air they turn dark and may easily escape the notice of the casual observer. ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... ends had a romantic upward flourish, gave its wearer a foreign, traditionary look and suggested that he was a gentleman who studied style. His conscious, curious eyes, however, eyes at once vague and penetrating, intelligent and hard, expressive of the observer as well as of the dreamer, would have assured you that he studied it only within well-chosen limits, and that in so far as he sought it he found it. You would have been much at a loss to determine his original clime and country; he had none ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... as were needed[18]. In the same State, a procession of several hundred colored men marching through the streets attracted attention. They marched under the command of Confederate officers and carried shovels, axes, and blankets. The observer adds, "they were brimful of patriotism, shouting for Jeff Davis and singing war songs."[19] A paper in Lynchburg, Virginia, commenting on the enlistment of 70 free Negroes to fight for the defense of the State, concluded with "three cheers ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... years in her grandson's dining-room, and is well known to all his friends. It represents a stately woman with an unmistakably fair skin; and if the face or hair betrays any indication of possible dark blood, it is imperceptible to the general observer, and must be of too slight and fugitive a nature to enter into the discussion. A long curl touches one shoulder. One hand rests upon a copy of Thomson's 'Seasons', which was held to be the proper study and recreation of cultivated ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... soldier, however, fixed his lurking glances on the chancellor. He saw that a sudden shock made the whole frame of the chancellor tremble, and a triumphant smile overspread the countenance of the secret observer. ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... that passed between them were now so strange that both their voices sank into solemnity, and had an acute observer listened to them he would have noticed that these two mellow voices had similar beauties, and were pitched exactly in the same key, though there was, of course, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... mingled fervor and humility. To any ordinary observer he would have seemed to be laboring under home strange hallucination,—but ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... alone in her own apartment; and having broke the ice, was now grown bold enough to declare his passion, with all the embellishments necessary to render it successful: mademoiselle Charlotta knew very well what became the decorum of her sex, and was too nice an observer of it not to behave with all the reserve imaginable on this occasion. All the freedom she had been accustomed to treat him with, while ignorant of his or her own inclination, was now banished from ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... seen to wend his way to the same cliffs, and, from no reason whatever with which we happened to be acquainted, sought out the same nook! We say "he was seen," advisedly, for the maid with the golden hair saw him. Any ordinary observer would have said that she had scarcely raised her eyes from the ground since sitting down on a niece of flower-studded turf near the edge of the cliff, and that she certainly had not turned her ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... this instant another door opened, and Lady Jane appeared. Luckily for me, the increased mirth of the party, as Lord Callonby informed them of my blunder, prevented their paying any attention to me, for as I half sprung forward toward her, my agitation would have revealed to any observer, the whole state of my feelings. I took her hand which she extended to me, without speaking, and bowing deeply over it, raised my head and looked into her eyes, as if to read at one glance, my fate, and when I let fall her hand, I would not have ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... transmitter and television receiver. The lens throws a distant image on the exploring disc of the transmitter, through which it acts on a photo-electric cell sensitive to invisible infra-red rays. The receiver amplifies it for the observer. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... aside from some angularities, considerable gauntness, and much sunburn, Seth told himself that he was not different from other men. It was not palpable to the casual observer that as men went he was a failure, but Seth realized the truth ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... was a tall, fine-looking man of about five-and-thirty. He wore a light-colored tweed shooting suit, which contrasted well with his dark hair and bronzed complexion. A remarkably handsome man was The McAllister of Dunmorton, but to a close observer there was something lacking in his face—the old weakness about the mouth and chin, which time, instead of eradicating, had only served to develop. The hard school of adversity would have been a wholesome ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... line-up? Seems to me nearly every face here is familiar; and I reckon their entire baseball squad has qualified for the gridiron," remarked another observer. ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... Rocky Mountain locusts in Nebraska, a scientific observer watched a long-billed marsh wren carry thirty locusts to her young in an hour and the same number was kept up regularly. At this rate, for seven hours a day, a nest-ful of young wrens would eat two hundred and ten locusts a day. From ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... of seven stages of life by a remarkably good observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it, yet I have been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural analysis into no less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the five primary divisions, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... remains all his life a herding animal. As one keen observer has written, "So great is man's horror of being alone that he will seek the society of those he neither likes nor respects sooner than be left to his own." The laws and conventions that govern men's intercourse have, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... began, and the reaction was led off by the London "Times." Instantly, as by a preconcerted signal, all papers of a certain class began to abuse; and some who had at first issued articles entirely commendatory, now issued others equally depreciatory. Religious papers, notably the "New York Observer," came out and denounced the book as anti- Christian, anti-evangelical, resorting even to personal slander on the author as a means of diverting ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... Barrier. Slowly it rose up out of the sea until we were face to face with it in all its imposing majesty. It is difficult with the help of the pen to give any idea of the impression this mighty wall of ice makes on the observer who is confronted with it for the first time. It is altogether a thing which can hardly be described; but one can understand very well that this wall of 100 feet in height was regarded for a generation as an insuperable obstacle to further ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... To the superficial observer the answer seems simple. The very name points to English sources. The Bill of Rights of 1689, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the Petition of Right of 1628, and finally the Magna Charta libertatum appear to be unquestionably the predecessors of the Virginia ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... much-enduring man rose, and turned his back upon the sight he loved so dearly. He went out at the open door intending to close it and bid her good-night. But he did not do so, just then; for his attention as an observer of nature was arrested by the unusual conduct of certain animals. Gannets and other sea-birds were running about the opposite wood and craning their necks in a strange way. He had never seen one enter ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... he learned, from common rumour, that a Dutchman had presented to prince Maurice of Nassau an optical instrument, which possessed the singular property of causing distant objects to appear nearer the observer. This Dutchman was Hans or John Lippershey, who, as has been clearly proved by the late Professor Moll of Utrecht,[8] was in the possession of a telescope made by himself so early as 2d October 1608. A few days afterwards, the truth of this report ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... possible to the very heart's blood. Yet the old gold, the elaborate execution of the quaint classical device, and the fanciful arrangement of the braided hair interwoven with twisted gold letters, all told no tales to the observer, whose unwakened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... warmth, the stir of the whole, the human kindness and benevolence of it replaced the want of clearness, depth, thoroughness, extent, perseverance, and steadiness. In this way each separate branch of education was in such a condition as to powerfully interest, but never wholly to content the observer, since it prepared only further division and separation and did not ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... have proved the falsity of this doctrine and led to a divorce between art and popular feeling which a sensitive observer cannot fail to remark. It is glaringly apparent in the hitherto most vital of all Russian arts, the theatre. The artists have continued to perform the old classics in tragedy or comedy, and the old-style operette. ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... it has occurred to an observer of these events—as a person who in other lands has seen and learned something of the ravages of smallpox among the unvaccinated—to try to forecast their natural and, in the view of many, their almost certain end. Hence these pages from the life history of the pitiable, but unfortunate ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... we can appreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... bookshelf and pulled down a copy of The World Almanac. "Sunrise and sunset times are listed in here. You can figure out quickly enough where the sun was in relation to the observer. It will take another sheet of paper ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... seat in Parliament in 1905; and Nationalists, though with some constitutional justification, secured his removal from office in 1907. At this moment there is friction and suspicion in this particular matter which seems to the impartial observer to be artificial, and which would not exist, or would be transmuted into something perfectly harmless, and probably highly beneficial, were there any normal political life in Ireland and a central organ of public opinion. As long ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... pretended to establish a new religion. His claims, indeed, were limited to purging the "School of Nazareth" of the dross of ages and of the manifold abuses with which long use had infected its early constitution: hence to the unprejudiced observer his reformation seems to have brought it nearer the primitive and original doctrine than any subsequent attempts, especially the Judaizing tendencies of the so-called "Protestant" churches. The Meccan Apostle ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... tough and resistant. In a small group of them—the species of Synapta—the calcareous bodies occur in the form of delicate anchors of microscopic size. Up till 1897 these anchors, like many other delicate microscopic structures, were regarded as curiosities, as natural marvels. But a Swedish observer, Oestergren, has recently shown that they have a biological significance: they serve the footless Synapta as auxiliary organs of locomotion, since, when the body swells up in the act of creeping, they press firmly with their tips, which ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... built the armed subterranean observer's dome three days' travel away from it. The plasmoid was installed in its new quarters. It then requested the use of the Vishni ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... lean angles, so that the daughters were willowy without being lathy, round-muscled without being chubby. In every feature of every face were haunting reminiscences of Asia, all manipulated over and disguised by Old England, New England, and South of Europe. No observer, without information, would have guessed, the heavy Chinese strain in their veins; nor could any observer, after being informed, fail to note immediately ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... genera of vipers in America, two of them are so closely related, and present characteristics that are so similar that the ordinary observer would regard them as being identical, and inasmuch as the character of their poison seems in every way similar, for practical purposes it would seem desirable to include them under one head; in both genera, the species have rattles on the tips of their tails, ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... and Rastignac instantly became an observer, could read the whole history, the character and customs of caste, in the phrase, in the tones of her voice, in her glance and bearing. He caught a glimpse of the iron hand beneath the velvet glove—the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... sure to bring wind a-plenty. But still there was hope. So long as it did not bring outright snow, my wife would not worry so much. Here where she was, the snow would not drift—there was altogether too much bush. She—not having been much of an observer of the skies before—dreaded the snowstorm more than the blizzard. I knew the latter was ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... flung in the loam, poured in the water, reset the shrub, and when the last stamp and pat were given performed a little dance of triumph about it, at the close of which he pulled off his hat and began to fan his heated face. The action caused the observer to start and look again, thinking, as he recognized the energetic worker with a smile, "What a changeful thing it is! haunting one's premises unseen, and stealing one's books unsuspected; dreaming one half the day and masquerading the other half. What will happen next? Let us ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... the Lord must specially have sent him to catch things with. He caught many things with it—willie-wagtails, laughing-jackasses, fowls, and mostly the dog. Joe was a born naturalist—a perfect McCooey in his way, and a close observer of the habits and customs of animals and living things. He observed that whenever Jacob Lipp came to our place he always, when going home, ran along the fence and touched the top of every post with ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... "You will remain where you are: act as observer: hold this line open and keep me informed. Captain Blake will leave immediately for observation. A squadron will follow. Let me know promptly ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... subject to laws and rules dependent on the nature of human intelligence. The difficulty consists in the fact that these laws and rules, on whose fulfilment beauty depends, are not consciously present in the mind of the artist who creates the work, or of the observer who contemplates it." Nevertheless they are discoverable, and can be formulated, after a fashion. We have only to read aright the lessons everywhere portrayed in the vast picture-books of nature and ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... ordinary observer it would have seemed that the chief characteristic of this pale, still day, was extreme and settled calm. There was not a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the sea; but there was a slight, glassy swell, and that ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... tradesmen's tables are now the emblems, not of plenty, but of luxury, not of good house-keeping, but of profusion, and that of the highest kind of extravagance; insomuch, that it was the opinion of a gentleman who had been not a traveller only, but a nice observer of such things abroad, that there is at this time more waste of provisions in England than in any other nation in the world, of equal extent of ground; and that England consumes for their whole subsistence more flesh than half ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize his animosity. The Dissertation on Parties (1734) and the Idea of a Patriot King (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the Letter to Sir W. Windham (1717), which was not published until after his death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... What interest could he take in inspecting the economy of their establishment? So far, however, from relaxing in their attention after this discovery, their politeness visibly increased, though, perhaps, a scrutinizing observer might have detected a shade of less cordiality ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... thatched sides remained. I cut a hole in one of these with my pocket-knife, and thus obtained a view of the German trenches without committing the error of looking out through the blown-out end, which would have clearly shown an observer that the house was occupied. Looking out through the slit I had made I obtained a panoramic view, more or less, of the German trenches and our own. The view, in short, was this: One saw the backs of our own trenches, then the "No man's land" space ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... said I, "to defer what we like" (the itch of the flesh occasion'd this hasty parting, tho' I had been a long time willing to shake off so troublesome an observer of my actions, that I might renew my old ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... persons, they must be seen from the same point of view. In the instance we are now considering, the religious man has his own especial station; the scientific man another, a very different one. It is not for either to demand that his co-observer shall admit that the panorama of facts spread before them is actually such as it appears ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the law. Such accidents are liable to happen in the most good-humored democracy. When he tries to enforce it there is a burst of angry surprise. He is treated as a revolutionist who is attacking the established order. And yet to the moderately philosophic observer the making of the law and its enforcement belong to the same process. The difficulty is that though united logically they are often ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... all eagerness to take up his traps and go still farther than he who has thus got in advance of him. With such men the desire to emigrate is an irresistible passion. At least so thought that sagacious observer of human nature, M. de Talleyrand, when he travelled ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... that I was leaving Act I, Scene I, of the drama of my life; and yet the scene, or rather the captain's face, lingered for some time in my memory. I was no prophet, as I say; but I was something else: I was an observer; and one thing I knew, I knew when a man was terrified. Captain Trent, of the British brig Flying Scud, had been glib; he had been ready; he had been loud; but in his blue eyes I could detect the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... stories, the same hallucinations, turned up in the most ancient mythology of India, when not only the character and achievements, but the very names of some of the gods and heroes were found to be the same, then every thoughtful observer saw that there must be a system in that ancient madness, that there must be some order in that strange mob of gods and heroes, and that it must be the task of comparative mythology to find out, what reason there is in all ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... ways this faculty of projecting have exerted itself, and of the various methods, as the genius of the authors has inclined, I have been a diligent observer and, in most, an unconcerned