"Conjurer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old man began to speak as follows: "Son, I see by your belt you are the great conqueror of giants, and behold, my son, on the top of this mountain is an enchanted castle; this is kept by a giant named Galligantua, and he, by the help of an old conjurer, betrays many knights and ladies into his castle, where by magic art they are transformed into sundry shapes and forms. But above all, I grieve for a duke's daughter, whom they fetched from her father's garden, carrying her through the air in a burning chariot drawn by fiery dragons. ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... Royal Highness can be so cool on hearing this cursed story. If that rascally Salmoni was here who acted the conjurer, he might save us by some contrivance, for the fellow was a bunch of tricks. As it is, he has slipped out of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... particular. Here, it was said, was a man fully qualified to expose the archimpostor who had been so justly pilloried in Browning's "Mr. Sludge the Medium"; here was a scientist, trained to exact knowledge and close observation, who would not be deceived by the artful tricks of a conjurer. It was pleasant too to learn that in order to circumvent any attempts at sleight of hand, Sir William intended using instruments specially designed for test purposes, and which he was confident ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... Greene reproached him for his scepticism, and every editor has remarked that his plays are heathenish in spirit. Lamb not only calls attention to the fact that "Marlowe is said to have been tainted with Atheistical positions," but remarks that "Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the Conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a character though but ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... changes of animal form and innumerable others which may be collected from the books of natural history, we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups of a conjurer. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... A mechanical mixture of two or more elements is a simple affair, but a chemical mixture introduces an element of magic. No conjurer's trick can approach such a transformation as that of oxygen and hydrogen gases into water. The miracle of turning water into wine is tame by comparison. Dip plain cotton into a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids and let ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... qu'un moment, dans le jardin, ou il a voulu presque se jeter a mes genoux pour me conjurer de lui garder le secret sur sa passion, et d'oublier l'emportement qu'il eut avec moi quand je le quittai. Je lui ai dit que je me tairois, mais que je ne pretendois pas rester dans la maison avec lui, et qu'il falloit qu'il sortit; ce qui l'a jete dans des gemissements, dans ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... person falls sick or meets with an accident, a conjurer is sent for, who attributes the disaster to some other person, on whom revenge must be taken. In the British territory, no more can be done than to treat the supposed wizard with contumely, such as to render his life a burthen to him, and he can generally escape this by entering some white ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... accepter adapter adviser affirmer aider almoner annoyer arbiter assenter asserter bailer caster censer (vessel) concocter condenser conferrer conjurer consulter continuer contradicter contriver convener conveyer corrupter covenanter debater defender deliberater deserter desolater deviser discontinuer disturber entreater exalter exasperater exciter executer (except in law) expecter frequenter granter idolater ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... Ralph, helping himself again to bread and honey. "No, Bertram Errol was not present. But Napoleon Errol was. It was he who so kindly shunted Mrs. Damer on to me. Nota bene! Give Napoleon Errol a wide berth in future. He has the craft of a conjurer and the subtlety of a serpent. I believe he is ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... I am not a conjurer," replied Austin, as he sank back upon his cushions. "That was what I heard last night. But of course you don't believe in such absurdities. It's only your ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... Jack recited and sang songs to the people one evening, and the next he appeared in costume as a conjurer, and performed a number of wonderful tricks; and the third day he got an interesting book, and read out to them a story in a voice that might be heard right across the deck, so that he had a large number ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... a conjurer," sobbed Patience; "but I wish you hadn't been right in this instance. However, comfort yourself. I'll die with you. We'll be carried to the grave in the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless. If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she despised them ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... scene, the lion tamer kept his eyes open. There were all sorts and conditions of men in Toys, but he was among them as a giant among pygmies; and even if the ex-ship's steward, the ex-trolley driver, the conjurer out of a job, and the smart young men who had been "clerking since they were in long pants," had wished to try their luck with Win, Earl Usher would have shown them the wisdom of ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... contrivance or artificial device." This was the merest showman's patter, for, as a matter of fact, it was not a very wonderful illusion. But as he led his wife forward to present her to the audience the conjurer was wondering whether the mishaps that had ruined his chance would meet him even here. If something should go wrong—he felt his wife's hand tremble in his, and he pressed it tightly to reassure her. He must make an effort, an effort of will, and then no mistakes ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... and the second opens ten years afterwards in a Greek Conjurer's house in Constantinople, with Paracelsus writing down the result of his work. And the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... stooping to deposit it, but still keeping his eyes fixed upon the horseman. "Then I step back, so," moving backward with long regular strides, "an' I reckon I count fifteen paces. Then I clear another space," he added grimly, like some fiendish conjurer describing the process of his tricks, "and stand ready. Now, 'Tough' McCulloch, or Anton, or wotever you notion best, skunk as you are, you're goin' to die decent. You're goin' to die as a gentleman in a square fought duel. You're ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... thundered the monitor, in towering rage, turning this way and that, uncertain whom to select as the first victim of his heavy hand. Before he could collect his wits, one of the boys yelled, 'Rabbi Isaac, Rabbi Isaac, the candles!'