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More "Uncertain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... length in the grass, and so abruptly spoiled the comedy. This was ridiculous. He stopped suddenly, turned him round about in a passion, and fired one of the pistols at an unfortunate robber too late to duck among the bracken. And the marvel was that the bullet found its home, for the aim was uncertain, and the shot meant more for an emphatic protest than ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... me what in my view was to happen next? The great object, he said, was to get rid of all personal questions, and to consider how all those men who were united in their general views of government might combine together to carry on with effect. For himself he felt both uncertain and indifferent; he might be able to carry on the government or he might not; but the question lay beyond that, by what combination or arrangement of a satisfactory nature, in the event of his displacement, the administration of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between; we should pant after the ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... to Ethel as she gazed down upon the flare of huge fires built upon the bank, the tiny flash of lanterns and the flicker of torches, where the men swarmed out upon the uncertain footing. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... just ten o'clock. Reims seems to be in bed and fast asleep, except for the presence in the streets of a very few persons, official and unofficial, of whom the former are evidently on the alert as to the movements, slouching and uncertain, of the latter. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... his fortune, already much impaired, hung on chances as uncertain as those in a game of roulette? What nonsense! The failure of a great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... progress on more politically sensitive reforms has slowed. For example, in the third and final year of its $1.3 billion IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility, Islamabad has continued to require waivers for energy sector reforms. While long-term prospects remain uncertain, given Pakistan's low level of development, medium-term prospects for job creation and poverty reduction are the best in nearly a decade. Islamabad has raised development spending from about 2% of GDP in the 1990s ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... employment of a superior force; and on this last supposition I will say nothing of the personal dangers which the king, my son, and I myself may have to encounter. But what could be the consequences but some enterprise, the issue of which is uncertain, and the ultimate result of which, whatever it might be, presents disasters such as one can not endure to contemplate? The army is in a bad state from want of leaders and of subordination; but the kingdom is full of armed men, and their imagination ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... situation in Lower Canada was simplified by the conditions prevailing among the French Canadians. For Lower Canada was whole-heartedly Catholic, and the Canadian branch of the Roman Church had its eulogy pronounced in no uncertain fashion by the Earl of Durham, who, after praising its tolerant spirit, summed up the services of the priesthood in these terms: "The Catholic priesthood of this Province have, to a remarkable degree, conciliated the good-will of persons of all ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... and more fully, more carefully expressed in the article 'Austria, France, and Italy' in the 'Edinburgh Review' of April. In this he distinctly combats 'what is termed the principle of "nationalities"' as unhistorical. The theory is, he says, 'of modern growth and uncertain application;' and he goes on to show in detail that it is not applicable to any one of the Great Powers ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... converted the whole country into a mere quagmire, or rather standing pool. The only way in which the men could secure themselves was by covering the earth as far as possible with boughs and bundles of twigs; and it was altogether uncertain how long even this expedient would serve against the encroaching element. Those on the higher grounds were scarcely in better plight. The driving storms of sleet and rain, which had continued for several weeks without intermission, found their way into every crevice of the flimsy ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... the professor's room another person than I entered it—guilty, humbled, wretched. That one false word had spoiled everything for me. All my past manliness was shadowed by it. My ease of mind had left me, my self-respect was gone. I felt uncertain, unsafe. I stood upon a lie, trembling, tottering. How soon might I not fail? I was right in feeling unsafe. It is always unsafe to lie. My feet were sliding beneath me. One of the students had lost a quarter's allowance in play, and ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... cave now. Black-and-Gray had seen his sister slain. The blood of great aristocrats and heroes was in his veins. His wrath was tremendous, overwhelming, in fact, and, but for the support of the cave's wall, would certainly have been too much for his still uncertain sense of balance. Suddenly now his ancestry spoke in this undeveloped creature. Determination took and shook him, and spurred him forward. With a sort of miniature roar—the merest little mixture ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines, or with what he infers; another takes note of the kind of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain; another sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into parts, throwing things into one mass which require to be separated, and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as one, that the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... had no rent to pay, for their one-roomed cabin, standing on uncertain stilts outside the old levee, had been deserted during the last high-water, when Uncle Mose had "tooken de chances" and moved in. But then Mose had been able to earn his seventy-five cents a day at wood-sawing; and besides, by keeping his ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... no Paris demoiselle!" said Cigarette, with a dash of her old acrimony. "Ceremony in a camp—pouf! You must have been a court chamberlain once, weren't you? Well, I have done it. Your officers were talking yonder of a delicate business; they were uncertain who best to employ. I put in my speech—it was dead against military etiquette, but I did it. I said to M. le General: 'You want the best rider, the most silent tongue, and the surest steel in the squadrons? Take Bel-a-faire-peur, then.' 'Who is that?' asked the general; he would have sent ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... The head of the Depot creek was not more than eight miles from us, its course to its junction with the main creek was not ten, yet it was a watercourse that without being aware of its commencement or termination might have been laid down by the traveller as a river. Such however is the uncertain nature of the rivers of those parts of the continent of Australia over which I have wandered. I would not trust the largest farther than the range of vision; they are deceptive all of them, the offsprings of heavy ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... himself into a Pleasure in considering this Being as an uncertain one, and think to reap an Advantage by its Discontinuance, is in a fair way of doing all things with a graceful Unconcern, and Gentleman-like Ease. Such a one does not behold his Life as a short, transient, perplexing State, made up of trifling Pleasures, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... concentrate at Goldsborough on the 10th, advancing-from there on the 11th. [Footnote: Id., p. 134.] My old division, which had been commanded by General Reilly since he joined us at Wilmington, was for the rest of the campaign led by General Carter, Reilly's uncertain health making him anticipate the quickly approaching end of the war by resigning. Ruger and Couch continued in command of the first and second divisions respectively. [Footnote: Id., pt. i. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... old Pharos was the last landmark we took leave of, as it was the first of which we caught sight. It contrasts with the Maison Carree as a wild legend of the dark ages would with a letter of Pliny; and though rough in its fabric, and uncertain in its history, dwells as strongly on the recollection ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... born in "the second city of the British Empire," to wit, Bombay, in the month of March, 1901. His birthplace was a hole in an old "Coral" tree. Domestic life in that hole was not conducted with regularity. Meals were at uncertain hours and uncertain also in their quantity and quality. The parents were hunters and were absent for long periods, and though there was incredible shouting and laughter when they returned, they came at such irregular ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... mineral springs, and recently, in America, to open fountains of petroleum or rock-oil. The geographical and geological effects of such abstraction of fluids from the bowels of the earth are too remote and uncertain to be here noticed; [Footnote: Many more or less probable conjectures have been made on this subject but thus far I am not aware that any of the apprehended results have been actually shown to have happened. In an article in the Annales des Ponts et Chaussees for July and ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in his chair. He had something to say which had long lain on his mind, and he was uncertain of ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... by the change of weather; for after a frost of some days, that very day became warmer, there was a thaw and a fall of rain." This alleged "proof" is interesting as it relies on the same principle which was held to justify the correction of an uncertain birth-time, by reference to illnesses, etc., met with later. Kepler however goes on to say, "If I am to speak of the results of my studies, what, I pray, can I find in the sky, even remotely alluding to it? The learned confess that several not despicable branches of philosophy have ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... a little hour pale and uncertain along the street, Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... earnestly than before, Ernest examined the poet's features; then turned towards the Great Stone Face; then back, with an uncertain aspect, to his guest. But his countenance fell; he shook his ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... — Make haste, will you? Oh, isn't he a holy terror, and isn't it true for Father Reilly, that all drink's a curse that has the lot of you so shaky and uncertain now? ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... scrap doubled up quite small, and, as I opened it, and held it close to the light, my eyes fell on these characters, scrawled in a very feeble hand, with some kind of pencil which left a very uncertain mark— ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... boy; what ghost? Thy fancy hath converted some white cow into a spectre, in the uncertain light ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... consul a second time, without having secured any office previously or the privileges of any office, and that while consul in Nicomedea he did not employ the triumphal costume on the Day of Vows. [Footnote: Translated by Sturz "votivorum ludorum die." What festival is meant is uncertain, but it is probably not the Compitalia (III. Non. Ian.). [Sidenote:—11—] With his infractions of law is connected also the matter of Elagabalus. The offence consisted, not in his introducing ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... Bourgain-Desfeuilles' loud, disputatious voice; the general was furious that his rest should be broken thus, and it required many cigars and toddies to pacify him. More telegrams came in; things must be going badly; silhouettes of couriers, faintly drawn against the uncertain sky line, could be descried, galloping madly. There was the sound of scuffling steps, imprecations, a smothered cry as of a man suddenly stricken down, followed by a blood-freezing silence. What could it be? Was it ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... American army out of British clutches. The king had succeeded in hiring Hessians, some twenty thousand of them, to fight England's battles in America, with the promise of all the loot they could secure. France was very slow in granting aid, uncertain as yet how much resistance America might be able to make. The attempt to capture Quebec had failed, and the Americans were chased out of Canada. Washington had been unable to keep an effective army together as ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... two about the old Moldavian capital, Jassy. This is picturesquely situated at an altitude of more than 1,000 feet above the sea-level, on the railway from Pascani (Galatz-Cernowitz) to Kischeneff in Russia. The number of its inhabitants is uncertain, probably about 75,000, and includes a very large proportion of Jews, who monopolise the trade and banking business of the place.[51] It stands upon three eminences, and its principal streets have been paved by contract with a London firm at a cost of 200,000L.[52] It is lighted with petroleum ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... reason to be considerably uncertain in regard to Stewart Morrison's newly developed ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... not in a case to speak with its enemies in the gate. In the commons 140 members were known to be supporters of Shelburne, 120 were followers of North, and 90 of Fox; the intentions of the rest were unknown or uncertain. With this division of parties and with the government in a state of dissolution, Fox, if he had exercised a little patience, might soon have formed a strong and united whig party. He chose another course, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... and to submit to the loss of the empire of the world with as little discomposure as if he had been playing a game at chess.(1) This does not prove by our theory that he did not use to fly into violent passions with Talleyrand for plaguing him with bad news when things went wrong. He was mad at uncertain forebodings of disaster, but resigned to its consummation. A man may dislike impertinence, yet ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... every hand, In life's uncertain path I stand: Father divine! diffuse thy light, To guide ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... divided the Cruciferae into five sub-orders in accordance with the position of the radicle and cotyledons, yet Mons. T. Gay (Ann. des Scien. Nat., ser. i. tom. vii. p. 389) found in sixteen seeds of Petrocallis Pyrenaica the form of the embryo so uncertain that he could not tell whether it ought to be placed in the sub-orders 'Pleurorhizee' or 'Notor-hizee'; so again (p. 400) in Cochlearia saxatilis M. Gay examined twenty-nine embryos, and of these sixteen were vigorously 'pleurorhizees,' nine had characters intermediate between pleuro-and ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... his third-floor back in St. Pancras, and, lighting his lamp and a candle to ensure as much illumination as possible, looked with brooding earnestness at his reflection in the worn uncertain looking-glass.... He began to realise the truth of things. The flag was in his button-hole, his eye had a glint of lingering excitement, his brain was ruffled; he saw himself as he was. England must fight, Englishmen must help, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... find yourself well settled and naturalized at Manheim, stay there some time, and do not leave a certain for an uncertain good; but if you think you shall be as well, or better established at Munich, go there as soon as you please; and if disappointed, you can always return to Manheim I mentioned, in a former letter, your passing the Carnival at Berlin, which ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... parasite in both town and country is, however, quite alarming. Little as mistresses dare to say to the disadvantage of servants when leaving their employment, no matter for what reason, they do sometimes remark of them that their temper is 'uncertain.' When this happens and the fact is communicated to Jane or Betsy by the lady to whom they have proposed themselves, they have one invariable method of self-defence: 'Temper, mum? Well, I 'ave my faults, I daresay, but not that; all as knows me knows my temper is 'eavenly. But the ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... that had brought about his return to Gottenburg, of which Sir Marmaduke was entirely ignorant. Postal communications were rare and uncertain, and Captain Jervoise had not taken advantage of the one opportunity that offered, after Charlie had been wounded, thinking it better to delay till the lad could write and give a ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... occurred which destroyed nearly all the town, with the clothing and provisions. According to Smith, who is probably correct in this, the fire did not occur till five or six days after the arrival of the ship. The date is uncertain, and some doubt is also thrown upon the date of the arrival of the ship. It was on the day of Smith's return from captivity: and that captivity lasted about four weeks if the return was January 8th, for he started on the expedition December 10th. Smith subsequently speaks of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... school for very nearly three years, and I shall divide that memorable period into three distinct epochs—the desponding, the devotional, and the mendacious. After I had been flogged into uncertain health, I was confined, for at least six weeks, to my room, and, when I was convalescent, it was hinted by the surgeon, in not unintelligible terms, to Mr Root, that if I did not experience the gentlest treatment, I might lose my ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Joe Cumberland his daughter sat fingering the keys of the only piano within many miles. The evening gloom deepened as she played with upward face and reminiscent eyes. The tune was uncertain, weird—for she was trying to recall one of those nameless airs which Dan whistled as he rode through the hills. There came a patter of swift, light footfalls in the hall, and then a ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... strains of exquisite landscape music scattered at random through these pages. More significant still, however, is the developing faculty for personal satire, pointing to a vastly riper human experience. Peak was uncertain, says the author, with that faint ironical touch which became almost habitual to him, 'as to the limits of modern latitudinarianism until he met Chilvers,' the sleek, clerical advocate of 'Less St. Paul and more Darwin, less of Luther and more of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... scarcely heard him through wonderment that he could so change at such a moment. Her happiness began to falter and darken like departing sunbeams. She remained for a space uncertain of herself, knowing neither what was needed nor what was best; then ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... in his words there seemed to lurk a certain lack of conviction. Somehow he seemed secretly to be saying to himself, "My good sir, you are talking the most absolute rubbish, and nothing but rubbish." Nor did he even throw a glance at Sobakevitch and Manilov. It was as though he were uncertain what he might not encounter in their expression. Yet he need not have been afraid. Never once did Sobakevitch's face move a muscle, and, as for Manilov, he was too much under the spell of Chichikov's eloquence to do aught beyond ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... marshy ground was sodden and took every footprint deeply. That some man had crossed this way, and recently, too, was perfectly plain. The footprints wavered a little that was all, showing that the man who made them was uncertain upon his feet. And Wynne had left the house ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... as he was by a phenomenon in which was revealed to the full the singular complexity of his nature. The Slav's especial characteristic is a prodigious, instantaneous nervousness. It seems that those beings with the uncertain hearts have a faculty of amplifying in themselves, to the point of absorbing the heart altogether, states of partial, passing, and yet sincere emotion. The intensity of their momentary excitement thus makes of them sincere ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to their posts, to tack ship and come round again, with the narrowest sweep, to repair their former mischance. And, with surprising quickness, their well-worked craft was again, and this time with no uncertain guidance, shooting alongside of the devoted merchantman. Still the crew of the latter quailed not; but, well knowing there was no longer any hope of escaping a struggle in which death or victory were the only alternatives, stood, with knitted brows and fire-arms cocked and levelled, silently ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... early deeds and hair-breadth 'scapes. Mary, embroidering an indescribable something, which every evening made its appearance but seemed never to advance, was rather in better spirits than usual, at the same time her manner was nervous and uncertain; and I could perceive by her frequent absence of mind, that her thoughts were not as much occupied by the siege of Java as her worthy father believed them. Without laying any stress upon the circumstance, I must yet avow that Waller's not having returned from Cheltenham gave me some uneasiness, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... of the rainbow—perishable the leaf of the rose—variable the love of woman—uncertain the sunbeam of April; but naught on earth can be fleeting; so perishable, so variable, or so uncertain, as the popularity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... at Lubeck and Stettin any accounts of the movements of the Russians, I had sent to those ports, four days before the receipt of the Police Minister's letter, a confidential agent, to observe the Baltic: though we were only 64 leagues from Stralsund the most uncertain and contradictory accounts came to hand. It was, however, certain that a landing of the Russians was expected at Stralsund, or at Travemtinde, the port of Lubeck, at the mouth of the little river Trave. I was positively informed that Russia had freighted ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... were dragged along until about four in the afternoon, when being both affected with vomiting, it was discovered that they had eaten clay. Whether this practice, which is frequent amongst the slaves, proceeds from a vitiated appetite, or an intention to destroy themselves, is uncertain. Three people remaining to take care of them, the slaves were suffered to lie down in the woods until they were somewhat recovered, but they did not reach the town until past midnight, and were then so exhausted that their master ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... return to his Family and Friends.—"The Inhabitants of Virginia are computed to be about 300,000 Men, the one-half of which Number are supposed to be Negroes. The Number of those who attend my Ministry at particular Times is uncertain, but generally about three Hundred who give a stated Attendance. And never have I been so much struck with the Appearance of an Assembly, as when I have glanced my Eye to that Part of the Meeting-House, where they usually sit; adorned, for so it had appeared to me, with so many ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... put him off the truck hadn't give him back his dollar, and that was all he had. He now put the First High Curse of the One Hundred and Nine Malignant Devils on all Germans. It is a grand curse, he says, and has done a lot of good in China. He was uncertain whether it would work away from home; but he says it did. Every time he gets hold of a paper now he looks for the place where Germans in close formation is getting mowed ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... "orthodox Brahmans to this day profess to observe all these five ceremonies, but that in reality only the offerings to the gods and manes are strictly observed, while the reading is completed by the repetition of the Gayatri only, and charity and feeding of animals are casual and uncertain." ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... long winters, sheep raising, in Maine, has often been an uncertain business. But at the old Squire's we usually kept a flock of eighty or a hundred. They often brought us no real profit, but grandmother Ruth was an old-fashioned housewife who would have felt herself bereaved if she had had no woolen yarn for ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of course, that you are younger than myself and likely to outlive me, but still, life is uncertain. I don't care much for money, but I wouldn't like to die destitute, and so I asked Mr. Coleman, the lawyer, to come round. I think I hear his ring now. ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... that Harold swore, whether in this specially solemn fashion or in any other, is left equally uncertain. In any case he engages to marry a daughter of William—as to which daughter the statements are endless—and in most versions he engages to do something more. He becomes the man of William, much as William had become ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... friends—all you who are so situated as to be able to avail yourselves of this privilege—go and see for yourselves how greatly we are bound by prejudices, how checkered and uncertain are many of our own advances, how very nearly all is balanced. No nation has all that is best, neither is any bereft of some advantages, and no nation, or tribe, or people is so unhappy that it would ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... consistent with the rejection of the Gospel of Christ is an eternal tomb, with the heart-shivering inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep." Americans who reject the Scriptures are as uncertain about the future as the poor heathen of other lands. Some of our unbelievers have gathered the information from heathen oracles that the future consists in being a poor, empty, shivering, table-rapping spirit, flying to and fro over the country in response to the sigh of some silly waiting-girl, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... of his personal conviction that he was right, Anketam had to admit that Jacovik had reason for his own opinion. He knew that many of the farmers were uncertain about the ultimate outcome of ...
