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More "Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... of boys have laughed until their sides ached over the weird and wonderful adventures of Jerry Todd, Poppy Ott, Trigger Berg and their friends. Mr. Edwards' boy characters are all real. They do the things other boys like. Pirates! Mystery! Detectives! Adventure! Ghosts! Buried Treasure! Achievement! Stories ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... of his conceptions; the richness and grandeur of his thoughts, and their easy, natural flow; the refined elegance and captivating force of the terms he employs as the medium through which he communicates those thoughts and the weird fancy which throws around them charms peculiarly their own. These, and perhaps other merits, will win ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... country in the world. Some of them are equal, if not superior, in the clearness and purity of their waters, in the distinctness of the reflections cast upon their limpid surface by surrounding hill or forest, and in the wild, weird beauty of their environments, to any of the world's old favourite ones that have been long praised in song and story. They are slowly being discovered and prized, for some of them are as a poet's dream and ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... touched it the undersides of the planks were scraping and hissing over vegetation. This was the winter fur of the land—thick, coarse tundra moss; and on that we pitched a camp, and on that we remained for long weeks while the ship was mending. It was a weird, lonely time. Once or twice strange, wandering creatures came our way—little, belted men, with hairless faces, who rode up on strong horses, and liked to exhibit their skilful management of them. They talked to ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... he found, glimmering like some weird death-fire over the actual horror, which made his realisation of the tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the poverty which she described. Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering—and ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... This etext was produced from Weird Tales March 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... red braids over her extraordinary cloak; and her big eyes were child's eyes. What her figure was like, except that she was a tall, long-legged, upstanding young creature, no one could judge, not even an anatomist, because of that weird wrap. As a cloak it was a shocking production—a hideous, unbelievable contribution to cloakhood from the hands of a mantle-making vandal—but it caught the man's interest, because before his eyes danced the hunting tartan of the MacDonalds of Dhrum. Once that particular ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver's skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought Grace Melbury to the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was blowing—that not unacceptable compromise ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... ever heard of me, and that you will never write me even a postal card, why, you can go ahead with your boom," and the old man tied his necktie so it looked like a scrambled egg, and he and the boy went in to breakfast, the boy opening the outside door and whistling a weird whistle, which brought three boys up on the porch, ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... necessary to be more mystical and weird in his dealings with this second party than with the first. He did a great many strange things which savored of magic and alchemy. Among other things, he got some fine bone dust, which he assured ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... thing, for it distorts vision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goes floundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor that grips reality. At the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon a man with a disconcerting swiftness. It rose now with all this weird rapidity. Henriot found himself enveloped at a ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... a strange-looking being stretched in an easy-chair, which was covered with pillows and almost hidden under various woolen draperies. He was dressed in a long coat of coarse, pale-blue cloth. He was bareheaded, and his long, white hair formed a weird frame for a face of bloodless hue and meagre proportions, from which two vacant eyes stared fixedly. He sat immovable and his arms hung limply over ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... I remembered the weird tales she had told us of her girlhood—tales that had thrilled me with wonder—told sometimes in the twilight, sometimes by the kitchen fire on winter nights, sometimes on long, still, midsummer afternoons when the air quivered ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... horrible nightmare. The catastrophe came so rapidly that he could hardly follow the whirlwind events. The half dozen great leaps he made from the lashing tentacles of his pursuer sufficed to give him a few seconds' respite, and then the weird, howling sound of the tortured world swelled to a piercing wail. His lungs were laboring from the violence of his exertions; again and again he barely escaped from the curling whips of metal tentacles. And now the monster was hardly a foot high; the huge condensers and tubes and colossal ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... a weird figure of a man. Aged and lean, long-faced, hollow-checked, with matted, sunburnt hair that fell below the shoulders of his buckskin shirt, his face was distorted with hatred and helpless rage. Holding his long rifle in his ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... "Weird and interesting to the point of being absorbing. The only way to get the story is to read ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... Caleb Plummer leading in his daughter. This spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, St. Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much relief ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... one of the picturesque incidents that Sturt has introduced in his narrative, and that help to fix on our memory the strangely weird picture of the lonely band of men confronted with the unaccustomed forces of ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the silvery Animas River, which frets in its narrowing bed, and breaks into foam against the opposing boulders, beyond which rise the hills; to the left are mountains, increasing in rugged contour as the advance is made, and in the shadow of the rocks all is solitary, weird and awful; the startled traveler loses all apprehension in the wondrous beauty and grandeur of ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... walls came the dull, confused murmur of many voices. Doors banged, and when they opened, brief, broken sounds penetrated from the cabins, evidence of the bewilderment and alarm of their tenants. The thing that was particularly weird to Frederick in that swaying corridor, creaking like a new boot and lighted by electricity, was the incessant ringing of electric bells. In a hundred cabins at the same time, frightened persons, who had paid dear for their passage and were entitled to excellent service, were pressing the buttons. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... on May-day, and fix in town on the first of November. But as they will not, I have made up my mind; and having so little time left, I prefer London, when my friends and society are in it, to living here alone, or with the weird sisters of Richmond and Hampton. I had additional reason now, for the streets are as green as the fields: we are burnt to the bone, and have not a lock of bay to cover our nakedness: oats are so dear, that I suppose they will ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... literature is human nature, and that human nature simply and forcibly expressed. This is fundamental, and this is why true literature has no fashion and knows no change, despite the cries of the modern weaklings who affect weird forms. The clarity of Shakespeare is the clarity of to-day and will be that ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... had worked out his invention in Salem, one editor displayed the headline, "Salem Witchcraft." The New York Herald said: "The effect is weird and almost supernatural." The Providence Press said: "It is hard to resist the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in league with it." And The Boston Times said, in an editorial of bantering ridicule: "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East Boston; but the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green, set there in a little valley, whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours, such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor-vitae, and many other evergreens, whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all deep and brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse on the baked deposit at the foot of these large crags. ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... mausoleum than a store!—and saw Hopewell leaning against the counter, while Lottie, in her pink sash and white dress, and the kid boots, sat upon it and leaned against her father while he scraped out some weird ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... Melmoth follows her and their conversations are continued at dead of night through the lattice. Here they discourse on the real nature of love. At length the gloomy lover persuades Isidora to marry him. Their midnight nuptials take place against a weird background. By a narrow, precipitous path they approach the ruined chapel, and are united by a hand "as cold as that of death." Meanwhile, Don Francisco, Isidora's father, on his way home, spends the night at an inn, where a stranger insists on telling ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... "Guinevere" (as Julia Magruder points out, North American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fall over this plate basket—it's one of the 'properties'—the caldron for the witches' cave; and the three uncouth-looking figures, with broken clothes-props in their hands, who are drinking gin-and-water out of a pint pot, are the weird sisters. This miserable room, lighted by candles in sconces placed at lengthened intervals round the wall, is the dressing-room, common to the gentlemen performers, and the square hole in the ceiling is the trap-door of the stage above. You will observe that the ceiling ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... been a season of low tides, and when, to save the weary work of rowing a heavy sail-boat farther, it was decided to make the shore, they were hindered by a length of shallow water and weedy flat, through which the ladies of the party must consent to be carried. A late weird moon was rising down behind the light-houses, all red and angry in the mist still brooding over the horizon, the boat lay in the deep shade it cast, the river beyond was breaking into light, reach after reach, like a blossom into bloom. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his yet published gives a better illustration of his genius, and of the weird charm which has given his stories such ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... that the moon which looks so lovely to our sight, is found by those who can get a nearer view to be such a weird and desolate place that it seemed as if only death reigned there? I know I was, when first I read about it, and saw a picture of the moon, and wondered at its bare mountain peaks, with their rugged craters and dreadful precipices, and its "Ocean of ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... was about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter flood rushed from his heart to his eyes; the iron dropped heavily ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... "Shylock," observes a recent critic, "seems so much a man of Nature's making, that we can scarce accord to Shakspeare the merit of creating him." What will you say of Balak, Nabal, Jeroboam? "Macbeth is rather guilty of tempting the Weird Sisters than of being tempted by them, and is surprised and horrified at his own hell-begotten conception." Saul is guilty of tampering with the Witch of Endor, and is alarmed at the Ghost of Samuel, whose words distinctly embody and vibrate the fears of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... men whose sole aim was the amassing of quick fortunes were virtual rulers of Cape Colony, with more power than the Government to whom they simulated submission. All sorts of weird stories were in circulation. One popular belief was that the mutiny of the Dutch in Cape Colony just before the Boer War was at bottom due to the influence of money. This was followed by a feeling that, but for the aggressive operations of the outpost agents ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... night would mourn over him, but they would keep his secret. He peered across a shining lake, and tried to pierce the gloom. No living thing moved before his vision. Silver rippling waves shimmered under that starlit sky; tall weird pines waved gently in the night breeze; slender cedars, resembling spectres, reared their heads toward the blue-black vault of heaven. He listened intently. There was a faint rustling of the few leaves left upon the oaks. The strange voices that had always haunted ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... confounded," Malone said. "I mean confusion. Anyhow, the Russian espionage rings in this country seem to be in as bad a state as the Congress, the labor unions, the syndicates, and all the rest. And all of them seem to have some sort of weird tie-in to these flashes of telepathic interference. Right, ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... ghost to some purpose—a ghost free from all the weird associations of death and the grave—a healthy, utilisable ghost, and a ghost, above all, which wanted to be photographed. It seemed too good to be true. Yet how strange it was! Here we have just been discussing whether or not we have each of us two ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... the blessedness of emancipation. The boat which has been tethered to the weird, baleful shore is set free, and sails toward the glories of the morning. The man, long cramped in the dark, imprisoning pit, is brought out, and stretches his limbs in the sweet light and air of God's free world. Black servitude is ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... the raven. Unsteady his steps were and slow, and he walked with a staff in his right hand, And white as the first-falling snow were the thin locks that lay on his shoulders. Like rime-covered moss hung his beard, flowing down from his face to his girdle; And wan was his aspect and weird, and often he chanted and mumbled In a strange and mysterious tongue, as he bent o'er his book in devotion, Or lifted his dim eyes and sung, in a low voice, the solemn "Te Deum," Or Latin, or Hebrew, or Greek— all the same were his words to the warriors,— All the same to the maids ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... arms, but began on a course of shameless piracy. He lived only a few months under the black flag, until he went down on the Isle of Haut. The events of that brief and thrilling period are unfortunately obscure, with only a ray of light here and there. But the story of his passing is the most weird of all the strange yarns that are spun about the "Island of ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... Then would appear the woollen tents, low and black, of the true Badawin, mere dots in the boundless waste of lion tawny clays and gazelle brown gravels, and the camp fire dotting like a glow worm the village centre. Presently, sweetened by distance, would be heard the wild weird song of lads and lasses, driving or rather pelting, through the gloaming their sheep and goats; and the measured chant of the spearsmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels; mingled with bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the humpy herds; while ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... saying, child? Do not let me hear you speak like this again. What motive could a wealthy man like Tonza have in getting rid of one of his own employes? Grief has turned your brain. Cast aside those weird garments, and in three hours be ready to receive your ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... to do is a hoarse, metallic roar that would drown a million country cock-crows if each particular cock were as big as the mythical rooster of antiquity and could crow in proportion to his size. My readers who dwell on the hills and in dales and wheat-fields, and who are unfamiliar with the wild, weird early morning din of the city, may not know that the metropolitan cock-crow is made up of the jingle and jangle of a million tin milk cans jolted over a million blocks of stone to the tune of thousands of steel-shod feet, the shrill cries of an army of butcher and baker boys ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the forward end of the promenade deck at night, looking out into the blackness, and heard the clang of four bells from the shadows at the bow, the answering clang from the crow's-nest on the foremast, and the weird cry of "All's well" from the lookouts. This experience made a great impression on us both. Hephzy expressed my feeling exactly when she ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... hurried on, my course lay round the heap of ashes and burnt wood which had formed the block-house; and curiously weird it all seemed to be, with the flashes and heavy reports of the pieces to right, and left, mingled with the savage yells of the attacking Indians, who, as far as I could tell, seemed to be striving to beat back ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... the weird fascination of Poe's strangely beautiful poem "The Raven"? Perhaps on some stormy evening you have read it until the "silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" has "thrilled you, filled you, with fantastic terrors never felt before." That poem is the almost perfect mirror of the life ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... glimpse of Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... represents Judas wandering about the night after the betrayal. By chance he comes upon the workmen who have been preparing the cross for Jesus. A fire burning close by throws its weird light on the faces of the men who are now sleeping. The face of Judas is somewhat in the shade; but one sees on it remorse and agony, as the traitor's eyes fall upon the cross and the tools which have been used in making it,—the cross to which his treason ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... there. Demoniacal possession is an article of faith, and a popular remedy is to burn human hair mixed with chillies and pig's dung near the person possessed, as the horrible smell thus produced will drive away the spirit. Many and weird, Mr. Low writes, are the simples which the Baiga's travelling scrip contains. Among these a dried bat has the chief place; this the Baiga says he uses to charm his nets with, that the prey may catch in them as the bat's claws catch in whatever it touches. As an instance of the Baiga's pantheism ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Borrow, with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature? Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is something strange, and weird, and great, lurking down yonder in the great peninsula which juts into the western sea. Borrow may, if he so pleases, call himself an East Anglian—"an English Englishman," as he loved to term it—but is it a coincidence that the one East Anglian born of Cornish blood was the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... abreast, a long line of warriors; in their centre two ensigns, and on their flanks, officers and non-commissioned officers with swords and pikes; more mounted men bringing up the rear. On they came, the fifes and flutes ringing out with a weird clearness in the hushed mountain air. I could hear the ground vibrate, the gravel crunch and scatter, as they steadily and mechanically advanced—tall men, enormously tall men, with set, white faces and livid eyes. Every instant I expected they would see me, and I became sick with ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... Stretching across the valley from distant heights, a fleecy veil of enchantment woven in the loom of mist, etherealized city and river, dome and monument, tower and steeple, cottage and castle; adding a weird beauty to the magnificent array of public buildings, which owned the Capitol and the Library as chief. Above and beyond all else in its unapproachable glory, the Dome of the Capitol in the mellow, hazy moonlight, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... winter, always a time for enjoyment in the days of old Guernsey, when evening after evening, people met together at the Veilles, to knit and sing and to tell stories of witchcraft and weird tales of the sea. ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... Indian-summer days went by, and as the wine-red sun slowly quenched his lower limb in the denser smoke along the horizon, the great bronzed moon struggled out of it, on the opposite rim of the sky. It was a weird light and a weird atmosphere, such as we might imagine overspreading Babylonian ruins, on the lone plains of the Euphrates; but no such fancies either charmed or tormented the lusty, wide-awake, practical ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... realistic effects. His concise, laconic periods are pregnant with deep meaning, and instinct with that indefinable Norse essence which almost eludes the translator—that vague something which specially lends itself to the treatment of weird or pathetic situations. ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... thrill of romance in the mystery of darkness, the weird beauty of it. The Tuileries gardens, without a single light except the faint gleams of star-dust, was an enchanted place, with the white statues of the goddesses very vague and tremulous in the shadow world above ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... the hall so dull that this did not penetrate! Dan had given to his last words a weird, mournful intonation whose effect was startling. He jumped lightly to the floor and was in his seat before the deep boom of his voice had ceased reverberating. Then instantly it seemed that the seventeen hundred delegates had been multiplied by ten, and that every man had become ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the bands already in position. Next comes the massed buglers of all the regiments, their thrilling soaring notes rising above the hills, and take their stand beside the bands already in place. Then a pause, when from round the hill shoulder rise wild and weird sounds. The music of the evening, to Scottish hearts and ears, has begun. It is the fine pipe band of the 42nd Royal Highlanders from Montreal, khaki clad, kilts and bonnets, and blowing proudly and defiantly their "Wha saw the Forty-twa." ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... back and brought it up, and after some delay a place for it was found. The two lights now plainly showed a sudden enlargement in the area of the cave, and above them hung what appeared to be huge icicles, giving the interior a weird appearance. Still no water ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... of whom his father and fellow-officers spoke ever in honor and esteem—a chief whose people wellnigh worshipped him—"Rolling-Thunder-in-the-Mountains," they called him ("Hin-Mato-Iya-Latkit," in their weird dialect). And as George and Connell knelt here now, listening to this deep, reverberant voice, thundering from bluff to bluff across the mile-wide valley, the name and fame of old Chief Joseph, whom the whites had so misunderstood and wronged, came back to ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... quotidianis conviciis uxoris (quae omnium consiliorum ei erat conscia) stimulabatur."—This is the whole that Buchanan says of the Lady; and truly I see no more spirit in the Scotch than in the English Chronicler. "The wordes of the three weird Sisters also greatly encouraged him [to the Murder of Duncan], but specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, brenning in unquenchable desire to beare the name of a Queene." Edit. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... up, The red-haired girl had lived at Krindlesyke, Instead of me, this forty-year: and I— I might ... But we must dree our weird. And yet, To think what my life might have ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... also to the Durga festival, in which the weird and often horrible and obscene rites of Skakti worship not infrequently play ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... by my window I am reminded that this is a queer world and queer be the mortals that pass through it. There is that wreck of a man over yonder squeezing a bit of weird melody out of an old accordion and expecting the tortured public to throw a penny into his hat now and then to pay him for his trouble. Do you suppose that man knows what happiness means, as God designed it. He was, without ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... often frightened her neighbors, and they treated her shyly, yet respectfully, because of her weird powers. But Tip frankly hated her, and took no pains to hide his feelings. Indeed, he sometimes showed less respect for the old woman than he should have done, considering ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... could tell the wild weird sights We saw in all the days and nights We travelled through those forests old. We saw the griffons on white cliffs, Among fantastic hieroglyphs, Guarding enormous heaps ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... dead, not divided; each, save for the other, alone. The dog, his saturnine expression glazed and ghastly in the fixedness of death, propped up against that humpbacked boulder beneath which, a while before, the Black Killer had dreed his weird; and, close by, his master lying on his back, his dim dead eyes staring up at the heaven, one hand still clasping a crumpled photograph; the weary body at rest at last, the mocking face—mocking no longer—alight with a ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... on, the country became more sombre from the increasing number of pines bordering the road and mingling with the distant forest. Very weird pines these were, chiefly covered with closely-packed dead foliage, with a living tuft of dark green at the end of each branchlet. A living death seemed to be their lot, and they moaned without moving as the light wind ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... betide me woe, That weird shall never daunton me!" Syne he has kissed her rosy lips, All underneath the ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... music I ever heard has come to me through the woods—not from the birds, but the whispering leaves. Have you ever listened—with your heart—and learned, by the faintest sound, the different voices of the trees—the quick, soft rustle of the maple; the stronger sound of the oak-leaves; the weird, ghostly shiver of the pine-needles? I know little of music, if anything out of heaven can touch a human soul more tenderly than these sounds. Then the birds—what joyous or solemn music they can make! Have you never felt your heart leap to the singing of a robin among the branches of an ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... and from the pastures and meadows, When from the spring-house and lane and from the mint-bed and orchard, When from the redbud and gum and from redolent lilac, When from the dirt roads and pikes comes that calling for Peter; Cometh the dolorous cry, cometh that weird iteration Of "Peter" and "Peter" for aye, of "Peter" and "Peter" forever! This is the legend of old, told in the tumtitty meter Which the great poets prefer, being less labor than rhyming (My first attempt at the same, my last ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... into bits, and when the fury of the wind was spent and the rain ceased the sun came out with a new warmth that bespoke the summer close at hand. The tide carried the splintered ice to the open sea, wild geese honked overhead in their northern flight, seals played in the open water, and the loon's weird laugh broke the wilderness silence. The world was awakening from its long slumber, and summer ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... started home, strange incantations were going on in Sing's lean-to. In four china bowls punk was burning, and an old Chinaman was muttering weird invocations over the clothes of Digger Dan slowly smouldering in a coal-oil can in the middle of the floor. Hop Sing held one hand in the smoke, raised the other aloft and made a blood-curdling oath of some sort which, by the expression of his face, probably ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... and weird-looking in the moonlight, rose the framework of the derrick, formed of heavy timbers, and apparently solid enough to resist any pressure that might be brought to bear upon it. Near by were scattered pieces of machinery, tools ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... the passengers], with his antarctic experience, was completely deceived. The fact that not one of the five persons on the flight deck ever identified the rising terrain confirms the totality of this weird and dangerous ocular illusion as it existed on the approach to Mt. Erebus at 12.50 ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... an Oriental character. After this clash of sound follows an air of a sombre style by Eli ("Hear my Prayer, O Lord"), the introduction and accompaniment of which are very striking. The "Man of God" once more appears, announcing the approaching death of Eli's sons to a weird, sepulchral accompaniment of the reeds and trombones, and leading up to a very effective duet between them ("Lord, cause Thy Face to shine upon Thy Servant"). Another chorale ensues ("O make a joyful ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... side, the hanging skin which served as a door and was barely visible, the tumble down appearance of everything, and withal the solemn stillness which brooded within the lodge: all these made the scene weird and ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Gorby saw Madge and Brian come out on to the verandah, and heard in the stillness of the night, a sound weird and unearthly. It was Miss Featherweight singing. He saw Madge go in, shortly followed by Brian. The latter turned and stared at ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... sacristies and other rooms behind, including one lofty room lined entirely with blue-and-white tiles. While there, I heard, to my surprise, a faint and very distant sound of a sweeping broom. It echoed through those empty, roofless halls with a weird sound, for at that moment there was only an occasional growl of artillery in the air. Everything else was strangely quiet. Needless to say, an uninhabited town is never noisy, and at five o'clock in the morning it is not merely not ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... his servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters. They will call upon Shakespeare—they always do—and will quote that hackneyed passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... one past youth. Subconsciously pursuing the Wiertz idea, I know not why, I invested the dimly-visible speakers with distinct personalities. The man became Asmodeus, master of the revels at the Black Sabbath, and the young woman I cast for that "young witch" depicted in one of the canvasses of the weird Belgian genius. ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... turned our prow North, towards an ocean weird Of Northern Lights and icy blasts; And for ten moons with reeling masts ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... Elizabeth Pilfold, reputed a great beauty. The first child of this marriage, born on August 4, 1792, was the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, born to all the ease and comfort of an English country home, but with the weird imaginings which in childhood could people the grounds and surroundings with ancient snakes and fairies of all forms, and which later on were to lead him far out of the beaten track. Shelley's little sisters were the confidants of his childhood, and their sympathy ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... stood Swift Arrow; at the left was a figure that formed a weird contrast to the other two. This one was lean, bent, and twisted like a gnarled tree that had been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... visible in a ghostly degree. Great boulders and masses of rock, which had fallen from the neighbouring mountains and cliffs, lay piled about in the creek or gully in wildest confusion. Some of these masses were as large as a small hut, but they were of all sizes as well as shapes. It was a weird scene, and forbidding; nevertheless some human being had seen fit to take up his abode there, as was made apparent by the light ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... Not that she wanted the vivacity of her age, but that it was tempered by periods of serious musing, when all kinds of what the Scotch call "auld farrant" (far yont) thoughts come to be where they should not be, the consequence being a weird-like kind of wisdom, very like that of the aged; so the effect on a creature so constituted was just equal to the cause. Annie ran out of the room with her face concealed in her hands, and got into a small bedroom darkened by the window-blind, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... I saw; and there Wild as of old and weird and sweet In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon Not on her brow; beneath ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... now all ablaze, the lurid fire feeding upon its walls lighting far the night scene, while throwing a weird glamor over the contending factions of war-crazed men, who had now both reached the further side of the plaza and temporally ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... in my acquaintance, and I have the queerest hodge-podge of scraps of things learned from them. I know a little Swedish from Miss Lindstroem. She's a Swedish old maid who does uplift work among the negroes—isn't that a weird combination? You just ought to hear what she makes of negro dialect! And I know all the socialist arguments from hearing a socialist editor get them off every Sunday afternoon. And I even know how to manage planchette and write mediumistically—save the mark!—from Cousin Parnelia, a crazy old ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... glooms and joys Born with their songs, gone with their toys; Nor ever is its stillness stirred By purr of cat, or chirp of bird, Or mother's twilight legend, told Of Horner's pie, or Tiddler's gold, Or fairy hobbling to the door, Red-cloaked and weird, banned and poor, To bless the good child's gracious eyes, The good child's wistful charities, And crippled changeling's hunch to make Dance on his ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... practised hand made clean straight cuts in the trunk, now on this side, now on that. His task was not an easy one, but he finished it with wonderful expedition. After the chopping was finished, the tree stood firm a moment; then, as the tensely-strained fibres began a weird moaning, he sprang aside, and stood waiting. In the distance he saw two men hewing a log. The axe-man sent them a shout and threw up his arms for them to look. The tree stood out clear and beautiful against ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Jane Bronte, was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, England, on August 30, 1818, and died at Haworth on December 19, 1848. She will always have a place in English literature by reason of her one weird, powerful, strained novel, "Wuthering Heights," and a few poems. Emily Bronte, like her sister Charlotte, was educated at Cowan School and at Brussels. For a time she became a governess, but it seemed impossible for her to live away from the fascination ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... playing Grieg and MacDowell, and Warrington was turning the pages. The chords, weird and melancholy, seemed to permeate his whole being; sad, haunting music, that spoke of toil, tears, death and division, failure and defeat, hapless love and loveless happiness. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... dim surmises, But experience advises Us to look for weird surprises, Somersaults, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... are alone. There is—is one here who—who would do anything in the world for you," I ended lamely. She did not withdraw her hand, and she looked up into my face with tears on her cheeks and I read in her eyes the thanks her lips could not voice. Then she looked away across the weird moonlit landscape and sighed. Evidently her new-found philosophy had tumbled about her ears, for she was seemingly taking herself seriously. I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her how I loved her, and had taken her hand from the rail and started ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the roots of the gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... forlorn, peered around him on all sides. At first he could see nothing beyond the glow of his own fire, which intensified the weird shadows of the forest; but he could hear the shouts and the ringing tramp of a horse's hoofs on the stony ground. He raised his voice in answer to ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... to the silent terrors of my house. The weird fancies that clung around the gloomy halls and dark doorways still whispered their threatening tales of danger and death. The air was still peopled with the ghosts of forgotten crimes, and the tragedy of the alley that had changed my life was ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... of such a faith upon the sensitive nerves of the women of those days? Viewed in its larger aspects this was an objective, not a subjective religion. It could but make the sensitive soul super-sensitive, introspective, morbidly alive to uncanny and weird suggestions, and strangely afraid of the temptation of enjoying earthly pleasures. Its followers dared not allow themselves to become deeply attached to anything temporal; for such an emotion was the device of the devil, and God would surely remove the object of ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... that, lad. At night all the sounds of a tropical forest seem mysterious and weird, but in the broad daylight the bush will be comparatively still. The nocturnal animals will slink away to their lairs, and there will seem nothing strange to you in the songs and calls of the birds. I should recommend you all to take a sound dose ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... of December 31, 1960, when the series of weird and startling events began which took me into the tiny world of an atom of gold, beyond the vanishing point, beyond the range of even the highest-powered electric-microscope. My name is George Randolph. I was, that momentous afternoon, assistant chemist for ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... deceiving fancy and go back to his handbook? Return to the wholesome realities of stalking and trailing which filled those engrossing pages? Poor Peter Piper felt that he had made a sort of bold excursion from Piper's Crossroads into the realm of miracles and that he had better not let that weird apparition over beyond the graveyard dupe and mock him. Perhaps he had been "seein' things." Yet there were the long and short flashes and they had spelled that warning message, or else he had gone out of his senses or been ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... building a car which would practically annihilate distance and time, and there were many weird pictures, showing him flying along without touching the ground, in a car, the pictorial construction of which was at once fearful ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... times hundreds of squaws and children wading about in Yaquina Bay taking crabs in this manner, and the reflection by the water of the light from the many torches, with the movements of the Indians while at work, formed a weird and diverting picture of which ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... country church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir, but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque and ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... valley of the dead; Lit by a weird half light; No sound they made, no word they said; And they were pale with fright. Then suddenly from unseen places came Loud laughter, that was ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... was supported by vast oaken beams; the floor was inlaid with polished marbles. The walls, instead of being hung with tapestry, were painted in distemper with life-size figure subjects, representing, as far as the boy could make out, some weird incantation scene. At one end of the room stood a heavy cabinet, the shelves of which were piled with gold and silver plate, richly chased, and evidently of great value. Here, in fact, seemed to have been deposited many of the precious heirlooms of the family, ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... together that they almost touched, and with the leafy foliage forming a thick covering. The depths of this brake Duane had penetrated was a silent, dreamy, strange place. In the middle of the day the light was weird and dim. When a breeze fluttered the foliage, then slender shafts and spears of sunshine pierced the green mantle and danced like gold ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... Marion Crawford is a master of mystery needs no new telling.... His latest novel, Cecilia, is as weird as anything he has done since the memorable Mr. Isaacs.... A strong, interesting, dramatic story, with the picturesque Roman setting beautifully handled as only a master's touch could do ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... believing himself a descendant of the Druids, Sam Gardner told me; and his mother had either died long ago or had run away from her husband, I forget which. In a way, I'm sorry David's dead. He had a sort of weird talent and wild good looks. By the way, he ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... most weird and remarkable scenes of the war, probably of any war. An army was being landed on an enemy's coast at the dead of night, but with the same cheers and shrieks and laughter that rise from the bathers at ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... "Odd? It's weird! But I'm getting used to such things. I picked up a chap this morning whose story I wouldn't have believed a year ago. Now I've learned that most ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of the representation suggests a great thought, perhaps I should say, principle of man's moral being, which Shakespeare has more than once worked upon with surpassing effect. For it is remarkable that, in Macbeth, the thinking of the Weird Sisters (and he cannot choose but think of them) fires the hero's moral and imaginative forces into convulsive action, and thus causes him to shrink back from the very deed to which the prophetic ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and the fire cast weird, uncanny shadows on the dimly-lighted interior walls of the wigwam. The Indians sitting around it in their peculiar dress seemed like unreal inhabitants of some spirit world. Bob's coming to himself in this place and amongst these people appealed to him as miraculous—supernatural. He could ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... stopped to listen and to sniff the air for an odor of smoke. More and more he became like a beast of prey. He left the last bush behind him. Ahead of him the starlit space was now unbroken by a single shadow. Weird whispers came with a low wind that was gathering ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... are, for the most part, malignant and malefic. They seem to hate man. They love to mock his toils, and sport with his despair. In his very first romance, "Den Fremsynte," Lie relates two of these weird tales (Nos. 1 and 3 of the present selection). Another tale, in which many of the superstitious beliefs and wild imaginings of the Nordland fishermen are skilfully grouped together to form the background of a charming love-story, entitled "Finn Blood," ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... the Sioux. They had a fresh scalp, said to be off a Chippewa chief. It was stretched on a sort of hoop, formed by a green twig, or limb. It was all very weird. This was in '54. ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... break into it with axes—one cannot but hope they will succeed. The female figures are especially beautiful in this picture, and again we have a foretaste of that wonderful modelling of the flank and thigh seen to perfection in the tombs at San Lorenzo. The weird sea and sky, the ark and the dead tree, show what Michael Angelo could do when he liked, in departments of art other than the human figure. The individual figures in the Deluge are difficult to see on account of the smallness of scale in this part of the vault. It must ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Irun, where we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at once to be temperamental differences which ought to have wrought against my weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a customs inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed them all with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial to a gentleman. Perhaps ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... cried, still holding his hand, "think o' the puir lass! have pity upon her, Erchie! and O, be wise for twa! Think o' the risk she rins! I have seen ye, and what's to prevent ithers! I saw ye once in the Hags, in my ain howl, and I was wae to see ye there - in pairt for the omen, for I think there's a weird on the place - and in pairt for pure nakit envy and bitterness o' hairt. It's strange ye should forgather there tae! God! but yon puir, thrawn, auld Covenanter's seen a heap o' human natur since he lookit his last on the musket barrels, if ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hit strange problems as routine: if they weren't weirdos, they weren't tough enough to merit Med Service attention. Now the essence of a weird problem is that it involves a factor nobody ever thought of before ... or the absence of one ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... are said to be the work of the devil. A friend tells me that in his childhood his nurse used to frighten him by saying that the devil lurked in a dolmen which stands near his father's house in Oxfordshire; and many weird traditions ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... squeak of rubber tires and he whirled to see Hafitz, in his wheelchair, slamming toward him. The fat man's hand held a weird-looking gun. ...
— Double Take • Richard Wilson
... the "Stovepipes" were not mere street corner ornaments addicted to posing and manicuring. Their serious occupation was the separating of citizens from their coin and valuables. Preferably this was done by weird and singular tricks without noise or bloodshed; but whenever the citizen honored by their attentions refused to impoverish himself gracefully his objections came to be spread finally upon some police station blotter ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... short. A new sound had reached his ears—a strange, weird sound that made his flesh creep and his ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... ears thrilled with tender sounds. Though all the winds were dead the undertones of the sea linger in lulling harmonies. The tepid tide on the warm sand crisply rustles and hisses as when satin is crumpled and smartly rent. Weird, resonant tappings, moans, and gurgles come from a hollow log drifting, with infinite slowness. Broken sighs and gasps tell where the ripples advancing in echelon wander and lose their way among blocks of sandstone. As the tide rose it prattled ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Alleghany and Monongahela at Pittsburg. Scarcely ever a man had so much relish for the supernatural, and so little faith in it. One must confess, however, that the most sceptical might have been overcome at Glamis Castle, for its appearance, by all accounts, is weird and strange, and ghostly enough to ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the elm trees had been removed to the main pavilion. The diving springboard was submerged by the swollen lake, the rowboats rocked logily, half full of water, and the woods across the lake looked weird and dim through the incessant stream ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... charitable disposition that we make the acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures— creatura being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being somewhat more pitiable than a poveretta. Our Creatures ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... thought, it was her condition that accounted for this morbidness. She was liable to fits of depression, and to mysterious illness—nausea and faintness and what not. Also, she had been told weird tales about prenatal influences; and he, not having been educated in such matters, could not be sure what were the facts. So, whenever she had been unhappy, there was the possibility that she had done some irreparable harm to the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... several Dayak dialects, but not Dutch, still less English, for Malay is the lingua franca of the Dutch Indies as well as of the Malay Peninsula. As we anchored for the night I heard for the first time, from the hills that rose near by, the loud defiant cry of the argus pheasant. How wildly weird it ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... still called Kalonese, this grotto had beheld more than one human sacrifice accomplished in its mystic depths. The first entrance to the cavern was by a moderate descent, above which distorted rocks formed a weird arcade; the interior, very uneven and dangerous from the inequalities of the vault, was subdivided into several compartments, which communicated with each other by means of rough and jagged steps, fixed right and left, in uncouth natural pillars. At the third compartment the vault was so ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... loons calling [Great Northern Divers]. They were somewhere out on the glittering water, and far apart. We could not see them, but there were four, and one wild call answering another rang out into the great silence. It was weird and beautiful beyond words; the big, shining lake with its distant blue islands; the sky with its wonderful clouds and colour; two little canoes so deep in the wilderness, and those wild, reverberant voices coming up from invisible beings away in the "long light" which lay across ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... place. I had had no experience in parachute jumping and I couldn't pilot the plane if Hughes jumped. We swooped down over the wreck as close as we dared and that was when we saw the condition of the bodies. The whole plane was cracked up pretty badly, but the weird part of it was the fact that the bodies of the crew had broken into pieces, as though they had been made of glass. Arms and legs were detached from the torsos and lying at a distance. There was no sign of blood on the ground. We saw all this with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... how he clears the points o' faith Wi' rattlin' an' wi' thumpin'! Now meekly calm, now wild in wrath, He's stampin' an' he's jumpin'! His lengthen'd chin, his turned-up snout, His eldritch squeal an' gestures, [weird] O how they fire the heart devout, Like cantharidian plaisters, On ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... track skirts the ocean side for many a sonorous league. The mile-long waves roll in majestically, as straight as if drawn with a ruler, and crash in thunder on the sandy beach. There were glorious sunsets and weird storms, with underhanded lightning stabs at the sky. I built little huts of discarded railway ties, and lit camp-fires, for I was fearful of the crawling things I saw by day. The coyote called from the hills. Uneasy ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... wildly over Kirk Alloway that it is difficult to see it as it actually exists. By-the-by, I do not understand why Satan and an assembly of witches should hold their revels within a consecrated precinct; but the weird scene has so established itself in the world's imaginative faith that it must be accepted as an authentic incident, in spite of rule and reason to the contrary. Possibly, some carnal minister, some priest of pious aspect and hidden infidelity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... asked if the inspiration is not Taoist in the main rather than Buddhist. Side by side with ethics and ceremony, a native stream of bold and weird imagination has never ceased to flow in China and there was no need to import tales of the Genii, immortal saints and vampire beauties. But when any coherency unites these ideas of the supernatural, that I think is ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... four miles. The grey trees were draped with ice, the grey zigzag of the fences was gliding ice under the hands that caught at it, the hands of the sick and weak. Motion resolved itself into a Dead March; few notes and slow, with rests. The army moved and halted, moved and halted with a weird stateliness. Couriers came back from the man riding ahead, cadet cap drawn over eyes that saw only what a giant and iron race might do under a giant and iron dictatorship. General Jackson says, "Press Forward!" General Jackson says, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... would write him a faithful account of our fete once we had decided our day. We took the five-o'clock train down, and a nice cold drive we had going home. The roads were rather slippery, and the forest black and weird. The trees which had been so beautiful in the morning covered with rime, seemed a massive black wall hemming us in. It is certainly a lonely bit of country, once we had left the lights of Villers-Cotterets behind us, crossed the last railway, ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... took up the basket, which had a cloth in it, and pushed forward. The pale light from his lantern, so different from that of a couple of blazing torches, made the objects around look strange and weird. He began not at all to like the appearance of things, and fancied at last that he must have got into a different part, of the cavern; still he thought, "I must have the gold. It would be so foolish to go away without it. It belongs to us as much as to anybody ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... the fingers of Laura Chipchase, who has already seated herself at the piano, begin to move dreamily over the keys. She plays well, and a soft weird-like melody attunes the minds of the spectators to what is to follow. Again the bell rings, and as the curtain slowly rises comes the sharp report of a pistol. "Good Heavens! there is some accident," escapes from three or four lips. But the wild ghostly ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... old songs which Rachel had called weird and wild, and now, as she listened to the plaintive tones, they thrilled on every nerve with a strange power as if it were a requiem sung by the dead over their own buried hopes. Nearer and nearer Bedouin pressed to the slowly moving vehicle, until at last she ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... And the weird evening, Karshish thinks, had something to do with the strange impression the man has made on him. Then we are placed in the dreamy village of Bethany. We hear of its elders, its diseases, its flowers, its herbs and gums, of the insects which may ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... and stat In the grave lie desolate. He who wore the kingly crown, With the base worm lieth down: Ermined robe, and purple pall, Leaveth he at death's weird call. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... that she was a subjective phenomenon vivified by the weird influences of his descent and birthplace, the discovery of her ghostliness, of her independence of physical laws and failings, had occasionally given him a sense of fear. He never knew where she next would be, whither she would lead him, having herself instant access to all ranks and ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... impact and reacted violently. Its tail lashed up to strike with sharp barbs at the intruder. The tail lashed the arrow shaft without effect. The ray's wings moved in a rippling motion like that of some weird flying carpet. It flashed upward, and into the air, then crashed back on the surface of the water again. It dived, heading for ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... A weird and wonderful story of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, told in a most absorbing manner. The Saddle Boys are to the front in a manner to ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... to fall from his shoulders. He went along more swiftly, inspired with new vague hopes. Down—down! The voice of the sea grew nearer; now he could hear the dull thud of the waves, then the weird whistling sounds that succeeded. Springing from a granite out-jutting to the sands, he looked eagerly, searchingly, this way and that. He saw no one. His gaze lowered and he walked from the dry ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the Afrikander cannon simultaneously opened fire on the town, turning the sleeping scene into a lurid inferno. Several buildings caught fire, and the whistling and shrieking shells at intervals made terrifying music in the weird silence of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Brazil, where the crew were allowed to escape to the shore. The Peterborough was re-christened the Victory and was manned by half of England's crew, while the other vessel was burned at night; the pirates dancing on the beach to the light of the flames and singing the weird songs ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... excited almost to exaltation; her eyes, moist with tears, shone with matchless splendor; passing blushes colored her face; and her voice had strange, weird vibrations. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... a dozen revolved on one post, and Maurice would stop long enough to laugh. How easy it was to walk! All he had to do was to lift a foot, and the pavement would rise to meet it. The moon, standing high behind him, cast a long, weird shadow, and he staggered after it and cut at it with the saber. It was only when he saw the lights of the royal palace and the great globes on the gate posts that sanity returned. This sanity was ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the street and of the sound of vehicles, the distant noises were strangely audible. The rustle of the flames at the Hotel de Ville and the great fires across the river, the crash of the falling roofs and walls, the incessant rattle of distant musketry, and the boom of cannon, formed a weird contrast to the silence that prevailed in the quarter. Cuthbert felt that he breathed more freely when he issued out ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... came these grim, cold, black-clad men, to kidnap three Earth people and carry them to a weird and terrible world where a man could ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... then he stood once more beside his father's death-bed, and heard again the solemn charge: "Be kind to your mother, John, and make her old age pleasant. She is all you've got now." With these words ringing in his ears John Lyman awoke to find the perspiration standing on his forehead, and a strange, weird sensation resting on him like a spell, which he tried in vain to throw aside. He tried to compose his mind, and again to sleep; but though nothing peculiarly frightful had troubled his slumber, he trembled ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... as rapidly as a weathercock before a thunderstorm. One moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... area steps her heart gave quite a quick beat of recognition. Several pieces of furniture had been set out of the van upon the pavement. There was a beautiful table of elaborately wrought teakwood, and some chairs, and a screen covered with rich Oriental embroidery. The sight of them gave her a weird, homesick feeling. She had seen things so like them in India. One of the things Miss Minchin had taken from her was a carved teakwood desk her father had ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of a certain sunset hour when she came at Pierre's call out to the shed he had built at one side of their cabin. Its open side faced the west, and, as Joan came, her shadow went before her and fell across Pierre at work. The flame of the west gave a weird pallor to the flames over which he bent. He was whistling, and hammering at a long piece of iron. Joan came ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... weird, savage, hurried chorus, interspersed with hoots and flapping of wings, all talking together and rocking ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... fiddles leaped from their places and began to play, accordions of all sizes joined them, the drumsticks beat upon the drums, the penny trumpets sounded, and the yellow flutes took up the melody on high notes, and bore it away through the trees. It was weird fairy-music, but quite delightful. The nearest approach to it that I know of above ground is to hear a wild dreamy air very well whistled to a ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... still retained lower foliage. The trees put on their winter shapes unduly early. The world was dark and sweated fungus. Uncouth children of the earth, whose hour is that which sees the leaf fall, sprang into short-lived being. Black goblins and gray, white goblins and brown, spread weird life abroad. With fleshy gills, squat and lean, fat and thin, bursting through the grass in companies and circles, lurking livid, gigantic and alone on the trunks of forest trees, gemming the rotten bough with crimson, twinkling like topaz on ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... who felt very much ashamed, and crept behind her two friends. Madame Torvestad now struck up a hymn, in which all the company joined. To Jacob Worse's ear, all these voices in the low room, the subdued tones of the women, and the rough bass of the men, sounded weird and unpleasing. ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... like a ballet dancer's skirt. Gradually the sick person is worked up to a frenzy, and, keeping time with the music, the medicine women sway about and wag their heads. So the proceedings go on, with weird fantastic dancing, nodding, howling, whistling, chanting, for all the hours of the tropical night. Then the medicine women are whirled round in the cone, and one by one they fall into a faint, to be recovered by fanning with the pinang blossom. They dance about and brush against the onlookers ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... again, he forgives and condones the oft-repeated offences of his friend. And there could be few more interesting psychological studies than to trace how, from the sentiments of love and admiration he once entertained for Douglas, he was wrought to such indignation and wrath as to yield to the weird fascination of that precedent which must have been so burnt in upon his childish memory, and to repeat the tragedy which within the recollection of all men had marked the Castle of Edinburgh with so ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... the plague-stricken man, together with Dorcas, who hurriedly told her tale as they moved, ran down the dark staircase and out into the street. There, a little way off, was the tall spectre-like figure, still hugging in bearlike embrace the hapless Frederick, and dancing the while a most weird and fantastic dance, chanting some awful words which none could rightly catch, but the burden of which was, "The dance of death! the dance of death! None who dances here with me will dance ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... later, they were assembled outside the ship, fully armed and armored, and with full field gear. The sun, a yellow G-O star, hung hotly just above the towering mountains to the east. The alien air smelled odd in the men's nostrils, and the weird foliage seemed to rustle menacingly. In the distance, the shrieks of alien fauna occasionally echoed ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Flannigan's fault," replied Dam, daubing pipe-clay on the huge cuff of a gauntlet which he had drawn on to a weird-looking wooden hand, sacred to the purposes of glove-drying. "He got beastly drunk and insulted a better man than himself by insulting his Corps—or trying to. He called a silly lie after a total stranger and got what he deserved. He shouldn't seek ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a violet, and the ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... increased. There was something put down on the map which was not there before. The contact with the islanders in the Strait gave a brisk element of adventure to the expedition; and certainly Papuan warriors are foes as wild and weird as any adventurer can desire to meet. The rescuing of wrecked mariners at Tahiti added a spice of adventure of another sort. From beginning to end, indeed, this voyage must have been as full of ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... a little ray of his genius: when he heard it, he laughed heartily, and told her it was a chair on which he never sat. He said it reminded him of Boswell and himself when they stopped a night, as they imagined, where the weird sisters appeared to Macbeth. The idea so worked on their enthusiasm, that it quite deprived them of rest. However, they learned the next morning, to their mortification, that they had been deceived, and were quite in another part ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... now had he appreciated the warm magenta coloring of gorgeous poinsettias and bougainvillea, the glowing-hearted, waxy white flowers of frangipani; not until now did he realize the prodigality of Nature towards Java in the matter of weird and awesome fruits ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... mouth, shut that one eye, and broke into a strange plaint. The others concluded that One-Eye was making a curious, hoarse noise ceilingward for some reason. Presently, however, Cis made out that the noise was a tune: a tune weird but soul-stirring. Music, as Cis could see, was One-Eye's medium of expressing his emotions. And then and there it became her firm conviction that he was bearing a great ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... of the unwillingness of Lucy and Julia to allow him to depart with such a companion, Bertram and Dandie (for Meg invited Dinmont also to follow her) hastened to obey the gipsy's summons. There was something weird in the steady swiftness of her gait as she strode right forward across the moor, taking no heed either of obstacle or of well-trodden path. She seemed like some strange withered enchantress drawing men after ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... visits to a number of remote and unfrequented places in the Rocky Mountains, from Wyoming to Alberta, the writer was deeply impressed with the awesome mystery of the wilderness and the weird legends he heard around the camp fires, while the bigness of the things he saw was photographed on his brain so distinctly and permanently as to act as a compelling force causing him, aye, almost forcing him to ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... volubility of the utterance in itself went far to prevent them from being distinguishable; but the high, vibrant, metallic tones rang through the house. It was a rush of noise, sharp grating noise, without a meaning. The effect was weird, very uncomfortable. Alec Naylor knit his brows, and once gave a little shiver, as he listened. Beaumaroy sat quite still, the expression in his eyes unaltered, or, if altered at all, it grew softer, as though with ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... spoke, the orchestra, which was a good one, and perhaps the most satisfactory feature in the performance, broke into some weird Mendelssohnian music, and when the note of plaintiveness and mystery had been well established, the curtain rose upon the great armoury of the castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and masses of faintly ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... form and face, Showed she was come of gentle race. 'Twere strange in ruder rank to find 610 Such looks, such manners, and such mind. Each hint the Knight of Snowdoun gave, Dame Margaret heard with silence grave; Or Ellen, innocently gay, Turned all inquiry light away: 615 "Weird women we—by dale and down We dwell, afar from tower and town. We stem the flood, we ride the blast, On wandering knights our spells we cast; While viewless minstrels touch the string, 620 'Tis thus our charmed ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... forty, under the influence of favourable criticism, would have persuaded himself he was a heaven-sent prophet, his whole life to be beautifully spent in the saving of mankind. At twenty he felt he wanted to live. Weird-looking Jessica, with her magnificent eyes veiling mysteries, was of more importance to him than the rest of the species combined. Knowledge of the future in his ease only spurred desire. The muddy complexion would grow pink and white, the thin limbs round and shapely; the now scornful ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... is that other weird notion that you cannot be really strong and healthy without stimulant. For you the glass of beer or wine may be a mere harmless luxury, in the way in which you take it. I purposely exclude spirits, which I am fanatic enough to think should only be used medicinally. But every individual ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally cast an impatient glance in that direction, as the sunlight faded more quickly than her fire. For the fluttering objects were the "week's wash" which had ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... grounds for the assured and easy demeanour with which he treated the singular mystery which he had been called upon to fathom. Once only had I known him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of August came, the day preceding the grand event of the century. Mary Trigillgus and her mother were lingering at the breakfast-table. The girl seemed wild and hawk-like, startling her mother with her unnatural merriment, commenting with weird brilliancy and grotesqueness and sparkle on the various items as Mrs. Trigillgus read them. At length she read a paragraph about the eclipse. "'And we would advise every reader,'" she continued, "'to furnish himself with an eclipse-glass, which he can procure at any of the news depots ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... but with feet always flat on the floor, often turning on her heels. All the time her arms were extended and her fingers snapping, and snapping also were the black eyes. She was the personification of grace, but the dance was weird—made the more so by the setting of bright evening dresses and glittering uniforms. One never sees a dance of this sort these days, even in the South, any more than one sees the bright-colored turban. Both have passed with the ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... across the sky like an exaggerated Milky Way, suddenly caught fire at its eastern end. Rapidly the red flame along ran its entire length to the other horizon. Then countless unexpected shadows woke up on the rocks about me, weird, undefined shapes, which became clear-cut only when the rim of the sun ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... turn in our search for the next step in the progress of art. Here we find the artists making melodramatic efforts to attract the attention and fascinate the mind with weird and incongruous shapes of mongrel brutes and ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... ascertained by superficial examination it was a mixture of alum and salt. He stood at one end of the fire-bed and poised the wooden tray over his head, and then sprinkled a handful of it on the ground before the glowing bed of coals. At the same time another priest who stood by him chanted a weird recitative of invocation and struck sparks from flint and steel which he held in his hands. This same process was repeated by both the priests at the other end, at the two sides, and ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... after an instant that was mainly taken up with the shock of her weird aspect Maisie felt herself reminded of another smile, which was not ugly, though also interested—the kind light thrown, that day in the Park, from the clean fair face of the Captain. Papa's Captain—yes—was the Countess; but she wasn't nearly ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... intertwining below the earth and their branches intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark and queer, gnarled limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire forest, save where the sunbeams found a path through which to touch the ground in little spots and to cast weird and curious shadows over the mosses, the lichens and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... of the wall came sounds of revelry, shrill squealings and shoutings. The Judies were disporting themselves at one of their weird games. It was known that they played touch-last, and Scandal said that another of their favourite recreations was marbles. The juniors at Wrykyn believed that it was to hide these excesses from the gaze ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... success was due to Poe's weird and wonderful stories; still more, perhaps, to his trenchant critiques and his startling theories anent cryptology. As regards the tales now issued in 'Graham's', attention may especially be drawn to the world-famed ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... would be disloyal to her—distinctly so. That I've never been yet, and I'm too old to begin now. There may be cases in which the end justifies the means, but this is not one of them. No: I must dree this weird (if that is the expression), and hoe this row, all by myself. If I had been bred in the east, I should be tempted to say it was a contumelious responsibility. The next time you want to get into difficulties ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... ought to make myself decent!" She smoothed the collar Jimsy's arms had crumpled, the hair his shoulder had rubbed from its smooth plaits. "She must think I'm weird enough ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... smarted, and her head was heavy with the fumes of alcohol. She turned around and saw the still, the machine that created drunkards. That evening the copper was dull and glittered only in one round spot. The shadows of the apparatus on the wall behind were strange and weird—creatures with tails, monsters opening gigantic jaws as if ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... history of fiction is due to the fact that he introduced the Gothic romance to American literature. He loved to subject the weird, the morbid, the terrible, to a psychological analysis. In this respect he suggests Hawthorne, although there are more points of difference than of likeness between him and the great New England romancer. In weird subject matter, but not in artistic ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... not, nor wake me, Lest grosser thoughts o'ertake me; From earth receding faintly with her dreary din and jars— What viewless arms caress me? What whispered voices bless me, With welcomes dropping dew-like from the weird and ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... New York at once!" sobbed Miss Dixon. "Make that train come back!" she cried to the lone station agent, who, with a set grin on his face, was looking alternately from the group of picture players to the approaching dust cloud that concealed so many weird noises. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... Phenomenon, lurid lightning was much in request to astonish the natives; and this was sufficiently well simulated by igniting, with a sudden flash and a hiss, highly inflammable spores of the Club Moss projected against burning tow within a hollow cone, producing weird scenic effects. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... roam where she would, there were always two mysteries that allured her back again, as Thone's curt sentence told,—"Tonkunst und Arzenei"; and to these might be added Race, in defiance of Mr. Buckle. Assuredly the Hebrew owes acknowledgment to her, and not George Borrow, with all his weird learning, enters more deeply into the Burden of Egypt; Browning's appreciation of the gypsy standing alone beside hers,—Browning, between whose writings and her own a rich sympathy exists, both being so possessed of fulness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... observed the wizened monkey-like figure creeping from the shadow of the hut. It crept on all fours, but when it reached the place where the king sat it rose upon its feet, and throwing the furry covering from its face, revealed a most extraordinary and weird countenance. Apparently it was that of a woman of great age so shrunken that in size it seemed no larger than the face of a year-old child, although made up of a number of deep and yellow wrinkles. Set in these wrinkles was a sunken slit, that represented the mouth, ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... Port Said—a globe-trotter, globe-trotting alone. Can you imagine anything more ghastly? She is very tall, dark and mysterious-looking, and last night when G. and I were in the music saloon before dinner, she sat down beside us and began to talk of spiritualism and other weird things. To bring her to homelier subjects I asked if she liked games. "Games" she said, "what sort of games? I can ride anything that has four legs and I can hold my own with a sword." She looked so fierce that if the bugle hadn't ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... any room unpreceded by what in Stageland is termed "noise without." It is somewhat disconcerting to the nervous incomer to be met, the door still in his hand, by a sound as of people springing suddenly into the air, followed by a weird scuttling of feet, and then to discover the occupants sitting stiffly in opposite corners, deeply engaged in book or needlework. But, as I have said, with regard to some households, such precautions might ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... for there seems to be a kind of fitness in the choice of damp and dismal weather for the extraction of teeth. Elderly ladies and gentlemen had been known to come many times to the Fitzgeorgian mansion. There was a legend of an old lady who had been seen to arrive in a brougham, especially weird and nut-crackery of aspect, and to depart half an hour afterwards a beautified and renovated creature. One half of the Fitzgeorgians declared that Mr. Sheldon had established a very nice little practice, and was saving money; while the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... to gather in the low valley and the weird evensong of the coyotes was at its height when suddenly from the north there came a rumble, as if a storm gathered above the mountain; then with a roar and the thunder of distant hoofs, the crashing ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... dry shingle the women place the salver and two brass "lotas" filled with milk and water, while the company ranges itself in a semi-circle around Rama the Gondhali, squatting directly in front of the platter. For a moment he sits wrapped in thought, and then commences a weird chant of invocation to the spirit of the dead woman, during which her relations in turn drop a copper coin into the salver. "Chandrabai," he wails "take this thy husband's gift of sorrow;" and as the company echoes his lament, Vishnu rises and drops his ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... 'lastic-sides; and hoops were hung horizontally from the tie-beams, with candles stuck round them. There were fresh-faced girls, and sweet, freckled-faced girls, and jolly girls, and shy girls—all sorts of girls except sulky, "toney" girls—and lanky chaps, most of them sawney, and weird, whiskered agriculturists, who watched the dancers with old, old time-worn smiles, or stood, or sat on their heels yarning, with their pipes, outside, where two boilers were slung over a log-fire to boil water for tea; and there were leathery women, with complexions like dried ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... facts, that till man is superman, there will always be people like Clarens, people who will never be redeemed. People, who no matter how carefully caged or watched, will ever be a potential threat, if only to their keepers. By what weird accident they came to life, well, list that among other facts as yet unknown, and consider only the end result, that there were people whose only pleasure lay ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... dreamers Who on my fair shores are dwelling. I, indeed, am your true likeness, Am the history of your nation; Storm and passion, bitter ending, All are pictured in my course. Most romantic is my birthplace, And weird Alpine spirits watched well By my glittering icy cradle, And conducted me to daylight. Strong and wild was I in childhood; Never can the rocks be counted, Which I roaring dashed to pieces, And hurled up like balls at tennis. Fresh and gay I then float onward, Through the Swabian sea, and carry, ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... when it knew of her return. Why did the rain hiss, and dash its cold and stinging showers in her face? Why did it saturate her thin skirts so that they, in chill folds, wrapped her wasted frame and clung cruelly to her weary limbs to stay her onward travel? And why that strange, weird sound—the sound muttered by miles of herbage when beaten down by rain—the swish and patter and sigh of the long grass and of the bracken, as they bent beneath the continuous fall, and rose in angry ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... with thick wrappings which a sword could not cut through; from chin to ankle they were padded thoroughly against injury; their arms were bandaged and rebandaged, layer upon layer, until they looked like solid black logs. These weird apparitions had been handsome youths, clad in fashionable attire, fifteen minutes before, but now they did not resemble any beings one ever sees unless in nightmares. They strode along, with their arms projecting ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the general public failure to realize the gift which is within their reach. Flying was first a circus stunt and later a war wonder. The solid practical accomplishments have been lost sight of in the weird or the spectacular. People who marveled when a British plane climbed up nearly six miles into the air, or 30,000 feet, where its engine refused to run and its observer fainted, failed generally to analyze what the invasion of this new element ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... jib down, backed the fore-staysail, and got the boom-foresail sheeted in, but they let the rent mainsail bang, for it could do no more damage than it had already done. Then a man sprang up on the rail with a blue light in his hand, and as the weird radiance flared in a long streak to leeward a cry rose from the water. In another few moments a blurred object, half hidden in flying spray, drove down upon the schooner furiously on the top of a sea, and then there was sudden darkness as the man ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... greatest interest of this weird little woman, who had a premature knowledge of things a child ought not to know, was in a house half-way down the street on the other side, where steam was always coming from the open door to the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... chow with the soldiers, and to eat in an old French barn used as a kitchen, in front of which the men lined up at the open doorways for mess. It was a very dirty barn indeed, with heavy cobwebs hanging in weird festoons from the ceiling and straw and manure all over the floor; quite too barnlike for a dining-hall for delicately reared women. The Staff-Captain hesitated about bringing them there, but the Mess-Sergeant offered to clean up a corner ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... told me he had once held a commission in the British Army and had seen service in diplomacy as military attache. Then he got cashiered. He didn't go into particulars, and of course I didn't cross-question. He recited some weird experiences. He had been a cattle man in Australia and a horse-trader in Syria and had served the Sultan in Turkey. There were lots of things that would have made a good book." The boy's voice ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... on Claiborne's face had made a paste of the dirt from the potato sack, which gave him a weird appearance. He grinned broadly, adding a fantastic horror to his visage which caused Zmai to leap back toward the door. Then Chauvenet cried aloud, a cry of anger, which brought Durand into the hall at a jump. Claiborne shrugged his shoulders, shook the blood into ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... strength than the sweetness of their voices, occupied a large box right under the pulpit, and thence led the congregation by a whole bar at least, in the rendering of Tate and Brady's metrical version of the Psalms. Very weird and sorrowful were many of the tunes. None were bright and inspiring like those Bert was wont to hear at home, and as choir and congregation vied with one another in the vigour of their singing, the little fellow was sometimes half-frightened ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... in a Broadway restaurant. Kernan was pleased with himself. He spent money like a prince of fiction. And then a weird and gorgeous musical comedy engaged their attention. Afterward there was a late supper in a grillroom, with champagne, and Kernan at ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the low hills across the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... made a real cowpuncher hang himself for shame. Petey confessed afterward that, of all the Rep Rho Betas, only seven had ever been on a horse, and, of these, three kept him in agony for fear they would fall off and compel him to explain that they were on the verge of delirium tremens. They were a weird-looking bunch, but, gee! they were fierce. Pirates would ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... uncouth show of interest, or to say a few words of kindness; but it was done diffidently, and a close observer might have detected in the man a sensitive shrinking from the idea of bringing his misshapen figure and weird ugliness into contrast with the peculiar beauty of the youngsters. The only human creature about Boobyalla in whose company he seemed to be quite at home was Yarra, the half-caste aboriginal boy, scandalously reputed in the neighbourhood—not without excellent reason, it must be ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... and there have been women of mystical mind who, believing that each quality of soul had its correspondent in a particular hue, wore those colors which they thought were significant of their chief traits of character—with weird ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... occasionally touched upon such subjects as death, was, as we have seen, informed with inspiring Hellenic beauty rather than depressing Hebraic moralization. It was in his sad moments, says Henry C. Whitney, that the mind of Lincoln "gravitated toward the weird, sombre and mystical. In his normal and tranquil state of mind, 'The Last Leaf,' by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was his favorite" (poem). It was Lincoln's happy lot to rise in the realm of oratory by the power of his poetic spirit higher than any ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... swords and gold lace, I maintained my innocence and heard Jack Herriott, on his opportune arrival, pour forth in weird, but fluent, Italian an account of me that must have surrounded me in the eyes of all present with a golden halo, and that firmly established me in their minds as the probable next President of the United States. Thanks to these exaggerations ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... gathered closer to each other as the figure approached. It was now seen to be that of a tall, gaunt woman. Her loose cloak and the long grey hair which hung over her shoulders blew out in the wind, giving her face a wild and weird look, for she wore no covering to restrain her locks, with the exception of a mass of dry dark seaweed, formed in the shape of a crown, twisted round ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... promenade, led him to it, he came back to the leaning poplar. With a pleasant memory drawing him on, he climbed the tree once more. The round moon was getting low now, and the shadows she cast out across the corn were long and weird. But the downpour of her light was still mysterious in its clarity, and in its sheen the porcupine, rolled up like a bird's nest, swung himself luxuriously ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... imbittered by relentless outrage and insult, and who, driven out of the pale of human fellowship, is thrown upon strange and fearful allies, would almost appear to be the counterpart of Mother Demdike. The weird sisters of our transcendant bard are wild and wonderful creations, but have no close relationship to the plain old traditional witch of our ancestors, which is nowhere represented by our dramatic writers with faithfulness and truth except in ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... are fonder of rhythmic motion and dreamy chanting than are the natives of the far north. The keen-witted Japanese girl had learned this by watching their native dancing. She had once visited an island in the Pacific and had learned while there a weird song ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... of which stood a dozen or more rough monoliths of mossy gray and weather-worn stones, disposed in a circle. Probably these were all that remained of some Druidical temple, and archaeologists came from far and near to view the weird relics. And in the middle of the circle stood the cottage: a thatched dwelling, which might have had to do with a fairy tale, with its whitewashed walls covered with ivy, and its latticed windows, on the ledges of which stood pots of homely flowers. There was ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... late at night to Hawes' Junction, on the border of Yorkshire and Westmoreland, and saw rising all around them in the half-darkness the mighty bulks of the great fells which rise amongst that wild and lonely stretch of land. At that hour of the night and amidst that weird silence, broken only by the murmur of some adjacent waterfall the scene was impressive and suggestive; it seemed to Spargo as if London were a million miles away, and the rush and bustle of human life a thing of another planet. Here and there in the valleys ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... dust shifted from place to place, and out of it came a medley of weird oaths, the dull thudding of a waddy, and the heavy breathing of men and animals in combat. Suddenly a lithe, sinewy black boy, dressed in a short blue shirt, bounded like a squirrel to the top of the fence and perched there; and through the mist they saw a very ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... wherefrom Tears ever stream: high up, the rugged crag Bows as one weeping, weeping, waterfalls Cry from far-echoing Hermus, wailing moan Of sympathy: the sky-encountering crests Of Sipylus, where alway floats a mist Hated of shepherds, echo back the cry. Weird marvel seems that Rock of Niobe To men that pass with feet fear-goaded: there They see the likeness of a woman bowed, In depths of anguish sobbing, and her tears Drop, as she mourns grief-stricken, endlessly. ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... in the room, but a fine copy of Michael Angelo's Fates hung on the wall, looking down at them with weird significance. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... on, sank, seemed swallowed; it rose, as if above water, in a hush of wind and trees. The trees bowed their heads rageing, the voice drowned; once more to rise, chattering thrice rapidly, in a high-pitched key, thin, shrill, weird, interminable, like winds through a crazy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into the full glow of the lanterns and the flare which had been lit close to the door of the dead man's carriage, conscious that every eye was fixed upon his face and that the members of the local force were silently and breathlessly "spotting" him. But in that moment the weird birth-gift had been put into practice, and Narkom fetched a sort of sigh of relief as he saw that a sagging eyelid, a twisted lip, a queer, blurred something about all the features, had set upon that ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... lighters moved lumberingly beachwards. From above, the firing grew loud, and a falling bullet wounded a man—the first casualty. Men stood silent, or spoke in subdued murmurs. The whole thing was weird, yet beautiful—the still glory of the night, the eerie, echoing rattle from above, and the ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... Hope lingered among the mountains, leading a strange wild life, and nursing in his heart the fierce desire for vengeance which possessed him. Tales were told in the City of the weird figure which was seen prowling about the suburbs, and which haunted the lonely mountain gorges. Once a bullet whistled through Stangerson's window and flattened itself upon the wall within a foot of him. On another occasion, ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... masses of calcined wood, which grew more numerous where there were open spaces farther on, and then the bare, black columns ran on again, up the valley and the steep hill benches on either hand. It was a weird scene of desolation; impressive to the point of being appalling in ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... embody his whims. It sprang from his powerful hands in resolute and impetuous flight, whirred threateningly overhead, and returned to foot, fluttering and purring, as if endowed with affection for its unlovable master. None so mastered the missile; but for all his weird influence over it, he was subject to the restraints of another weapon which seldom left his hands. Is there not a spiritual law which imposes checks on the bombastic tricks of crude and cultured alike, or was it by force of gravity ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... for it is well known that the grandeur of Alpine scenery is greatly enhanced by the wild and weird movements of the gauze-like drapery with which it ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... riddling terms, to be lesser than Macbeth and greater! not so happy, but much happier! and prophesied that though he should never reign, yet his sons after him should be kings in Scotland. They then turned into air, and vanished: by which the generals knew them to be the weird ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... adopting for eyes two sardonyxes, whereof the second layer, representing the iris, is dark, while the white centre of the orb, corresponding to the pupil, exhibits a hopeless opacity. We pause in succession before those weird sisters, arranged stiffly a l'Etrusque, who are receiving the infant Bacchus, not to give him milk, you may be sure, but to dry-nurse him upon Burgundy; a perfectly intellectual head, planted upon misshapen shoulders, supposed to be AEsop, a beautiful deformity; a Hercules, leaning against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... out, North American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," North American Review, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... straight up to a great height without a branch, and then form a thick leafy canopy far overhead; a canopy so dense that even the blaze of the cloudless blue sky is subdued, one might almost say into a weird gloom, the effect of which is enhanced by the solemn silence. At first such a forest gives the impression of being more open than an English wood, but a few steps are sufficient to correct this error. There is a thick ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... invites him to follow her through tortuous and ruined passages (which she describes) to a sepulchre, which she inhabits, with owls for her only live companions. Then she rises, picks up her shroud-like mantle, and vanishes in the darkness with a weird laugh and the famous ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... answer, and cautiously pushing open the door, he entered unbidden, but started back in horror at the sight which met his eyes. The electric lights had not been turned on, but a few tall wax tapers, in a pair of candelabra upon the mantel, were burning, and in the dim, weird light, Mrs. LaGrange, still elegantly attired for her interview with Harold Mainwaring, lay upon the low couch near the grate, her features scarcely paler than a few hours before, but now rigid in death. Upon the table beside her, the supper ordered by the maid stood untasted, ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... It was a weird stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian's shoulder, still green ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... the change of the moon, and a most wild-looking evening; the sun sets with a fiery forge glowing about it, and fringing with an angry border the banks of darksome clouds that mingle their weird shapes with the mountain masses to the west, the wind sighs and moans through the archways and menzils of the huge caravanserai, breathing of rain and unsettled weather. These warning signals are not far in advance, for a drenching rain soaks and saturates everything ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... that of the corresponding section in the first part (6/4), is added a coda (2/2) introducing the characteristic motive of the first subject. In the scherzo, the grandest movement and the climax of the sonata, the gloom and the threatening power which rise to a higher and higher pitch become quite weird and fear-inspiring; it affects one like lowering clouds, rolling of thunder, and howling and whistling of the wind—to the latter, for instance, the chromatic successions of chords of the sixth may not ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... much to hear. Ralph and mysel' we were walking up to the Moss together ya day, when we heard Angus and Wilson at a bout of words. Wilson he said to Angus with a gay, bitter sneer, 'Ye'll fain swappit wi' me yet,' said he. 