spectator, and perhaps have some advantage from thence more easily to discover the faux pas of the actors. If I have given an essay towards anything new, or made discovery to advantage ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... the youngest on the school staff, and very decidedly the best-looking. He was tall and well made, with black hair and eloquent dark eyes, which had the gift of expressing rather more than a rigid examination would have found inside him—just now, for example, a sentimental observer would have read in their glance round the bare deserted room the passionate protest of a soul conscious of genius against the hard fate which had placed him there, whereas he was in reality merely wondering whose hat that was on the row ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... glasses were drained. Dickey Savage's eyes met Quentin's in a long look of perplexity. At last an almost imperceptible twinkle, suggestive of either mirth or skepticism, manifested itself in his friend's eyes and the puzzled observer ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... and no one ignorant of the fact would ever have suspected that his mind was unsettled as he moved among the guests, talking to one another with that pleasant, courtly manner so natural to him. A very close observer, however, might have seen his eyes dilate and even flash with some sudden emotion when his brother's wife passed him and her brilliant diamonds, his gift, sparkled in the bright gaslight. The setting was rather peculiar, but Mrs. Tracy liked it for the peculiarity, and had never ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... extracts record the impression made by Mr. Newman's preaching on contemporaries well qualified to judge, and standing respectively in very different relations to the movement. This is the judgment of a very close observer, and very independent critic, James Mozley. In an article in the Christian Remembrancer, January 1846 (p. 169), after speaking of the obvious reasons of Mr. Newman's influence, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... my dear Theo," said he, dipping the fingers of his right hand into the palm of his left, "by more than one acute observer, that the mind of the race whose ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... infant that will be remarked by a close observer of Nature is, that while adding to its knowledge by observation, it always confines its attention to one thing at a time, till it has examined it. Before the period when this principle becomes conspicuous in an infant, the eye, and the other senses are in a great measure ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... intermediate forms always remove the difficulty. In very many cases, however, one form is ranked as a variety of another, not because the intermediate links have actually been found, but because analogy leads the observer to suppose either that they do now somewhere exist, or may formerly have existed; and here a wide door for the entry of doubt and conjecture ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... man who had never in his life smiled, yet his face was not an unpleasant face altogether, though there was much in it to give the observer pause. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... exhibitions of superlative skill, all this would have seemed to an uninitiated observer like Bob an easy task, were it not for the misfortunes of one youth. That boy was about half the time in the water. He could stand upright on a log very well as long as he tried to do nothing else. This partial skill undoubtedly ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... formation were current in his day, and have often been repeated since. But the reader who has given any study to Darwin's array of facts and powerful reasoning will be interested in the ideas of the earlier observer: ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... of the vessel made him pause a moment. The casual observer would have said he stopped to cast an experienced eye on a sky that could not deceive him; but the casual observer does not always know. It is a long distance between the prow and the stern of an ocean liner, when the deck is composed of alternating ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... evidently some years younger, and was neither so tall nor so strongly built as his companion. His countenance was decidedly handsome, and what would be called aristocratic. It was very grave, and, indeed, melancholy in the extreme; and an accurate observer of character might have divined, from the form of his mouth and expression of his eyes, that he was sadly in want of firmness and decision in his actions, which idea, probably, would not have been very far from the truth. ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... from the ceiling—unstamped—and Spirits used to squatter up and down their staircases all night; but they had never come into contact with kittens. Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the minute, as every Psychical Observer is bound to do, and appending the Englishman's letter because it was the most mysterious document and might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An outsider would have translated all the tangle thus: "Look out! You laughed ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... of a modern organ the observer will be struck by the fact that the familiar draw-stop knobs have disappeared, or, if they are still there, he will most likely find in addition a row of ivory tablets, like dominoes, arranged over the upper manual. If the stop-knobs are all gone, he will find an extended row, perhaps two rows of ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... are excellent, and, as they are misrepresented by a treacherous and hypocritical cousin, we sympathize more strongly with the hero of the piece; and all his indiscretions appear, at least, amiable defects. A nice observer[102] of the human heart says, that we are never inclined to to cure ourselves of any defect which makes us agreeable. Frederick's real virtues will not, probably, excite imitation so much as his imaginary ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... entirely unable to explain, and the reason for which I could by no means fathom, was the pertinent enquiry constantly occurring, "why should one cow be given a first prize and another none at all," when the only difference to the mind of a just and impartial observer consisted in the variety of their attitudes or colour. Being thus baffled in my attempts at edification, we adjourned to ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... this popular work. On the outside cover, which was dark blue in color, there was a picture of a person whose stomach was sliced four ways, like a twenty-cent pie, and then folded back neatly, thus exposing his entire interior arrangements to the gaze of the casual observer. However, this party, judging by his picture, did not appear to be suffering. He did not even seem to fear that he might catch cold from standing there in his own draught. He was gazing off into space in an absent-minded kind of way, apparently ...
— "Speaking of Operations—" • Irvin S. Cobb
... control his conduct. This struggle between the forces of good and evil is exceedingly well depicted in Greene's Repentances, under his own or fictitious names; of all the heroes of his tales he is himself the most interesting and the most deeply studied. As a novel writer and an observer of human nature, his own ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... matter, except for the way her face is turned, ye wud never ken whether her buckets were fou or toom" (full or empty), said an admiring observer, as he watched her steady and rapid steps ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... The observer must take into account that among these people there happened to be a good many who, as the war went on, enrolled themselves in the various Volunteer Corps which were formed. These gave the benefit of their experience to the British officers, who relied on the knowledge and perception of ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... followed by three well-washed children, each of whom carried a concertina, now returned and sat down beside a middle-aged lady, who made herself conspicuous by using a gold framed eyeglass so as to convey an impression that she was an exceedingly keen observer. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... breakfast at the "Hotel du Rhin." While we were having breakfast, there was a great noise outside—an English voice was cursing someone else hard and telling him to get on and not make an ass of himself. Then a Flying Pilot was pushed in by an Observer. The Pilot's hand and arm were temporarily bound up, but blood was (p. 021) dropping through. The Observer had his face badly scratched and one of his legs was not quite right. They sat at a table, and the waiter brought them eggs and coffee, which they took ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... strength or military efficiency, or (pace Mr. Benjamin Kidd) relative standards of living, or even the usual material accompaniments of what we call an advanced civilization; it is a question for the trained anthropologist and the craniologist rather than for the casual observer of men and manners. The Japanese people are now much more highly civilized—according to western notions—than they were half a century ago, but it would be ludicrously erroneous to say that they are now a higher race, from the evolutionary point of view, than they were then. Evolution does ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... European trip by a wide-awake, intelligent, and irrepressible American girl. Pictured with a freshness and vivacity that is delightful."—Utica Observer. ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... a private hotel with paying guests than an establishment for the retention of the insane, and even to an outside observer the eccentricities of the doctor's family—as he loved to call them—were not more marked than many of the oddities possessed by people at large. Indeed, Jorce was in the habit of saying that "There were more mad people in the world than were kept ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... the same reasoning, to confine all such volcanic action exclusively to this side of the moon. Thus we have the reason for the violently disrupted state which that luminary presents to the telescopic observer, exceeding any analogy to be found upon our globe, as the earth's axial motion has prevented any similar concentrated action upon any particular part of its surface, either from solar or lunar attraction. Another marked effect of the elongation of the moon toward the earth ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... others. There is nothing sadder than that page of the 'Confessions,' in which he relates how he often placed himself at the window to observe the dismission of a school, in order to listen to the conversations of children as a furtive and unseen observer!"[122] ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... there was life and movement. Every little while the surface would be softly broken, and a tiny ripple would set out in widening circles toward the shore, starting from a small dark nose thrust up for a second. The casual observer would have said that these were fish rising for flies; but in fact it was the apprehensive beavers coming up to breathe, afraid to show themselves on account of the Boy. They were all sure that he had not ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... vesica, set within a bevilled fringe of bay-leaves arranged zigzagwise, with their points in contact. Of this Ruskin said in his lecture,[165] "Do you recollect the west window of your own Dunblane Cathedral? It is acknowledged to be beautiful by the most careless observer. And why beautiful? Simply because in its great contours it has the form of a forest leaf, and because in its decoration it has used nothing but forest leaves. He was no common man who designed that cathedral of Dunblane. I know nothing so perfect ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... Sterne,—very human and stomachic, and entirely free from the contempt and superciliousness of most current writers. I did not get one whiff of Dickens anywhere. No doubt it is there in some form or other, but it is not patent, or even appreciable, to the sense of such an observer as I am. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... live up to their Sunday's lesson. And again and most important, she loves them tenderly, and from love flows wisdom. Usually the mother gives her own children a love far beyond that given by anyone else, and this deeper love sharpens her intellectual faculties and makes her both a keen observer and a good tactician. Giving her children some simple lesson on Sunday afternoon, she finds a hundred opportunities to make the lesson living and vital to them ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... is a blue country; for, a very short distance from the observer, the atmosphere tinges everything blue; and the waters are chiefly of that colour, the sky ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... in a perfect tempest, and he only laughed. The new Roland, the bold and marvelous knight, is already revealed in the letters to be given below. On the 16th he departed on his rounds, carrying, as observer, Lieutenant de Lavalette. His airplane was hit by a shell projectile in the right wing. On the 17th his machine returned with eight wounds, two in the right wing, four in the body, and in addition one strut and one longitudinal spar hit. ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... 'chased the frogs into the bogs,' so the redoubtable 0'Mahony has compelled the rebellious Fenians to hide their diminished heads and betake themselves to the recesses of oblivion, where their contortions will be watched by the observer of futurity, as the visitors of Blarney Castle are edified by the gambols of the 'comely eels in the verdant mud.' The brave 0'Mahony has come forth from the contest like gold from the crucible, or whisky from the still, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... up Regent Street the other day, thinkin what a clever fam'ly I come of, and looking at the gay shop-winders. I've got some new close since you last saw me. I saw them others wouldn't do. They carrid the observer too far back into the dim vister of the past, and I gave 'em to a Orfun Asylum. The close I wear now I bo't of Mr. Moses, in the Commercial Road. They was expressly made, Mr. Moses inforemd me, for a nobleman, but ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 5 • Charles Farrar Browne
... was bombed by Red aeroplanes on September 28 and 30; one of the machines was forced to descend on the latter date some 6 miles to the north of the town. The pilot and observer were taken ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... proceeded, it became evident to the hidden observer that the relations between the conspirators were growing strained. The Cuban seemed to be in taunting mood. The veins on the negro general's bull neck began to swell, and ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... along the walk of life, we working men; so that we want to see a bit of green sward and a flower or two on Sundays. There is a capital gymnasium, and our observation of the young men who disport themselves there would lead an uninitiated observer to form the opinion that the normal condition of humanity was upside down. The way one youthful workman hung by his legs on the trapeze was positively Darwinian to behold. Swings attracted the attention of the ladies; and I regret to say that the particular young lady ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... matter what the weather was, they dressed up in their best suits and visited the little whitewashed cottage. It would have taken a very keen observer to decide which of the young men she cared the most for, or whether, indeed, she had any tender feeling for either of them. Both were always given a most cordial welcome. If, however, Charlie had been a very close observer—which was unfair to expect at such a time—he might, ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... observer telephoned by wireless back to Croydon telling them of our position, and in a few moments we were high over the Channel. At Marquise, on the other side, we again reported, and then following the railway line we sped towards Paris long before the ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... Judy's appearance that her business rather lay with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making. A close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her brother's, when their venerable grandsire anticipates his being gone, some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some resentful opinion that it is ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... regular and almost imperceptible degrees. The partiality they conceived for each other was, according to her biographer, "In the most refined style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before, or who after. One sex did not take the priority which long established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. Neither party could ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... they were waits, in which case I might be put to inconvenience. So I took a spade and dug two (or three) large holes in the quadrangle of the inn. Then I carried the bodies to the place in my rug, one at a time, shoved them in, and covered them up. A close observer might have noticed in that part of the quadrangle, for some time after, a small mound, such as might be made by an elbow under the bed-clothes. Nobody, however, seems to have descried it, and yet I see it often even now in ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... the hat-stand in the hall must offend young Hitchcock. The incongruities of the house had never disturbed him. So far as he had noticed them, they accorded well with the simple characters of his host and hostess. In them, as in the house, a keen observer could trace the series of developments that had taken place since they had left Hill's Crossing. Yet the full gray beard with the broad shaved upper lip still gave the Chicago merchant the air of a New England worthy. And Alexander, in contrast with his brother-in-law, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... at Seymour's, seemed to know Sheen very well, with the exception of Drummond; and those who troubled to think about the matter at all rather wondered what Drummond saw in him. To the superficial observer the two had nothing in common. Drummond was good at games—he was in the first fifteen and the second eleven, and had won the Feather Weights at Aldershot—and seemed to have no interests outside them. Sheen, on the other hand, played fives for the house, and that was all. He was ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... long-continued dry weather and severe cold. In Scandinavia, according to Eisen, and in Scotland, according to Mr. Lindsay Carnagie, the burrows run down to a depth of from 7 to 8 feet; in North Germany, according to Hoffmeister, from 6 to 8 feet, but Hensen says, from 3 to 6 feet. This latter observer has seen worms frozen at a depth of 1.5 feet beneath the surface. I have not myself had many opportunities for observation, but I have often met with worms at depths of 3 to 4 feet. In a bed of fine ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... outward shows; and amongst the rest, an upright, a comely grace, courtesies, gentle salutations, cringes, a mincing gait, a decent and an affected pace, are most powerful enticers, and which the prophet Isaiah, a courtier himself, and a great observer, objected to the daughters of Zion, iii. 16. "they minced as they went, and made a tinkling with their feet." To say the truth, what can they not effect ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of Cooper is his descriptive power, his astonishing vigor in depicting forest, sea, prairie,—all the grandeur of wild nature as a background of human heroism. His descriptions are seldom accurate, for he was a careless observer and habitually made blunders; but he painted nature as on a vast canvas whereon details might be