— The Destroyers • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the duke, "that considering my brother has no children, that his health is uncertain, and that after him the crown will come naturally to me, there is no reason why I should compromise my name and my dignity, in a useless struggle, and try to take, with danger, what will come to ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... about the same time made a like discovery. It was soon found that refined oil could not be shipped with profit; the barrels often had to be left in the sunshine or exposed to the weather, and transportation facilities were very uncertain. The still was then torn ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... other boys, I could accept the appointment of nurse from the Secretary of War, General Russell A. Alger. But, if it proved practicable, I preferred to be under no obligations to render service, for my health was poor, my strength uncertain. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... possibility of this, there are a few striking and suggestive facts at hand. The sound judgment and law-abiding element of this country expressed itself in no uncertain tones at the late election. After the defeat of Mr. Bryan, he was given a tremendous demonstration of approval at Denver, in which the women played a conspicuous part. Mrs. Bradford said: "The women tried to welcome you to the White House. When a few more stars have been added ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... this time, felt very uncertain and rather small. The street door, when she had pulled the bell-handle, had unlatched with a click, but no voice had called down, and when she reached the top landing the door in front of her stood forbiddingly ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... very great men,—in reference to which arrangement the honour and dignity attached to each is exactly contrary to that which generally prevails in the world; the front stairs being intended for everybody, and being both slow and uncertain, whereas the back stairs are quick and sure, and are used only for those who are favoured. Miles Grendall had the command of the stairs, and found that he had plenty to do in keeping people in their right courses. Mr Longestaffe reached Abchurch Lane before one,—having altogether failed ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... at an uncertain hour, Now oftimes and now fewer, That anguish comes and makes me tell My ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... on the part of those whom she considered her superiors, Maggie looked first at Aggie, then at Jimmy, then at Zoie, uncertain whether to go ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... man who had given Gratton the register followed her with his speculative eyes. She went to the door and looked out, seeing neither the dusty road, the deserted house across the way, nor the mountains beyond. She was groping blindly in a mental fog; she was tired, very tired. And uncertain. Something was happening—had happened, or was about to happen, and she did not know which way to turn. Her father, poor old papa, was fighting hard against some kind of money troubles. Mark King, Gratton, Brodie—figures to race through her brain, ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... that they were slackening speed, and the trumpet rang out again, but with an uncertain sound, for it was nearly drowned by the angry yelling which arose. The command was gallop, but the execution of the order was walk, and a minute later the whole escort came to a stand, literally wedged in, with the frightened horses standing shivering and snorting, only one here ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... which they evolved about marriage,—men were uncertain creatures, only partly tamed, and it was the woman's business to "hold" them. So much the worse for the women if they happened to be tied to men they could not "hold." Isabelle, remembering on one occasion the flashing eyes of the Kentuckian, his passionate denunciation of mere commercialism ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... The stumbling, uncertain words were unlike Mrs. Breckenridge's usual certain flow of reasoning. But in spite of this, or because of it, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... which was read to Margaret, destroyed all hope, and still she wavered, uncertain whether it would be right to deceive her grandmother. But while she was yet undecided, Hagar's fingers, of late unused to the pen, traced a few lines to Henry Warner, who, acting at once upon her suggestion, wrote to Margaret a letter which he ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... praise; he deprived himself of everything for them, and although he possessed musical talents that would have enabled him to make a fortune, the immediate needs of those dependent on him, and an extreme reserve, had always led him to prefer an assured income to the uncertain chances ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... our hilltops, and the water-wheel which formerly brought wealth to the miller now rots in its mountings at the end of the dam. Except for pumping and moving boats and ships, wind-power finds its occupation gone. It is too uncertain in quantity and quality to find a place in modern economics. Water-power, on the other hand, has received a fresh lease of life through the invention of machinery so scientifically designed as to use much more of the water's energy than was ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... without any enthusiasm. It was not considered quite good form to be enthusiastic; it was apt to lead you into rather uncertain company with such people as ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... Our respected Phoenix, the Head of this ancient House, has at length done us the honour to come among us. I think I may say, gentlemen, that we are not insensible to this honour, and that we welcome with no uncertain voice one whom we have so long desired to see in ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... 'There are some reasons for which they may seem particularly qualified for a military life. They are used to suffer want of every kind; they are accustomed to obey the word of command from their patrons and their booksellers; they have always passed a life of hazard and adventure, uncertain what may be their state on the next day.... There are some whom long depression under supercilious patrons has so humbled and crushed, that they will never have steadiness to keep their ranks. But for these men there may be found fifes and drums, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... not the same sound of different words: they are of necessity present, I suppose, in all languages, and corresponding words in independent languages will often develop exactly corresponding varieties of meaning. But since the ultimate origin and derivation of a word is sometimes uncertain, the scientific distinction cannot ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... office, Vandover saw that the proprietor of the Reno House had set up a great bagatelle board in a corner of the reading-room. A group of men, sailors, ranchmen, and fruit venders were already playing. Vandover approached and watched the game, very interested in watching the uncertain course of the marble jog-jogging among the pins. The clear little note of the bell or the dry rattle as the marble settled quickly into one of the lucky pockets thrilled him from head to foot; his hands trembled, all at once his ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... from its employments, would rise against the feeble garrison, whose presence entailed upon them such calamities; but herein, of course, he underestimated the coercive power of a few resolute men, organized for mutual support, over a mob of individuals, incapable of combined action and each uncertain of the constancy ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... of Poland and of Germany, which were then about to become a confederation, occupied the forefront of interest at the Congress as they did at the Conference. A similarity is noticeable also in the state of Europe generally, then and now. "The uncertain condition of all Europe," writes a close observer in 1815, "is appalling for the peoples: every country has mobilized ... and the luckless inhabitants are crushed by taxation. On every side people complain that this state ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... pernicious in their extremes. Thus prudent forethought, which is one of the first conditions of a successful life, may easily degenerate into that most miserable state of mind in which men are perpetually anticipating and dwelling upon the uncertain dangers and evils of an uncertain future. How much indeed of the happiness and misery of men may be included under those two words, realisation ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... dogmatically along any of these lines, they are too blurred and uncertain. I can only express an ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... pleaded, "do let us take her over to the church now. The younger the better, I think; it is so uncertain ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... after Jacob's visit to the cottage, it was rumoured that Frank Oldfield and his man had left the colony. Hubert called at the place and found that they were indeed gone, and that it was quite uncertain when ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... "Nothing is more uncertain than the history, or even the existence, of St. Orberosia. An ancient anonymous annalist, a monk of Dombes, relates that a woman called Orberosia was possessed by the devil in a cavern where, even down to his own days, the little boys and girls of the village used to play at a sort ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... very uncertain in low water in these primitive times. This time the Thursday boat had not arrived at ten at night—so the people had waited at the landing all day for nothing; they were driven to their homes by a heavy storm without having had a view of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fight was on, and the end seemed uncertain, these gentlemen stepped to the front and fairly won the reputation of statesmen. They saw that if the filibustering of the Democrats were brought to a close, it would have to be accomplished by the leaders in that party ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... necessaries of life, coupled with an overweening attachment to the enjoyment of forest scenes and forest pastimes, it will perhaps be matter of greater astonishment that they did not more frequently forego the security of a fortress, for the uncertain enjoyment of those comforts and necessaries, and the doubtful gratification of this attachment. Accustomed as they had been "free to come and free to go," they could not brook the restraint under which they were placed; and rather than chafe ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Bhutan are underway with support from multilateral development organizations. Each economic program takes into account the government's desire to protect the country's environment and cultural traditions. Detailed controls and uncertain policies in areas like industrial licensing, trade, labor, and finance ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that piles could be made of concrete and driven into the ground with a pile driver, and that neither beams nor girders—none of the timbers, in fact—were needed in this new construction. He was nearly through with it, and still he did not notice the uncertain expression in her eyes. It was not until she asked in a faltering undertone, "When are you going to begin?" that it came to him. And then he looked at her so long that Pete began to notice, and she had to touch his foot ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... Yet who knows—let destiny be fulfilled—condemned he was, let him remain so then! Good or evil spirit—gloomy and scornful power, whom men call the Genius of man, thou art a power more restlessly uncertain, more baselessly useless, than the wild wind in the mountains; Chance thou term'st thyself, but thou art nothing; thou inflamest everything with thy breath, crumblest mountains at thy approach, and suddenly art thyself destroyed at the presence of the Cross of dead wood, behind which ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... say to you, give yourselves now to Jesus Christ, because no to-morrow may be yours. Delay is gambling, very irrationally, with a very uncertain thing—your life and your future opportunities. 'You know not what shall be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... cries. Out of a hut behind us burst two or three priests, the conjurer, and a score or more of old men. They had Indian drums upon which they beat furiously, and long pipes made of reeds which gave forth no uncertain sound. Fixed upon a pole and borne high above them was the image of their Okee, a hideous thing of stuffed skins and rattling chains of copper. When they had joined themselves to the throng in the firelight the clamor became deafening. Some one piled on more logs, and the ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... door, where my dog was already snuffing and uttering angry growls, as though suspicious that the person on the outside was not exactly such a guest as his master would wish for in that lonely habitation. While I was uncertain what to do, another knock, louder than the first, startled the dog into a howl; but I hushed his noise, and taking down my gun, that hung over my bed, I asked what ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... some unknown reason—I suspect insanity—did not want me in Jerusalem just then; and, when we landed, spun me a strange yarn of how the people I had thought to visit were exceedingly eccentric and uncertain in their moods; and how it would be best for me to stop in Jaffa until he sent me word that I was sure of welcome. His story was entirely false, I found out later, a libel on a very hospitable house. But I believed it at the time, as I did all ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... relative; the old primary controls have disappeared; the new secondary instruments of discipline, necessarily formal, are for the most part crude and inefficient; the standing of the family and of the individual is uncertain and subject to abrupt changes upward or downward in the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... violent murmurs had often interrupted M. Dupin. M. Manuel, more adroit, felt the necessity of being also more temperate. He appeared at first uncertain on the determination it would be proper to take; and, after having brought all the parties on the stage, and placed in the balance the hopes and fears, with which each might inspire the nation, he exclaimed: "But is it an individual, then, is it a family, that is in ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... here; any one going up the Dyke Road in early spring will observe a little brown bird singing in the air much like a lark, but more feebly. He only rises to a certain height, and then descends in a slanting direction, singing, to the ground. The meadow-pipit is, apparently, uncertain where he shall come down, wandering and irregular on his course. Many of them finish their song in the gardens of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, which seem to be a refuge to birds. At least, the thrushes sing there sweetly—yellowhammers, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... it is by no means uncommon. To some extent, it is grown in Western New York and close to Lake Erie in Northern Ohio. There are some trees in Eastern Michigan and a very few in what is known as the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, but with few exceptions, the crops they bear are uncertain. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... door and looked into the dark entrance, the gusts having blown out the light. He shook his head, muttered something unintelligible, and then bent his uncertain steps to the tavern. The next morning Mr. Baron suspected where he was and went to see him. The overseer was found to be a pitiable spectacle, haggard trembling, nervous in the extreme, yet sullen and reticent and resolute in his purpose never to set foot on the plantation ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... frown, and then stretching out the finger with decision. "Short—just above my shoulder—crying to make himself tall by turning up his mustache and keeping his beard long—a glass in his right eye to give him an air of distinction—a strong opinion about his waistcoat, but uncertain and trimming about the weather, on which he will try to draw me out. He will stare at me all the while, and the glass in his eye will cause him to make horrible faces, especially when he smiles ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... he resolved to turn his talents to account, so he made friends with the Old Man of the Sea, an elderly gentleman of uncertain temper, who spent his time in sailing over the ocean in an ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the Buck, "my temper is so uncertain that if I permit one of those noisy creatures to come into my presence I am likely to forget myself and do ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... husbands the most erratic. He might perhaps come in for an hour or two in the middle of the day on a Wednesday, or perhaps would take a cup of tea at home on Friday evening. But anything so fitful and uncertain as were Bozzle's appearances in the bosom of his family was not to be conceived in the mind of woman. Sir Marmaduke then called in the middle of the day on Wednesday, but Bozzle was reported to be away in the provinces. His wife had no ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... within a mile of the southern end of the lake, or a distance of quite two leagues from the "castle," which was now hidden from view by half a dozen intervening projections of the land, when he suddenly ceased paddling, as if uncertain in what direction next ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... But at last, just at noon, when the mistress of the house had warranted him to sing, the little feathered exile began as it were to tune his pipes. The savage men gathered round the cage that moment, and amid a dead stillness the bird uttered some very uncertain chirps, but after a while he seemed to revive his memories, and call his ancient cadences back him to one by one, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... got on rapidly, and his boat was soon far in advance of the other. He neared the bank, plunged in and drew the uncertain little craft to the shore, and then as a sledge ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... a great dilemma, for they were uncertain which way to proceed, and Mr. Malcolm endeavoured to persuade the men to return to the beach, assuring them that it was quite useless their proceeding any further, for they did not know where they were going; but they turned a deaf ear to every argument, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... the wayside. Perhaps that is because the story is too clear to need the "Moral." Here are a few sentences from it: "The present is all we have to manage: the past is irrecoverable; the future is uncertain; nor is it fair to burden one moment with the weight of the next. Sufficient unto the moment is the trouble thereof. . . . One moment comes laden with its own little burden, then flies, and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... comradeship of soldiering, the common experience of audience and actors, and the abandonment of all thought for the morrow, gave that impression of cheerful carelessness the root of which is not happiness but the conviction that the future is so uncertain and the possibilities so dreadful that he is wise who lives for the hour only, even as the hour may snatch life from him. I thought I knew the head in front of me, and, leaning forward, saw it was my brother-in-law. It has always struck me as quaint that he, who had been with his battery for a ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... Parts, so likewise may the Orang-Outang be. This that I dissected, which was brought from Angola (as I have often mentioned) wanted something of the just stature of the Pygmies; but it was young, and I am therefore uncertain to what tallness it might grow, when at full Age: And neither Tulpius, nor Gassendus, nor any that I have hitherto met with, have adjusted the full stature of this Animal that is found in those parts from whence ours was brought: But 'tis most certain, that there are sorts of Apes ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... Carlos, no doubt. And in this placing me in that position there was apparent the work of death, the work of life, of time, the pathetic realization of an inevitable destiny. He talked a little disjointedly, with the uncertain swaying of a shadow on his thoughts, as if the light of his mind had flickered like an expiring lamp. I remember that once he asked me, in a sort of senile worry, whether I had ever heard of an Irish king called Brian Boru; but he did not seem to attach any importance to my reply, and ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... in the SW. of France of uncertain origin; treated as outcasts in the Middle Ages, owing, it has been supposed, to some taint of leprosy, from which, it is argued, they were by their manner of life ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to trust myself out in this uncertain weather. Can't you both come and take tea with us to-morrow? I hope to be well enough then, and it would be a great pleasure, for if there is any truth in this, I want to ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... selection of representatives in the Councils from among that class of men who live by the law, whose sole income is derived from its uncertainties and perplexities. Obviously, it is to the interest of these men to make laws which shall be uncertain and perplexing—to confuse and darken legislation as much as they can. Yet in nearly all the Councils these men are the most influential and active element, and it is not uncommon to find them in a numerical majority. It is evident that ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... Europe manifested a desire to share with Spain, the glory, the wealth, and the dominion to be acquired in the new world. By no one of these states, was this desire carried into action more promptly than by England, Henry VII. had received communications from Columbus, during the tedious and uncertain negotiations of that great man, at the dilatory court of Ferdinand, which prepared him for the important discoveries afterwards made, and inclined him to countenance the propositions of his own subjects for engaging in similar ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... covet honors? E'en in thy youth, fame's brimming chalice stood Full in thy grasp—thou flung'st the toy away. Which of us, then, must be the other's debtor, And which the creditor? Thou standest mute. Dost tremble for the trial? Art thou, then, Uncertain of thyself? ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... authors by the clandestine seizure and sale of their papers. He tells in tragic strains how "the cabinets of the sick and the closets of the dead have been broken open and ransacked," as if those violences were often committed for papers of uncertain and accidental value which are rarely provoked by real treasures—as if epigrams and essays were in danger where gold and diamonds are safe. A cat hunted for his musk is, according to Pope's account, but the emblem of a wit winded by booksellers. His complaint, however, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... policy of any party to forget that between the irrevocable past and the uncertain future there intervenes the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... public square of the Cascades, in front of the Auteuil hippodrome, she paused a moment between the two lakes, uncertain ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... Then, by the uncertain light of her night-lamp, she thought she saw the door open slowly and noiselessly. Marie-Anne entered—gliding in like a phantom. She seated herself in an arm-chair near the bed. Great tears were rolling down her cheeks, and she looked sadly, ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... for many reasons. We shall start on the first of September.' As this was said about the middle of August there was still some remnant of comfort for poor Mrs Pipkin. A fortnight gained was something; and as Mr Fisker had come to England on business, and as business is always uncertain, there might possibly be further delay. Then Mrs Hurtle made a further communication to Mrs Pipkin, which, though not spoken till the latter lady had her hand on the door, was, perhaps, the one thing which Mrs Hurtle had desired ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... a second visit to Aitutaki, Mr Williams sailed in search of Raratonga, of the position of which even he was uncertain. He was accompanied by Papehia, and by some natives of Raratonga, who had been carried away by a trading vessel from their own island, and cruelly deserted on Aitutaki. Among them was Tapaeru, the daughter of ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... increased in volume and frequency, and I started slowly up the road, uncertain whether I should come upon a young fox or other wild beast, but determined to solve the mystery. As I drew near, I began to be conscious of a knocking sound in the woods beside the road. It was like a light tapping on hollow wood, ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... events of the immediate future. Their author is well known to entertain the soundest views in reference to the thoroughness of the measures necessary to restore harmony in the Union, without being of that extreme and impracticable school whose policy would render union uncertain or impossible; and if a ripe experience in public affairs and the most brilliant success in transactions of great delicacy and difficulty, as well as of the most vital importance to the triumph of our arms, are of any value, they cannot be without ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... equation with that on page 30 will make it plain that hydrolysis is just the reverse of neutralization and must, accordingly, interfere with it. Salts of methyl orange with weak acids are so far hydrolyzed that the end-point is uncertain, and methyl orange cannot be used in the titration of such acids, while with the very weak acids, such as carbonic acid or hydrogen sulphide (hydrosulphuric acid), the salts formed with methyl orange are, in effect, completely ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... mounting and classifying the moths they had taken. When the housework was finished Mrs. Comstock with her ruffle sat near, watching and listening. She remembered all they said that she understood, and when uncertain she asked questions. Occasionally she laid down her work to straighten some flower which needed attention or to search the garden for a bug for the grosbeak. In one of these absences Elnora said to Philip: "These replace quite a number of the moths ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... that of all the rest of the crowd. It was not a hearty, resonant laugh, like that from the mouth of a strong-lunged, wholesome-natured man, which has the mellow roundness of a solo on a French horn. It was a slovenly, greasy, convictionless laugh, with uncertain tones and ill-defined edges. Its effect was due to its volume, readiness, and long continuance. Swelling up of the puffy form, and reddening ripples of the broad face heralded it, it began with a contagious cackle, it deepened into a flabby guffaw, and after all the others roundabout had ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... mouthful of bread and butter, so Faith attempted to speak. The words came slowly, for she was a little uncertain how to say them. "I am sorry if Miss Brady does not like me, I am sure. But you are wrong, Miss Willis. I have not 'cut her out' with Mr. Denton. On the contrary, I have never spoken to the young man but once, and that ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... the French, and by their government ceded in 1763 to Spain as a set-off for Florida, while the French King at the same time ceded his other possessions on this continent to England. In 1800, Napoleon had forced Spain to re-cede Louisiana to France, as the price of the First Consul's uncertain goodwill and other intangible or elusive favors. At this period, France desired to occupy the country, or at least to form a great seaport at New Orleans, the entrepot of the Mississippi, that might be of use to her against English warships in the region of the West Indies. When news of the ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... rather uncertain way: an old fellow who owns a boat lives close by there, and if he's at home he will be only too glad to row you over for a few cents. It would not make your walk much longer to go round that way first and see. I have often crossed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... chance of his succession to the title of his ancestors was for some time altogether uncertain—there being, so late as the year 1794, a grandson of the fifth lord still alive—his mother had, from his very birth, cherished a strong persuasion that he was destined not only to be a lord, but "a great man." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... Cassowary man will say to himself, "My leg is long and thin, I can run and not feel tired; my legs will go quickly and the grass will not entangle them." Members of the Cassowary clan are reputed to be pugnacious, because the cassowary is a bird of very uncertain temper and can kick with extreme violence. (A.C. Haddon, "The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits", "Journal of the Anthropological Institute", XIX. (1890), page 393; "Reports of the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... a professional hunter. It was rather an addition to the regular programme of existence, something unannounced and voluntary, and therefore not weighted with too heavy responsibilities. There was a touch of the transient and uncertain about it. He seemed like a perpetual visitor; and yet he stayed on as steadily as a native, never showing, from the first, the slightest wish or intention ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... on that air," she said. "It's one of their ways of teasing. But then, if the man was really very much in love, and she was only enough in love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well seem troubled. It would be a very serious question. Girls often don't know what to do in such ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of elevation, was changed to "Abraham," father of a multitude which expressed the reason for the change as given at the time thereof, "for a father of many nations have I made thee" (Gen. 17:5). "Sarai," the name of Abraham's wife, and of uncertain distinctive meaning, was substituted by "Sarah" which signified the princess (Gen 17:15). "Jacob," a name given to the son of Isaac with reference to a circumstance attending his birth, and signifying a supplanter, was superseded by "Israel" meaning a soldier ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the little form, but not so rapidly or so vigorously. And now the sound was louder, or, rather, less faint, less uncertain—was a cry—was the cry of a living thing. "She's alive—alive!" shrieked the woman, and in time with his movements she swayed to and fro from side to side, laughing, weeping, wringing her hands, patting her bosom, her cheeks. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Brotherhood was split into two hostile camps thereby. It was considered that Stephens' policy of carrying on the rebellious operations in Ireland was an impossible and suicidal one to the success of the cause. Many Irish-Americans were languishing behind the bars of British prisons, with an uncertain fate awaiting them when they were arraigned for trial, and their comrades in the United States bitterly blamed Stephens and O'Mahony for the fiasco. Consequently the majority in America revolted, and seceded from the Stephens faction, claiming that he had woefully misrepresented the state ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... Colgate in this State to San Francisco by way of Mission San Jose, where it is supplied with additional power, has a length of 232 miles and is the longest transmission of electrical energy in the world. The power house at Colgate has a capacity of 11,250 kilowatts in generators, but it is uncertain what part of the output is transmitted to San Francisco, as there are more than 100 substations on the 1,375 miles ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... of monarchy, and of the constitution, Montrose espoused the falling cause of royalty and raised the Highland clans, whom he united to a small body of Irish, commanded by Alexander Macdonald, still renowned in the north, under the title of Colkitto. With these tumultuary and uncertain forces, he rushed forth, like a torrent from the mountains, and commenced a rapid and brilliant career of victory. At Tippermoor, where he first met the covenanters, their defeat was so effectual, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... sort of blackmail whenever they were hungry. The solemn awe and fear in the eyes of that old mother and those little pigs I never can forget; it was as unmistakable and deadly a fear as I ever saw expressed by any human eye, and corroborates in no uncertain way the oneness ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... the point upon which, as yet, we had obtained no satisfaction. Jerusha and I, in an uncertain hope that we should find out something in due time, were discussing the music. The particular point in debate was, why village choirs will astonish the people with pieces of music in which nobody can join them. We did not settle it, nor has anybody ever solved the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... he was confused and agitated, and uncertain what to do, Mr. Pickwick cut the matter short by drawing the invalided stroller's arm through his, and leading him away, without saying another ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Uncertain, but with lighter hearts, they veiled their faces, ungirt their garments, and, gathering each an armful of the stones, flung them behind, ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... an uncertain smile, and was going to speak, when a sharp report from the gun mounted in the bow of the steam launch that was just then coming into view arrested the words on her parted lips. The smile died out, and was replaced by the old look of anxious attention. From the hills far away the echo came back ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... A single gas burner threw a dim, uncertain light over the old desk, and lit up the figure of a tall, gray-haired man, who was bending over it. He had round, stooping shoulders, and long, spindling limbs. One of his large feet, encased in a thick, square-toed shoe, rested ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... out of the treaty-making power the delegated powers of Congress, though just what he meant by this exception is uncertain. He may have meant that no international agreement could be constitutionally entered into by the United States within the sphere of such powers, or only that treaty-provisions dealing with matters which are ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... beheaded. On the other side, it was considered that although it would lessen the anxiety to kill all the Sangleys or to attempt it, it did not appear a just punishment toward people of whose crime they were uncertain—much more so, since they had come to Filipinas to conduct their trading in good faith, and the governor had given them his word for their safety if they were quiet and did not mix in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... safer method of gambling offered them, and being as fond of gambling as other peoples of the world, the men of the labouring classes and a few of their women, the publicans and their frequenters, army officers, farmers, and women of uncertain virtue stake their money on horses they have never seen, who may not even exist, and thus keep the industry going. And the chevaliers of this "industry," the go-betweens, the parasites of this sport, are the twelve thousand professional book-makers ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Chips over on his face, and cast him adrift with my hands, which proved to be a longer and much more difficult job than I could have believed, owing, of course, to the giddiness arising from my wound, which made both my sight and my touch uncertain. But at length the last knot was loosed, the last turn of the rope cast off, and Chips was once more a ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... answer, but stood hat in hand as the great carriage rolled out under the arch. Then he buttoned his greatcoat, and went out alone into the dark and muddy streets. The rain had ceased, but everything was wet, and the broad pavements gleamed under the uncertain light of ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... judges who lost their places for courageous fidelity to law, were wont to resume practice at the bar. To provide against the consequences of ejection from office, great lawyers, before they consented to exchange the gains of advocacy for the uncertain advantages of the woolsack, used to stipulate for special allowance—over and above the ancient emoluments of place. Lord Nottingham had an allowance of L4000 per annum; and Lord Guildford, after a struggle for better times, was constrained, at a ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the experimenting to some one else. One thing is certain: thoroughbreds will pay better than mongrels. Their eggs are of more uniform size and colour, the stock will be healthy and as a rule weigh a pound or two more than birds of uncertain breeding. Thoroughbreds do not cost any more to feed or care for than the mongrels and in every way ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... was cooking some flapjacks in the grease which he had carefully saved. The coffee was bubbling away gaily, sending its aroma far and wide upon the whispering morning breeze. The skies were still dark, their stars not yet gone from them. Only the faintest of dim, uncertain lights in the horizon told where the east was and where before long the sun would roll up above the floor of the desert. The horses, already hitched to the buckboard, were vague blots in the ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... vessels were coiled about vulnerable parts, or draped over the sides amidships to protect the boilers. Knowing that it was to be a night action, the gun-decks had been whitewashed; so that even by the dim, uncertain light of the battle lanterns, the gunners could see plainly all objects about them. Hammocks and nettings were stretched above the decks to catch flying splinters from the spars overhead. Late at night the admiral in his longboat was pulled from ship to ship to view the preparations made, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... heart of the country. Once a year certain provinces disappeared under the sea, becoming muddy plains which were neither earth nor water, on which one could neither walk nor sail. The large rivers, for lack of sufficient incline to drain them into the sea, strayed here and there, as if uncertain which road to take, and then fell asleep in vast pools amongst the coast-sands. It was a dreary country, swept by strong winds, scourged by continual rain, and enveloped in a perpetual fog, through which nothing was heard ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... it may gradually give way before some sounder and better regulated system of credit which the growing intelligence of the age may devise. That a better may be substituted I cannot doubt; but of what it shall consist, and how it shall finally supersede the present uncertain and fluctuating currency, time alone can determine. All that I can see is, that the present must, one day or another, come to an end or be greatly modified—if that indeed can save it from an entire overthrow. It has within itself the seeds of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the last moment people in Paris did not believe that I would really go. My health was so uncertain that it seemed folly to undertake such a journey. But when it became absolutely certain that I was going, there was a general concert of spiteful reproaches. The hue and cry of my enemies was in full swing. I have now under my eyes these specimens of insanity, calumnies, lies, and stupidities; burlesque ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... was desirous to entertain of his own courtesy. From that night I evidently rose in his good graces; and, as he was always most agreeable and interesting when familiar, it was worth my while to advance, but by cautious circumvallations, into his intimacy; for his uncertain temper made his ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... off," he said. He started for the Platz. "How uncertain life is. It seems that I did not come to Bleiberg carelessly in the way of amusement, but to work out a part of my destiny." He arrested his steps at the fountain and listened to the low, musical plash of the water, each drop of which fell with ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... were bright. He told me of the fierce attacks of the pain, and how he had been given hypodermic injections which he amusingly termed "hypnotic injunctions" and "the sub-cutaneous." From Mr. and Mrs. Allen I learned how slender had been his chances, and how uncertain were the days ahead. Mr. Allen had already engaged passage home ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the morning there came an uncertain knock at the front door of the Trellis House. It presaged a note brought by one of the young Robeys for Mrs. Otway—a note written by Jervis Blake, telling her of his good fortune, and explaining that he had ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the manager of the bank, and got him to go before a magistrate with him, whilst he deposed on oath that the two cheques, before mentioned, were forgeries, alleging that his life was so uncertain that the criminal might escape justice by his sudden death. Then he and Dickson went back to the inn, and after dinner started together to drive ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... was descending the grand staircase of the Palais, steadying the uncertain steps of ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... him. Fatigued and appeased, he sank into a sort of gentle and uncertain torpor. As he fell asleep, he decided he would await a favourable opportunity, and his thoughts, fleeting further and further away, lulled him ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... you can afford it; a man as well fixed as you, that makes such terbacker as this, can afford to pay a lawyer right smart. I've no doubt the old man will get tired of it before you do; but, after all, law is the most uncertain thing ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... rigid form of the old man lying there before him, whose life had been such an enigma to his neighbors, then at the retreating forms of the two men who were slowly wending their way to the village, and a strange, uncertain light came into his eyes as he thus looked. He said nothing, however, of the thoughts that occupied his mind, and after bidding the others watch beside the body, he returned to his own home and informed the frightened females of what ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... in the constitution of his kingdom; whence it comes that many Laconian laws and customs appear amongst the Roman institutions. Yet, in any case, Numa was descended of the Sabines, who declare themselves to be a colony of the Lacedaemonians. And chronology, in general, is uncertain; especially when fixed by the lists of victors in the Olympic games, which were published at a late period by Hippias the Elean, and rest on no positive authority. Commencing, however, at a convenient point, we will proceed to give the most noticeable events that are recorded ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Montorio's height for a last farewell of the city,— So it appears; though then I was quite uncertain about it. So, however, it was. And now to explain the proceeding. I was to go, as I told you, I think, with the people to Florence. Only the day before, the foolish family Vernon Made some uneasy remarks, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... to the right. On the left it was uncertain whether it was joined or not. There was a line of trench to be seen on that side running back towards the German lines. It was merely a more regular line of mud amongst the irregular mud-heaps of the craters; but there were the heads of the ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... her book drop gently on the table, received Egremont with composure and native grace. It is civilization that makes us awkward, for it gives us an uncertain position. Perplexed, we take refuge in pretence; and embarrassed, we seek a resource in affectation. The Bedouin and the Red Indian never lose their presence of mind; and the wife of a peasant, when you enter her cottage, often greets you with ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... conflict is quite uncertain, for actually even the Sunday question hangs in the balance; while the spectacle is most amusing to the outsider and ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... more day in any event! For even if the weather should change in this uncertain season of the year, and a heavy fall of snow should stop Mrs. Brudenell's journey, that shall not prevent Mr. Brudenell from acknowledging you as his wife on Sunday! for it is quite time this were done, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... had a few gifts each year and an occasional legacy, both gifts and legacies have, in their very nature, been uncertain quantities and not to be relied upon. It has, therefore, followed that from 1870 to 1910, as well as in the period above referred to (1912 to 1915), for forty-three years, the Stone-Blackwell family has borne the brunt of the burden of the support ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Look Forward and Back at the Woman's Journal, the Organ of the - Woman's Movement • Agnes E. Ryan