'He'll yoke wi' an unco weird. Thy braw chiel 'ul tryste wi' th' hangman soon, I wat.' And Angus he was fair mad, I can tell ye, and he said to Wilson, 'Thoo stammerin' and yammerin' taistrel, thoo; I'll pluck a lock of thy threep. Bring the warrant, ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... and trickle of water by us. Once or twice it seemed to us that small living things had rustled out of our reach, but what they were we never saw. They may have been venomous beasts for all I know, but they did us no harm, and we were now tuned to a pitch when a weird creeping thing more or less mattered little. And at last, far above, came the familiar bluish light again, and then we saw that it filtered through a grating ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... and quaint, They reign in robes of magic round me here; But fading, blotted, dim, a picture faint, With spell more silent, only pleads a tear. Plead not! Thou hast my heart, O picture dim! I see the fields, I see the autumn hand Of God upon the maples! Answer Him With weird, translucent glories, ye that stand Like spirits in scarlet and in amethyst! I see the sun break over you: the mist On hills that lift from iron bases grand Their heads superb!—the dream, it is my ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... across the waters from the tug. There was a loud splash beneath the bows, while shadowy figures that howled a weird ditty as they hove the hawser in, rose and fell black against the foam-flecked sea on the dripping forecastle. Nobody had missed Black, who now sat astride the yard watching the tug, as the ship, listing over further and commencing to hurl the spray in clouds about her plunging bows, gathered way. ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable, fantastic shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... room, as their presence induces the rats to move elsewhere. Little house lizards are always present, and not infrequently a large lizard makes its home on the ridge pole, and from time to time gives its weird cry. ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... apprised of what was to be done. The ceremony took place, and the apparition of Mr. Kirke was visibly seen while they were seated at table; but Grahame of Duchray, in his astonishment, failed to perform the ceremony enjoined, and it is to be feared that Mr. Kirke still "drees his weird in Fairyland," the Elfin state declaring to him, as the Ocean to poor Falconer, who perished at sea after having written his popular poem ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... yet tired of them and their hoofs and their slanting eyes and their way of coming suddenly out of woods to wean quiet English villages from respectability. We did tire later. But Braxton's faun, even now, seems to me an admirable specimen of his class—wild and weird, earthy, goat-like, almost convincing. And I find myself convinced altogether by Braxton's rustics. I admit that I do not know much about rustics, except from novels. But I plead that the little I do know about them by personal observation does ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... anomalies in public life chafed the eager spirit of Nelson, but we can never know the extent of the suffering it caused except during the Neapolitan and Sicilian days. This lonely soul lived the life of a recluse for months at a time. The monotony of the weird song of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers, the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of God's works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even on the most ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... walls were blotched, as if missionary maps were bursting out of them to impart geographical knowledge; notwithstanding that its weird furniture was forlornly faded and musty, and that the prevailing Venetian odour of bilge water and an ebb tide on a weedy shore was very strong; the place was better within, than it promised. The door was opened by a smiling man like a reformed assassin—a ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... or Alpleich, that weird music with which Bunting, the pied piper of Hamelin, led forth the rats into the river Weser, and the children into a cave in the mountain Koppenberg. The song of the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... was with weeds o'ergrown, And crumbling and shaky its walls of stone; Its roof of tiles, in tiers and tiers, Had stood the storms of a hundred years. An olden, weird, medieval style Clung to the mouldering, gloomy pile, And the rhythmic voice of the breaking waves Sang a lonesome dirge in its land of graves. As I walked in the Mission old and gray— The Mission ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... little face, that should have been on the pillow hours before, lighted up with triumph as the supposed guests departed; the dumb show of folding the dinner napkins belonging to myself and the master, and putting them in their respective rings, told us the ordeal was over. What a weird scene it was,—the dim light, the silent house, the spread table, and the empty chairs! One could imagine ghostly revellers, visible only to that one fragile attendant, who ministered so willingly to their numerous wants. ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... he mean? Was this some kind of spiritism? Had Kennedy turned medium and sought a message from the other world to solve the inexplicable problems of this? It was weird, uncanny, unthinkable. We turned to him blankly for an ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... nothing. Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand—she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence—and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if she had been deaf. ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... corn-lands and was rich in minerals and cattle, from which the hides came regularly down the Rhone to be carried to the Mediterranean markets. "Long-haired" Gaul was at this date rude and superstitious, with that weird druidical religion which the Emperor Claudius had done his best to suppress. Its chief vice was that of drunkenness. As with the French, who have largely descended from them, the proverbial passions of the Gauls were ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... now that one ought somehow to have foreseen that the stamp of a sad end was impressed by nature on that rugged, haggard face. The exceeding sadness of the eyes and their strange sweetness were the one redeeming feature in a face of unusual plainness, and there was about them that odd, weird look, which some eyes possess, of seeming to see more than the outer objects of the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... gold and silver money to be burnt at the grave and so wafted to the next world for use of the departed spirit, tablets embossed with golden Chinese characters, and lanterns of varied size and shape are carried in advance by an army of riffraff. A band of priests chanting, or playing weird dirges on instruments much resembling bagpipes in sound, immediately precedes the catafalque, an immense edifice from ten to fifteen feet in height, containing the coffin and covered with beautiful hangings of embroidered silk, and which is carried bodily on massive red poles some nine inches ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... Itika came to the valley of the Yukon the giant drove hunted with him. To this day they run through the mountains on cold, clear nights, in a multitude, while the light of the moon flickers from their white sides, flashing up into the sky in weird, fantastic figures. Some people call it Northern Lights, but old Isaac assured me earnestly, toothlessly, and with the light of ancient truth, as I lay snow-blind in his lodge, that it is nothing more remarkable than the spirit of Itika ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... his light course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a chill pass over me as I looked at the beautiful creature; there was something so unnatural, so weird about her actions, that I felt as if I were gazing upon a being from another world. Her eyes were brighter than ever before, but in them was no sight for what was near her; they seemed fixed upon objects far away. I could not speak, for when I tried ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land of witchcraft, and took one up and down its mountains, and into its old weird towns, haunts of magic and [58] incantation, where all the more genuine appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea when she fled through that country, were still in use. In the city of Hypata, indeed, nothing ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... prophecy comes to pass and the gods enter their twilight. The apparition is sinking back into the earth. Wotan beseeches it to tarry and tell him more. But with the words, "You are warned.... Meditate in sorrow and fear!" it vanishes. The masterful god attempts to follow, to wrest from the weird woman further knowledge. His wife and her brothers hold him back. He stands for a time still hesitating, uncertain, wrapped in thought. With sudden resolve at last he tosses the ring with the rest of the treasure, and turns heart-wholly ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... find his clew as he had hoped, and instead of lifting the fog grew heavier. He found himself at last no longer striving for any end, but rambling along mechanically, feeling like a man in a dream—a nightmare. Once he recognized a weird suggestion in the mystery about him. To-morrow might one be wandering about aimlessly in some such haze. He ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... we lit one of our torches, and paddled on as long as we could keep our eyes open. During the time, we passed through another cypress swamp, when the light from the torch, as we twisted in and out among the stems of the trees, made them assume weird and strange forms; while the occasional cry of some night-bird or wild beast, coming sometimes from one side of us, sometimes from the other, had a very depressing effect, and I could have fancied, had I believed in the existence of such things, that the forest was the habitation of evil spirits ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... about it the more Tom Swift thought there was something queer in that weird cry for help on the lonely meadow in the darkness ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... boy in the woods holloas to another to say, "All's well! Here am I. Where are you?" A form of it they sing to the rising moon, for this is the time for good hunting to begin. They sing when they see the new camp- fire, for the same reason that a Dog barks at a stranger. Yet another weird chant they have for the dawning before they steal quietly away from the offing of the camp—a wild, weird, squalling refrain: Wow-wow- wow-wow-wow-w-o-o-o-o-o-o-w. again and again; and doubtless with many another change that man cannot distinguish any more ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... party was breaking up. The body had been burned and gifts were being distributed—bits of calico, handkerchiefs, blankets, etc., according to the rank and wealth of the deceased. The death ceremonies of chiefs and head men, Mr. Young told me, are very weird and imposing, with wild feasting, dancing, and singing. At this little place there are some eight totem poles of bold and intricate design, well executed, but smaller than those of the Stickeens. As elsewhere throughout the archipelago, the bear, raven, eagle, salmon, and porpoise are the chief ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... trees put on their winter shapes unduly early. The world was dark and sweated fungus. Uncouth children of the earth, whose hour is that which sees the leaf fall, sprang into short-lived being. Black goblins and gray, white goblins and brown, spread weird life abroad. With fleshy gills, squat and lean, fat and thin, bursting through the grass in companies and circles, lurking livid, gigantic and alone on the trunks of forest trees, gemming the rotten bough with crimson, twinkling like topaz on the crooked stems of the furze, battening upon death, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... clergyman always seeing visions and believing himself a descendant of the Druids, Sam Gardner told me; and his mother had either died long ago or had run away from her husband, I forget which. In a way, I'm sorry David's dead. He had a sort of weird talent and wild good looks. By the way, he wasn't altogether ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the minds of the conservative. I suspected the Reverend Mr. Goodloe of a great deal of worldly wisdom when I saw how he had been able to persuade the directors, Hampton Dibrell and Mark and Cliff, to let him do such a weird thing. Mrs. Sproul and Mrs. Cockrell and their friends had first been tolled out to prayer meeting and then had come to witness a tennis match. Billy, in great glee, recounted to me the first time they had stayed to dinner ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the shoulder, etc. No organically caused anaesthetic area ever does this, and so the neurologist is able, usually, to separate the two conditions. And the anaesthesias yield as do the hysteric paralyses to a variety of agents, from prayer and persuasion to a bitter tonic or a blow. I confess to a weird feeling in the presence of a hysteric whose arm can be thrust through and through with a needle without apparently suffering any pain, and it seems to me that this may be the explanation of the fortitude of those martyrs who have astonished and sometimes converted their ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... offers a quiet retreat. Following the wooded shores of Glena Bay, we pass Stags, Burnt, and other islands, and come to Glena Cottage, hiding in the foliage of leafy trees. Glena means "the valley of good fortune," and a name more suggestive of happier thoughts than weird Glownamorra across the lake—"the glen of ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... an electric torch on Dr. Mannering, and recognized him. It appeared that while one detective kept guard outside, the others watched within. At the sound of voices the door of the Grey Room opened, and in the bright light that streamed from it a weird figure stood—a tall, black object with huge and flashing eyes and what looked like an elephant's trunk descending from between them. The watchers, wearing hoods and gas masks, resembled the fantastic demons of a Salvator ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... mere fact of the Hall being illuminated at night was not enough to account for her extreme agitation, and that it must have derived its importance in her eyes from being one in a chain of incidents, all of which had left a weird or ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... furtively back across her shoulder—evidently the policeman had disappeared, for she released her slight grasp of my arm, although continuing to walk quietly enough by my side, her face partially averted. The night was deathly still, the sodden walk underfoot scarcely echoing our footfalls, the weird mist closing denser about us, as ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... spoke in Spanish to one of them, then the fellow began putting on the weird uniform. It made him look like a visitor from another world. The tremendous weight of his garb prevented him from moving at more than a slow shuffle across the deck, ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... cynical contempt, which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary. He brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim. He described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer than upon a pious Abbe. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... too. I knew Tusa hErin as a boy. It was then a weird old place. The yew-trees were unclipped, the turf riotous, the little lake ungraveled ... It had an eeriness. But now—it ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... kept that night as a precautionary measure, because it was not then known whether the group was inhabited or not; but nothing occurred to alarm the watchers, the only sounds heard being those made by the countless insects on shore or the weird cries uttered by the nocturnal birds. Some of the sounds and cries were certainly uncanny enough to send a creeping thrill through the frame of the listener, but with that exception the night passed peacefully away; and when the hands were turned up next morning to wash decks ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... syllable of them clear, though spoken in a voice shrill and cracked and strange, and such as neither of them had ever heard before, were beyond doubt. Close on them followed a shriek of weird laughter, and then the blasphemy repeated in the same tone of mockery. The hair crept on Claude's head, the blood withdrew to his heart. The key which he had drawn out of the lock fell from the hand it seemed ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... insomuch that Banquo would call Macbeth in jest king of Scotland, and Macbeth again would call him in sport likewise the father of many kings. But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as you would say) the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies, endued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science, because every thing came to pass as ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... cavern cold, Like one who flies a crime, Fearful, and old as God is old, The spirit shrank from time; For a stifled scream was the angry gold Of the weird sunset, and the noonday bold Was the stare on ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... a village in the Budweis neighborhood, 100 miles to south. There, for three centuries after him, stood "Zisca's Oak" (under shade of which, his mother, taken suddenly on the harvest-field, had borne Zisca): a weird object, gate of Heaven and of Orcus to the superstitious populations about. At midnight on the Hallow-Eve, dark smiths would repair thither, to cut a twig of the Zisca Oak: twig of it put, at the right moment, under your stithy, insures good ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... term of active service is completed. Besides the spear and shield they generally carry a sword or knobkerrie, suspended from a raw-hide waist-belt; and they certainly look very ferocious in their weird-looking headdress when on the warpath. Once or twice I met detachments out on these expeditions, but they were always quite friendly to me, even though I was practically alone. Before the advent of British rule, however, sudden raids were constantly being made by them ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... thing to remember—a weird and unearthly bit of living—that war-ruined church, strewn with straw, the wounded wrapped like mummies in dark blankets, their white bandages making high spots in the wavering, irregular lights of lanterns ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... of the room, looking behind and under the larger objects, lifting the lids of the marriage chests and opening the doors of the cupboard. Into the cellar, too, they descended, and made a careful search. The five candles produced a weird effect in their promenade along this subterraneous apartment, lighting up an astonishing medley of furniture, garden implements, empty bottles, the posts and side pieces of an extra bed, a broken statue, another wheelbarrow, a lot of ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... rushing sensation of one who is going to faint away. The wall behind the ornate Empire bed was covered with photographs, some in frames, others left, as they had been received, upon the large squares of weird cardboard which ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... in this respect on the native kinds. There are doves belonging to the same genus as stock-dove and wood-pigeon, that have exceedingly good voices, in which the peculiar mournful dove-melody has reached its highest perfection—weird and passionate strains, surging and ebbing, and startling the hearer with their mysterious resemblance to human tones. Or a Zenaida might be preferred for its tender lament, so wild and exquisitely modulated, like sobs etherealized and set to music, and passing ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... clean across the sky like an exaggerated Milky Way, suddenly caught fire at its eastern end. Rapidly the red flame along ran its entire length to the other horizon. Then countless unexpected shadows woke up on the rocks about me, weird, undefined shapes, which became clear-cut only when the rim of the sun came up over ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... a grand laddie, and buirdly, and no that thrawn, either—like ye, Dick, ye born deevil,' looking at me. 'But I misdoot sair ye'll die wi' your boots on. There's a smack o' Johnnie Armstrong in the glint o' yer e'e. Ye'll be to dree yer weird, there's nae help for't.' ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... earth in unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of some one else—generally a lunatic or weak-minded person, who cannot resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape. Surely a weird and horrible idea! I wish I had slept all the time and not heard it at all. My mind is morbid enough without such ghastly fancies. Such mischievous propaganda should be stopped by the police. I'll write to the Times and suggest ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the fashionable views of later England. I know that in Bleak House he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than he treats them in David Copperfield. I know that in A Tale of Two Cities, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in The Mystery of Edwin Drood he not only praised the Minor Canon of Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I know that he even took the last and most disastrous ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... short, and fixed his keen eyes upon the agitated girl, who stood in front of him. For at least two minutes the man and the girl stood face to face, motionless, and without exchanging a word. Through the dead, weird silence, the pulsations of their hearts were plainly audible. It seemed as if before speaking again each wished to fathom the depths of guilt that lay in the other's heart. It was a compact entered into by look and not by speech; and Daumon ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... world; in a few minutes after that he should be lying here still— for he meant to be killed; he had that planned. They should not take him—a wave of sick repulsion at that thought shook him. Nearer, nearer, right on his track came the riders pell-mell. He could hear their weird, horrible cries; now he could see gleaming through the dimness the huge head-dress of the foremost, the white coronet of feathers, almost the stripes of ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... this weird monstrosity the balance of the herd had fed quite close to me and I now saw that while many had the smaller specimens dangling from them, not all were thus equipped, and I further noted that the little ones varied in size from what appeared to be but tiny unopened buds an inch in ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and brilliant ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... tour of the stalls on the arm of Anna, to admire them in their first freshness, and put finishing touches wherever solicited. The Rocca Marina conservatories were in rare glory, orchids in weird beauty, lovely lilies of all hues, fabulously exquisite ipomoeas, all that heart could wish. Before them a fountain played in the midst of blue, pink, and white lotus lilies, and in a flower-decked house the Seasons dispensed pot-flowers, bouquets, and button-holes; the Miss Simmondses ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... interbreed before the gap became too wide? Where are the descendants of the union between plants and animals? If animals were first developed from this first germ, what did they live on while there was no vegetation? What folly is like the folly of the evolutionist who claims that such weird speculation is science? ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... was stamped with the little passion peculiar to it—the mark of its peculiar spirit. The mouths, especially, betrayed the souls within. Somewhere Mr. Neal had once read weird stories of souls seen to escape from the bodies of dying persons, and always they had been seen to issue from the open mouths of the corpses. There was a singular appropriateness in this phenomenon, it seemed to Mr. Neal, for the soul stamped the mouth even before it marked the eyes. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a great deal of mystery and enchantment about this old house for the Lancians, who were endowed with imagination; more especially for the children, who are the only beings who are open to weird fancies ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... thought along these lines, an explanation slowly took form in Marsh's mind. In some of its features it seemed weird and unreal. This, perhaps, was due to the fact that the few definite pieces of information in his possession had to be largely supported and connected by theories and deductions. Strange as the explanation might seem, it nevertheless gave ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... don't intend to go beyond your power of control; neither did the drunkards who have gone before you. Do you suppose Edgar Allen Poe dreamt when he took his first drink in the social gathering of an old Virginia gentleman's home that it would bring from his brilliant brain the weird strain: ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... It has the ring and weird mystery of De Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the pale piles" is a hideous ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Jimmy Grayson, coinciding so well with their own views. Harley saw a look of awe appear upon the faces of many—Sylvia's face was pale—and the house, save for the voice of Jimmy Grayson, was as still as death. Harley felt the effect himself, and the weird, unreal quality that he observed before increased. Once, when he went over to make some notes, he noticed that the words written a half-hour before were scarcely visible, but, when he glanced at the opposite ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... is the habit of wolves in this land to follow the trail of the caribou herds and prey upon the stragglers. And so it was that sometimes of a winter's night the silence of the hills was startled by the distant howl of wolves. And always Skipper Ed's dogs and Abel's dogs would answer the wild, weird cries of their untamed kin of the hills with equally weird cries, their muzzles in the air and the long-drawn notes rising and falling in woful and ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the Spaniard, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... thoughts, realized in all its intensity the depth of solitude from which Robinson Crusoe suffered on his lonely island. Illimitable as the ocean, the weary waste stretched away until lost in the purple of the horizon, and the mirage created weird pictures in the landscape, distorted distances and objects which continually annoyed and deceived. Despite its loneliness, however, there was then, and ever has been for many men, an infatuation for those ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the pale-faced, blue-eyed Theo, likens it to a piece of shining satin. Now, as ever, the pet and darling of the household, she moves among them like a ray of sunshine; and the servants, when they hear her bird-like voice waking the echoes of the weird old place, pause in their work to listen, blessing Miss Margaret for the joy and gladness her presence has ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... shifted from place to place, and out of it came a medley of weird oaths, the dull thudding of a waddy, and the heavy breathing of men and animals in combat. Suddenly a lithe, sinewy black boy, dressed in a short blue shirt, bounded like a squirrel to the top of the fence and perched there; ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... specimen of the bottom in his hand, he said later, sand with black specks and broken shell—when something queer attracted his attention half a point on the starboard bow. It was a thick foggy night, ships bellowing all round, and a weird-looking tow coming up astern with a string of lights one over another like a lot of Chinese lanterns. It was probably these lights that had drawn the mate's attention away from the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... had Brice studied that weird tree and its position. Now, standing beneath its black shade, he drew forth a matchbox he had taken from ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... to its depths by the intensity of passion which rang through this delicate creature's words. What weird and awesome mystery of iniquity and of crime lay hid, I wondered, between these walls? In what tragedy had I thus accidentally become involved while fulfilling my prosaic duty in the interest of His Majesty's exchequer? ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... precipitated war, she can hardly be surprised if the judgment of Europe (one may also say the world) is against her. If she has played her cards so badly as to put herself entirely in the wrong, she must naturally "dree her weird." ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... bestowed upon the town of the Ritualistic church. Let it stand in these pages as Bumsteadville. Possibly it was not known to the Romans, the Saxons, nor the Normans by that name, if by any name at all; but a name more or less weird and full of damp syllables can be of little moment to a place not owned ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... away she saw a weird scene about her: hundreds of Japanese men and women, speaking in low angry voices which somehow reminded her of the breaking of the surf on the beach—perhaps because the Japanese language has a sing-song rhythm. The little boy, apparently limp and lifeless, lay in his ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... of her companion. But about her slender, finely-proportioned figure there was an air of style and grace which lent an elegance even to her shabby and faded finery, and which was wanting in the owner of the fresher and more appropriate attire. Her face was beautiful, with a singular and weird beauty which owed nothing of its fascinations to the ordinary charms of delicate outlines and dainty coloring. Her features were small and attenuated, and her complexion was of a sallow paleness, whose lack of freshness seemed caused by dissipation and late ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... light, was like the rising and falling of billows—like the ebb and flow of the tide upon the stranded shore of the ocean. Close to the house the faces were plainly discernible, but they faded into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly; and what added to the weird, spectral beauty of the scene, was the confused hum of voices that rose above the sea of forms, sounding like the subdued, sullen roar of an ocean storm, or the wind soughing through the dark lonely forest. It was a grand and imposing scene, and when the President, with pale face ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... plains, with sad and spectre-like memories—with the flutter of unseen eagle pinions. A land without the tall and sombre figure worshipping the Great Mystery; without suns and snows and storms—without the scars of battle, swinging war club, and flashing arrow—a strange, weird world, holding an unconquered race, vanquished before the ruthless tread of superior forces—we call them the agents of civilization. Forces that have in cruel fashion borne down upon the Indian until he had to give up all that was his and all that was dear to him—to ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... our parents' absence. The only remaining memory of that visit was that the old doctor brought down from one of his shelves a large jar, out of which he produced a pickled human brain. I was thrilled with entirely new emotions. I had never thought of man's body as a machine. That this weird, white, puckered-up mass could be the producer or transmitter of all that made man, that it controlled our physical strength and growth, and our responses to life, that it made one into "Mad G." and another into me—why, it was absolutely marvellous. It attracted ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of her lovely bay tremblingly waited Mobile, never before so empty of men, so full of women and children. Southward, from two to four leagues apart, ran the sun-beaten, breezy margins of snow-white sand-hills evergreen with weird starveling pines, dotted with pretty summer homes and light steamer-piers. Here on the Eastern Shore were the hotels: "Howard's," "Short's," "Montrose," "Battle's Wharf" and Point Clear, where summer ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... great mistake, this worst blunder I have made. In spite of myself it will haunt me. And the curse! that awful curse! Gods! will it never cease ringing in my ears! night and day, sleeping and waking it never leaves me! I see her now! How weird-like her prophetic looks! How like the sentence of doom are her words, as, with flashing eye and quivering lip, she says: 'As you have wilfully, voluntarily, and wickedly called it down upon your own head, may the curse of God rest upon you in this world and the world to ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... Men All" has been reading and enjoying Mr. BARRY PAIN's Stories and Interludes. The book has a wondrously weird and heavily-lined picture in front, which is just a little too like a "Prophetic Hieroglyphic" in Zadkiel's Almanack. An emaciated and broken-winged devil is apparently carrying an engine-hose through a churchyard, whilst ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... views of all employers in the industrial world, and his fanatical ideas of class loyalty, were impressed with weird exaggeration upon the fertile minds of his children. From their father's conversation with his workmen neighbors, and from the suggestive expressions and epithets which Sam had gleaned from the literature upon which he fed ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... morning—for it was then near the end of October—the weird song of a solitary brave was heard. In an instant the camp was thrown into indescribable confusion. The meaning of this was clear as day to everybody—all of our war-party were killed, save the one whose mournful song announced ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... hour he paced slowly back and forth at the edge of the Barren, his senses still keyed to the highest point of caution. Then he rebuilt his fire, pausing every few moments in the operation to listen for a suspicious sound. It was very cold. He noticed, after a little, that the weird sound of the lights over the Pole had become only a ghostly whisper. The stars were growing dimmer, and he watched them as they seemed slowly to recede farther and farther away from the world of which he was a part. This dying out of the stars always ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... a draughty, unconsidered table by the door. Paragot looked at it, then at Madame Boin and then at his own private and particular table usurped by Monsieur Papillard and his associates, and swore a stupefied oath of considerable complication. A weird, pug-nosed, pig-eyed, creature with a goatee beard scarce masking a receding chin, sat in the sacred seat against the wall. His hat and cloak were hung on Paragot's peg. He was reading a poem to half a dozen youths who seemed all ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York. One heard of fashion-albums and autograph-fans and talking crows and rare orchids and reindeer meat; of bracelets for men and ankle rings for women; of "vanity-boxes" at ten and twenty thousand dollars each; of weird and repulsive pets, chameleons and lizards and king-snakes—there was one young woman who wore a cat-snake as a necklace. One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose; one had a table-cover ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... best impersonations it was. The actors too, with whom Mary Anderson rehearsed, looked forward to anything but a success. Nothing daunted, however, and confident in her own powers, she spent two hours in perfecting a make-up so successful, that even her mother failed to recognize her in the strange, weird disguise; and then, darkening her dressing-room, set herself resolutely to get into the heart of her part. Mary Anderson's Meg Merrilies was an immense success; Cushman herself never received greater applause, and the scene was quite an ovation. Hearing, on the fall of ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... flew over her head?" Sabrina interrupted, eyes glistening. "A bat—it's blind—stone blind!" the jilted girl echoed gleefully. "There's a sign for you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, to conjure with!" She let out a screech and then a weird laugh that echoed through Crockett's Hollow. She cast off the coverlid and in one bound was in the middle of the floor, though she had lain long weeks pining away. She clapped her hands high overhead like she was shouting at meeting. Sabrina laughed ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... well- known, and outside the masters' common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any rate admiration. At football he was too erratic to be a really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure, and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt were eagerly treasured by those who were fortunate enough to hear them. At athletics in general he was a showy performer, and although new to the functions of a prefect he had already established a reputation as an effective and artistic ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... don't see him as he saw himself. He was a peaceful citizen from the law-abiding West. It was not until he had been flung into the whirlpool of New York that violent and melodramatic mishaps befell this innocent. The Wild East had trapped him into weird adventure ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... tempest; fluttering hymns, which seemed to be mounting to the throne of the Lord like a mixture of light and sound—all were expressed by the organ's hundred voices, with more vigor, more subtle poetry, more weird coloring, than ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... prayer. Between the words he interjected a number of strange trills and turns. How weird it all sounded, and yet how familiar to the wondering priest. Mikail found himself almost instinctively supplying the following word before it was uttered by the reader. Then the congregation arose and responded ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... contrast the scenes, for the Mate, and the Old Man himself, were at our backs, man-driving the few sober hands, to make up for their inability to handle the skulkers. They did not spare themselves in driving, and at salving the gear in the lamp-room the Captain made a weird picture, black and grimy, with a cloth over his mouth, passing the lamps out ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... returning from an afternoon's fishing, with a couple of weird-looking fish as his sole catch, found him and would have gone on with a ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... musician. In little more than a week's time he composed an opera, "Rodrigo," for which he obtained one hundred sequins. His next visit was to Venice, where he arrived at the height of the carnival. Whatever effect Venice, with its weird and mysterious beauty, with its marble palaces, facades, pillars, and domes, its magnificent shrines and frescoes, produced on Handel, he took Venice by storm. Handel's power as an organist and a harpsichord player was only second to his strength as a composer, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... bright sunshine and cheat each other throughout the course of an afternoon and lie out of it in the most obvious manner. The game was finally discontinued, owing to a shortage of checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... down the shaft and enter the tunnel, and when it happened that the men were not at work I allowed visitors to go down and view this wonderful ice-cavern. The walls of the chamber appeared semi-transparent, and the light of the candles or lanterns gave the whole scene a weird and beautiful aspect. It was almost possible to imagine one's self surrounded by limpid waters, which might at any moment rush ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton
... Alloway that it is difficult to see it as it actually exists. By-the-by, I do not understand why Satan and an assembly of witches should hold their revels within a consecrated precinct; but the weird scene has so established itself in the world's imaginative faith that it must be accepted as an authentic incident, in spite of rule and reason to the contrary. Possibly, some carnal minister, some priest of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... distance. The sun shone hot, the wind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expanse hovered a shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of wastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to decay and death, could have shown so barren an acreage. Half of this wandering patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... when nearly forty, Elizabeth Pilfold, reputed a great beauty. The first child of this marriage, born on August 4, 1792, was the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, born to all the ease and comfort of an English country home, but with the weird imaginings which in childhood could people the grounds and surroundings with ancient snakes and fairies of all forms, and which later on were to lead him far out of the beaten track. Shelley's ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... in no special danger. Even I could tell that the gale had gone down, the night was clear, and between the scudding of black clouds with silver linings, the moon and stars shone very beautifully, though it made one giddy to look at them from the weird way in which the masts and yards seemed ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a new working schedule that precluded labor in the middle of the day was inaugurated. The more intense the heat grew, the more intense, it seemed to Roger, grew the weird beauty of the desert. The midnight stars seemed hardly to have blossomed before dawn turned the desert world to a delicate transparent yellow, deepening at the zenith to blue and on the desert ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... the multitude accepted the responsibility has been only too completely fulfilled in the millennium-long Iliad of woes which has attended the Jews. Surely, the existence, in such circumstances, for all these centuries, of that strange, weird, fated race, is a standing miracle, and the most conspicuous proof that 'verily, there is a God that judgeth in the earth.' But it is also a prophecy that Israel shall 'turn to the Lord,' and that the blood which has so long been on them as a crime, carrying ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... to side, sometimes whirling around, but with feet always flat on the floor, often turning on her heels. All the time her arms were extended and her fingers snapping, and snapping also were the black eyes. She was the personification of grace, but the dance was weird—made the more so by the setting of bright evening dresses and glittering uniforms. One never sees a dance of this sort these days, even in the South, any more than one sees the bright-colored turban. Both have passed with the ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... chair and crossed over to the dying fire, so that no one could see the expression on his face as he stood with his back to the grate, and continued his weird tale. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the brotherhood which is in the world.' He did not mean to say, 'Take comfort, for other people are as badly off as you are,' but he meant to call to the remembrance of the solitary sufferer the thousands of his brethren who were 'dreeing the same weird' in the same ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... "it was not for myself I grieved thus. But the pang is past, and the worst is known. Now, then, back to those things that never die—restless projects and daring schemes. That hag's curse keeps my blood cold still, and this solitude has something in it weird and awful. Ha!—what sudden ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... are said to have fed St. Paul, the first hermit,—he very clearly foretelleth unto everyone who is desirous to be certified of the condition of his lot what his destiny will be, and what future chance the Fates have ordained for him; for the Parcae, or Weird Sisters, do not twist, spin, or draw out a thread, nor yet doth Jupiter perpend, project, or deliberate anything which the good old celestial father knoweth not to the full, even whilst he is asleep. This will be a very summary abbreviation of our labour, if we but hearken ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... pickets shudderingly shrank away from the weird light that was streaming out to them and tinting their faces with a ghastly, greenish pallor, Farmer Burns' small boy, moved by some imp of perversity, did a characteristically childish thing. He picked up a good-sized stone and flung it straight ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... spirits and phantoms of night would mourn over him, but they would keep his secret. He peered across a shining lake, and tried to pierce the gloom. No living thing moved before his vision. Silver rippling waves shimmered under that starlit sky; tall weird pines waved gently in the night breeze; slender cedars, resembling spectres, reared their heads toward the blue-black vault of heaven. He listened intently. There was a faint rustling of the few leaves ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... with the sick, and long rows of them were stretched through the centre of the hall. A gallery ran around above the cases, and this was filled with cots. The clatter of the feet of passing surgeons and nurses over the marble floor added to the weird impression. ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... on discovering that the pale face of the white man had many years preceded him. "What, ho!" he muttered to himself; "methinks I see a paleface toying with a dusky maiden. I will have speech with him." On approaching near where the two were engaged in some weird incantation the voyageur overheard the dusky maiden impart a strange message to the paleface by her side. "From the stars I see in the firmament, the fixed stars that predominate in the configuration, I deduce the future destiny of man. 'Tis with thee. O Robert, to live ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and havoc, the Verdun conflict viewed ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... arch-enemy of mankind—in plain English, that they were witches. The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, "and palter with him in a double sense," had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the "weird sisters" (Act i, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... to bed greatly disturbed in mind as to whether she was doing well to marry the obstreperous Westerner. "He fascinates me in a wild, weird sort of a way when I'm with him," she had said to herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough for—for ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the lower part of the State, where Jack Agery, a noted plantation orator, was holding forth, denouncing the Democracy and rallying the faithful. He was a man of great natural ability and bristling with pithy anecdote. From a rude platform half a dozen candles flickered a weird and unsteady glare. Agery as a spellbinder was at his best, when a hushed whisper, growing into a general alarm, announced that members of the Ku Klux, an organization noted for the assassination of Republicans, were coming. Agery, a born leader, in ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... moonlight might stream in; and as the soft silvery beams stole silently into the room and laid their tremulous light on the young forms and awestruck faces, the flames leaping and crackling joined in enhancing the effect of the story by throwing on the walls weird shadows ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... composer for the violin was the German Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859), who was born the same year as the wizard Paganini, and who, although having less scintillant genius than the weird Italian, is believed to have had a more beneficent influence over violin playing in his treatment of the instrument. He set an example of purity of style and roundness of tone, and raised the violin ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... listens and her weird gray eyes Grow weirder in their pensive gaze. The sea birds toss her tangled curls, The skiff lights ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... in full and limping flight, pursued by Mrs. Charlton Denyse clad in inconsiderable pink, and shrieking vengeance as she splashed. Relieved, through this unexpected alliance, of further interference, the messenger collected a weird assortment of his liege's clothing and an article or two of his own and returned to her. There was no mistaking the gladness of ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... any Englishman must long to import a hundred London street boys, with their sense of ridicule and fearless tongue. At all times the world has possessed an army of geniuses whose greatness consists of faith and not of works—of faith in themselves which takes the outward form of weird clothing, long hair, and a literary or artistic pose. Paris streets were so full of such in 1870 that all thoughtful men could scarce fail to recognise a nation in ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... on long humming notes, chiefly, it seemed to me, upon two notes with the occasional interjection of a third and fourth, and, at long and rare intervals, of a fifth. It was harmonious beyond all description, just as it was weird and unearthly; but now that I heard it more distinctly it had much more the sound of bells—very ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... moments I stood still on the ridge, struck by the somewhat weird aspect of the shadowed scene before me—the long strip of dull uniform green, with here and there a slender palm lifting its feathery crown above the other trees, standing motionless, in strange relief against the advancing blackness. Then I set out once more at a run, taking advantage of the downward ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... card, why, you can go ahead with your boom," and the old man tied his necktie so it looked like a scrambled egg, and he and the boy went in to breakfast, the boy opening the outside door and whistling a weird whistle, which brought three boys up on the porch, when he said ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... the same name at home. Among the most common were the box, wattle, and cherry; but undoubtedly the most prominent everywhere in the landscape were the old gum trees, and the huge iron stringy-bark trees, which, now with shattered and weird appearance, had braved the fierce storms of winter and the hot blasts of summer for centuries. Many strange birds flew by overhead, and still stranger wild animals started up from beneath some sheltering bush, and ran off along the fresh glades, all reminding ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... stature, wearing coarse, dusty felt hats or peaked caps, with shaggy beards or faded scarfs around their throats. Here and there, too, was a woman of comely face and figure, but for the most part it was a collection of crones, prematurely aged, with weird, wan, old-world features, slip-shod and draggle-tailed, their heads bare, or covered with dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets—red shawls, gray shawls, brick-dust shawls, mud-colored shawls. Yet there was an indefinable touch of romance and pathos about the tawdriness and witch-like ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the mystery ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... poetry, and commemorates the lineage of the Argive kings. After Io's departure, Prometheus renews his defiance to Jupiter, and his stern prophecies, that the son of Saturn shall be "hurled from his realm, a forgotten king." In the midst of these weird denunciations, Mercury arrives, charged by Jupiter to learn the nature of that danger which Prometheus predicts to him. The Titan bitterly and haughtily defies the threats and warnings of the herald, and exults, that whatever be his tortures, he is at least immortal,— ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... procession followed, still in the same order, amid the same dazzling light and the same clangor of trumpets, the shaded path that skirts the edge of the meadows. Having reached the little bridge, it stopped; I saw the torches rise, wave, and cast showers of sparks; the horns sounded a weird and prolonged blast; then suddenly every light disappeared, every noise ceased, and the valley was again wrapped in the darkness and the deep silence of the night. That is what I saw and heard. You who have just arrived from Germany, did you meet the ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... the sheepmen drove their animals nearer and nearer to the pits, they urged them faster until the unhappy creatures, besides themselves at the weird occurrences of a night of terror, were ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... ringing, jingling bells of mules ahead, and the voices of their drivers: turn a corner, and the bright light of torches flashes in your eyes. Look again and earnestly at the beautiful scene: mules, drivers, black rocks, olive trees above, all flamboyant in the ruddy light, appearing and disappearing; a weird, wild scene. Up, up, long is the way; past the fountain where the stars are flashing in the splashing waters; past gardens; past the mountain path at last. Ecco, the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... they were assembled outside the ship, fully armed and armored, and with full field gear. The sun, a yellow G-O star, hung hotly just above the towering mountains to the east. The alien air smelled odd in the men's nostrils, and the weird foliage seemed to rustle menacingly. In the distance, the shrieks of alien fauna occasionally echoed ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... many an Orcadian who, in attempting to reach the innermost recesses of such caverns, had been taken possession of by the evil spirits that were commonly believed to inhabit these places; and the strangely-echoing sounds we heard were exaggerated in her imagination, and became to her as the weird voices ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... catalogue of calamities, I never dreamt that among other claims to distinction he might have been billed as The Fractured Man, principal attraction in a travelling show, eclipsing the One-Legged Camel, the Tinted Zebra, and the Weird-Eyed Wanton from the Crusty North, who can sing in five languages "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary." Ignoring the monotony of experience suffered by the ribs, and noting the obtrusiveness of one collar-bone, we may, with slight variation from a formula in use by the SPEAKER in the House ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... to win him from that self-analysis which later enabled him to mystify a world that rarely pauses to take heed of the ancient exhortation, "Know thyself." In the depths of his own being he found the story of "William Wilson," with its atmosphere of weird romance and ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... linden," reported Marion in a low voice, "a little Jewish boy was standing. He had very large black eyes, two tightly twisted black curls hung down over his ears, and he wore a long coat like a grown man; he brought the letter. It was awfully weird." ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the blinded moths, Roused by a lantern in old palaces Among the mouldering tapestries of thought, Weird fables woke and fluttered to and fro, And wild-eyed sages hunted them for truth. The Italian, Frangipani, thought the star The lost Electra, that had left her throne Among the Pleiads, and plunged ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... profounder. Wherein such diversities, coupled with a general resemblance to man, might consist, whether in mere physical differences or in different mental laws, in the lack of certain of the great passional motors of men or the possession of quite others, were weird themes of never-failing attractions for my mind. The El Dorado visions with which the virgin mystery of the New World inspired the early Spanish explorers were tame and prosaic compared with the speculations which it was perfectly ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... round the weird spot as the noise of their spades became monotonous, relieved only by the throwing aside of the great lumps of moist earth; a mist was rising from the river flowing near, of which in the first stillness of our coming I could just catch the ripple of ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... faster in spite of that tranquillizing assurance. She heard an unaccustomed hand trying the fastening of the gate, then a bolt withdrawn, the sharp light step upon the turf behind her, and in the next moment George Fairfax was by her side, among the weird shadows ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... wilderness; it was the expression of the influence of the vast, desolate, and lonely nature amid which they passed their lives. It is true that Lincoln was never a backwoodsman, and never roved alone for long periods among the shadowy forests and the limit-less prairies, so that their powerful and weird influences, though not altogether remote, never bore upon him in full force; yet their effect was everywhere around him, and through others he imbibed it, for his disposition was sensitive and sympathetic for such purposes. That there was also a simple prosaic physical inducement cannot ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... in Macbeth as the Weird Sisters; and it is probably from this connexion that weird has become an adjective for ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... position on the central figure of the dry-painting, facing the east. The effort this night is to frighten the patient and thus banish the evil spirits from his body. The two maskers come running in, uttering weird, unearthly howls, in which every spectator in the hogan joins, feigning great fear. The masked figures make four entries, each like the other. In many cases the patient either actually faints from fright or feigns to do so. The patient then leaves the dry-painting and ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... impression of the man from the West did nothing to contradict the expectation of something weird, rough, and uncultivated. The long, ungainly figure upon which hung clothes that, while new for this trip, were evidently the work of an unskilful tailor; the large feet, the clumsy hands of which, at the outset, at least, the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... order of their ages, were Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends. These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political questions as ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... even account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for himself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the Brontes. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given to silences ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... mysterious, dark recesses of the Highlands on either hand, the waters turned to a livid gray under the feeble light of the waning moon. No part of our voyage was more impressive, no scene more awe-inspiring. It was a region of such weird lights and gruesome shadows as no fancy could people with aught but gaunt goblins and dread demons, come down to us through generations untold, an unspent legacy of terror, from ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever it was that stuck up on it—a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly ...