ignored, and he reproduced the total impression of nature in a way that few novelists have ever rivaled. It is this sustained power of creating a vast natural stage and peopling it with elemental ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... by the darkness; his wife and her sister had both grown stout steadily as they grew older, but each insisted upon the other's greater magnitude and consequent incapacity for quick movement. A casual observer would not have been persuaded that there was a pound's weight ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... cried the captain. Then, after a minute's silence, during which a superficial observer would have thought him absorbed in the appreciation of the pate, as he had been an instant before in that of the wine, he leaned his two elbows on the table, and looking at D'Harmental with a penetrating glance between his knife ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... that Harborne—the motor-cyclist who had spoken the German language so well when he had accompanied the pretty young girl the day before to watch the testing—was dead, seemed to cause the cable-engineer considerable reflection. He said nothing, but a close observer would have noticed that the report of the murder had had a distinct effect upon him. He was in possession of some fact, and this, as a stranger on that coast, and a foreigner to boot, it was not, after ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by a nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor's coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences of appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions, his free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust, the cobwebs, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... went worse with me; for I still saw the ghosts of the cousins everywhere, and feared, now here, now there, to see one of them step forward. Even the most indifferent glances of men annoyed me. I had lost that unconscious happiness of wandering about unknown and unblamed, and of thinking of no observer, even in the greatest crowds. Now hypochondriacal fancies began to torment me, as if I attracted the attention of the people, as if their eyes were turned on my demeanor, to fix it on their memories, to ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... waiting a good bit?" A keen observer of Flossie's face might have detected in it a faintly triumphant appreciation of the fact. "I'm awfully sorry I got behind-hand and had to ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... effect of correct dressing. He sat in the roomy rear seat beside Nap, leaning an elbow negligently on the arm-rest. He watched Paul shrewdly in certain mysterious preparations for starting the car. An observer would have said that one false move on Paul's part would ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... a sharp observer in his own quiet, unobtrusive way, was struck by two peculiarities in little Mary's behavior during lunch. In the first place, he remarked with some interest and astonishment, that while the clown's wife was, not ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... appreciated to the full the extreme fallibility of the human eye and the ease with which the most careful observer may be deceived by a clever prestidigitator, failed to apply this test to Home; and by so failing laid himself open on the one hand to deception and on the other to the flood of criticism let loose by his scientific colleagues. Thus, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... together at table, you might, knowing their relationship to each other, have readily detected a certain likeness between them; but it was a likeness of expression rather than of features, and would scarcely have been noticed by any casual observer. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... said that in the State of Maine, previous to the appearance of the potato disease, and before the soil had become exhausted by continued cropping, potatoes yielded an average of four hundred bushels per acre. Now, every observer is aware that the present average yield of the same vegetable is much less than half what it was formerly. This great deterioration in yield can not be attributed to "running out" of varieties; for varieties are extant which have not yet passed their prime. It can not be wholly due to disease; ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... afternoon journeyed on to New York. When they went into the diner for supper and the waiter referred to Mary as John's wife, she did not blush, but touched his arm and looked at him with a smile of confidence and love. As he returned the glance a close observer would have ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... of recommending Mr. Stelling to his friend Tulliver without any positive expectation of a solid, definite advantage resulting to himself, notwithstanding the subtle indications to the contrary which might have misled a too-sagacious observer. For there is nothing more widely misleading than sagacity if it happens to get on a wrong scent; and sagacity, persuaded that men usually act and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in view, is certain to waste ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... to a keen and close observer a knowledge of the spirit of St. Francis de Sales for which we cannot be too grateful. Let it be granted that Mgr. Camus had a very prolific imagination; that he had an unconscious tendency to embroider facts; that he read a meaning into words which their speaker had no thought of ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... loved some one else more. Colonel Scrappe had long been the most ardent admirer of Mrs. Gushington-Andrews, and Mrs. Constant-Scrappe's devotion to young Harry de Lakwitz had been at least for two seasons evident to any observer with half an eye. Gushington-Andrews had considerately taken himself out of the way by eloping to South Africa with Tottie Dimpleton of the Frivolity Burlesquers, and Harry de Lakwitz's only recorded marriage had been ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... intended to make science my life-work. I did not, for the simple reason that at that time Harvard, and I suppose our other colleges, utterly ignored the possibilities of the faunal naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature. They treated biology as purely a science of the laboratory and the microscope, a science whose adherents were to spend their time in the study of minute forms of marine life, or else in section-cutting and the study of the tissues of the higher organisms under ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... they continued to watch the circling of the lofty observer and map-maker, "that there can be no surprises in this war, because the enemy always knows all about the massing of troops long before an attack can be delivered. An eagle or a hawk, hovering over shallow water, can see every bit of bottom when the surface is still, and so he's able to pounce down ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... est vertu parce qu'elle est bonne en son fonds, et le vice tout au contraire, ce n'est pas les faire connoitre.' For me, if I was to write a novel, I would first make myself an acute, active, and vigilant observer of men and manners. Secondly, I would, after having thus noted effects by action in the world, trace the causes by books, and meditation in my closet. It is then, and not till then, that I would study the lighter ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could not comply without such a debasement of character as to compel the scorn of all men, not only to themselves, but all those with whom they were united. It could not fail to strike any ordinary observer that materials so incongruous and repulsive were incapable of cohesion; and the consequence must be the distrust of the more ardent of their ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... suggest—that the adjustment of organisms to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as constant and normal phenomena under those conditions. It is no doubt difficult to investigate this matter, since the presence of Man as an observer itself implies human intervention. But it seems to be a legitimate view that every disease to which animals (and probably plants also) are liable, excepting as a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man's interference. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... off-hand looking Irishman, with something of dash in his tone and air, which at first view might lead a common observer to pronounce him to be vulgar; but at five minutes after sight, a good judge of men and manners would have discovered in him the power of assuming whatever manner he chose, from the audacity of the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... they had not the necessary money, they gave up their prisoner, the Duke of Urbino, estimating his worth at 40,000 ducats—nearly all the sum required—and handed him over to Alexander on account; he, a rigid observer of engagements, made his own general, taken prisoner in his service, pay, to himself the ransom he owed ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... carry this agitation to the same triumphant issue as that for Catholic emancipation, in which he had taken a conspicuous part; but the new movement did not, like the old one, appeal immediately and plausibly to the English sense of fair play and natural justice. A competent and not unfriendly observer has remarked that O'Connell's "theory and policy were that Ireland was to be saved by a dictatorship entrusted to himself." Whether any salvation for the unhappy land did lie in such a dictatorship was a point on which ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... almost childlike resumption of hope as they gazed at this conclusive evidence of Nature's bounty. The gold had been there—THEY had only missed it! And if there, more could be found! Was it not a proof of the richness of Heavy Tree Hill? So strongly was this reflected on their faces that a casual observer, contrasting them with the thoughtful countenances of the real owners, would have thought them the lucky ones. It touched Barker's quick sympathies, it puzzled Stacy, it made Demorest more serious, it aroused Steptoe's active contempt. Whiskey Dick alone remained stolid and ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... a keen observer, possessed an excellent but not lofty imagination, and never asserted a philosophy of life. His writings are all interesting, terse, precise, and truthful, but lack the glow that comes with a sympathetic and spiritual outlook ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... distance it must have looked to an observer as if the old man was approaching the boy to hurl the bottles at him with evil intent, for they were high in the air, and over Nort's head. And Snake Purdee must have taken this view of it, for, a moment later, standing in the door of the bunkhouse, ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... not lost on Cleopatra. On the contrary, she registered them every one with the accuracy of a trained observer. And as surely as the cumulative evidence of all she saw began to point with ever greater precision in the direction of her sister's fickleness and mutability, the more her health improved, and the more cheerful she became. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... the landscape. This pretended physical process itself, quite as much as my conscious perception of the landscape, is a physico-psychical phenomenon; for my cerebral movements are perceived, hypothetically at least, by an observer. This is a perception, consequently it can be decomposed into two things, a consciousness and its object. As a further consequence, when we wish, by a metaphysical effort, to attach the consciousness ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... and send your eyes and ears abroad to see and hear for you. Wherever the electric connection is carried—and there need be no human habitation however remote from social centers, be it the mid-air balloon or mid-ocean float of the weather watchman, or the ice-crusted hut of the polar observer, where it may not reach—it is possible in slippers and dressing gown for the dweller to take his choice of the public entertainments given that day in every city of the earth. And remember, too, although you can not understand it, who have never ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... consequences of such a link of connection would be, are indeed far beyond the reach of the human mind to foresee; but its immediate results stand out apparently to the most common observer. In the first place, Cape Horn (the roughest point to weather in the whole world) would be avoided. In the next, the long passage by the Cape of Good Hope to innumerable places in the Pacific Ocean would become also unnecessary. In both these cases a great amount of time (which in commerce is ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth
... brought in we caught sight of one of our aeroplanes crashing. Making our way over to it we found that neither the pilot nor the observer was seriously hurt. Flying in Mesopotamia was made unusually difficult by the climatic conditions. The planes were designed for work in France and during the summer months the heat and dryness warped the propeller blades and indeed all the wooden parts. Then, too, ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... the almost habitual twisting of his chestnut-brown mustache attractively self-satisfied. His clothing is handsome, of distinctive materials, and tailored to the day. So much for an observing estimate. The critical observer would note more. He would detect a sluggishness in the responses of the pupils, as the eyes listlessly travel from face to face, producing an effect of haunting dulness. Mumbling movements of the lips, a slightly incoordinate ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... and brave. But he wasted his life and ruined his health in the pursuit of pleasure. His face, as it has come down to us in contemporary paintings, is disagreeable. He was, as with unusual candor a {185} contemporary observer put it, a devil even to the extent of considerably ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the marked contrast between the neighbouring people of Nova Scotia and New England was quickly discerned by so good an observer as the author proved himself to be, while his national and partisan judgments made his characterization of the Yankee to be a double-edged sword, that cut with equal keenness the Colonist and the Democrat. While he has no liking for the United ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... They represent the story of Mercury. (Frontispiece.) The cartoon is Italian, and so perfect is its drawing, so rich in invention is the exquisite border, that the name of Raphael is half-breathed by the thrilled observer. But if the artist is not yet certainly identified, the name of the weaver is certain, for on the galloon he has left his sign. It is none other than the celebrated ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... show up Gipsy life in some of its brightest aspects, have, unwittingly, no doubt, thoroughly substantiated and backed up the cause of my young clients—i.e., the poor Gipsy children and our roadside arabs—so far as they have gone, as a reperusal of the letters will show the most casual observer of our hedge-bottom heathens of Christendom. At the same time, I would say the tendency of some of the remarks of your correspondents has special reference to the adult Gipsies, roamers and ramblers, and, consequently, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... love of what was good and pure and noble, his charitable, generous, unenvious disposition, his sweetness of temper, and his gallantry, all of which found expression in face or action, made a character so lovely and so beautiful that every daily observer of them both found him, Iago, hateful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... A B represents the direct ray, and the line A C D the reflected one. Fig. 3 shows the different geometrical and trigonometrical elements of the curve, which can be read upon the various scales, or to which the instrument may be set. An observer standing at C sights the point B directly and the point A by reflection. A staff being set up at each point, he will see them simultaneously, and in coincidence if the instrument be properly set for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... believe that they will feel offended at what I have said of them. Some of our little generals may perhaps take exception to the positions my artist has assigned them, and feel disposed to make war on him. But there will be nothing new in this, inasmuch as any close observer of the war must have seen that these little generals were always more fierce in making war on writers and artists than courageous in facing the enemy. That the Siege of Washington was the most remarkable military event history has any account of, is very well understood among ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... was well up before a suitable kopje came in sight, one so small that it did not appear likely to contain enemies, but sufficiently elevated to give an observer a good view for miles ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... been found in the line of Christ's example. "The surest way to bring a man to acknowledge his errors," says Bishop Bloomfield, "is to give him full credit for whatever he had learned of the truth."[12] "What should we think," says a keen observer of the work of missions—"what should we think of an engineer who, in attempting to rear a light-house on a sandbar, should fail to acknowledge as a godsend any chance outcropping of solid rock to which he might fasten ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Alexis de Tocqueville published his Democracy in America, in 1835, had any foreign observer made an equally intimate study of American life, until James Bryce, a young English historian, began a series of visits to the United States in the early seventies. For nearly twenty years Bryce repeated his visits, living at home a full life in his Oxford professorate, ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... their trials. But the room upstairs at the "King's Head" was the centre of their operations. Stack was the indefatigable tipster, Journeyman was the scientific student of public form. His memory was prodigious, and it enabled him to note an advantage in the weights which would escape an ordinary observer. He often picked out horses which, if they did not actually win, nearly always stood at a short price in the betting ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... kind of character in thy life, That to th' observer doth thy history Fully unfold. Thyself and thy belongings 30 Are not thine own so proper, as to waste Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee. Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues Did not ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... described by Homer existed in his time, and that geographer thought it better to assign a physical change, rather than ignorance in Homer, to account for a difference which he imagined to exist between the Ithaca of his time and that of the poet. But Strabo, who was an uncommonly accurate observer with respect to countries surveyed by himself, appears to have been wretchedly misled by his ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... and perhaps far advanced, and beat her for an unmerciful wretch, until his infant falls a lifeless lump at her feet! Can the Americans escape God Almighty? If they do, can he be to us a God of Justice? God is just, and I know it—for he has convinced me to my satisfaction—I cannot doubt him. My observer may see fathers beating their sons, mothers their daughters, and children their parents, all to pacify the passions of unrelenting tyrants. He may also, see them telling news and lies, making mischief one ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... be the same as always!" the captain said, banging his fist on his desk. "The area of action, the battle plan may be the same but this time we've got General Fyfe as an observer and Dolliver Wims as a participant and, if I can manage to squeeze the day successfully past that Scylla and Charybdis, I'll promise not to devour any more second lieutenants ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... undertaken, and continued daily from six in the morning till eight at night, with the intermission only of mealtimes: nor could anything be more lively and interesting than the scene which now presented itself to an observer on the southeast point. The day was beautifully clear, the sea open as far as the eye could stretch to the northward, and the "busy hum" of our people's voices could at times be heard mingling with the cheerful though fantastic songs ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... An observer might have supposed that the baronet peeped at his grandson with the courteous indifference of one who merely wished to compliment the mother of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... area is about equivalent to that of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island united. In considering this with the loyalty of its inhabitants, and in studying 'Cumberland Gap,' the great natural highway of the Alleghany Range, the observer appreciates with pleasure the remark of Secretary Chase, who, in a recent interview with certain eastern capitalists, disclaimed on behalf of the Government and of General M'Clellan any purpose to send the army into winter quarters, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... this scene, painful as it was, had its grotesque features, which, in a less interested observer than Nicholas, might have provoked a smile. Mrs. Squeers stood at one of the desks, presiding over an immense basin of brimstone and treacle, of which delicious compound she administered a large installment to each boy in succession, using for the purpose a common wooden spoon, which might have ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... animal—or so it looked—crawling forward on the far side of the Hindenburg Line. Already it was doing a left incline in accordance with its instructions, so as to enfilade a communication trench which ran back to N——. The German observer had spotted her. Here and there, on each side of her, a column of dirt and snow rose into the air. But the little animal seemed to bear a charmed life. No harm came to her, and she went calmly on her way, for all the world like a giant tortoise at which ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... this reaction hazarded by "a sagacious observer withdrawn from the world, and surveying its movements from a distance," Mr. Alexander Knox. He had said twenty years before the date of my writing: "No Church on earth has more intrinsic excellence than the English Church, yet ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... he looked wholesome; his humour was fitful, sometimes easy, sometimes unaccountably stiff. They called him a Character at home, meaning that he was liable to freakish asides from the common rotted road, and could not be counted on. It was true. He, for his part, called himself an observer of Manvers, which implied that he had rather watch than take a side; but he was both hot-tempered and quick-tempered, and might well find himself in the middle of things before he knew it. His crooked smile, however, seldom deserted him, seldom was exchanged for a crooked scowl; ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... fragrance only needing air and sunlight to diffuse itself. For all the youthfulness, a quality of indolent magic was about her, a soft haze, as it were, woven of matured experience, of detachment from youth's self-absorption, of the observer's kindly, yet ironic, insight. Her figure was supple; her nut-brown hair, splendidly folded at the back of her head, was hardly touched with white; her quickly glancing, deliberately pausing, eyes were as clear, as pensive, as a child's; with almost a child's candor of surprise in the ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... be expected from an observer who did not understand the earth's motion in its orbit, the periods assigned to the inferior planets in this paragraph are all wrong, while those assigned to the superior planets are ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... The calm male observer might marvel at Bessie's elation over the prospect of sitting in Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's box at the performance of "Faust" given by the French Opera Company on tour. But no candid woman will. It could be explained partly by the natural desire to ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... obtayne a greater. He was chosen agayne this Parliament to serve in the same place, and in the beginninge of it, declared himselfe very sharply and sevearely against those exorbitances which had bene most grievous to the State; for he was so rigidd an observer of established Lawes and rules, that he could not indure the least breach or deviation from them, and thought no mischieve so intollerable, as the praesumption of ministers of State, to breake positive rules for reason of State, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... to occupy—and they could, of course, look forward with certainty to the opening of the prison door when a marriage should be arranged for them. They order this matter better in Europe; or, at least, differently, for there, as a discerning observer has pointed out, marriage means always that a woman is taken down from the shelf, while with us, alas, too often! that she is placed upon it, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... say that in no part of the book has the author consciously done violence to conditions as he has been permitted to view them, amid which conditions he has spent his whole life, up to the present hour, as an intensely absorbed observer. ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... may not be, each in succession. I would try the life of power, ruling men; but that might come later, after I had had long experience of men, and had lived through much history, and had seen, as a disinterested observer, how men might best be influenced for their own good. I would be a great traveller at first; and as a man newly coming into possession of an estate goes over it, and views each separate field and wood-lot, and whatever features it contains, so will I, whose the world is, because ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ministry. The meeting for business was long and tedious, being protracted four and a half days by an appeal. It was disagreeable in its nature, but was conducted in a way to afford information and instruction to the minute observer of ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... Racey Dawson, sitting on the bed, his knees on a level with his chin, clasped his hands round his bare ankles and accorded the stranger his closest attention. To the casual observer, however, Racey looked uncommonly dull and sleepy, even stupid. But not too stupid. Racey possessed too much native finesse to ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... "Hunter" or Cyrus Dallin's "Indian". Both of these groups lack suggestive quality. They are carried too far. Edward Kemeys' "Buffaloes" lacks a sense of balance. The defeated buffalo, pushed over the cliff, takes the interest of the observer outside of the center of the composition, and a lack of balance is noticeable in this otherwise well ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... philosophical. In this aspect it is very different from the cognate works of Mr. Spencer. Darwin does not speculate on the origin of the universe, on the nature of matter or of force. He is simply a naturalist, a careful and laborious observer, skillful in his descriptions, and singularly candid in dealing with the difficulties in the way of his peculiar doctrine. He set before himself a single problem—namely, How are the fauna and flora of our earth to be accounted for? . . . To account for the existence of matter and life, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... To an observer the Apache appears to be equally without fear and without conscience. The Apache is many degrees more dangerous than his more cowardly cousin, ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... black and violet turned round. He had a good and mild countenance, without expression—a mathematician minus the pride. A certain fire sparkled in the eyes of this personage, a rather sly smile played round his lips; but the observer might soon have remarked that this fire and this smile applied to nothing, enlightened nothing. Vatel laughed like an absent man, and amused himself like a child. At the sound of his master's voice he ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... class; and the more, because it partly forfeits its claim even to such position, by obscuring in twilight and disturbing our minds, in the process of scientific investigation, by sensational effects of afterglow and lunar effulgence, which are disadvantageous, not to the scientific observer only, but to less learned spectators; for when simple persons like myself, greatly susceptible to the influence of the stage lamps and pink side-lights, first catch sight of this striding figure from the other side of the ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... gleam in Mrs. Agar's eyes. A close observer knowing her well could have seen the cunning written on her face, for it was cheap ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... astrolabe used in astronomy ashore, that Columbus chiefly used in getting his solar altitudes. As will be seen from the illustration, its broad principle was that of a metal circle with a graduated circumference and two arms pivoted in the centre. It was made as heavy as possible; and in using it the observer sat on deck with his back against the mainmast and with his left hand held up the instrument by the ring at the top. The long arm was moved round until the two sights fixed upon it were on with the sun. The point where the other arm then cut the circle gave ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... from the ground which seemed to accompany him as he walked along. He saw the same thing later, at Cesena