... precursor of defeat. If necessary it invents new methods of attack, and rests not until it gains its objective point, or demonstrates the hopelessness of its quest. The world needs but be informed that on a given point knowledge is dim and uncertain, when there are found earnest minds applying to the solution of the mystery all the energies of their natures. All the resources of science are brought to bear; every department of knowledge is made to contribute of its store: and soon a mass of facts ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... I suppose I would," said Christie, in a rather uncertain tone; "but if Uncle Edward's going to Heaven, I do hope the angels will keep him a good way off Aunt Alice, and Father, and me. I don't think it would be so ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... difficulty he was persuaded to an interview with Pizarro. The latter addressed him courteously, and urged his return with him to the Castilian quarters in Caxamalca, representing it as the command of the Inca. Ever since the capture of his master, Challcuchima had remained uncertain what course to take. The capture of the Inca in this sudden and mysterious manner by a race of beings who seemed to have dropped from the clouds, and that too in the very hour of his triumph, had entirely ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... exclaimed the Emperor frequently, "your son, the work of your hand? And if the pages of history assign me any glory, must it not be shared with you—or rather, do you not share it with me? Anything that impedes my successes, or makes the continuance of my power uncertain or hazardous, reflects on you and is dangerous to you. With me you will shine or be obscured, rise or fall. Could you, therefore, hesitate (were I to demonstrate to you the necessity of such a measure) ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... store where I usually bought provisions I chanced to meet a woman who had crossed the continent in my company; and she turned her back upon me without speaking. She was an ignorant, bigoted sort of woman, of an uncertain temper, and at another time I might not have cared for the slight; but coming at a time when I was in a state of nervous alarm, it cut me to the quick. With great difficulty I restrained my tears, and left the store. While hurrying home with a basket on my arm, almost choked with grief, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... Baree wandered alone, or at least until the moon was well on the wane. He was a long way from the cabin, and his trail had been an uncertain and twisting one, but he was no longer possessed with the discomforting sensation of being lost. The last two or three months had been developing strongly in him the sense of orientation, that "sixth sense" which guides the pigeon unerringly on its way and takes a bear straight as ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... factor is introduced which outweighs the known quantities. Therefore the application of the culminative effect of interest accumulations is much dependent upon the sort of mine under consideration. In most cases of uncertain continuity in depth it introduces a mathematical refinement not warranted by the speculative elements. For instance, in a mine where the whole value is dependent upon extension of the deposit beyond openings, and where an expected ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... us hopes of drying our wet clothes; but the sunshine was of short duration. We had strong breezes at south-east by south, and dark gloomy weather, with storms of thunder, lightning, and rain. The night was truly horrible, and not a star to be seen, so that our steerage was uncertain. ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... another, but also on the grounds that, as ecclesiastical bodies occasionally used their power, "length of possession, which fortified and strengthened legal right and just title in every other case, did in this alone render them more weak and uncertain," from the difficulty which often occurred in finding documentary proof of very ancient titles; and that this was not an imaginary danger, since a member of the House then present had recently lost L120,000 by a ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... have spoken, and the air and curtains were laden with a subtle perfume. Perfume too seemed to emanate from the glorious hair and white-clinging vestments of She herself. I entered the little room, and there stood uncertain. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... was no sudden effort. He had brooded over it for many years: and to this hour it is uncertain what his principal motive was, unless it were a vain notion of his superiority, in being able, by whatever means, to deceive mankind. To effect this, he produced certain passages from Grotius, Masenius, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... he judged would please the young ladies. Of Mrs. Chadron he was sure; she had laughed over it a hundred times. It was about an adventure which the bard had shared with his gal in a place designated in Banjo's uncertain vocabulary as "the big ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... current from the thermopile, opening and closing switches, and actuating bells and lights. Then, too, I have the recording instrument. The thing is fundamentally very simple and is based on well-known phenomena. It is not uncertain and can be tested at any time, just as I did then, when I showed a slight fall in temperature. Of course it is not the slight changes I am after, not the gradual but the sudden ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... in applying them. The semeiotic says: "Such a gesture reveals such a passion;" and gesture replies: "To such a passion I will apply such a sign." And without awaiting the aid of an inspiration often hazardous, deceitful and uncertain, it moulds the body to its will, and forces it to reproduce the passion the soul has conceived. The semeiotic is a science, the aesthetic an act ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... library a few minutes later, her manner was that of one considerably disturbed by something that has transpired almost on the moment. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were reflectors of a no uncertain distress of mind. Mrs. Wrandall was standing before the fireplace, an exquisite figure in the slinky black evening gown which she affected in these days. Her perfectly modelled neck and shoulders gleamed like pink marble in the reflected ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... overwhelmed with her misery. Theodore belonged to another woman, and Jinnie, alone with her past and an uncertain future, sat staring dry-eyed into ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... in silence toward their hotel. The former was the first to speak. His uncertain fifteen-year-old voice broke in in a melancholy ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... perhaps even heavier and more obscuring, if possible, than the one so well remembered. He could not see anything three feet before him, he could not see with distinctness anything two feet ahead. The sensation of stepping forward was uncertain and mysterious enough to be almost appalling. A man not sufficiently cautious might have fallen into any open hole in his path. Antony Dart kept as closely as possible to the sides of the houses. It would have been easy to walk off the pavement into the middle ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thoughts and aspirations: "Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" Whether he spoke for himself alone, or by his use of the plural "we" meant to include all the Twelve, is uncertain and unimportant. He was thinking of the home and family he had left, and a longing for them was pardonable; he was thinking also of boats and nets, hooks and lines, and the lucrative business for which such things ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... seemed to me? You seemed to me like the reminder of everything good I had ever hoped for or believed in, looking at me across that distance, horrified at me. It was that I could not bear." His voice sounded harsh and uncertain, but it was better to hear than the even off-hand tone he ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... Johnson shows his hand most plainly. Comus "is a drama in the epic style, inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive". [Footnote: Johnson's Works, ix. 153.] Of Lycidas "the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers un-pleasing" [Footnote: Ib. 159.] As for the sonnets, "they deserve not any particular criticism. For of the best it can only be said that they are not bad; and perhaps only the eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... anxious, too. The schoolma'am recovered a bit of control and revolved in her mind several pert forms of greeting. She would not be too ready to forgive him—it would do him good to keep him anxious and uncertain for a while before she ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... was a most comfortless lodging, Glen would presently introduce some of his exploits and hardships, in comparison with which the state of things at the beacon bore an aspect of comfort and happiness. Looking to their slender stock of provisions, and their perilous and uncertain chance of speedy relief, he would launch out into an account of one of his expeditions in the North Sea, when the vessel, being much disabled in a storm, was driven before the wind with the loss of almost all their provisions; and the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Notions of Musick are so very uncertain, that we do not know what it is we like, only, in general, we are transported with any thing that is not English: so if it be of a foreign Growth, let it be Italian, French, or High-Dutch, it is the same thing. In short, our English Musick is quite rooted out, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Blake, the white sheets on the drafting boards showed growing pictures of braces and struts and curved plates, of castings for gun mounts, and ammunition hoists. And the manufacturers were told in no uncertain terms exactly what part of this experimental ship they would produce, and when it must ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... grab for the servant, who stood with mouth open, uncertain as to whether or not he ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... when the earth and stones fell away they left a narrow pathway, winding around the mountain, but so near the edge of a great chasm, that there was room but for one person at a time to walk on that footway. The uncertain trail up Phantom Mountain had all ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... certain heads of women smiling. This was in the workshop of Verocchio, who had already fixed a smile on David's face in bronze. When an old man, he left "Mona Lisa" on the easel not quite finished, the portrait of a subtle, shadowy, uncertain smile. This smile, this enigmatic revelation of a movement in the soul, this seductive ripple on the surface of the human personality, was to Lionardo a symbol of the secret of the world, an image of the universal mystery. It haunted ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... embracing points the most interesting, laws the most important, {359} doctrines the most essential to advance man in accordance with the spirit of the times. I may not live to see it in print; for, at ——, life at best is uncertain: but, live or die, be assured Sir, it is not my intention to debase the work by seeking patronage, or pandering to the public taste. Your advice was the less needed, seeing I am an old-established ——. I remain, etc.—P.S. You will oblige me by returning ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... soldiers they would always find him there. My opinion has always been, though I have never had much to do with war, that the general who establishes his headquarters in the saddle, was not always to be found when you wanted him. In short, the saddle is a very uncertain locality, and very difficult to find when you have information to convey, and orders to receive; both of which may be necessary during a battle. I rode an hour once to find a general whose headquarters were in the saddle, and did n't find ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... miss, my good Proudhon, that dark, obscure, smoky chamber in which I dwelt in Besancon, and where we spent so many pleasant hours in the discussion of philosophy! Do you remember it? But that is now far away. Will that happy time ever return? Shall we one day meet again? Here my life is restless, uncertain, precarious, and, what is worse, indolent, illiterate, and vagrant. I do no work, I live in idleness, I ramble about; I do not read, I no longer study; my books are forsaken; now and then I glance over a few ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... why, and he went away without thanking me. An hour later another outcast approached and whined his story. I had a blank bit of paper in my pocket, on which was traced the Yellow Sign, and I handed it to him. He looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then with an uncertain glance at me, folded it with what seemed to me exaggerated care and placed it ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... heavenly grace and vertue shrined is, When ye these rythmes doo read, and vew the rest, Loath this base world, and thinke of heavens blis: And though ye be the fairest of Gods creatures, Yet thinke that death shall spoyle your goodly features. [* Tickle, uncertain.] ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... fever longing still, For that which longer nurseth the disease; Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approve Desire is death, which physic did except. Past cure I am, now Reason is past care, And frantic-mad ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... stood mazed and uncertain, I hearde a distant Clatter of Horse's Feet, on the hard Road a good Way off, and could descrie Dick coming towards Sheepscote. Rose saw him too, and commenced running towards me; Mr. Agnew following with long Strides. Rose drew me back into the House, and sayd, kissing me, "Dearest ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... it might be added, that the revenue belonging to most of the Corporation Livings is no such mighty business: for were it not for the uncertain and humorsome contribution of the well-pleased parishioners, the Parson and his family might be easily starved, for all the lands and income that belong to the Church. Besides, the great mischief that such kind of hired Preachers ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... raising a hand, and brushing something off her cheek. I gazed round for a means of diverting her thoughts. On one side of the road rose a high, rough bank, where hazels and stunted oaks, with their roots half exposed, held uncertain tenure: the soil was too loose for the latter; and strong winds had blown some nearly horizontal. In summer Miss Catherine delighted to climb along these trunks, and sit in the branches, swinging twenty ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... MUSHARRAF has complied largely with IMF recommendations to raise petroleum prices, widen the tax net, privatize public sector assets, and improve the balance of trade. However, Pakistan's economic prospects remain uncertain; too little has changed despite the new administration's intentions. Foreign exchange reserves hover at roughly $1 billion, GDP growth hinges on crop performance, the import bill has been hammered by high oil ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... architecture in order to satisfy an American woman's appetite for startling effect, and told him to arrange to dispose of the lot and its immature walls to the highest bidder. His precise plans for the future were still uncertain when Selma called on him, and found comfort for her own miseries in ministering to his solitude, but he expressed an inclination to return to his native Western town, as the most congenial spot in which to end his days. Selma, whose soul was full of Benham, suggested it as an alternative, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... three times to the king, he replied to us that, although he was grieved by what had happened, there were three reasons why we should not avenge ourselves or make war upon Luzon. The first was that the Castilians had long been friends of the Chinese in this region; the second is that it was uncertain who would be victorious, Chinese or Castilians; and the third and last reason, that the people slain by the Castilians were a base people, ungrateful to China, their native country, to their parents, and to their relatives, since so many ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... measures for the purpose of collecting his troops, when he was surprised by Dagalaiphus, an active officer, whom Julian, as soon as he landed at Bononia, had pushed forwards with some light infantry. The captive general, uncertain of his life or death, was hastily thrown upon a horse, and conducted to the presence of Julian; who kindly raised him from the ground, and dispelled the terror and amazement which seemed to stupefy his faculties. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... satisfaction in life from her. She is much the same age as myself. My eldest son is nineteen years, my next son seventeen, the third fourteen, and the last child, a girl of eleven years; they are all members of the church. My occupation is a farmer, but as the seasons in this part of the country, are uncertain, I also keep a team of horses, and waggons for the carrying goods from one place to another, which I attend to myself, with the assistance of my sons; and by this way of life have gained the good will of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... dies, he is buried, after being wrapped up in mats and cloth, much after our manner. The chiefs seem to have the fiatookas appropriated to them as their burial-places; but the common people are interred in no particular spot. What part of the mourning ceremony follows immediately after, is uncertain; but that there is something besides the general one, which is continued for a considerable length of time, we could infer, from being informed, that the funeral of Mareewagee's wife, as mentioned before, was to be attended with ceremonies that were ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... molded concrete piles with hammer drivers is an uncertain operation. It has been done successfully even in quite hard soils and it can be done if time is taken and the proper care is exercised. The conditions of successful hammer driving are: Perfect alignment of the pile with the line of stroke of ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... these causes, and others which I forbear mentioning, the profession of provincial Bankers in England is limited in its regular profits, and uncertain in its returns, to a degree unknown in Scotland; and is, therefore, more apt to be adopted in the South by men of sanguine hopes and bold adventure (both frequently disproportioned to the extent of their ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... however, misty or uncertain about what we can touch. Through the sense of touch I know the faces of friends, the illimitable variety of straight and curved lines, all surfaces, the exuberance of the soil, the delicate shapes of flowers, the noble forms of trees, and the range of mighty winds. Besides objects, surfaces, and ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... bit!" That covers everything. Here's an example of how God walks among us. In one of our attacks on the Somme, all the observers up forward were uncertain as to what had happened. We didn't know whether our infantry had captured their objective, failed, or gone beyond it. The battlefield, as far as eye could reach, was a bath of mud. It is extremely easy in the excitement of an offensive, ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... go to London. She had money enough for her fare, and perhaps a few shillings over. In a dim way she did understand that the choice was between going to the devil at once,—and not going quite at once; and then, weakly, wistfully, with uncertain step, almost without an operation of her mind, she did not take the turn which, from the end of Trotter's Buildings, would have brought her to the Railway Station, but did take that which led her by ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... poet, Longfellow, who talked to me in the pure Tuscan. I saw, too, other smaller cities, and then I appeared again in New York, where the favour of the public was confirmed, not only for me, but also for the artists of my company, and especially for Isolina Piamonti, who received no uncertain marks of esteem and consideration. We then proceeded to Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Toledo, and that pleasant city, Detroit, continuing to Chicago, and finally to ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... their privileges are to be proportioned to this. The constitution in the Laws is a timocracy of wealth, modified by an aristocracy of merit. Yet the political philosopher will observe that the first of these two principles is fixed and permanent, while the latter is uncertain and dependent on the opinion of the multitude. Wealth, after all, plays a great part in the Second Republic of Plato. Like other politicians, he deems that a property qualification will contribute stability ...