— Wind • Charles Louis Fontenay
... large house moved the figure of Porportuk, ominous, with shaking head, coldly disapproving, paying for it all. Not that he really paid, for he compounded interest in weird ways, and year by year absorbed the properties of Klakee-Nah. Porportuk once took it upon himself to chide El-Soo upon the wasteful way of life in the large house—it was when he had about absorbed the last of Klakee-Nah's wealth—but he never ventured so to chide again. El-Soo, like her father, ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... the white hills and towers and gorgeous battlements of cloud-land rose into the bright blue sky. Around me were groups of flowering mimosa bushes, with thorns from three to six inches long, interspersed with which were curious aloes, whose weird leafy tops gave them the aspect of shrubs growing upside down with their roots scrambling aimlessly in the air. In front stood the native hut, the wretchedness of whose outside was only equalled by the filth and poverty-stricken aspect within. Near to this were several native children, as ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the picturesque incidents that Sturt has introduced in his narrative, and that help to fix on our memory the strangely weird picture of the lonely band of men confronted with the unaccustomed forces of nature in ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... difficulty, he was passing along, suddenly he saw a man in black standing right in his path, about fifty yards distant, in a field of some growing barley or wheat. The gloomy stranger was standing stock-still; one outstretched arm, with weird intimation pointing towards the deceased Squire's abode. To the brooding soul of the now desolate Israel, so strange a sight roused a supernatural suspicion. His conscience morbidly reproaching him for the terrors he had bred in making his escape from the house, he seemed to see in the ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... can give to its fairies that incorporeal shape, that purity of essence, of which the heathen nymphs fall so far short? The antique Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has imparted to Jean Goujon's faces that weird, tender, ethereal delicacy? What has given them that unfamiliar suggestion of life and grandeur, if not the proximity of the rough and powerful ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... officer, after him came the band, and then, four abreast, a long line of warriors; in their centre two ensigns, and on their flanks, officers and non-commissioned officers with swords and pikes; more mounted men bringing up the rear. On they came, the fifes and flutes ringing out with a weird clearness in the hushed mountain air. I could hear the ground vibrate, the gravel crunch and scatter, as they steadily and mechanically advanced—tall men, enormously tall men, with set, white faces and livid eyes. Every instant I expected they would see me, and I became sick with terror at the ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the gloomy hall was not pleasant. The red wall-paper was soiled and torn, and weird shadows flickered from the small gas taper that blinked from the ceiling. There were suggestions of old dinners, stale fried potatoes and pork in all the corners, and one moving toward the stairs seemed to stir them up and set them going again like ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... therefore "varium et mutabile semper," should suddenly deceive her followers, as did Zamiel's seventh charmed bullet (which ought always to have been kept up Caspar's sleeve—but Caspar was an idiot), and the Weird but Larky ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... 128: The old Norse word is rlg, which is plural, (from r Ger. ur, and lg, laws,) and means the primal law, fate, weird, doom; the Greek moira. The idea of predestination was a salient feature in the Odinic religion. The word rlog, O.H.G. urlac, M.H.G. urlone, Dutch orlog, had special reference to a man's fate in war. Hence Orlogschiffe in German means ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... nearly finished his work when he heard a loud bellowing from the wooded heights! It sounded so weird and awful he began to be alarmed. He stood still a moment and listened. Soon he heard it again. Then he knew it was nothing to be afraid of, but on the contrary, it seemed to be a cry ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... Peter forgot to thank the stranger in his haste to overtake Jesus. He rounded the next corner, running, then stopped short. Flickering straight ahead of him were torches. Soon he was close enough behind the men who carried them to see more clearly. The yellow flames threw weird patterns on the houses: shadows of men twisted and dodged on the walls as the torchbearers swung the lights to and fro. Peter followed cautiously, coming no closer than necessary. His heart leaped ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... strange and weird depression of the earth's crust about fifty miles long and ten wide, the deepest part of which is more than two hundred and fifty feet below sea level. Once upon a time, it is thought, the Gulf of California reached so far inland that it included this gash. Then the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... entitled: "The Night of the Dead"; i. e. the eve of All Saints' Day. A servant girl, rising early one morning as she supposed (it was really midnight), witnesses a weird procession, which she unwittingly disturbs by lowering her candle and asking the last passer-by to light it. This he does; but when she pulls up her basket she finds in it, besides the lighted candle, a human arm. Her confessor ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... when he played, the atmosphere Was filled with magic, and the ear Caught echoes of that Harp of Gold, Whose music had so weird a sound, The hunted stag forgot to bound, The leaping rivulet backward rolled, The birds came down from bush and tree, The dead came from beneath the sea, The ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... trespassing, and clutching Terry's collar, he stood rigid, while the whip-like shadow of death writhed across a strip of moonlight—and disappeared. There was life,—of a sort, in Chitor. So Roy trod warily as he passed from room to room; dread of dark forgotten in the weird fascination of foreknowledge verified ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... together to look into that mystery ahead, toward which this universe and we within it are so prodigiously plunging on. Do we not often feel, upon this earth whirling through space, like men and women who by some weird chance have found themselves upon a ship, ignorant of their point of departure and of their destination? For all the busyness with which we engage in many tasks, we cannot keep ourselves from slipping back at times to the ship's stern to ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... They slept well on board the Annihilator, which was speeding so swiftly through space—slept as comfortably as they had on earth. Each hour brought them nearer the moon, and they figured on landing on the surface of that wonderful and weird body ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... had been at Rome and received the Pope's blessing. But to-day he had spoken of long journeyings by sea and land; of perils by fire and flood; of wolves and bears and fierce snowstorms and black nights in the lonely forest; of dark altars of heaven gods, and weird, bloody sacrifices, and narrow escapes from ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... most barren, desolate parts of the earth, cursing the gods and hating himself. At length he found a spot which he felt sure would be hidden even from Odin's eyes. It was in a steep, rocky valley, where nothing grew, and where no sound ever came except the weird noise of the wind as it swept through the narrow passes, and the chatter of a mountain stream as it ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the suggestion of contrast still farther one should read Hugo's "Notre Dame" on the spot. It will give a wonderful and whimsical conception of those weird gargoyles and devils, which have only to be seen to awaken a new interest in what this great writer has put forth. For another sensation, pleasant or otherwise, one might look up a copy of Meyron's wonderful etching of the same subject, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... less about this weird, disappearing fleet of vessels that, for some time now, had been acting so mysteriously along the coast of the big bay. Like most of his class, he believed that they were unreal, and possibly but the ghosts of ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... and the other men clambering over the neighboring wrecks seemed weird figures in their bulky suits and transparent helmets. Kent looked back at the Pallas, and then along the wreck-pack's edge to where he could glimpse the silvery side of the Martian Queen. But now Krell and Liggett were descending into the ship's interior ...
— The Sargasso of Space • Edmond Hamilton
... ventured to communicate the fact that a very old and strange-looking man, who did not appear to be quite right in his wits, together with a. slightly younger, though equally weird-looking companion, craved an audience with ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... finds that the end is upon him. Swiftly, like some wild hunt of shadows, the generations fleet away—nothing stays their frantic speed; and to the true observer no fictitious flight of spirits on the Brocken could be half so weird as the passage of one generation of the children of men. As we grow old, the appalling brevity of time impresses itself more and more on the consciousness of calm and thoughtful men; yet nine-tenths of our race spend the best part of their days in trying to ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Nappy and Pop and every one of the millions of people looking silently on around the world. But most of all, he hated Milt. It was a weird, sickening thing, that hatred. But only a mentally sickening thing. Physically, it seemed to make Frankie stronger, because when the bell rang and he got up and walked into a straight right, it didn't ...
— Vital Ingredient • Gerald Vance
... down the entry on to the quay. The river was there, and waters, they say, have a luring power, and a weird promise of rest in their perpetual monotony of sound. But many people were there, if such a temptation presented itself to Philip's mind; the sight of his fellow-townsmen, perhaps of his acquaintances, drove him up another entry—the town is burrowed with ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... it permeates the whole house. Where this is damp, it leads not alone to disease among the inmates, but to the disintegration of the house itself, through what is called "dry rot," but is paradoxically the result of dampness. Edgar Allan Poe, in his weird story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," has given a mystical interpretation of the dissolution of an old homestead which really has a scientific explanation that might be found in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... in search of adventures in the thick of a 'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head, and the air is full of a kind of ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... but a child have taken that soft-tongued wanton to her bosom, and not have seen through acting so transparent? Would any but the veriest child that never ought to have been let out into the world by itself have thought to dree her weird in such folly? Children! poor babies they were, both ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... won't mind being offered a coffee and liqueur. We can give him something decent—Where's the waiter?" Angus lifted his pinched, ugly bare face and looked round with weird command for the waiter. The waiter, having not much to do, and feeling ready to draw these two weird young birds, allowed himself ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... grounds. But on the main point our correspondent is begging the question, or at least assuming as fully proved a conclusion which is very far from being so. Is he quite sure that the only explanation of these strange sights and weird noises is that they are brought about by the action of departed spirits (we naturally exclude cases of deliberate fraud, which in reality are very unusual)? And if so, what meaning would he put upon the word "spirits"? And even if it be granted that the phenomena are caused by the inhabitants ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... sorry to hear that the moon which looks so lovely to our sight, is found by those who can get a nearer view to be such a weird and desolate place that it seemed as if only death reigned there? I know I was, when first I read about it, and saw a picture of the moon, and wondered at its bare mountain peaks, with their rugged craters and dreadful precipices, and its "Ocean of Storms" ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... time they sat there, now dozing by the stove, and anon starting up as some unusually weird contortion on the part of the boat gave them the impression that the end had come, and they were about to be ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... that these pence I had procured with so much toil were always expended in the public-house by both the man and his wife who were supposed at that time to provide me with the weird accommodation they were pleased to call home. My particular portion of this edifice was a dirty mat by way of a bed, which I shared with a rough-haired terrier dog called Sam. We two, Sam and I, were roofed in with ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... was sweeping along below them, its mangroved shores gloomy and desolate-looking, not to say weird, in the pale moonlight. Among those dense forests and thickets the flyers knew many a wild animal was prowling at that very moment, and in the thatched huts in the glens slept many a fierce-visaged savage with weapons close ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... fierce flame, sudden crashing arcs that glowed and snapped in the steady light of the laboratory, and glimpses of white-hot metal supported on beams of force. The sputter of welding, the whine of transmuted air, and the hum of powerful generators, blasting atoms were there. All combined to a weird symphony of light and dark, of sound and quiet. About F-1 were clustered floating tiers of ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... win her name? Well, in the first place, "the nut-browne mayd" and she were near of kin. But whether her parents, as they looked into the baby's clear dark eyes, saw there anything weird or elfish,—or whether the name 'grew,'—of that there remains no record. She had been a pretty ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... nor less than an expedition to Oak Ridge, that lay some ten miles back from the lake, amid the Sunset Mountains. Report had it that there was a real ghost to be seen there, and the boys were bent on discovering the truth of this weird story. It can be easily understood that they must have had a glorious time on that trip, viewed from the standpoint of an eager, adventure-loving boy. But the story is set down in full in the third volume, and you can read it for yourselves in "The Outdoor Chums in the ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... strange, wild formula of induction. From time to time he was interrupted by loud expressions of approval and assent from the vast throng of encircling braves, but apart from this no sound was heard but the low, weird monotone of a ritual older than the white man's ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... effect of such a faith upon the sensitive nerves of the women of those days? Viewed in its larger aspects this was an objective, not a subjective religion. It could but make the sensitive soul super-sensitive, introspective, morbidly alive to uncanny and weird suggestions, and strangely afraid of the temptation of enjoying earthly pleasures. Its followers dared not allow themselves to become deeply attached to anything temporal; for such an emotion was the device of the devil, and God would surely remove the object of such affection. ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... profound consolation hidden in the old Egyptian inscribed rocks. They show us that the weird figures, half man and half beast, which we find carved and painted there, were not the true gods of Egypt, but politico-religious masks, concealing the true godhead. These rocks teach that the real object of worship was ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... rich in flavour. The city was a marvel of many terrors, a place of weird sounds, strange shapes and swift movements, among which—having been made timid by much adversity—you had need to be very, very careful if your hand was in no one's. The house itself was wonderful: ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... quay was reached. The river was covered with all sorts of odd craft, and George gazed with astonished eyes at the scene before him. The moon was just rising, and the great golden globe shone over the river, causing the boats of varying build to cast weird and fantastic shadows on ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... some quaint old tale, or writing furiously upon a composition of his own. When he looked at the boys, he did not seem to see them, but would gaze beyond them—the pupils of his full, soft, grey eyes darkening and dilating as if they were held by some weird vision invisible to all eyes save his own; and indeed the belief was general among his friends that he was endowed with the power of seeing visions. This impression had been made even upon his old "Mammy," when he was a mite of a lad. Many a time, when he turned that abstracted gaze ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... with the framework, and even details, of stories which from time to time I have contributed to various magazines. A ghost story,* published some years ago in a London magazine, and much commented on because of its peculiarly weird and startling character, had this origin; so had a fairy tale,** which appeared in a Christmas Annual last year, and which has recently been re-issued in German by the editor of a foreign periodical. ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... far green depths of the forest glade, Where the hunter's footsteps but rarely strayed, Was a darksome dell, possessed, 'twas said, By an evil spirit, dark and dread, Whose weird voice spoke in the whisperings low Of that haunted wood, and the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... these anomalies in public life chafed the eager spirit of Nelson, but we can never know the extent of the suffering it caused except during the Neapolitan and Sicilian days. This lonely soul lived the life of a recluse for months at a time. The monotony of the weird song of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers, the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of God's works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... growth and acquisition of wealth. Three famous streets in New Orleans bear testimony to the importance of the colored people in the life of the city. Congo Square, one of the great open squares in the old Creole quarter, was named for the slaves who used to congregate in its limits and dance the weird dances to the tunes of blood-stirring minor strains. Those who know the weird liet-motif of Coleridge-Taylor's Bamboula dance have heard the tune of the Congo dance, which every child in New Orleans could sing. Gottschalk's ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... had passed away, long secret labour had been expended in the erection of this weird and tottering structure; but it was all the work of one hand. Night after night had the Pagan entered the deserted temples in the surrounding streets, and pillaged them of their contents to enrich his favoured shrine: the removal of the idols from their appointed ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... at illustrations in the margin. They were quite understandable, although the perspective was all wrong. "Weird beasts they seem to have had knocking about the country in those days. Whacking big size too, if one may judge. By Jove, that'll be a cave-tiger trying to puff down a mammoth. I shouldn't care to ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... auroral cloud now began to assume the shape of a mighty umbrella, the enormous ribs of weird light forming in an apex above the heads of the party, and radiating towards all points of the compass. Sometimes these ribs would all shake, and then blend; but they would speedily rearray themselves in perfect and majestic symmetry. It was ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... opened with that timorous eagerness and that species of terror which the supreme elegance of one of society's queens generally inspires in our sex. For the first time, Madame de Palme appeared handsome to me; the expression of her countenance was wholly novel to me, and a weird animation gleamed in her ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... don't think I am complaining, do you? I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Blunt in a ragged old jacket and a white tie and that incisive polite voice of his seemed strange and weird. It seemed as though he were inventing it all rather angrily. I had doubts as to ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... ordinary small hut. Outside the hut was what he took for a curiously shaped log of wood. The inside of the hut was in shadow, but as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw something in one corner. It was a weird-looking ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... what you are. I've got the impression that you are something, that there's a real 'you' in your inside. But you don't let me see it. You send a polite servant to the door when I knock. Probably this sounds very weird and un-English to you. But to my mind it is much more weird to behave as you are behaving. Come out, can't ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp flared up, dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men moved about nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts. Oofty-Oofty laid hold of Parsons's thumb, pulling it out stoutly and snapping it back into place. I noticed at the same time that ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... friend Peggotty tells me, in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner, a story much more weird than this. He says that after we watchers had left the scene, the divers got fairly to work and attained a fair run of the ship. They found she lay broadside on to a bank of sand, by the edge of which she had sunk till it overtopped her decks. By the action of the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... at the other end, though it looked so simple, was full of weird pitfalls, into one of which Chatty fell an easy victim. She played too soon at a short-pitched ball, and spooned a catch to mid-on, who took good care not to drop it. Chatty retired rather ruefully, but was consoled by the applause she ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... dripping tangle of leaf-thick branches, and stillness Keeps in the strange-coiled stems, ferns, and wet-loving weeds. Hither comes Pan, to this pregnant earthy spot, when his piping Flags; and his pipes outworn breaking and casting away, Fits new reeds to his mouth with the weird earth-melody in them, Piercing, alive with a life able to mix with the god's. Then, as he blows, and the searching sequence delights him, the goat-feet Furtive withdraw; and a bird stirs and flutes in the gloom Answering. Float with the stream the outworn pipes, with a whisper,— ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of ascending to the ship's control-room were weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... campaigns had already smashed her flabby fleets and driven the remnants from space, but the Council, faced with the destruction and casualties from just a few days of the weird surprise ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... decks presented, with huge fires blazing away under our pots, and the men with the ladles skimming off the scraps, or baling out the oil into the coolers, was strange and weird in the extreme. Had I been suddenly introduced among them, I should not have recognised them as my shipmates, begrimed as they were with smoke and oil. I was, however, much in the same condition. Dr Cockle had become accustomed to it, but I cannot ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... his eyes and strange, weird ideas and images floated through his brain. When he regained some part of his senses he saw ahead of him a long, curling crest of yellow water and foam, and he knew, vaguely, that it was pouring over ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... generation that smile is irresistibly funny. He recalls the year 1836, when the Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities. "Tradition preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold summer. Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens. People predicted strange things; but the strange ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... particular wish to sell them myself,' answered the ogre, with equal indifference. 'But I have a necklace of shining stones which was left me by father, and one, the largest engraven with weird characters, is missing. I have heard that it is in your husband's possession, and if you can get me that stone you shall have any of these jewels that you choose. But you will have to pretend that you want it for yourself; and, above all, do not mention me, for ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... of the Thessian fleet had already fled, but there remained half a hundred great battleships. And now, within half a million miles of the planet, there began a battle so weird that astronomers who watched ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... with the riot and tumult of the night. A thousand lamps and coloured lanterns flashed like fireflies along the way, and under them the crowd had gathered, and was flowing back and forth. It was a weird and fantastic sight—this one strange and almost uncanny street that was there largely for the play and the ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... experienced that sympathetic American kindness can realise what it is. It is all that gives me courage to face the reading public as a writer of fiction and attempt to depict to it the fascinating world of an Indian jungle, the weird beasts that people it, and the stranger humans that battle with them in it. The magic pen of a Kipling alone could do justice to that wonderful realm of mountain and forest that is called the Terai—that fantastic region of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... wailing of women broke upon the utter silence which ensued, and nearer and nearer came that weird singing as it approached the summit. The women were chanting Marko's death dirge. At last, as they passed the little window, we went outside and saw four women, dishevelled and weeping, approach the grave, kneeling ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... leafless, growing on the roots of the gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... looked at him in sleepy wonder as he tiptoed into the barn and lit the lantern. To be led out of his stall at "midnight's solemn hour" and harnessed was more than George's equine reasoning could fathom. The harnessing was a weird and wonderful operation. Caleb's trembling fingers were all thumbs. After a while, however, the harnessing was accomplished somehow and in some way, although whether the breeching was where the bridle should have been or vice versa was more than the harnesser would have dared swear. After several ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... upward, brick buttresses appear constantly, but always with the courses of brick laid slanting to the earth's level, and perpendicular to the thrust of the dome. Every possible effect of light and obscurity makes the strange vistas yet more weird, and, now and then, there is a feeling of standing upon the vast, rounding slope of some planet that shines at one's feet, then gradually falls ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... English shell-cases. These cases are made of brass, and the four-fives, especially, in the opinion of some people, make very nice rose-bowls when they are polished, with wire arranged inside to hold the blossoms. Weird music could be heard issuing from our dugout at times, when we gave an impromptu concert, by putting several of these shell-cases on a log of wood and playing elaborate tunes on them with ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... signified that they were in league with the arch-enemy of mankind—in plain English, that they were witches. The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, "and palter with him in a double sense," had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the "weird sisters" (Act i, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... five acts of piffle that was mostly talky junk to me. And, at that, I wa'n't sufferin' exactly; for when them actorines got too weird, all I had to do was swing a bit in my seat and I had a side view of a spiffy little white fur boa, with a pink ear-tip showin' under a ripple of corn-colored hair, and a—well, I had something worth watching ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... little cockney. Henry Woods stood fifth in line. They were a motley lot, adventurers every one of them, and some were obviously afraid as they stood before that column of light, with only a few seconds of the third dimension left to them. They had answered a weird advertisement, and had but a limited idea of what they were about to do. Grimly, though, they accepted it as a job, a bizarre job, but a job. They faced it as they had faced other equally dangerous, but less ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... is safe," said the leader. By this time it was quite dark. At a word from him two or three men lighted lanterns. The picture was more weird than ever in the fitful glow. "May I ask, your highness, how do you intend to reach Edelweiss in your present condition. You cannot manage those horses, and besides, you do not know ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... son, M. le Marquis?" repeated the old man mechanically. "I have the right to know," he added with sudden, weird energy. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Goethe to fill his carriage with every variety of plant and mountain flower. Hence Davy, and the late lamented Samuel Brown, analysed, in the spirit of poets as well as of philosophers, and gave to the crucible what it had long lost, something of the air of a weird cauldron, bubbling over with magical foam, and shining, not so much in the severe light of ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... sentencing of the criminal was merely the beginning of a weird life of horror. It was customary at that period to immure prisoners in solitary confinement. There, in their small and reeking cells, filled with damps and pestilential odors, they were confined day after day, year after year, condemned to perpetual ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. John Clemens seldom devoted any time to the company of his ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that he is his father's spirit by stroking HAMLET'S face, and then his own, and then shrinks about the stage to weird music, descriptive of his prison-house. He concludes by appealing to HAMLET'S love for him by pressing his clasped hands to his own heart, and then pointing towards the left-hand side ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... shore, we saw the bickering flames of a ravaging forest fire; dyeing all the surrounding air and landscape crimson, while dense clouds of smoke hung over the burning land like a pall upon which the sun-rays were reflected with weird effect. It was, indeed, an unusual sight, ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York. One heard of fashion-albums and autograph-fans and talking crows and rare orchids and reindeer meat; of bracelets for men and ankle rings for women; of "vanity-boxes" at ten and twenty thousand dollars each; of weird and repulsive pets, chameleons and lizards and king-snakes—there was one young woman who wore a cat-snake as a necklace. One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose; one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... a quiet manner by the father of Mrs Anthony. Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer. Mr Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck. His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical. He was doubtless an eccentric old gent. But from that to calling his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind his back was ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... crowded together under a grey, pitiless sky, with here and there a patch of trailing-pine, or a black pinnacle of trap-rock, to intensify by contrast the ghastly whiteness and desolation of the weird snowy mountains. In front, but far below, was the troubled sea, rolling mysteriously out of a grey mist of snowflakes, breaking in thick sheets of clotted froth against the black cliff, and making long reverberations, and hollow, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pass by the weird sisters pale![29] 7 Marked ye the lowering castle on the heath! Hark, hark, is the deed done—the deed of death! The deed is done:—Hail, king of Scotland, hail! I see no more;—to many a fearful sound The bloody cauldron sinks, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... little commercial and social barques of men; it was a miasma of misinterpretation where the ills of life festered, and also a place where the accidentally wounded were ground between the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance; it was a strange, weird, interesting, and yet futile battle of wits where the ignorant and the incompetent and the shrewd and the angry and the weak were made pawns and shuttlecocks for men—lawyers, who were playing upon their moods, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... from Jersey City, by the fleeting magic voice on the wire. Even his iron composure was stirred by this weird complication. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... starting and at every pause he has something to say that is apposite and suggestive. His country's wintry state is the key-note of the first Introduction, which is an appropriate prelude to a great national tragedy; weird Border legends and the touching and mysterious silences of lone St. Mary's Lake fitly introduce the 'mysterious Man of Woe'; the third and the fourth Introductions, with their features of personal interest and ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... speeding on her way. The road wound for some distance through a wooded region and over several hills. At length it entered upon a settlement where the land was lean and rocks lifted their frowning heads above the surface. The few houses were poor, standing out grey and gaunt in the midst of this weird barrenness. But at every door Midnight was accustomed to stop. Well did she know the little voices which welcomed her, and the tiny hands which stroked her soft nose, or held up some dainty morsel of bread, potatoes or grass. But to-day there was none of this. She ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... rigging on the starboard side, there was another glow of yellowness in the night. Apart from these, all was blackness. And then from above—high above—there wailed down through the darkness a weird, sobbing cry. What it was, I do not know; ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... deadly barrages; I can see shells tearing up great holes in the earth, and scattering mud and stones around them. I can see, too, where trenches were levelled, just as I have seen pits which children make on the seashore levelled by the incoming tide. Now and then there come back to my mind dim, weird pictures of Germans crawling out of their dug-outs, holding up their hands, and ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... golden crescent just above the horizon, look down upon a sleeping world; yet not all asleep, for far down the road skirting yonder wood, a strange procession approaches;—goblin-like figures, hideous with enormous horns, glaring eye-balls and lolling red tongues, and mounted upon weird-looking steeds, are ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... down across the waters from the tug. There was a loud splash beneath the bows, while shadowy figures that howled a weird ditty as they hove the hawser in, rose and fell black against the foam-flecked sea on the dripping forecastle. Nobody had missed Black, who now sat astride the yard watching the tug, as the ship, listing over further ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Burnbrae, an' yon shepherd's wife Dunleith wy; an' we were a' sae prood o' ye, an' pleased tae think that ye hed keepit deith frae anither hame. Can ye no think o' somethin' tae help Annie, and gie her back her man and bairnies?" and Tammas searched the doctor's face in the cold, weird light. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... and very ignorant in those days on the subject of psychic laws; and probably this was our salvation, for I can remember no terrible or weird experience, such as one reads of nowadays when ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... moved, nor had she taken her eyes from the blaze. She seemed to be addressing some invisible body who could hear and understand. The girl felt its influence and a tremor ran through her. The fitful blaze casting weird shadows helped this feeling. At last, with an ...
— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... procession or scoff at it, according as they are friends or foes. Upstairs, behind the big windows, are gaily clad ladies and gentlemen, quizzing the procession with half- scornful, half-uneasy smiles. What weird, hungry, unkempt world is this that has suddenly risen up from obscurity to take possession of the highway? And behind their transparent lace curtains the manufacturers gaze and grumble. What novel ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... "Huge Trade!" he said, "Would thou wouldst lift me on thy head And run where'er my finger led! Once said a Man — and wise was He — 'Never shalt thou the heavens see, Save as a little child thou be.'" Then o'er sea-lashings of commingling tunes The ancient wise bassoons, Like weird Gray-beard Old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes, Chanted runes: "Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss, The sea of all doth lash and toss, One wave forward and one across: But now 'twas trough, now 'tis crest, And worst doth foam and flash to ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... to be seen although Captain BABBIJAM kept his binoculars levelled at the silent horizon for three-quarters of an hour by the saloon clock. Far away in the murky distance of the mysterious empyrean, a single star flashed with a weird brilliance down upon the death-like stillness of the immemorial ocean. Yet the good old Marlinspike was rolling from side to side and rising and falling as if the liquid expanse were stirred by the rush of a tempest ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... of complete preservation on the printed page. The presence, the eye, the voice, the magnetic touch, are beyond record. The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird, illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel dissecting knife of the critic. It is the marvelous light flashing out in the intellectual heavens which no Franklin ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... there—it's pretty fair," suggested Belfast. So advised, he gathered the gifts at his feet, pressed them in a bundle against his breast, then looked cautiously at the Russian Finn, who stood on one side with an unconscious gaze, contemplating, perhaps, one of those weird visions that haunt the men of his race.—"Get out of my road, Dutchy," said the victim of Yankee brutality. The Finn did not move—did not hear. "Get out, blast ye," shouted the other, shoving him aside with his elbow. "Get ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... rugged crag Bows as one weeping, weeping, waterfalls Cry from far-echoing Hermus, wailing moan Of sympathy: the sky-encountering crests Of Sipylus, where alway floats a mist Hated of shepherds, echo back the cry. Weird marvel seems that Rock of Niobe To men that pass with feet fear-goaded: there They see the likeness of a woman bowed, In depths of anguish sobbing, and her tears Drop, as she mourns grief-stricken, endlessly. Yea, thou wouldst say that verily so it was, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... at the thought of having agreed to work for such a mysterious personage, he quickly resorted to the clergyman, who ordered him to fulfil his engagement, but to play nothing but psalms. Accordingly, as soon as Christ-tide arrived, the weird stranger made his appearance, and beckoned the fiddler to a spot where some company was assembled. On reaching his destination, he at once struck up a psalm tune, which so enraged his audience that they instantly vanished, but not without so violently ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... in the Union and treats the question with a light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go on because of the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... living limbs I suck it out, Red, clotted, gout by gout,— A draught abhorred of men and gods; but I Will drain it, suck thee dry; Yea, I will waste thee living, nerve and vein; Yea, for thy mother slain, Will drag thee downward, there where thou shalt dree The weird of agony! And thou and whatsoe'er of men hath sinned— Hath wronged or God, or friend, Or parent,—learn ye how to all and each The arm of doom can reach! Sternly requiteth, in the world beneath, ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... with something about his position that made us both remark afterwards that he looked as though he was doing it quite voluntarily and had planned it all out just that way. It was weird. ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... causing her heart to stand still with fear. She had heard it once before, a night or two ago, when their train had stopped in a wide desert for water or repairs or something and the porter of the car had told her it was coyotes. It had been distant then, and weird and interesting to think of being so near real live wild animals. She had peered from the safety of her berth behind the silken curtains and fancied she saw shadowy forms steal over the plain under the moonlight. But it was a very different thing to hear the sound now, ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... peculiar to suffering, oppressed, and tormented souls, who can endow even dumb misery with speech. Nobody can approach him in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably touching joy of a last, a very last, and all too short gladness; he knows of a chord which expresses those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul, when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder, and at every moment something may spring out of nonentity. He is happiest of all when creating from out the nethermost depths ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... sets, each group clad in a different colour or design of feather-silk. Their head-dress, while composed of the entire body of a bird of plumage, lacked the flamboyant tail of the peacock. The music was weird and whimsical, as there were neither stringed nor brass instruments. It was made wholly by women playing upon a vast variety of drums and reeds. There were all sizes of whistling reeds or flutes; several of these ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... one outstanding fact, frightening, indeed, though at first we could not believe that it meant very much, or that it had any connection with this weird affair. In the residential suburb of Paget, across the harbor from Hamilton, a young white girl, named Miss Arton, had vanished. Mr. Dorrance turned from the telephone after listening to the details and faced us with white face and trembling hands, his expression ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... boat was chartered for a sail of a couple of hours, and then followed the drive home to 'Sconset by a different course from that of the morning, and varied by the gradually fading light of the setting sun and succeeding twilight casting weird shadows here and there among ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... out again, and the priest was left alone. The fire had died out, and the only light in the hut was that of a dim lantern. For the first time that night he began to feel that he was in a weird place, and the old woman's words, "Whatever you do don't peep into the back room," aroused his curiosity and ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... of dust shifted from place to place, and out of it came a medley of weird oaths, the dull thudding of a waddy, and the heavy breathing of men and animals in combat. Suddenly a lithe, sinewy black boy, dressed in a short blue shirt, bounded like a squirrel to the top of the fence and perched there; and through ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, St. Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much relief ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... didn't. Why she's Cleopatra is as weird a history as why I'm Mrs. Jones. But she's Monny's aunt—at least, she's a half-sister of Peter Gilder, and as his only living relative his will makes her Monny's guardian till the girl marries or reaches twenty-five. A ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Ctesiphon, Carus was not convinced, but he fell sick, and his projects were delayed; he was still in his camp near Ctesiphon, when a terrible thunderstorm broke over the ground occupied by the Roman army. A weird darkness was spread around, amid which flash followed flash at brief intervals, and peal upon peal terrified the superstitious soldiery. Suddenly, after the most violent clap of all, the cry arose that the Emperor was dead. Some said that his tent had been struck by lightning, and that ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... where the breakers had roared in angry monotone, the ears thrilled with tender sounds. Though all the winds were dead the undertones of the sea linger in lulling harmonies. The tepid tide on the warm sand crisply rustles and hisses as when satin is crumpled and smartly rent. Weird, resonant tappings, moans, and gurgles come from a hollow log drifting, with infinite slowness. Broken sighs and gasps tell where the ripples advancing in echelon wander and lose their way among blocks of sandstone. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... witnessed a weird and most extraordinary electric display." In the Gulf of Oman, he saw a bank of apparently quiescent phosphorescence: but, when within twenty yards of it, "shafts of brilliant light came sweeping across the ship's bows at ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... frightened the sensitive Katerina (who was reared amid family affection, and cannot understand or endure the tyranny of her mother-in-law) by vague predictions and threats of hell; and when a thunderstorm suddenly breaks over the assembled family, after her husband's return, and the weird old lady again makes her appearance, Katerina is fairly crazed. She thinks the terrible punishment for her wayward affections has arrived; she confesses to her husband and mother-in-law that she loves Boris. Spurned by the latter—though ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... that I suppress his name until he had saved enough to get him to Cuba, where he had new plans for advancement. And now, after months of thought, I am following his advice; for no effort of the creative mind, and no flight of conventional fancy, can equal the weird, grim yarn that he ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... warning, he put his head back in a most surprising fashion, opened his mouth, shut that one eye, and broke into a strange plaint. The others concluded that One-Eye was making a curious, hoarse noise ceilingward for some reason. Presently, however, Cis made out that the noise was a tune: a tune weird but soul-stirring. Music, as Cis could see, was One-Eye's medium of expressing his emotions. And then and there it became her firm conviction that he was bearing a ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... coyotes, possibly in chase of a rabbit, gave vent to their yodeling cry, and awakened us from a sound sleep. They were in a little lateral canyon, which magnified and gave a weird, organ-like echo to their calls long after the coyotes themselves had passed ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... to face with a weird and gloomy case—a case of a contemporary character, if I may say so—a case possessing, in the fullest sense of the word, the hallmark of time, and circumstances pointing to a person and life of different surroundings. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... threatened so vehemently, that at last, in abject terror, she let go her hold of her babe. The boy leaped from her arms into the air, and, whilst the distracted mother uttered a wail of anguish, Giovanni deftly caught his little son in his arms. The child chortled merrily, as if enjoying his weird experience, and, inasmuch as he never so much as uttered the slightest cry of fear, the intrepid Condottiere felt perfectly reassured as to the ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... lacquer trays, little tea-pots, little cups—all the accessories and all the remains of a Japanese feast, resembling nothing so much as a doll's tea-party. In the midst of this circle of dandies are three over-dressed women, one might say three weird visions, robed in garments of pale and undefinable colors, embroidered with golden monsters; and their great chignons arranged with fantastic art, stuck full of pins and flowers. Two are seated and turn their back to me: one is holding the guitar, the other singing with that soft and pretty ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... flared up as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... indifference. He told his monstrous story with a cynical contempt, which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary. He brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim. He described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer than upon a pious Abbe. And, his story ended, he leered at the Court with the satisfaction ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... the mutterings of thunder, like the low growls of some angry animal, and the shrieking of the wind through swaying branches, gave a weird, uncanny effect to a scene which was being enacted, on a certain April night of the year 1862, in a secluded piece of woodland a mile or more east of the village of Shelbyville, Tennessee. In the centre of a small clearing ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... unknown peril of death that came up from the sea, made a deep impression upon my mind, though not in any sense a haunting or unpleasant one? I longed to see the chips fly and the tiny tree bow to the sturdy strokes of the weird woodman. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... they might go to sleep they were to be disappointed Two of the men sat with their backs to the rocks, their rifles across their knees. The others sprawled lazily upon the soft grass. Two torches, stuck in the earth, threw a weird light over ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone snapped by a storm, its prodigious hulk laboring in a gloomy sea of hornblendic granite, its deck-houses, shapen with perfect accuracy of imitation, still remaining in their place, and a weird-looking demon at the wheel steering it on to some invisible destruction. This naval statue (if its bulk forbid not the name) was carved out of a coarse millstone-grit by the chisel of the wind, with but slight assistance from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... her tale as they moved, ran down the dark staircase and out into the street. There, a little way off, was the tall spectre-like figure, still hugging in bearlike embrace the hapless Frederick, and dancing the while a most weird and fantastic dance, chanting some awful words which none could rightly catch, but the burden of which was, "The dance of death! the dance of death! None who dances here with me will dance with ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... before that ocean grew, "By silver drops from many a floating cloud, "By icebergs bellowing in their throes of death, "By lesser seas toss'd from their rocking cups, "And leaping each to each; by dew-drops flung "From painted sprays, whose weird leaves and flow'rs "Are moulded for new dwellers on the earth, "Printed in hearts of mountains and of mines. "Nations immortal? where the well-trimm'd lamps "Of long-past ages, when Time seem'd to pause "On smooth, ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... shadows. As she went onward with slower motion, the calm water, which the moon converted into a bright mirror, rippled at her approach like a silver-broidered cloth; eddies widened and lost themselves amid the shadows of the banks, under the hanging willow branches, whence issued weird, plashing sounds. At every stroke she perceived recesses full of sound; dark cavities which she hastened to pass by; clusters and rows of trees, whose sombre masses were continually changing form, stretching ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... close together that they almost touched, and with the leafy foliage forming a thick covering. The depths of this brake Duane had penetrated was a silent, dreamy, strange place. In the middle of the day the light was weird and dim. When a breeze fluttered the foliage, then slender shafts and spears of sunshine pierced the green mantle and danced like gold on ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... I—that we, for my wife and little girl would be at one with me in my wish, did they know of it, must not keep you from your purpose of fighting out your trouble alone. Every man, as the Scotch proverb says, must "dree his own weird." I shall not, I must not, ask you for any promise; but I trust that if ever you do come back you will make us all glad by seeing you. And remember that what I said of myself and of all I have—all—holds good so long ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... at dawn, with a queer feeling of awe at the weird, gray light which filtered through the cotton walls. A sense of oneness with Nature and the beat of Her eternal heart filled her soul. The soft wash of the water on the sands seemed to be keeping time to the throb of her ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... most gigantic obelisks, without the aid of any other kind of mechanism or of any more occult power. The same hands could, as Diodorus suggests, remove all trace of the debris of construction and leave the pyramids and obelisks standing in weird isolation, as if sprung ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the sick man's mind, his morbid appetite tends, strange to say, to horrors. He 'snatches a fearful joy' from the weird and supernatural. I have known those terrible tales of Le Fanu, entitled 'In a Glass Darkly,' which for dramatic power and eeriness no other novelist has ever approached, devoured greedily by those whose physical sustenance has been dry ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... of whose St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children scarcely ventured to catch a glimpse as we hurried up the narrow street, followed by the bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. This weird and grotesque sight, more weird and more grotesque seen through a muddled childish fancy and through the haze of years, has remained associated in my mind with that particular corner of Rome, where, with windows looking ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... in Honolulu trace their ancestry back to Kamehameha with great pride. The chant is a weird sing-song which relates ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the passengers gazed absently at the men exchanging the bags of mail. All at once a sound of singing was heard in the distance. It was a woman's voice, old and quavering, and the song was a weird, almost unearthly, chant or dirge in a minor key. Slowly the singer approached the station, and reaching it, mounted the steps of the platform and seated herself on a bench, keeping on, without pause, her monotonous singing. The woman was a Mexican, very poorly dressed, and looked ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... introspective boy found little to win him from that self-analysis which later enabled him to mystify a world that rarely pauses to take heed of the ancient exhortation, "Know thyself." In the depths of his own being he found the story of "William Wilson," with its atmosphere of weird romance and its heart of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child. It is customary to give prominence to De Quincey's pernicious habit of opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird flights of his marvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to emphasize the fact that the later achievements of that strange creative faculty were clearly foreshadowed in youth. For example, the earliest incident in his life that he could afterwards recall, he describes as ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... to work with a will, and the frozen ground yielded quickly to the strokes of his trusty spade, and surely the faint moon, glimmering from between the drifting clouds sweeping across the dark face of the black heavens overhead, never looked upon a wilder, more weird scene. ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... astounded at the mere multitudinousness of the curios he had contrived to crowd into the space around him. Side by side rested a palaeolithic implement, a Chinese 'wise man,' a Gnostic gem, an amphora of Graeco-Etruscan work. The general effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom. Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets, miniature paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacquered leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin gods. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into, as one emerged — the revelation of ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... professor out in favour of a "darnce"—and the other pubs decanted their contents, and chance souls skipped for the verandas of weather-board shanties out of which other souls popped to see the runaway. They saw a weird horseman, or rather, something like a camel (for Harry rode low, like Tod Sloan with his long back humped—for effect)—apparently fleeing for its life in a veil of dust, along the long white road, and some forty rods behind, an unaccountable tilted coach careered in its own separate ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... What the public wants in its literature is human nature, and that human nature simply and forcibly expressed. This is fundamental, and this is why true literature has no fashion and knows no change, despite the cries of the modern weaklings who affect weird forms. The clarity of Shakespeare is the clarity of to-day and will be ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... just as the light of day dispels the gloom of night, so the sufferer clings to the hope that any minute he may open his eyes, and find things as they were before the darkness settled down, with all its weird shadows, to fill his soul with dread. The continued darkness causes a feeling of depression and repression, very hard to combat, and so the sufferer is in need of "first aid"—in need of a friendly hand ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... alone in his bedroom that night long after his father and every guest had retired. The casement window was wide open, so that the sweet breath of the June roses could steal in, and with it the weird tremolo of a nightingale singing its love-lay in an adjoining copse. The moonlight was everywhere, bathing the flower-beds, spiritualizing the trees, lying on the grass like snow, and casting deep shadows from ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... that creeping red, and this whiteness I pride myself on is I, and my black hair, and my blue eyes are I. It is a weird thing to be a person. What makes me ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... traced as with a gold pen dipped in melted pearls on black enamel. My seal was an emerald, Faith also, impaled. I snatched it up and laid it by the ring on her hand. She smiled—such a smile! intensest sympathy, deepest! Could it be? to love the same old symbols, the same weird music? I caught her close, and bent over her lips. The gold hair waved over my shoulder; the great, glittering eyes foamed into mine, then melted and swam into deep, quivering seas of dreams. I whispered, 'Zoe mou!' Oh, the quick, golden whisper, the flash of genial heartiness, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not that," he said quietly. "If we spare you one pain we give you another. Miss Darryll, I should say Mrs. Richford, a terrible thing has happened, a strange, weird thing. As you know, the inquest was to have been to-day. Events have rendered that utterly impossible. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... singing—but singing in a fashion quite novel to the British. Throughout their column there were anything up to a dozen songs in progress, some as choruses and some as solos, and the effect was certainly rather weird. The Tower Bridge officers, knowing their own men's fondness for swinging march songs, expected, and, to tell truth, half hoped that they would give a display of their harmonious powers. They did, ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... could recall nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only of the weird tree-shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Dore, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his illustrations. He knew how to ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... of this weird ceremony. They saw the naked Indians going about their task in the pit in the glare of torches, like veritable imps of hell. It was a discouraging scene. But a greater trial than the Feast of the Dead was in store ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... Cameron also produced a photograph of him in her peculiar style, but it was not so successful as her fine portrait of Tennyson. An oil-painting by Mr. Watts, exhibited some fifteen years ago, and now also forming part of the Forster Collection at South Kensington, is remarkable for its weird wildness; but it gave great displeasure to the old philosopher himself! More lately we have a remarkable portrait by Mr. Whistler, who seized the tout ensemble of his illustrious sitter's character and costume in a very effective manner. The terra cotta statue by Mr. Boehm, exhibited ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... these occasions must have been a weird sight; though one did not mark that at the time. The poacher crept from the darkness. into the glaring smithy light; for in country parts the anvil might sometimes be heard clanging at all hours of the night. As ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... vine, the scraped wood of which, and some bitter roots, form the chief ingredients, boiled together. The rites and incantations employed, and the numerous other articles added to the poisonous cauldron, may remind one of the weird sisters' concoction in Macbeth. The pacuna is composed of a very delicate thin reed, perfectly smooth inside and out, which is encased in a stouter one. The arrows are from nine to ten inches long, ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the silent terrors of my house. The weird fancies that clung around the gloomy halls and dark doorways still whispered their threatening tales of danger and death. The air was still peopled with the ghosts of forgotten crimes, and the tragedy of the alley that had changed ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... half effaced inscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. Snatches of dialogues once held are recalled, faint recollections of old friendships return, and fragments of landscapes beheld and deeds performed long ago pass in weird procession before the mind's half opened eye. We know a professional gentleman of unimpeachable veracity, of distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firm believer in his own existence on the earth previously to his present life. He testifies that on innumerable occasions he has ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo, Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic history of the men, and with a certain mystery which ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... up all your joyful creeds; you must keep on believing in the weird underground dwarfs; for I am going to tell you of one that the cold calculating Professor Science has at last accepted, and that lives in your own back-yard. That is, the Cat's-eye Toad or Spadefoot. It is much like a common Toad, ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... He was a weird figure of a man. Aged and lean, long-faced, hollow-checked, with matted, sunburnt hair that fell below the shoulders of his buckskin shirt, his face was distorted with hatred and helpless rage. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or religion? But why not study this Sanscrit? What if one moon has come and gone, with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions,—so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... longer it grew; he had a hooked nose, and his hair stood straight up (I never saw a man so easy-going about the expression and so scared about the head), and he was very tall, with long, thin, hairy legs. We must have looked a weird pair as we sat there, naked, on the low three-legged stools, with the billy and the tucker on the box between us, and ate our bread and meat ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... up twenty buckets—it was weird to watch him suck it, (And the market price for water was per bucket half-a-crown) Till the speculator stopped him, saying, "Not another bucket— If I give him any more there'll be a famine in the town. Take him back to old Mahomet, and ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... fantastical illusion by Macbeth and Banquo, insomuch that Banquo would call Macbeth in jest king of Scotland, and Macbeth again would call him in sport likewise the father of many kings. But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as you would say) the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies, endued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science, because every thing came to ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... is in the world.' He did not mean to say, 'Take comfort, for other people are as badly off as you are,' but he meant to call to the remembrance of the solitary sufferer the thousands of his brethren who were 'dreeing the same weird' in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... that vast schooltime drawled on, Mr. Sandsome lost energy, drooped like a flower,—especially if the day was at all hot,—his sandy hair became dishevelled, justice became nerveless, hectic, and hasty. Finally came copybooks; and yawns and weird rumblings from Mr. Sandsome. And so the ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Ridiculous things of the same yellowish-quartz material as composed the cave-walls. At regular intervals a dull, bluish light poured forth from rounded holes in their smooth sides. And issuing forth from within these comic globes was the same weird, compelling music he had heard before. They rolled up to him, brushed against his toes; a shrilling in his brain told him that ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... eyes two sardonyxes, whereof the second layer, representing the iris, is dark, while the white centre of the orb, corresponding to the pupil, exhibits a hopeless opacity. We pause in succession before those weird sisters, arranged stiffly a l'Etrusque, who are receiving the infant Bacchus, not to give him milk, you may be sure, but to dry-nurse him upon Burgundy; a perfectly intellectual head, planted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... nothing improbable in the claim that phenomena like these, strange, weird, startling, "were so much like miracles that they had the same effect as miracles on unbelievers." They helped break up the apathetic torpor of the church and summon the multitudes into the wilderness to hear the preaching of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... of the river and between the hills, but is fast rolling away in grey, ghost-like masses. Out to sea it obscures the horizon, making it difficult to be sure where water ends and fog begins, and creating a strange, rather weird, effect by which ships at a certain distance appear to ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... an oak weird eddies play, Where fate was writ for Saxon seer; And yonder park is white with may, Where shadowy ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... swelled itself into a torrent in the winter, and roared as it swept over the smooth bowlders to its bridegroom, the sea; sometimes it was the only sound in the valley, save always the murmur of the ocean, and the shrill weird cry of the curlew as it flew from the sea marge to the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... small circumference, then gradually widens out to the proportions of an enormous barrel, and at the top closes up to the two-foot circumference again. Two branches, like giant arms spread themselves out in a most weird-looking manner on the top of all. About five leaves grow on each bough, and, instinctively, you consider them ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... Hitherto hast thou earned fame by thy deeds, but henceforth will wrongs and man-slayings fall on thee, and the most part of thy doings will turn to thy woe and ill-hap; an outlaw shalt thou be made, and ever shall it be thy lot to dwell alone abroad; therefore this weird I lay on thee, ever in those days to see these eyes with thine eyes, and thou wilt find it hard to be alone—and that shall drag ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... befooled of light liars, how shall they put the shame off them? Therefore I say, show to us a token; and if thou be the God, this shall be easy to thee; and if thou show it not, then is thy falsehood manifest, and thou shalt dree the weird. For we shall deliver thee into the hands of these women here, who shall thrust thee down into the flow which is hereby, after they have wearied themselves with whipping thee. But thy man that kneeleth at thy feet shall we give ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... for a very brief period, and then went forth and gloriously defeated his old enemy the butcher boy. What a contrast between this humour and the strange scene in the drawing-room at James Steerforth's home after Rosa Dartle had sung the strange weird Irish song to the accompaniment of her harp! And how different, again, the scene in the home of Scrooge's nephew (C.C.) when, after tea, 'they had ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... physical, if designed and applied with sufficient wisdom. The bull-roarer, of which something has been already said, furnishes the ceremonies with a background of awe. It fills the woods, that surround the secret spot where the rites are held, with the rise and fall of its weird music, suggestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits in the air. Not until the boys graduate as men do they learn how the sound is produced. Even when they do learn this, the mystery of the voice ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... charge: "Be kind to your mother, John, and make her old age pleasant. She is all you've got now." With these words ringing in his ears John Lyman awoke to find the perspiration standing on his forehead, and a strange, weird sensation resting on him like a spell, which he tried in vain to throw aside. He tried to compose his mind, and again to sleep; but though nothing peculiarly frightful had troubled his slumber, he trembled from head to foot. In fact, Conscience so long soothed and stifled, had with ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... upon the scene, while a fine orchestra discoursed melodiously from some green-embowered nook, the place seemed like an enchanted realm where one might almost expect to discern, flitting among the playful shadows, those weird forms that people the elf land of ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... He has original ideas, though he is not in the least brilliant. I believe he talks more freely to me, on the whole, than to most people, though I can't say he has a particularly good opinion of me. He stuck his glass in his eye and stared at me last night, in that weird way of his, and said to me, 'Maria, in an ingenuous fashion of your own, you are the most abominably selfish woman I ever beheld.' Still, I know he rather likes me. I said to him: 'That isn't quite true, James. I ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... I saw all that happened with a weird, unnatural distinctness, as one sees, before a storm, vivid outlines of far headlands that the usual ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... who was willing to run the newspaper, and I turned the post office over to Ma Wagor. Amid the weird beating of tom-toms and the hoo-hoo ah-ah-ahhh of the Indians across the trail, I set up my farewell message in The Wand. In gorgeous regalia of beads and quills, paint and eagle feathers, the Indians had ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... to his one respectful listener. I was ashamed of my companions, but I couldn't help catching stray fragments of the conversation, and the involuntary mixing of Bertie's affairs with the Religious Wars, and the destruction of Les Baux by Richelieu's soldiers, had a positively weird effect on my mind. Bertie, it seemed—(or was it Richelieu?) was invited to visit at the chateau of a French marquis called de Roquemartine (or was it good King Rene, who inherited Les Baux because he was a ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... old grey wood was full of weird light, but the silence of the night had fallen on it. Beast and bird and insect had sought their lair and nest and cranny. Not a leaf moved. I felt ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... we went on through the dark, our path lit only by the stars and the faint radiance of the glowing pillar of smoke above the Peak, which was reflected on to us from the mighty mantle of its snows. Forward we toiled, whilst a few paces ahead of us walked our unwearying guide. If she had seemed weird and inhuman before, now she appeared a very ghost, as, clad in her graveyard white, upon which the faint light shimmered, never speaking, never looking back, she glided on noiselessly between the black rocks and the twisted, dark-green ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... reported Marion in a low voice, "a little Jewish boy was standing. He had very large black eyes, two tightly twisted black curls hung down over his ears, and he wore a long coat like a grown man; he brought the letter. It was awfully weird." ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... part of the blame rests on such individuals as X-101, who, when lubricated with Moon Glow, insists upon dancing around on large, cast-iron feet to the hazard of all toes in his vicinity. He is thin and long jointed, and he goes "creak, creak," in a weird, sing-song fashion as he dances. It ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... a strange, weird dance amongst the imagery of the rings, over which my earth planet was beginning to throw a haze of light. At first it was hardly more than a walk, a slow procession round the twin circumferences of the centred tripod. But soon it increased to an extraordinary graceful ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... Sunday morning, streaming into the room, fell upon a weird, dishevelled figure, that still stared fixedly at the wall, and every now and then muttered strange and wholly unclerical words and phrases. Still the hours wore on, until the sun rose high in the heavens, and the bells began to ring for church. Then came a knock at the curate's door. His ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... were sitting alone before the open fireplace. It's a dangerous place to be! The glowing fire sends such weird shadows flickering up and down. Its living fire is sometimes an entreating Circe waking undesirable impulses, then again it's a spirit that heals and inspires. I love an open fire but to-day I should have fled from it and yet—I think I'm glad ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... gaze, from the edge of a deep draw, at Wade's ranch buildings. That very morning a gaunt, gray timber-wolf had peered forth at almost the same point; and despite Moran's bulk, there was a hint of a weird likeness between man and beast in the furtive suspicious survey they made of the premises. The wolf had finally turned back toward the mountains, but Moran advanced. Although he was reasonably certain that the place was deserted, a degree of ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing. Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand—she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence—and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... and seemed to reverberate round and round some great vault, and then came directly after a dull, solemn, weird-sounding plosh! evidently not many feet below ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... even the anatomical learning of the great English palaeontologist did not enable him to place them all correctly or reconstruct the true proportions of the animal to which they belonged. With them were found associated the bones of the great carnivorous dinosaur Megalosaurus; and the weird reconstructions of these animals, based by Waterhouse Hawkins upon the imperfect knowledge and erroneous ideas then prevailing, must be familiar to many of the older readers of this handbook. Life size restorations of these ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... Jerry saw that the temporary clearing of the mystery only made things darker than ever. For, why should Tod be rescued in this weird fashion? Why had the man refused to let Tod's friends come on the island? And why, why had Mr. Fulton laughed at Jerry's story—and yet followed his clue in this stealthy way? Jerry, up to his nose in the water, and deeper than ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... much interested in the geology of my environments; much more so than I should have been had I been told that those strange, weird hills were the haunt of the red man, who was on the war-path, and looking constantly for scalps. But these unpleasant facts were not touched upon by the officers, and in blissful ignorance we pursued ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... and unhallowed, for purposes of romance—the delight in dealing with revelations of primitive feeling and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another—the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as with ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... real love for music, was a revelation. Lorry felt like smiling, yet he did not smile. Bud Shoop could not play, but his personality forced its own recognition, even through the absurd medium of an untutored performance on that weird upright piano. Lorry began to realize that there was something more to ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... preferred—She listened, but caught only the rustling of the heavy silk. When? Minutes passed; at her left, a candle, carelessly adjusted by the maid, dripped to the dresser; its over-long wick threw weird, ever-changing shadows; her own silhouette appeared in various distorted forms on ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... time I was thinking 'poor Jane,'" laughed Judith. "Oh, dear! Why doesn't Mrs. Weatherbee come back. I'm crazy to hear the weird story ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... nothing whatever to do, he does it to the highest artistic perfection. At least one justification remains. Civilization has not done away with the moon. In the stillness of night, its great white face peeps over the hills at intervals no dog has yet determined. Under this weird light, strange shadowy forms trip across the fields. The watchdogs of each farm have given warning, and the whole countryside is eager ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... was a great mistake, this worst blunder I have made. In spite of myself it will haunt me. And the curse! that awful curse! Gods! will it never cease ringing in my ears! night and day, sleeping and waking it never leaves me! I see her now! How weird-like her prophetic looks! How like the sentence of doom are her words, as, with flashing eye and quivering lip, she says: 'As you have wilfully, voluntarily, and wickedly called it down upon your own head, may ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... time had been gathering together, and which by this time had completely obscured the moon, now burst with a torrent of rain. A flash of lightning for a brief moment illuminated the scene, and then died away again, leaving it more weird even than it had been before. A faint roll of thunder broke upon the unpleasant reverie into which the company had fallen, and Sir George's voice ordering the oil lamps to be lighted, somewhat reassured the more fearful among the spectators. ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... to discover the whereabouts of Costal and the negro; but for some time he could see nothing of either. The enchanted hill, glistening with a vitreous translucence under the white moonbeams, presented a wild, weird aspect; and, from time to time, strange unearthly sounds appeared to proceed from it, as also from the ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... mountain, and mosque, and cathedral dome, Lofty peak, and column, and minaret, And ponderous arches in order set, Tower and spire and pinnacle high, Soaring up to the deep blue sky Statues ice sculptured, frost work and fret, That had some weird ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... but their souls remembered the animosity and manifested an instinctive antagonism. He developed his theme jocularly. Yet the affair was so absurd from the worldly, the military, the honourable, or the prudential point of view, that this weird explanation seemed rather ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... money enough to surfeit every instinct of pleasure, had preferred to live a shy secluded life, busily engaged either in the collection of curiosities or the invention of toy-like futile machines. There was a girl too whom Sir Charles remembered, a weird elfin creature with extraordinary black eyes and hair and a clear white face. Her one regret in those days had been that she was not born a horse, and she had lived in the stables, in as horse like a fashion ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... "though ye kenna me. But as sure as that sun's in heaven, and as sure as that water's rinning to the sea, and as sure as there's an ee that sees and an ear that hears us baith, Harry Bertram, that was thought to perish at Warroch Point, never did die there. He was to have a weary weird o't till his ane-and-twentieth year, that was aye said o' him; but if ye live and I live, ye'll hear mair o' him this winter before the snaw lies twa days on the Dun of Singleside. I want nane o' your siller," she ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... amethyst and deepened the purple gloom of the valleys. Now, as we rode in merry groups of six or eight, over the country by-ways, the new moon slowly touched every tree and shrub with her magical wand until the land with its long, weird shadows and silver radiance seemed to belong to another ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... he was about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... to take the car down there, as if I did "it was likely that the car would stop some pieces of metal." There was nothing for it but to walk down the road leading to the recently captured village. It was very dark, but star-shells, with their weird green light, would illuminate the countryside every five minutes or so. In the darkness one could vaguely discern the shape of the first-line transport wagons taking up rations to the trenches, and small columns of silently ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... listen expectantly. Then again he seated himself to wait. Several times, passionately insistent, he shook his head, and it was as if the refusal were being made to an invisible presence. Suddenly he lifted his face as the sound of a weird, wild wail was borne to him, mingling with the elf-like moaning of the wind. He leaned forward slightly, listening intently. From somewhere above him pleading notes from a violin were making the night even more mournful. A change came ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... rough poles are made to form a tripod and the kettle is suspended from the vertex of the angles or the crossing point of the poles. Music, in which string instruments figure most conspicuously, should be selected, as this lends itself best to the weird effect which should be sought. Three or four pieces will generally be sufficient and they may consist of a violin, guitar, banjo and snare drum or the drum may be omitted if not convenient. The committee appointed to gather the refreshments must have the assistance ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... to death he made a death-like groan which awoke the Indian snake charmer who was asleep in one corner of the tent on a pile of rugs. The man took in the situation at a glance, and came to Billy's rescue, making the snake uncoil itself by playing on a kind of bagpipe, a queer, weird, monotonous piece of music. This charmed the snake and it uncoiled itself from Billy and, swaying its body, ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... the girl struck a few chords and dashed off into that old plantation song full of mingling pathos and humour. Barney picked up his father's violin, touched the strings softly till he found her key and then followed in a subdued accompaniment of weird chords. The girl turned herself toward him, her beautiful face lighting up as if she had caught a glimpse of a kindred spirit, and with a new richness and tenderness she poured forth the full flood of her song. The crowd were entranced with delight. Even those who had been somewhat impatient ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... his trunk on high, coughed mightily, then rising on his hind legs until he stood almost as high as the widow's cottage, he uttered a wild, weird trumpeting that ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... the pipal was surrounded by thousands of Mahratta sepoys, for word had gone forth,—the mysterious rumour of India that is like a weird static whispering to the four corners of the land a message,—had flashed through the tented city that the men from Karowlee were to take the oath of allegiance ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... bluffs with the castle atop that meant Chagres, this comradeship rather fell apart. Soon a landing was to be made and transportation across the Isthmus had to be obtained. Men at once became rivals for prompt service. Here, for the first time, the owners of the weird mining-machines already described found themselves at a disadvantage, while those who carried merely the pick, shovel, and small personal equipment were enabled to make a flying start. On the beach there was invariably an immense wrangle over ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... pocket, and locking the cash box again, was closing the safe, when he paused as though struck with a sudden thought. The storm without seemed to be renewing its strength. The dashing of sleet and snow against the windows, the howling of the wind, the weird singing of the wires, and the sharp banging of swinging signs and shutters, carried terror to the heart of the man kneeling in the dimly lighted office. Sinking on the floor, he buried his face in his hands and ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... would come to my casement and lift up his voice, and howl into the bosom of the silent night. At first I thought that he had found some one in distress, or wanted to get me out of doors and save my life. I went out several nights in a weird costume that I had made up of garments belonging to different members of my family. I dressed carefully in the dark and stole out to kill the assassin referred to by Lucretia, but he was not there. Then the faithful animal would run up to me and with almost human, pleading ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... night, from sweet refreshing sleep I wake to hear outside my window-pane The uncurbed fury of the wild spring rain, And weird winds lashing the defiant deep, And roar of floods that gather strength and leap Down dizzy, wreck-strewn channels to the main. I turn upon my pillow and again Compose myself for slumber. Let them sweep; I once survived great floods, and do not fear, Though ominous ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with a, a, aa, au, o, oo, ou, u, y or ei (long), i (short), oi, e, which I afterwards found to be the twelve vowels of their language. After he had thus uttered some forty distinct sounds, he drew from the back of the instrument a slip of something like goldleaf, on which as many weird curves and angular figures were traced in crimson. Pointing to these in succession, he repeated the sounds in order. I made out that the figures in question represented the sounds spoken into the instrument, and taking out my pencil, marked under each ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... said! It has the ring and weird mystery of De Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the pale piles" is a hideous alliteration. But in spite of such immaturities ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records of "weird seizures", of the Irish dialect piece To-morrow, the popular Spinster's Sweet-Arts, and the Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on the gloom of the ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... was stated, was building a car which would practically annihilate distance and time, and there were many weird pictures, showing him flying along without touching the ground, in a car, the pictorial construction of which was at once ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... was aiming for another shot when Jeb's ears were filled with a weird, screeching noise; a violent jolt of air almost knocked him from the box, and a geyser of spray shot up ten feet from the submarine's bow. Before even the deep boom of the distant gun that had fired this projectile reached him, another screeching followed, another jolt of air ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... thunderstorm. One moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the drawing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the extreme, with here and there a wild, weird canyon thousands of feet deep. Some of the awful pitfalls made Sam fairly hold ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... was a most remarkable personality. From the first I had been compelled to admit that whatever the Russian public had said, there was a certain amount of basis for the gossip. His was the most weird and compelling personality that I had ever met. Even Stolypin had been impressed by him, though the Holy Synod had declared ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... have gone to sleep soon after that. The moon, big, weird, solemn, rose slowly over yonder parallel range of mountains. The men at the fire talked low and mumbling between long intervals. Presently the heavy man rose, skirted the thicket, and stumbled off across the field ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... return to Northborough he wrote what he called an account of his journey, prefacing the narrative by this remark, "Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary." Mr. Martin gives this extraordinary document in his "Life of Clare." It is a weird, pathetic and pitiful story, "a tragedy all too deep for tears." Having finished the journal of his escape he addressed it with a letter to "Mary Clare, Glinton." ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... fox barks away up next the mountain, and I imagine I can almost see him sitting there, in his furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down in my direction. As I listen, one answers him from behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter sound,—wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills. Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mountains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to be compared with it. So wild! I get up in the middle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... these noises around her making her start? Rats! Yes, here they were, venturing out from all the corners. They knew there had been food in the room. This was why Madge had those to gaunt, weird-looking cats in her kitchen! Aurelia went and sat on the step into the court to be out of their way, but Madge hunted her in that the door might be shut and barred; and when she returned trembling to the sitting room, she heard such a scampering and a scrambling that she durst ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... puzzling over the meaning of these apertures there came a repetition of the weird cry, but this time the lad was so startled that he almost lost his balance and ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green. Set these in a little valley, framed by mountains whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, oistus, arbor vitae and many other evergreens, whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all deep or brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as usual, the sunlight streamed over breadfruit and palm, and the night seemed a dream. But there were rumors in the village of a strange dance held by the inhabitants of Nuka-hiva, on another island, in celebration of the harvest of the mei. Weird observances were hinted, rites participated in only by men who danced stark naked, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... unearthly beauty of a summer night in Finland is likely to forget it. The Arctic Circle should, of course, be crossed to witness the midnight sun in all its glory, but I doubt if the quiet crepuscule (I can think of no other word) of the twilit hours of darkness is not even more weird and fascinating viewed from amid silent streets and buildings than from the sullen dreariness of an Arctic desert, which is generally (in summer) as drab and as flat as a biscuit. In Arctic Lapland, where for two months the sun never sinks below the horizon, you may read small print ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... of this success was due to Poe's weird and wonderful stories; still more, perhaps, to his trenchant critiques and his startling theories anent cryptology. As regards the tales now issued in 'Graham's', attention may especially be drawn to the world-famed "Murders in the Rue Morgue," the first of a series—'"une ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
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