near Bologna. There was some correspondence on the subject (started by Dr. Herbert Snow) in the Observer of December 1915 and January 1916. Many are the graveyards I visited in this country and in others with a view to "satisfying my curiosity," as old Ramage would say, on this point, and all in vain. My usual luck! The fiammelle, on that particular ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... clean as were always the habiliments that clothed his attenuated form, no one could remember having seen the judge's hat smoothly brushed; and although in the course of thirty years it is unlikely that he never became possessed of a new one, even the closest observer, and that was Martha Lacey, could not be certain of the transition period, probably owing to the lingering attachment with which the judge returned spasmodically to the headgear which had accommodated itself to his bumps, and which he was heroically endeavoring ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... man of such power as yourself in the manner which I have planned to do; but I would forever lose my own self-respect, which I state honestly is of far greater value to me than any opinion which you or another may have of me, if at this time I failed to be open with you. I was an unintentional observer of the scene which just occurred between you and Mr. Carmichael—one in which, to my thinking, you ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... puppy under me at the Rocket?" said Durfy, excitedly; "the very man to a T!" And he thereupon launched into a description of Reginald's character in a way which showed that not only was he a shrewd observer of human nature in his way, but, when it served his purpose, could see the good even in a ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... stepped upon the shore, followed by the President, who held his little son by the hand, and Admiral Porter; the officers followed, and six more sailors brought up the rear. The writer of this article was there upon the spot, and, joining the party, became an observer of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... become blunted. At the moment of which I speak, valuable books, dried plants, papers containing the data of scientific observations, concerning the survey of the river Gambia to a considerable distance, were destroyed during the illness of the observer, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... fell into a long silence: for she was a practised observer of men and things, and the face before her compelled attention. The keynote of the whole was vigour: not mere impetuosity, though that was present also, but a sustained, indwelling vigour, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... investigations respecting the development of political relations, diplomatic negotiations, finances, &c., but exhibited a visible image of the life and movement of an age prolific of great deeds. Shakspeare, moreover, was a nice observer of nature; he knew the technical language of mechanics and artisans; he seems to have been well travelled in the interior of his own country, while of others he inquired diligently of travelled navigators respecting their peculiarity ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the American civil war. My strongest feelings were engaged in this struggle, which, I felt from the beginning, was destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs for an indefinite duration. Having been a deeply interested observer of the slavery quarrel in America, during the many years that preceded the open breach, I knew that it was in all its stages an aggressive enterprise of the slave-owners to extend the territory of slavery; under the combined influences of pecuniary interest, domineering temper, and the fanaticism ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... to ride at a great pace, meeting no enemy, and at last reached the creek. He was a good observer and he was confident that he could ride back up it without trouble. He feared nothing but Shepard. A single horseman in the darkness could throw off any pursuit by cavalry, but the terrible spy might turn at once to the creek and the gorge. He had the consolation, though, of knowing ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... on, his beard unshaved, and his countenance pale and haggard. There was a want of firmness in his gait; his brow was overcast, and his whole visage bespoke the deepest melancholy; and it needed but a glance to convince the most careless observer that Napoleon considered himself a doomed man. In this trying hour, however, he lost not his courtesy or presence of mind; instinctively he raised his hat to the guard of marines, when they presented arms as he passed, slightly inclined his head, and even ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... and shape, on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand. For, though it must not be said that every species of birds has a manner peculiar to itself, yet there is somewhat in most kinds at least that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... of the best witnesses to the viciousness of this measure is Governor Gillett, surely an unprejudiced observer. In giving his reasons for vetoing the bill, ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... the things which will not fail to impress a careful observer is the beauty of the Corean hand. The generality of Europeans possess bad hands, from an artistic point of view, but the average Corean, even among the lower classes, has them exceedingly well-shaped, with long supple fingers, somewhat ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... must astonish the kindly-disposed observer and vex him a little; that is, the capricious and disproportionate manner in which oaths are paid for, the inequality of the prices that M. Bonaparte places on this commodity. For example, M. Vidocq, if he were still chief of police, would receive six ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... his arm from the other's grasp and turn to stride away. He saw the other raise an arm as if to stay Jack. And he saw the movement flip Jack's low-pulled hat from his head. It was accidental, but to Jack and Bob—the actor and the observer in this little drama—it seemed to be by intent. It is possible Jack still might have saved the day, had he stooped quickly, recovered his hat and clapped it on again before Muller could have ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... of manners in the republic, it is clear that the jealousies and emulation of commerce were not likely to lessen the vice of avarice with which the natives have been reproached. The following is a strong expression of one, who cannot, however, be considered an unprejudiced observer, on occasion of some disputed points between the Dutch and English maritime tribunals—"The decisions of our courts cause much ill-will among these people, whose hearts' blood is their purse."[5] While drunkenness was a vice considered scarcely scandalous, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... Political Problems, 1870, 173. Il n'y a que les Allemands qui sachent etre aussi completement objectifs. Ils se dedoublent, pour ainsi dire, en deux hommes, l'un qui a des principes tres arretes et des passions tres vives, l'autre qui sait voir et observer comme s'il n'en avait point.—LAVELEYE, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1868, i. 431. L'ecrivain qui penche trop dans le sens ou il incline, et qui ne se defie pas de ses qualites presque autant que ses defauts, cet ecrivain tourne a la maniere.—SCHERER, Melanges, 484. ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... occasions been used for a seat as well as a covering. The keen blue eyes under it, and the general contour of the face, ending in a smoothly-shaven chin, revealed a hard-working, frugal, money-saving character, yet honest, sincere, and unselfish. He was, indeed,—what he struck the observer as being,—a prudent counsellor, a true friend, a wisely-generous helper in every good word and work. No man in the settlement was more respected than he—a respect not based on his personal appearance, it was clear; for he had a perfect contempt ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he wrote as follows:[66] "An English statesman of the last century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for those who think. Very well, then, if we are destined to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we would far rather prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... of days and years in the field, and every word he uttered had about it the crisp, clear-cut ring of command. It was safe to bet that no mere company was the extent of this soldiers authority, and Sancho, keen observer, had put him down for a lieutenant-colonel at least. Full colonels were mostly older men, and Arizona had but one in ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... its exact name. It is this capacity for recognizing a plant in a complex order of classification which distinguishes the botanist from the ordinary gardener, and it is exact and scientific language which characterizes the trained observer. ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... go?" he asked, and she was drawing her screen by instinct across her form. An observer, if there had been such, might well have been amused to see an elopement so conducted. There was still no sound in the night, except that the cock crew at intervals over in the cottars. The morning was heavy with dew; the scent of ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... details in the windows, and with the acute angle of the central pitch, which forms the characteristic quality of the late trecento Lombard manner. In its combination of purity and richness it corresponds to the best age of decorated work in English Gothic. What, however, strikes a Northern observer is the strange detachment of this elaborate facade from the main structure of the church. Like a frontispiece cut out of cardboard and pierced with ornamental openings, it shoots far above the low roof of the nave; ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
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