— Laws • Plato
... seemed uncertain whether the kingbirds would ever really occupy the nest, so spasmodic was the work upon it. Now one of the pair came with a bit of something, placed it, tried its effect this way and that, and then disappeared; while for hours every day ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... spirit, evidently considering it a mortal and material be- lief of flesh and bones, whereas the Jews took a diametrically opposite view. To Jesus, not 352:9 materiality, but spirituality, was the reality of man's ex- istence, while to the rabbis the spiritual was the intangi- ble and uncertain, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... ghosts of dead passions and intrigues, of dead Queens, in whom the twin flames of love and courage could be quenched only by flames of the funeral pyre. Their blood ran in her veins—and in his too. That closeness of belonging none could snatch from her. About the other, she was growing woefully uncertain, as day followed day, and still no word. Was there trouble after all! Would ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... cabinet: State Council is the collective executive authority; members appointed by the president elections: president elected by the National Assembly; election last held 8 June 1993 (next election date uncertain as the National Assembly did not hold a presidential election in December 2001 as anticipated) election results: ISAIAS Afworki elected president; percent of National Assembly vote ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... strangely of her dead brother. It was not surprising that she attributed Anthony's condition to a somewhat similar cause. What troubled her most was her conscience. She had set her heart upon the match, and she was now uncertain whether it was not her clear duty to try to ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... to the fact that Monkey's old-time enemy, the vanquished of Cannibal's National fifteen years before, Chukkers, the greatest of cross-country riders, was an American citizen of uncertain origin. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... was swarming with natives who had come, no doubt, from the neighbouring islets, attracted by the prospect of pillaging the Jane. Seventy boats were being paddled towards the ship. The six men on board fired on them, but their aim was uncertain in the first volley; a second, in which mitraille and grooved bullets were used, produced terrible effect. Nevertheless, the Jane being boarded by the swarming islanders, her defenders were massacred, and ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... have these attempts, which have doubtless been made at several periods, come out? This would at present be very difficult to ascertain. The exploitations have been too numerous to allow us now to estimate the value of a bed from the data furnished by geology, and local tradition is too uncertain or exaggerated to allow us to place ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... established in a large rude house surrounded by its various outbuildings and the huts of the British slaves and the Saxon and British bondmen. Just how largely the Britons were exterminated and how largely they were kept alive as slaves and wives, is uncertain; but it is evident that at least a considerable number were spared; to this the British names of many of our objects of humble use, for example mattoc and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the idea had several times presented itself to him, and he had deliberated on it—for that we have facts, witnesses, and his own words. I confess, gentlemen of the jury," he added, "that till to-day I have been uncertain whether to attribute to the prisoner conscious premeditation. I was firmly convinced that he had pictured the fatal moment beforehand, but had only pictured it, contemplating it as a possibility. He had not definitely considered when ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... should be at his mercy. Then he commenced to say to her, in that delicate manner to which princes are accustomed, that, in the first place, virtuous women pay dearly for their virtue, since in order to gain the uncertain blessings of the future, they lose all the sweetest joys of the present, because husbands were compelled, from motives of conjugal policy, not show them all the jewels in the shrine of love, since the said jewels would so affect their hearts, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... 'Uncertain,'" called the girl roguishly, seeing that no one was paying any attention to her ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... himself that he did so. But Betty, being Betty, though for the most part her eyes seemed downcast, knew that the man at her side thought of little but her own exasperating self. She did a good bit of speculating upon Jim Kendric; she was perplexed and uncertain; when he was not observing she shot many a curious ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... African traveller ever avoids camping near bare stones. Dew, however, wetted our boxes like thin rain: the meteor, remarked for the first time on March 13th, will last, they say, three months, and will greatly forward vegetation. It seems to be uncertain, or rather to be influenced by conditions which we had no opportunity of studying: at times it would be exceptionally heavy, and in other places it was entirely absent. Before evening new contract-boots, bought from the Mukhbir, were distributed to the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... men of his regiment, and shouting wildly, he rushed at the doorway. In the dusk the enemy were uncertain of the number of their assailants and, in their horror of the bayonet, they fired one wild volley and fled. To continue the ruse, Captain Uniacke climbed to the roof, shouting words of command, as if he had a company behind him. Then he ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... Campaign, And no Coffee-house haunts, but to settle his Brain. He laughs at dry Morals, and never does think, Unless 'tis to get the best Wenches and Drink. He dwells in a Tavern, and lies ev'ry where, And improving his hours, lives an Age in a Tear: For as Life is uncertain, he loves to make haste; And thus he lives longest, because he lives fast: Then a Leap in the dark to the Devil he takes. What Death can ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... can hope for retribution, deny not to the gentle shade of this unfortunate captive the humble though uncertain hope of animating some happier form; or trying his new fledged pinions in some happy elysium, beyond the reach of Man the ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... of the queen he was brought before the Star Chamber in 1634, sentenced to the pillory, and had his ears cropped off, and for an offence against Laud, whether by order of the Star Chamber or not is uncertain, was in 1637 sentenced anew, and "lost his ears a second and final time, having had them 'sewed on again' before; this time a heroine on the scaffold," adds Carlyle, "received them on her lap and kissed him"; after this the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... samovar for me?' exclaimed Jane Anne, addressing both her parents, as though uncertain which of them would help her. 'You filled it so awfully full to-day, I can't lift it. I advertise ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... too; for, if you fulfill your engagements, you do them no injustice. You may, in this case, as well have two strings to your bow as not, and I think I would advise to it, especially as the 'Columbian's' continuance is uncertain.[7] I would inform N. W. that some consideration was necessary respecting his plan; but that I was, upon the whole, inclined to think I would join him, if he could get the other gentlemen he mentioned to me to ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... have room for one,' he said at length. 'But you're such an uncertain kind of chap. You don't seem to care much whether you work or not. You're too independent, you know; one can't say two words to you but you must needs ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... northern shore of Bahia Blanca. I did not observe any shells in this neighbourhood at a greater height than twenty feet; and therefore the age of the sea-drifted pebbles of pumice, now standing at the height of 120 feet, must remain uncertain. ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... strength of his nature, this man whom he had confided in so entirely, had deceived and betrayed him. It was too horrible to doubt the noblest and most beautiful, the holiest and gentlest—to be so confounded, so uncertain in his best and purest feelings. He could not banish doubt from his heart; like a death-worm, it was gnawing day and night, destroying his vitality—poisoning every hour of the day, and even in his dreams uttering ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... particular about him—his delicate white hands, his weather-worn and travel-stained dress, his fair, aristocratic features, his sweeping, abundant beard, his careless, cool, tired, reckless way; and they were uncertain what to ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... bridges. But it was in vain; lying comfortably on straw or branches around great fires, devouring horse meat, they were afraid of the crowding on the bridge during the night, they hesitated to give up a sure bivouac for an uncertain one, they feared that the frost, which was very severe, would kill ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... words that she called her first son Cain, an acquisition (the Latin peculium expresses it more exactly than any English word), because she had gotten (literally acquired, or obtained possession of) a man. As for Lamech, or more properly L[)e]m[)e]ch, its etymology must be confessed to be uncertain; but there is a curious and interesting explanation of the whole series of names of the patriarchs, Noah's forefathers, in which the name of the other Lemech, son of Methusaleh, is regarded as made up of L[)e], the prefixed preposition, and of mech, taken for the participle Hophal of the verb ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... succession to the title of his ancestors was for some time altogether uncertain—there being, so late as the year 1794, a grandson of the fifth lord still alive—his mother had, from his very birth, cherished a strong persuasion that he was destined not only to be a lord, but "a great man." One of the circumstances ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... off in a far corner to get your momentary glimpse of daylight, but to batter a hole in the roof of your cave and let daylight in where you live all the time. I can't help being suspicious of a daylight that's so uncertain you have to go away from life and hold your breath before you can see it for a minute. I want it where I ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... These writers passed with the most artful conciseness over the misfortunes of the nation, celebrated its successful valor, and adorned the triumph with many Asiatic trophies, that more properly belonged to the people of Scythia. On the faith of ancient songs, the uncertain, but the only memorials of barbarians, they deduced the first origin of the Goths from the vast island, or peninsula, of Scandinavia. [5] [501] That extreme country of the North was not unknown to the conquerors of Italy: the ties of ancient consanguinity ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... is not less uncertain than that of the body, and when passions seem furthest removed we are no less in danger of infection than of falling ill when we ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... alone. For a promise cannot be received except by faith alone. Rom. 4, 16: Therefore it is of faith that it might be by grace, to the end that the promise might be sure; as though he were to say: "If the matter were to depend upon our merits, the promise would be uncertain and useless, because we never could determine when we would have sufficient merit." And this, experienced consciences can easily understand [and would not, for a thousand worlds, have our salvation depend upon ourselves]. Accordingly, Paul says, Gal. ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... Mrs. Laudersdale turned, she saw Mr. Raleigh standing composedly in the doorway and surveying them. She bade him good-morning, coolly enough, while Helen began searching the grounds of the tea-cups, rather uncertain how much of her recital might have met ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... victory, saying he would not be satisfied with less than twenty prizes. He was cheerful and talked freely, but all the while he carefully watched the enemy's course and formation, and personally directed the course of his own ship. He meant, as he had said before, to keep the enemy uncertain to the last as to his attack, and as the distance shortened he headed for a while for the enemy's van before turning for the dash into his centre. Cheerful as he was, he did not expect to survive the fight. He disregarded the request of his friends ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... from the Government concerning them. Ministers are entitled to appear and to speak in either chamber as often as they may desire, provided they do not otherwise infringe upon the order of business. By reason of the uncertain status of ministerial responsibility the right of interpellation means as yet but little in practice. The minister may or may not reply to inquiries, and in any case he is not obliged by unfavorable opinion or ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... October 6th.—The weather still uncertain, but more beautiful in its effects on these grand mountains, in their October glory, than I can describe to you. They are grand—Mount Washington[A] being higher than Mount Rhigi and Mount Rhigi is majestic even in the presence of Mont Blanc and of the Jungfrau. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with no motive but to confirm her belief that the world was full of interest, "You must go on with your Spanish, you know. Don't just treat it as a commercial language. There's a lot of fine stuff in Spanish literature." He hesitated, feeling uncertain as to whether "Celestina" or "Juan de Ruiz" were really suitable for a young girl. "Saint Teresa, you know," he suggested, with the air of one who had landed ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... It is here indeed, that the personal character of the white man is put to the test. A calm, just, firm rule will win both the love and respect of these over-grown children, but an excitable, harsh, uncertain temper and manner, will only awaken distrust and hatred. The more popular the head of the Station, the easier it is for him to find workers in the villages, which in turn affect the general condition of the country around. Although the system ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... lonely ones sat hand in hand, talking of the happy days of childhood, of the perplexing present and the uncertain future. At last, wearied out with watching and anxiety, Catharine leaned her head upon the neck of old Wolfe and fell asleep, while Louis restlessly paced to and fro in front of the sleeper; now straining ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... advance from the state of separate wandering families to that of a nomadic tribe. The authority of the strongest makes itself felt among a body of savages as in a herd of animals, or a posse of schoolboys. At first, however, it is indefinite, uncertain; is shared by others of scarcely inferior power; and is unaccompanied by any difference in occupation or style of living: the first ruler kills his own game, makes his own weapons, builds his own hut, and economically considered, does not differ from others of his tribe. Gradually, as the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... been hauled sufficiently high upon the beach, and carrying away uncautious natives. This violent surf is probably in some way dependent upon the swell of the great southern ocean and the violent currents that flow through the Straits of Lombock. These are so uncertain that vessels preparing to anchor in the bay are sometimes suddenly swept away into the straits, and are not able to get back ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... head. If she dropped off, it was uncertain whether she would stop until she had rolled some distance; perhaps she might not stop before she reached the edge of the crag. Anyhow, she did not mean to let go, and tried to catch the snow with her toes in an effort to help Thorn to steer the sledge. It swerved a little but rushed on again, ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... the sense that they're exact duplicates of humans—and they live, but what about emotions? If we accept the somewhat unscientific theory that it's a soul which is responsible for feelings and emotions, these ... these ... creatures would be handicapped." Brent paused as if uncertain of his ground. "Wouldn't they?" he asked lamely. "I mean, they couldn't—theoretically, at least—react to situations ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... the author's hand is now in the British Museum. Editions of his works were published with added information by William Herbert (3 vols., 1785-1790), and T. F. Dibdin (4 vols., 1810-1819). Ames's occupation is variously given. It is uncertain whether he was a ship-chandler, a patten-maker, a plane-iron maker or an ironmonger; but he led a prosperous life at Wapping, and amassed valuable collections of antiquities. He died on the 7th of October 1759. His other works are catalogues of English printers, of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... time in a conversation of this kind Marsham's reply was halting and uncertain. He would do his best, but he could not pledge himself. When the Chief Whip, disappointed and astonished, broke up their conference, Marsham walked into the House after him, in the morbid belief that a large part of his influence and prestige ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Then an uncertain hand drew the heavy curtain aside. Jadwin, her husband, stood before her, his eyes sunken deep in his head, his face dead white, his hand shaking. He stood for a long instant in the middle of the room, looking at her. Then at last his ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... light but moist soil of a vegetable nature, but they also thrive in a sandy loam. They may be increased by seed, or, more quickly, by grafting on stocks of spurge laurel; cuttings may be rooted, but are uncertain. ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... pomatum, with which a few grains of carbonate of lead, lead plaster, or trisnitrate of bismuth, have been blended by heat and careful trituration, has generally a like effect on the hair to ferruginous solutions; so also has a leaden comb, but its action is very uncertain. None of these last are, however, safe for long-continued use. Atrophy of the scalp, baldness, and even local paralysis, have sometimes, though rarely, been caused ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... reflection, the doubt, the hope, that all this might be a rumor spread by his enemies. She hastened to Paris to obtain information from the Directory, so as to find out if there were any foundation for the report of Bonaparte's death. But the Directory had as uncertain news as Josephine herself, and the absence of information seemed ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... When uncertain as to whether you have to deal with a broken bone or a dislocated joint, give treatment for a broken bone, because rest and quiet for the injured part are good in ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... glass with, some coloring matter, and occasionally ornamented it with a ribbing. Whether they were able to form masses of glass of any considerable size, whether they used it, like the Egyptians, for beads and bugles, or for mosaics, is uncertain. If we suppose a foundation in fact for Pliny's story of the great emerald (?) presented by a king of Babylon to an Egyptian Pharaoh, we must conclude that very considerable masses of glass were produced by the Babylonians, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... Throughout the night at uncertain intervals their guns threw shells into Gommecourt. It was difficult to believe that the terrible explosions which resulted were caused by a shell lighter than our 18 pounders, whose shrapnel burst with an almost inaudible 'pip.' Practically the only retaliation indulged in by the Germans ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... that he rightly understood himself, you see. I think his mind was troubled by their having broke with one another; and that but for being ashamed before the gentlemen, and perhaps for being uncertain too, how she might take it, he'd have gone through any suffering or trial to have had Meg's promise and Meg's hand again. That's my belief. He never said so; more's the pity! He took to drinking, idling, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... But as Molly grew to be a little girl instead of a child, when she was about eight years old, her father perceived the awkwardness of her having her breakfasts and dinners so often alone with the pupils, without his uncertain presence. To do away with this evil, more than for the actual instruction she could give, he engaged a respectable woman, the daughter of a shopkeeper in the town, who had left a destitute family, to come every morning before breakfast, and to stay with Molly ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... excitement he took the gold piece out of his pocket and pitched it up. He had been stooping over the table. The fog was creeping into the room. And in the uncertain light about the ceiling he missed the gold piece and it fell on the table before Sir Henry. The gold piece did not ring, it fell dull and heavy, and the big Baronet looked at it openmouthed as though it had suddenly materialized out of the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... him here, for they know him As well as the clerk of the course; He's raced and won races till, blow him, He's done as a handicap horse. A jady, uncertain performer, They weight him right out of the hunt, And clap it on warmer and warmer Whenever he gets near ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... dim as though it fell on beating wings; but there too divine colour seized and shaped forth solid forms, and thence away to others in uttermost distances where the incredible flickering gleam of new heights arose, that soared, or stretched their white uncertain curves in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the young king heard these last words, he appeared as if he had received a poisoned arrow in his heart. He could not remain quiet in a place, but cast around an uncertain, dead, and aimless look over the assembly. He with his eyes interrogated his mother more than twenty times: but she, given up to the pleasure of conversing with her sister-in-law, and likewise constrained by the glance of ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... high disdain; "as if I'd put myself again under that quack's thumb. No, sir!" and snapping his fingers derisively at Ben, he straightened up jauntily on his somewhat uncertain feet. "All I want is a little air," ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... but indefinitely located piece of land in their place. He tried to undersell the state in the land market, and undoubtedly his offers had been among the main causes that induced Robertson and his associates to go to the Cumberland when they did. But at the time it was uncertain whether Cumberland lay in Virginia or North Carolina, as the line was not run by the surveyors until the following spring; and Robertson went up to see Clark, because it was rumored that the latter had the disposal of Virginia "cabin-rights"; ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... through her formularies in her natural voice as she did venture to do in the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, it must be that she has fallen into that stage of decrepitude where the natural voice is uncertain. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... of Julius the Third sanctioning the use of these proscribed articles of food—at whose instigation it was given is uncertain—was regarded by the Parliament of Paris as allowing a "scandalous relaxation" of morals, and the keeper of the seals gave orders, by cry of the herald, that all booksellers and printers be forbidden to sell copies ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... becoming a Christian is beginning a work, not finishing it. Be cautious how you form an opinion even yourself on the question of the genuineness of their piety. Be content not to know. You will be more faithful and watchful if you consider it uncertain, and they will be more ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... peculiar character of this income I am kept in a state of strange and most painful excitement. Although it is tolerably certain that my two last operas will be given at all German theatres, as "Tannhauser" has already been at most of them, the time when they may be asked for and paid for is so uncertain that I, being largely dependent upon this income, often get into a fatally unsettled state of mind, in which my sanguine temperament is apt to suggest to me that the royalties to be expected are nearer than they really are. By ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... to be in some common hall trod by the footsteps of an ever-changing crowd. But the brilliant sunlight no longer streamed on the pallid walls, the tapers burning at every altar simply gleamed like stars amidst the uncertain gloom which filled the building. A solemn high mass had been celebrated at midnight with extraordinary pomp, amidst all the splendour of candles, chants, golden vestments, and swinging, steaming censers; but of all this glorious display there now remained only the regulation number of tapers ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... examination. When sick, according to Parkes, the coat of the animal is rough or standing, the nostrils are dry or covered with foam, the eyes are heavy, the tongue protrudes, the respiration is difficult, the movements are slow and uncertain, and the various organs of the body perform their functions abnormally. On the other hand, the healthy animal moves freely, has a bright eye and moist nostril and a clear skin, the respiration is not hurried and the breath has no unpleasant odor, the circulation ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... against a massive carved bookshelf, and looked at Sagan, who, with a cigar-butt buried in his ragged beard, was walking, with long, uncertain steps, up and down the floor. The tiger in the old ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... It became a marvel to Martie that life could go on for any one while her own future was so frightfully uncertain. She was going to have a baby, and she was not married—that was the summary of the situation. It was like something in a book, only worse than any book that she had ever read. Sometimes she felt as if her brain were being ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... night leading to far-off African lands, hugging the shore by a tufted darkness of trees, there came a felucca that gleamed with lanterns. The oars sounded in the water, mingling with the voices of the men, whose vague, uncertain forms, some crouched, some standing up, some leaning over the river, that was dyed with streaks of light into which the shining drops fell back from the lifted blades, were half revealed to the watchers above them ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... In a civilized country when ridicule fails to kill a movement it begins to command respect. Opponents meet it by respectful and cogent argument and the mutual behaviour of rival parties never becomes violent. Each party seeks to convert the other or draw the uncertain element towards its side by ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... saw we Dread, all trembling how he shook With foot uncertain proffered here and there, Benumbed of speech, and with a ghastly look Searched every place, all pale and dead with fear, His cap borne up with staring of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... affect the rights of nationalities there represented, still Congress might be unwilling to subject the existing treaty rights of the United States on the Isthmus and elsewhere on the continent to be clouded and rendered uncertain by the expression of the opinions of a congress composed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... his personal conviction that he was right, Anketam had to admit that Jacovik had reason for his own opinion. He knew that many of the farmers were uncertain about the ultimate outcome of ...
— The Destroyers • Gordon Randall Garrett
... German national spirit flourished, but the future of the Empire was uncertain till its fate was decided by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In the great hall of the Palace of Versailles in 1871 William I, King of Prussia, proclaimed, in the hour of victory, the restoration of the confederated ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... upon its bleak, bare surface as if they would fain shield it with a pure and beautiful mantle. Faster and faster came the storm, even the deacon concluded that it would amount to something, after all; perhaps there might be sleighing on Thanksgiving-day; though he thought it rather uncertain. His wife did not reply, she was bidding the children be a little less ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... Jim to hold his tongue. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Furze wished to appear in court, and they were uncertain what Catharine might do if they went any further. Mr. Orkid Jim had the best of reasons for silence, but Mr. Humphries, the builder, of course repeated what he himself knew, and so it went about that Tom was wrong in his accounts, and all ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... as he turned away, but other sounds came from within the house, clearly audible with the opening of a door upstairs—a long and wailing cry of lamentation in the voice of Mrs. Adams. Russell paused at the steps, uncertain, but Alice waved to him to ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... interesting now, when, owing to the war, the railways of the land are under temporary Government control, and their future all uncertain, to remember that, on the Statute Book to-day, there is an Act which provides for State purchase of the railways of the country. Whether a solution of the difficulty will be found in State purchase or in State control ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... that they found the Elk after being lost in the woods for one Day and part of another, the most of the meat was Spoiled, they distance was So great and uncertain and the way bad, they brought only the Skins, york was left behind by Some accident which detained us Some time eer he Came up after passing round the pt. No. 2 in verry high swells, we Stopd & Dined in the commencement of a bay, after which proceeded on around the bay to S E. & assended ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Peter, gathering up the scattered sheets of Kenelm's effusion with hurried, trembling hands. "Don't ask,—don't talk of it; 'tis but one of the disappointments that all of us must undergo, when we invest our hopes in the uncertain ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... importance of these principles is obvious. The next chapter will show more of their influence on ideas and emotions; but for the present we will consider their lessons in the sphere of the physical. Psychology speaks here in no uncertain terms to physiology. Whoever becomes fascinated by the processes of his own body is bound to magnify the sensations from those processes, until the most insignificant message from the subconscious becomes a distressing and alarming symptom. The person whose mental ear is strained ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... instruction is given in villages and visitas are in excess of seven hundred, as was represented to his Catholic Majesty by the royal officials in a report in the year 1720. As for the number of Spaniards and foreigners, the computation is extremely difficult and uncertain; and therefore it is not safe to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... the way; its atmosphere, heated by a stove at one end, was dry and oppressive. It would have been impossible, looking at the motley company lounging in the lamplight, to have told their relations one to another; but it was evident that an uncertain number of young people, placed near the lady who held the baby, were of the same party; they slept in twos and threes, leaning on one another's shoulders and covered by the same wraps. It was to seats left vacant near this group that the man and his wife who had ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the humble-born: he desired above all, and attempted too much, to depict the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical leanings which account for his uncertain tread when he would move with ease among the boudoirs of Mayfair. Nevertheless, in the honest heart of him, as his earliest novel forever proves, he felt for the woes of those social underlings who, as we have long since learned, have their microcosm faithfully reflecting the greater ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... a word, Patty need not have insisted on her silence. But Patty was so excited that it made her quick of speech and a little uncertain of temper. ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... no more heed to her than if he were a shadow of a man, and went by her with wavering, uncertain steps, without a word. In sudden alarm she hastened to the roof, and found Mildred kneeling by her chair, weeping and almost speechless from grief. She took the girl in her arms, and said excitedly, "Vat did ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of Constantine. But as some mixture of prodigy and fable has in every age been supposed to reflect a becoming majesty on the origin of great cities, the emperor was desirous of ascribing his resolution not so much to the uncertain counsels of human policy as to the eternal and infallible decrees of divine wisdom. In one of his laws he has been careful to instruct posterity that in obedience to the commands of God he laid the everlasting ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... with her cap on one side, and her shoes down at heel; with a row of pins between her teeth; with the Oriental Cashmere Robe slowly slipping off the table; with her scissors suspended uncertain in one hand, and her written directions for dressmaking held doubtfully in the other—so absorbed over the invincible difficulties of her employment as to be perfectly unconscious that she was at that moment the object ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... unlikely that Harry would reciprocate her proposed feelings? The Imp hesitated between a natural vexation and an artistic pleasure. Such a failure on his part would wound the woman, but it would add pathos to the play. She became almost sure that she could love Harry; she remained uncertain whether he should return the compliment. And, after all, to be Lady Tristram of Blent! That was attractive. Or (in case Harry suffered defeat) to be Lady Tristram of Blent in the sight of heaven (a polite and time-honored way of describing ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... men, and induce them to face danger more readily on his account, if he bestowed some pains on the burial of the horsemen who fell in that expedition, ordered them to be conveyed into the camp, in order that all might be spectators of the honours paid them at their funeral. Nothing is so uncertain, or so difficult to form a judgment of, as the minds of the multitude. That which seems calculated to increase their alacrity, in exertions of every sort, often creates in them fear and inactivity. Accordingly, those who, being always accustomed to ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... street lamps, the town was in darkness and the streets silent, except for a chance wayfarer. Two or three seamen came up the quay and went aboard the steamer in the next berth. A woman came slowly along, peering in an uncertain fashion at the various craft, and shrinking back as a seaman passed her. Abreast of the Seamew she stopped, and in the same doubtful manner looked down on the deck. The skipper crossed to the side, and straining his eyes through the ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... is capable of is to calculate—interpreting the vague phrases of ministers, spelling out the sense of the speeches of sovereigns, and ruminating on the words attributed to diplomatists reported on the uncertain authority of the newspapers—whether it is to be to-morrow or the day after, this year or the next, that we are to be murdered. So that one might seek in vain in history an epoch more insecure, more crushed under ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... us: which is the only means to keep the true Sabbath in inward holinesse." {149} The anonymous translator ascribes the book to Weigel. It is, in fact. Part Two of [Greek] Gnothi Seauton, but it is uncertain whether it was written by Weigel himself. But whether written by Weigel or later by one of his school, it is a good illustration of the way in which mystically inclined Christians of that period endeavoured to make spiritual ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the sailor hesitated, uncertain as to which way to turn. Little by little, however, his eyes grew accustomed to the touch of the water, and he saw, lying on the bottom a few feet ahead of him, a small ball glowing with a pale phosphorescent light. Stooping to touch ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... day in which she peculiarly wished his attendance at some one of those parties in which Englishmen think the notion of festivity strange—for it includes conversation—Volktman had foretold the menace of some great misfortune. Uncertain, from the character of the prediction, whether to wish his wife to remain at home or to go abroad, he yielded to her wish, and accompanied her to her friend's house. A young Englishman lately arrived at Rome, and already celebrated in the circles of ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... interest, which last is a great thing gained; for the pupil rejoiced in the anticipation of success. The struggle over single difficult places destroys all pleasure, palsies talent, creates disgust, and, what is worse, it tends to render uncertain the confirmation of the faculty already partially acquired,—of bringing out a fine legato tone, with loose and quiet fingers and a yielding, movable wrist, without the assistance of ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... appears on the title-page of this volume, it is necessary that I should exactly state what part I had in its preparation. I had no doubt originally engaged to undertake the work myself; but finding, from multiplicity of engagements and my uncertain health, that I could not accomplish it satisfactorily, I thought the best course I could take was to recommend Mr. Cooke to the publishers; a gentleman well known, not only in this country, but in the United States. The whole of the work has therefore been prepared by himself, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... stood close And awful; drank the light up as it dropt, And kept the dusk of ages at their roots); They do not well who mock at such, and cry, "We peaceably, without or fault or fear, Proceed, and miss not of our end; but these Are slow and fearful: with uncertain pace, And ever reasoning of the way, they oft, After all reasoning, choose the worser course, And plunged in swamp, or in the matted growth Nigh smothered struggle, all to reach a goal Not worth their pains." Nor do they well whose work Is still to feed ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... full. Our other book was much more compassable and more widely circulated. Its author was a certain Johannes Marchesinus, of whom so little is known that his date has been put both at 1300 and at 1466. Even the title of the book was uncertain. Marchesinus names it Mammotrectus or Mammetractus, which he explains as 'led by a pedagogue'; but a current form of the name was Mammothreptus, which was interpreted as 'brought up by one's grandmother'. The book consists of a commentary on the whole Bible, chapter by chapter; ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... distances of the planets. Plato probably intended to represent the earth, from which Er and his companions are viewing the heavens, as stationary in place; but whether or not herself revolving, unless this is implied in the revolution of the axis, is uncertain (Timaeus). The spectator may be supposed to look at the heavenly bodies, either from above or below. The earth is a sort of earth and heaven in one, like the heaven of the Phaedrus, on the back of which the spectator ...
— The Republic • Plato
... walked an elderly man, with bronzed features and thin gray hair, supporting his somewhat uncertain steps by a stout cane. He was apparently tired, for, seeing a slight natural elevation under a branching elm tree, he sat down, and looked thoughtfully ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - or, Jacob Marlowe's Secret • Horatio Alger
... in the case of the liveries or uniforms which some corporations prescribe as the distinctive dress of their employees. In this country the aversion even goes the length of discrediting—in a mild and uncertain way—those government employments, military and civil, which require the wearing of a ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... evil tendencies show themselves, my reliance will be confidently placed on pious example, on religious instruction, and, above all, on intercession by prayer. Repeat to your friend," he concluded, "what you have just heard me say. Let him ask himself if he could confront the uncertain future with my cheerful submission ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... of her pain smote him with anguish. He lost his head and forgot the barrier between them—that he was poor, with a dark past and an uncertain future, that she ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... and water at their best, the home has a reasonable chance of escaping many of the sorrows brought by disease or uncertain health; and, the power to work to the best advantage being secured, we may now pass to the forms ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... to protect my face or body, I advanced my left fist, and waited for Sam Weeks to come on with a rush, as I was certain he would do, bracing myself well on my legs to receive the shock, although the pitching of the ship made me somewhat more uncertain of my equilibrium than if the combat ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... cannot hear again. They were to sail by the next packet, and it is uncertain how soon they ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Heliodorus died, whether of sickness or through some deliberate violence is uncertain (I should not like to say, and I wish that the facts themselves were equally silent), many men of rank in mourning robes, among whom were these two brothers of consular rank, by the express command of the emperor, attended his funeral when ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... over his fear of startling him. The bear caught sight of Blessing slinking off to the ship and set after him. Blessing also was now much less concerned than he had been as to the bear's nerves. He stopped, uncertain what to do; but a moment's reflection brought him to the conclusion that it was pleasanter to be three than one just then, and he went back to the others faster than he had gone from them. The bear followed at a good rate. Hansen did ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... ensued in the barracks when Garcia opened the attack the men who ran out to meet him had left the gates of the barrack yard open, and as I stood, uncertain what to do, I saw a soldier pushing them together. He had just closed one when I caught sight of him. I fired with my revolver, and shouted to the men. "We must get inside those gates," I cried. "We can't stay here. Charge those gates!" I pointed, ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... authority, and I have been informed that he deliberated for some time as to whether he should retire behind the Loire, or immediately hazard a bold stroke upon Paris, which would have been much more to his taste than to resign himself to the chances which an uncertain temporising might bring about. This latter thought pleased him; and he was seriously considering his plan of attack when the news of the 31st, and the unsuccessful issue of Caulaincourt's mission, gave him to understand ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... this remark, because the hearers felt uncertain whether he meant the pronoun for a jest. To evade the difficulty, old O'Beirne bade Dan fetch a mug for a drop of poteen, and meanwhile said to ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... later Lincoln spoke with no uncertain voice. 75,000 militia were called out to suppress the "rebellion." The North gave the President loyal support. The insult to the flag set the blood of the nation, of Democrat and Republican, aflame. The time for reconciliation ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... sled. Presently he found the dog moccasins for which he had been looking, repacked his sled, and fitted the shoes to the bleeding feet of the team leader. Elliot, suspicious and uncertain what to do, watched him at work, but at a signal from Sheba turned reluctantly away and drove down to ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... conversation was only about the state of poor old Matthew Frost. Lionel had taken Clay Lane on his road home for the purpose of inquiring after old Matthew. There, standing in the kitchen, he found Lucy. Decima was with the old man, and it was uncertain how long she would stay with him; and Lucy, who had no umbrella, was waiting for the shower to be over to get back to Deerham Court. Lionel offered her the shelter of his. As they advanced through the courtyard, Lucy saw Sibylla at the small drawing-room window—the ante-room, ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... 'Life is very uncertain, love, but I don't feel like sickness or death just at present,' answered Hammond cheerily. 'Indeed, I feel that the present is full of sweetness, and the future full of hope. Don't suppose, dear, that I am not grieved at this good-bye; but before we are a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... I waited above an hour before it came, still vainly longing for access to the library; and, after that lonely repast was concluded, I waited again about an hour and a half in great suspense and discomfort, uncertain what to do. At length Lady Ashby came to bid me good-morning. She informed me she had only just breakfasted, and now wanted me to take an early walk with her in the park. She asked how long I had ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... They felt uncertain as to just what their duty might be in a case like this, for while it seemed only right that the guilty one should suffer, at the same time both Fred and Bristles remembered what sorrowful faces that brother and sister had, and ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... Murray and Adair never lost an opportunity of taking an observation, while they kept their reckoning with the greatest care; but, after all, they often could only guess at their position. The weather, too, was very uncertain. Day after day down came torrents of rain—not merely English spring showers—but, as Adair observed, regular bucketsful, which compelled them to open the ports to let the water run off the decks, for ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... thousand ducats. The Indian revenue, so called, was nearly spent; still it might yield him four hundred and twenty thousand ducats. The quicksilver mines would produce something, but so little as hardly to require mentioning. As to the other mines, they were equally unworthy of notice, being so very uncertain, and not doing as well as they were wont. The licences accorded by the crown to carry slaves to America were put down at fifty thousand ducats for the two years. The product of the "crozada" and "cuarta," or money paid to him in small sums by individuals, with the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... they left the spring, the youths realized what was before them. The trail now led constantly upward, and was in parts stony and uncertain. In several places they had to leap brooks of ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... Waller says, women are born to be controuled. Gentle as he was, he knew that. A tyrant husband makes a dutiful wife. And why do the sex love rakes, but because they know how to direct their uncertain wills, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... presently introduce some of his exploits and hardships, in comparison with which the state of things at the beacon bore an aspect of comfort and happiness. Looking to their slender stock of provisions, and their perilous and uncertain chance of speedy relief, he would launch out into an account of one of his expeditions in the North Sea, when the vessel, being much disabled in a storm, was driven before the wind with the loss of almost all their provisions; and the ship being ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for a moment, and looked up and down the house doubtfully, as if seeking for signs of life from within. A great many people were still out of town, and he was uncertain whether the occupants of this house were at home or not. The place had evidently been in the hands of painters and cleaners since he saw it last: the stone-work was scrupulously white, the wood-work was painted a delicate green. The visitor lifted his well-defined ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... roadway between the entrances of Diana's Grove and Lesser Hill were many trees, with not much foliage except at the top. In the dusk this place was shadowy, and the view was hampered by the clustering trunks. In the uncertain, tremulous light which fell through the tree- tops, it was hard to distinguish anything clearly, and at last, somehow, he lost sight of her altogether, and turned back on his track to find her. Presently he came ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... foe. The American land-forces had reached the outer lines of the British camp, and the increasing din of the musketry, with ringing through it the whip-like crack of the Tennesseean rifles, called out the whole British army to the shock of a desperate and uncertain strife. The young moon had by this time struggled through the clouds, and cast on the battle-field a dim, unearthly light that but partly relieved the intense darkness. All order was speedily lost. Each ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Lover' and 'A Drama in Muslin' we find him dealing with a life he knows. He is no longer on ground wholly foreign to him, and it is no longer necessary that he should grope from one uncertain standing place to another, verifying himself by the dark lantern of his note-book as he goes. He moves with a more natural ease, views things with a larger and more comprehensive eye, and has at least that outside sympathy with ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... state that the Colhuas came from the east in ships. Sahagun mentions that a tradition to this effect was current in Yucatan. The precise value of these traditional reports is uncertain; but, if accepted as vague historical recollections, they could be explained by supposing the civilized people called Colhuas came from South America through the Caribbean Sea, and landed in Yucatan and Tabasco. They are uniformly described as the people who first established civilization ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... compiled by the author during the uncertain hours which he could spare from the more active duties of the ministry. It substantially embodies the instructions and discourses delivered by him before mixed congregations in ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... He stood uncertain whether to go or stay, then hastened his steps, and determined to have speech with Mark. He sought distraction of some kind to rid himself of his mood of depression, and to drive away the insistent thoughts of Vera. Passing the warped houses, ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... she whispered, "you know I loved you more than any other human being, but I dare not show it lest my feelings should run riot with me. Farewell! The future is all obscure and uncertain. I dare not talk of when ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... Eleanor was standing, uncertain of what was best to do in this strange meeting. She had felt over-joyed a moment before, to find Paul there, but now she wondered why he was so angry, and why he had not waited to greet her, as long ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... he threw off the bedclothes, and by the uncertain light of the fire, which was still glimmering, found his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Catherine talk so much at once before," said Frieda lazily. "She looks beautiful to-night, too,—to boot!" She had just heard that phrase and though a little uncertain as to its exact significance, took pleasure in inserting it here and ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... those subjects are treated by the leading subject of this realm is to me most unsatisfactory. Although the prime minister of England is always writing letters and making speeches, and particularly on these topics, he seems to me ever to send forth an "uncertain sound." If a member of Parliament announces himself a Republican, Mr. Gladstone takes the earliest opportunity of describing him as a "fellow-worker" in public life. If an inconsiderate multitude calls for the abolition or reform ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... terrified (uncertain as to whether he were a soul in torment or a human being still alive), and debating as to whether he could get off the couch, relight the candle, and close the windward window, he heard a sound that caused his heart to miss a beat and his hair to rise on end. A ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... am as good as new," he smilingly answered. "A trifle weak and uncertain in my lower extremities, but a few days of exercise in the mountains will overcome all that. Is all well with you and Graustark? They will give me no news here, by whose ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... made in safety. In fact nothing had been seen of the raiders since the start, and it was uncertain what might ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... of appointing this guardian or regent have been so various, and the duration of his power so uncertain, that from thence alone it may be collected that his office is unknown to the common law; and therefore (as sir Edward Coke says, 4 Inst. 58.) the surest way is to have him made by authority of the great council in parliament. The earl of Pembroke by his own authority assumed, in very troublesome ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... are all, like swimmers in the sea, Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate, Which hangs uncertain to which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... understand the value of the acquisition. An universal ignorance then prevailed in the knowledge of ancient writers. A scholar of those times gave the first rank among the Latin writers to one Valerius, whether he meant Martial or Maximus is uncertain; he placed Plato and Tully among the poets, and imagined that Ennius and Statius were contemporaries. A library of six hundred volumes was then considered ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... who chases the chain of necessity to the sources of this grand instability, is merged at once in a haze of speculations, beautiful as sunlight through morning mists, but uncertain as the veriest chimeras. While beyond the idea of comprehensive motion the colossal symmetry of Truth expands in ultimate outlines, her features are shrouded, but in such an attractive clare-obscure of inviting analogies and semi-satisfying glimpses, that the ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... brooding and meditative, looking at life with half-closed eyes and then shutting them to be alone with memory and the interpreter, his painting, so beautiful and full of surety in early pictures like the Wounded Heron, grows to be often labored and muddy, and his drawing uncertain. That he could draw and paint with the greatest, he every now and then gave proof; but the surety of beautiful craftsmanship deserts those who have not always their eye fixed on an object of vision; and Watts was not, like Blake or Shelley, one of the proud seers whose visions are ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... a quarter which was unexpected to us, although it should not have been so. Several of the electric ships had been hovering above us during the fight, their commanders being apparently uncertain how to act—fearful, perhaps, of injuring us in the attempt ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... Italian history, the correctness, or at least approximation to correctness, of which may be looked upon as established. But how far beyond that epoch the sending forth of the earlier Ionian colonies reached back, is quite as uncertain as is the age which gave birth to the poems of Hesiod or even of Homer. If Herodotus is correct in the period which he assigns to Homer, the Greeks were still unacquainted with Italy a century before the foundation of Rome. The date thus assigned however, like all other ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and hold onto the dock!" was the additional order, accompanied by a punctuation mark in the form of another bullet which splintered the gunwale of the boat. Looking as they were, into the dazzling eye of the bulb light, the men were uncertain of the number of their assailants: surrender was natural. Cleary's men made quick work of them. The boat from the yacht now hove to by this time, filled with excited and profane sailormen. The skipper of the "White Swan," ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... animal scurried along, almost hidden by the clover, only its large ears showing. Then it swerved across a furrow, stopped, started off again at full speed, changed its course, stopped anew, uneasy, spying out every danger, uncertain what route to take, when suddenly it began to run with great bounds, disappearing finally in a large patch of beet-root. All the men had waked up to watch ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... his hands were thus employed, the whole map, as it were, of the known countries seemed to pass without volition before his mind. He saw the cities along the shores of the great Lake; he saw their internal condition, the weakness of the social fabric, the misery of the bondsmen. The uncertain action of the League, the only thread which bound the world together; the threatening aspect of the Cymry and the Irish; the dread north, the vast northern forests, from which at any time invading hosts might descend on the fertile south—it all ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... yoke! I need no more to be guided, agitated, heated. My heart ferments sufficiently of itself. I want strains to lull me, and I find them to perfection in my Homer. Often do I strive to allay the burning fever of my blood; and you have never witnessed anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as my heart. But need I confess this to you, my dear friend, who have so often endured the anguish of witnessing my sudden transitions from sorrow to immoderate joy, and from sweet melancholy to violent passions? I treat my poor heart like a sick child, and gratify its every fancy. Do not ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... It is too much." Fairthorn was choking; but as if the idea presented to him was really too monstrous for belief, he clutched at Darrell with so uncertain and vehement a hand that he almost caught him by the throat, and sobbed ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... judge, he must feel; before he can distinguish good from evil, he must compare. Morals, is a science of facts: to found them, therefore, on an hypothesis inaccessible to his senses, of which he has no means of proving the reality, is to render them uncertain; it is to cast the log of discord into his lap, to cause him unceasingly to dispute upon that which he can never understand. To assert that the ideas of morals are innate, or the effect of instinct, is to pretend that man knows how to read before he has learned the letters ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... thing: "Go on! Go on! You are called upon!" He had heard this voice when he had left his home and had chosen the life of a Samana, and again when he had gone away from the Samanas to that perfected one, and also when he had gone away from him to the uncertain. For how long had he not heard this voice any more, for how long had he reached no height any more, how even and dull was the manner in which his path had passed through life, for many long years, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... thinking:—"Presently we shall know what is the matter, and the doctor will give her the right medicines." But when the examination was ended, instead of turning to the bottles in his bag, he seemed uncertain and began to ask interminable questions. How had it happened, and where, particularly, did she feel pain ... Had she ever before suffered from the same trouble ... The answers did not seem to enlighten him very much; then he turned to the sick ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... I long since hesitated whether I should follow your Excellency or him—and I begin to be uncertain whether I have made the best choice, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... watching for the coming of the uncle, feeling quite uncertain whether to expect a frail old broken man, or to find themselves absolutely deluded, and made game of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it be when one of us alone Goes on that strange last journey of the soul? That certain search for an uncertain goal, That voyage on which no comradeship is known? Will our dear sea sing with the old sweet tone, Though one sits stricken where its billows roll? Will space be dumb, or from the mystic pole Will spirit-messages be backward blown? When our united ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the aisle, and hurried away, leaving Duncan and Miss Brunswick alone together in the box. If Roderick Duncan had really desired an opportunity to confide his troubles to Beatrice, it was afforded him then; but now that it was at hand, he felt suddenly uncertain about the wisdom of such ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... and those my father bought for his own reading, and which I liked, though I only caught a glimpse of their meaning by strenuous study. To this day Sheridan's Comedies, Sterne's Sentimental Journey, and Captain Cook's Voyages are so mixed up in my remembrance that I am still uncertain whether it was Sterne who ate baked dog with Maria, or Sheridan who wept over a dead ass in the ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... grandchild, and I was badgered finally into rising and making a few scattering remarks by way of grateful acknowledgment. An effort of this kind would be trying to the sensibilities of even a real philosopher, and I will confess that, what with stammering and repeating myself, I was uncertain for some moments whether I should be able to make myself intelligible. At last, however, a sudden reflection coming straight from my heart drew me from the slough of renewing thanks and ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... with the first advance from the state of separate wandering families to that of a nomadic tribe. The authority of the strongest or the most cunning makes itself felt among a body of savages as in a herd of animals, or a posse of schoolboys. At first, however, it is indefinite, uncertain; is shared by others of scarcely inferior power; and is unaccompanied by any difference in occupation or style of living: the first ruler kills his own game, makes his own weapons, builds his own hut, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... my guide. At first he was nothing but a shape, well muffled, with some kind of flat cap upon his head. A little more light revealed a glittering eye, more, a great, hooked nose with wide nostrils. He was a man of uncertain age, bordering upon the elderly, with a black skullcap under which curled outward two silverygray horns of hair. The lower part of his face was covered with a ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... subsistence, Mrs. Howe, after waiting two or three years in the hope of her husband's return, was forced to apply for an Act of Parliament to procure an adequate settlement of his estate, and a provision for herself out of it during his absence, as it was uncertain whether he was alive or dead. This act Mr. Howe suffered to be passed, and read the progress of it in a little coffee-house ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... he had been—before he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born—a brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on big railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... hand. Let him next imagine a dinner-party, say at the Crooms, and Wilson, who had taken her down, talking about the state of the Liberal party. She would say—of course she was absolutely ignorant of politics. Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly, and honest too. Her temper was uncertain—that he had noticed—and she was not domestic, and she was not easy, and she was not quiet, or beautiful, except in some dresses in some lights. But the great gift she had was that she understood what was said to her; there had ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... strange delusions, Felix approached, to call him to breakfast. The black beheld him walking backwards and forwards, with orderly and composed steps, and congratulated himself upon the change since the day before. He had not, however, ventured to address his master since being ordered away, and uncertain how he would be received, preferred to be spoken to first. With this view, he drew nigh one of the flower-beds, which Armstrong was passing and re-passing, and pretended to busy himself with tying ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Herrick shot with one accord. One Indian came on; the other uttered a cry of pain; then both dashed outside for the shelter of the veranda. There was silence; the Indians hesitating in doubt as to their companions' fate, the white men uncertain as to what form the attack ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... on. Our company has been selected. We need only a handful of actors, but the manager has enlisted the street. The dearest little girl has been chosen for Betsy, and each day she practices her lullaby at the piano with uncertain, questing finger. A gentle rowdy of twelve will speak the Duke's blood-curdling lines. I understand that two quarrelsome pirates have nearly come to blows which shall act the captain. The hero, Red Joe, will be played ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... barely visible in the uncertain light there clustered about the central structure the long, low-lying guard-room, stables, quartermaster's store, and several smaller adjacent buildings comprising "The Barracks." It was a bitter ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... surely cut loose. I ought to have been halfway up the hill watching things from a safe distance, but I wasn't. Lucky for me the shaft was a little on the drift, so she didn't quite shoot my way. But she distributed about a ton over those renegades. They sort of half got to their feet uncertain. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... animals when at bay, and the facility with which they rip open their antagonists with their tusks. They were in former times considered as royal game, and fines were imposed on those who killed them without having the privilege of doing so. The time of their extirpation in England is uncertain; but we know that in the reign of Charles the First, orders were given for some domestic hogs to be turned into the New Forest, that they might become wild; but they were all destroyed in the time of Cromwell. Some still exist ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... tavern office and faced Latisan in the yard; there were curious spectators on the porch, the loungers of the hamlet, but she paid no attention to them; she was searching the countenance of Latisan, avidly anxious, fearfully uncertain regarding what mischief had ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... for the weight of his wet garments was beginning to tell upon him. As the rowboat came closer he also thought to dive, but the effort almost cost him his life. He came up half unconscious, and only realized in a dim, uncertain ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... about it for a long time, but throughout Mrs. Fonss felt a coldness in whatever she said, which she could not overcome. She was afraid of being too sympathetic with Tage on account of her own emotion. Besides, in the uncertain state of her mind she was distrustful of the idea that there might be even the faintest shadow of an association between her kindness of to-night and what she was to ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... their own hearts, as will teach them better to understand and excuse what they detect in the hearts of others; ever remembering that all things on earth are earthly; and therefore changeful, perishable, and uncertain. ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... of the last two of the judges of Israel. Eli and Samuel were not as the rest, men of war, but priests. It is uncertain who wrote these books. Some say that Samuel wrote the history of his times, and that Nathan the Prophet continued it. Elkanah, though a godly man, had sore family trials, the result of having married two wives, just as Abraham and Jacob did before him. It is probable that Elkanah ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... at last; the moonlight streamed pale and uncertain through the casement; no sound broke the stillness, even the wind had ceased its moaning. He could go forth now without fear ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... of which was most uncertain as the coach journeys soon overlapped, there was always a lengthy, well-attended "roll-up" at the Store. Here we first made acquaintance with Messrs. Browne and Lyon, then negotiating for the purchase of Bayley's fabulous mine of gold. No account of the ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... the community; or partly of foreigners and partly of clients, the latter being equalised by the patres with the former in self-defence; and whether as a name it dated from or was antecedent to the so-called Tullian organization is uncertain. But we know that in one way or other a second political division in the State arose and that the constitution, of which Servius Tullius was the reputed author, made every freeman in Rome a citizen by giving him a vote in the Comitia Centuriata. Yet though ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... no longer. For three years he did good service and saved money, and the lurid nose grew dim. There is, however, a limit to human endurance. Like victims of other forms of circular insanity, the dipsomaniac completes his cycle in an uncertain period and falls upon bad times. For a month before we parted company I saw signs of relapse in Sam. He was loquacious at times, at other times morose. He talked about going into business for himself, and his ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... In the uncertain light of dawn they could see nothing around them but leaden breakers from whose foam-crested manes the wind swept the blinding spray. The ship lay in this terrible plight for some little time, while every soul on board counted each ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... a 'matsouri', a fete, a procession passing through the quarter which is not so virtuous as our own, so our mousmes tell us, with a disdainful toss of the head. Nevertheless, from the heights on which we dwell, seen thus in a bird's-eye view, by the uncertain light of the stars, this district has a singularly chaste air, and the concert going on therein, purified in its ascent from the depths of the abyss to our lofty altitudes, reaches us confusedly, a smothered, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... precious of the old marbles of Rome is the Rosso antico. Its classical name has been lost, unless it be identical, as Corsi conjectures, with the Marmor Alabandicum, described by Pliny as black inclining much to purple. For a long time it was uncertain where it was found, but recently quarries of it have been discovered near the sea at Skantari, a village in the district of Teftion, which show traces of having been worked by the ancients. From these quarries the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... that at least one of his injuries had been the work of a Pauline whom he had met in the opening bout; but the great majority were presents from Ripton, and Drummond had described the dusky one, in no uncertain terms, as a ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... the meantime, all the while, even from the very first evening when we off-saddled in the rocky Westchester woods and made our first flying-camp, I had become uneasy concerning the Siwanois—uncertain concerning his loyalty to the very verge ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He is not a traitor working by craft and calculating ability to well-considered ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at an uncertain and impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as a self-abandoned atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted by vicious living, takes a fury to his heart, and, because the goodness of the world has been for ever lost to him, recklessly seeks ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... stood a woman, also in black, with dishevelled hair floating down her back. Her face was colorless, she looked like a corpse, and her thin, blue lips were pressed together as if in death. There was life in her eyes—a gloomy, wild, fanatical fire flashed from them. Her glance was glaring and uncertain, like a will-o'-the-wisp, and filled those upon whom it fell with a shivering, mysterious feeling ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... years ago, they built durable homes, curiously enough, more than in the Northern States; planted oaks about them, that bore the strength of the earth up to heaven in sturdy arms, shaming the graceful, uncertain elm of shallower soils. Just such old farm-houses as those, Blecker thought, would turn out such old-time moulded men as McKinstry: houses whose orchards still held on to the Waldower and Smoke-house ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... feet and took her rudely by the shoulder. "Do you mean to say—" he began, almost with violence; and then checked himself, peering at her with fierce, uncertain eyes. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... attempt to sow fall wheat; and it was several seasons before their crops became nearly adequate for food. The difficulties of transportation up the St Lawrence rendered the arrival of supplies irregular and uncertain. Cut off as they were from civilization by the St Lawrence rapids, they were in a much less advantageous position than the great majority of the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick settlers, who were situated ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... others. Crates Thebanus was adored for a God in Athens, [3679]"a nobleman by birth, many servants he had, an honourable attendance, much wealth, many manors, fine apparel; but when he saw this, that all the wealth of the world was but brittle, uncertain and no whit availing to live well, he flung his burden into the sea, and renounced his estate." Those Curii and Fabricii will be ever renowned for contempt of these fopperies, wherewith the world is so much affected. Amongst Christians I could reckon up many kings and queens, that have ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... pool, when coming to my waggon-driver, I found him looking with no little alarm in an opposite direction, and with good reason, as no fewer than two lions with a cub were eyeing us both, apparently as uncertain about us as we were distrustful of them. We thankfully decamped to the waggon and sat down to keep alive our scanty fire, while we listened to the lion tearing and devouring his prey. When any of the other hungry lions dared to approach he would pursue them for some paces with a horrible howl, which ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... dates as he leaned against one of the palm-trees, casting an interrogating glance from time to time across the desert in quest of some deliverer, and on his terrible companion, watching the chance of her uncertain clemency. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... which never run down, the doctor's agreeable carelessness and imperturbable good-humor, the exceeding kindness of Mr. Regulus, who grew so gentle, that he almost seemed melancholy,—all continued the same. In reading, writing, thinking, feeling, hoping, reaching forward to an uncertain future, the season of fireside enjoyments and comforts passed,—spring,—summer. Mrs. Linwood and Edith returned, and I was once more installed in that charming apartment, amid whose rosy decorations "I seemed," ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... economy, a mixture of private enterprises of all sizes and extensive government intervention, experienced enormous difficulties in the late 1980s, notably declining real growth, runaway inflation, foreign debt obligations of more than $100 billion, and uncertain economic policy. Government intervention includes trade and investment restrictions, wage/price controls, interest and exchange rate controls, and extensive tariff barriers. Ownership of major industrial facilities is divided ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and makes money by it. Tom Slink, who used to smoke short-sixes and get acquainted with the little circus boys, is popularly supposed to be the proprietor of a cheap gaming establishment in Boston, where the beautiful but uncertain prop is nightly tossed. Be sure, the Army is represented by many of the friends of my youth, the most of whom have given a good account of themselves. But Chalmerson hasn't done much. No, Chalmerson is rather of a failure. He plays on the guitar and sings love songs. Not that he ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... differences were the constant occasion of personal animosity and bitterness. The two men represented the age in an uncommonly complete way. Swift had the greater genius: he was, indeed, in respect of natural endowment, the foremost man of his time; but his nature was undisciplined, his temper uncertain, and his great powers quite as much at the service of his passions as of his principles. He made himself respected, feared, and finally hated; his lack of restraint and balance, his ferocity of spirit when opposed, and the violence with which he assailed his enemies, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lifting him from the slough of despair by which he was so nearly submerged. It was as though the presence of his twins had drawn from him an acknowledgment of his duty, a sense which was so strongly and incongruously developed in his otherwise uncertain character, and demanded of him a sacrifice of all personal inclination. They were her children. Yes, and they were his. Her children—her children. And she was gone. They had no one to look to, no one to care ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... words, "I believe in the Holy Ghost." In this reign, too, began to be sung the Te Deum, which is generally known as the hymn of St. Ambrose. It was first used at Milan, but whether he wrote it or not is uncertain, though there is a story that he had it sung for the first time at ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the second lot. But the first lot are no nearer starting than they were two weeks ago. I may be kept waiting here for weeks and weeks. I do not like to turn out Palmer, although I very much want to go with the first bunch. On the other hand I am paid pretty well to get to the front, and I am uncertain as to what I ought to do. If the second column were to start immediately after the first, we then would have two men in the field, but if it does not, then Collier will be paying $1000. a week for stories of tea houses and "festivals." Palmer threatens to resign ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... ceremonies, and sacrificing to the god Fear. In the meanwhile the oldest of his commanders, and chiefly Parmenio, when they beheld all the plain between Niphates and the Gordyaean mountains shining with the lights and fires which were made by the barbarians, and heard the uncertain and confused sound of voices out of their camp, like the distant roaring of a vast ocean, were so amazed at the thoughts of such a multitude, that after some conference among themselves, they concluded it an enterprise too difficult and hazardous ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the eastern desert. Two figures were moving across its expanse, swiftly and stealthily, furtive dark shadows against the lighter ground. They saw them dimly, dipping and rising over the rolling desert, now lost, now reappearing in the uncertain light. They were flying away from the Arabs. And then, suddenly they halted upon the summit of a sand-hill, and the prisoners could see them outlined plainly against the sky. They were camel-men, but they sat their camels astride as a horseman ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... it till to-morrow [came this night], But I count myself surer of War than ever; as the Austrians have named Generals, and their Army is ordered to march, from Kolin to Konigsgratz"—Schlesien way. "So that, expecting nothing but a haughty Answer, or a very uncertain one, on which there will be no reliance possible, I have arranged everything for setting out on Saturday next. To-morrow, so soon as the news comes, I will not fail to let you know. Assuring you that I am, with a perfect affection, my dear Brother and my dear Sister,—Yours,—F." [OEuvres ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... of the national legislature, beg leave to suggest for consideration, whether they have not some claim to national attention and encouragement, from the nature and importance of their undertaking; which though hazardous and uncertain as concerns their private emolument, must, at any rate, redound to the public security and advantage. If their undertaking shall appear to be of the description given, they would further suggest to your honorable bodies, that unless they can procure a regular supply for the trade in which ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... and the puddles quivered in the gray uncertain moonlight. We stood up under a part of the roof at the corner of the old house thinking of ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... you find such people so fickle and uncertain in their spirits; Now on the mount, then in the valleys; now in the sunshine, then in the shade; now warm, then frozen; now bonny and blithe, then in a moment pensive and sad; as thinking of a portion nowhere but in hell. This will ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of burdens," he answered, gruffly; "what I said was not meant angrily. I love you, and that's enough. Now the question only is, Where to go? If at least this baby had not come, the chance of an uncertain existence might be borne for some time. But now, you ill, the child requiring careful nursing, the end of it is there is nothing for it but to buy a farm, and to give the two thousand thalers for a premium. ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... those vows of fidelity exacted upon a Testament, and hence also the allusions to a possibility of something happening on the very morning of the wedding. James Windibank wished Miss Sutherland to be so bound to Hosmer Angel, and so uncertain as to his fate, that for ten years to come, at any rate, she would not listen to another man. As far as the church door he brought her, and then, as he could go no farther, he conveniently vanished ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... history of mankind is yet complete enough, if ever it can be so, to furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain and much more obscure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign causes that tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm, a community. It is often impossible in these political inquiries to find any proportion between the apparent force of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... in a dream when all is uncertain, unreasoning, and contradictory, except the feeling that guides the dream, so in this intercourse contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not consecutive and clear but only ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... submarines were forecasted for delivery during the period July to the end of December, the dates of three, however, being somewhat uncertain; of this total of twenty-six, only nine were actually delivered. Of the remainder, seven were shown in a November forecast as delayed for four months, two for five months, ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... to the boats; a third, Boccanegra's, lost her mainmast, and staggered away crippled. What was Doria about? The wind was now in his favour; the enemy was in front: but Doria continued to tack and manoeuvre at a distance. What he aimed at is uncertain: his colleagues Grimani and Capello went on board his flagship, and vehemently remonstrated with him, and even implored him to depart and let them fight the battle with their own ships, but in vain. He was bent on tactics, ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... apparition had faded, and the Mountain appeared only as an uncertain bulk shadowed upon the night, then came the miracle. Gradually, the east, beyond the great hills, showed a faint silver glow. Silhouetted against this dim background, the profile of the peak grew definite. With no other warning, suddenly from its summit the full moon shot forth, huge, majestic and ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... carefully carpeted with lynx skins; then it seemed to them that a big cord, wet, cold, and viscous, was gliding between their legs. Through some fissures cut in the wall there fell thin white rays, and they advanced by this uncertain light. At last they distinguished a large black serpent. It darted quickly away ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... for they not only swam round and round her, but approached her so closely and so persistently that Miss Trevor became seriously alarmed; while even Leslie began to grow somewhat uneasy lest the brutes, whose temper he knew to be rather uncertain, should develop an inclination to attack the craft. To the relief, however, of all hands, the curiosity of the creatures at length appeared to be satisfied, and they drew off from the brig a little, still remaining upon the surface, however. And presently the huge brutes began to develop a ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... confused by the sudden outcry, stood the Dauphin and the two lads, and towards them ran Hugues with all his speed, La Mothe not far behind. La Follette waited at the door, uncertain and bewildered. But from a further covert, the thicket of more distant alder, a troop of ten or a dozen horsemen had burst, galloping at the charge, nor could there be any doubt of their sinister purpose. It was a race for the boy, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... appendages of military establishments. Standing armies, it is said, are not provided against in the new Constitution; and it is therefore inferred that they may exist under it.1 Their existence, however, from the very terms of the proposition, is, at most, problematical and uncertain. But standing armies, it may be replied, must inevitably result from a dissolution of the Confederacy. Frequent war and constant apprehension, which require a state of as constant preparation, will infallibly produce them. The weaker States ...
— The Federalist Papers
... forward or deliver this and is on his return to England, can inform you of our different movements, but I am very uncertain as to my own return. He will probably be down in Notts, some time or other; but Fletcher, whom I send back as an incumbrance (English servants are sad travellers), will supply his place in the interim, and describe our travels, which have ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... small bay, and cut off from the main jungle by some large rocks. Three of our party immediately declared that they would have a tiger-hunt, and bring back his skin as a trophy. They landed, two of them having each a ship's musket, a very uncertain weapon, as they are at present provided, for, whether from damp or careless manufacture, the percussion caps will not often go off; and the third armed with nothing but a knife. On their landing, they took their position ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
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