—It worked like a conjurer's charm upon a serpent. In an instant the monitor turned and ran to his room and searched it. Seeing no one there, he sank into his chair, and groaned: 'Wicked, depraved children! Those gallows-birds, I'll mangle their flesh, and flay the skin from their bones!' and he kept on mumbling to himself ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... again in the posture of death and neatly replaced the statue. I tell you it's physically impossible. And how else could he have unclothed a man covered with that stone monument? It's worse than the conjurer's trick, when a man shuffles a coat ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... knowledge and experience of the world as most men. And what does it all end in? It ends, Mr. Ezra Jennings, in a conjuring trick being performed on Mr. Franklin Blake, by a doctor's assistant with a bottle of laudanum—and by the living jingo, I'm appointed, in my old age, to be conjurer's boy!" ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... I have found an excellent advantage to take away the chain: my Master put it off e'en now to say on a new Doublet, and I sneak't it away by little and little most Puritanically. We shall have good sport anon when ha's missed it about my Cousin the Conjurer. The world shall see I'm an honest man of my word, for now I'm going to hang it between Heaven and Earth ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... earth just as he was unveiling the precious mystery. At which sight (she confessed), she was horribly afraid, and half inclined to run: but, gathering courage from the thought that the white men used to laugh at the whole matter, she rushed upon the hapless conjurer, and bore off her prize in triumph; and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... There is only one way in which it was possible—and that was, of course, a mere conjurer's illusion. To cause a locked door to appear bolted in addition, it would only be necessary for the person on the inside of the door to wrest the staple containing the bolt from the woodwork. The bolt in ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... she saw there was something wrong with Wally. A shadow of depression hung over him—a shadow which he tried to hide with bursts of cheerfulness. But his old air of eagerness was gone—that air with which he had once looked at the future as a child might stare with delighted eyes at a conjurer drawing rabbits and roses out of old hats ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... measles epidemic a large number of children died on the Agency. At this village, a little child had been conjured until they thought it was dying, and then they sent for me. I found the poor little one all bruised with the hands of the conjurer. I showed the mother how to bathe it, and I poulticed the throat and sent Josephine over again to change the poultice, and she reported the child as breathing quietly. The next morning the swelling had gone down and the baby seemed much better; all day it continued ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 10, October, 1889 • Various
... understand that the place of the ordinary musical critic of The Times will be taken at the next performance of Parsifal by Mr. WATERER, the great floricultural expert, and Mr. DEVANT, the eminent conjurer, with a view to their contributing their impressions of the flower maidens and the methods of the magician ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... general travels "light," and all his worldly possessions were crowded ready for mobilization into a small compass. He had his sword, his field blanket, his trunk, and the tin despatch boxes that held his papers. From these, like a conjurer, he would draw souvenirs of all the world. From the embrace of faded letters, he would unfold old photographs, daguerrotypes, and miniatures of fair women and adventurous men: women who now are queens in exile, men who, lifted on waves of absinthe, still, across a cafe table, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... perform the most supernatural cures, who can lick red-hot iron, who can cut open their bowels, and, by passing their hand over the wound, make themselves whole again—who can raise the dead. In China, these miracles, with all their authentications, have descended to the conjurer, and are performed for the amusement of children. The common expressions of that country betray the materialism and indifferentism of the people, and their consequent immorality. "The prisons," they say, "are locked night and day, but they are always full; the temples are always open, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Comrades Under Castro For Home and Honor From Switch to Lever Little Snap, the Post Boy Zig-Zag, the Boy Conjurer Zip, the Acrobat ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... hither, Piqui Chaqui? Yes, 'tis the holy Uillac Uma; He brings his tools of augury. No puma[FN14] more astute and wise I hate that ancient conjurer Who prophesies of evil things, I feel the evils he foretells; 'Tis ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... groundless fears, than those who reject the object of legitimate awe. The man who will not believe in a deity, has often believed in witchcraft; and those who will not acknowledge a Providence, have often trembled before a conjurer. At this period, Frederick had grown peculiarly anxious and irascible—a temper for which the ambassador accounts by a sudden impulse of superstition. He says—"Amongst several other incredible follies in so great a character, he has that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... shoulders and spread his hands apart, like a conjurer who has just vanished a rabbit or ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... appropriate colouring! The colouring happens merely to be new. Of melody not the remotest trace,—when in this opera particularly the composer casts melodies up in the air like golden balls and juggles with them; when, like a conjurer, he goes on taking fresh roses in absurd abundance out of a horn that should naturally have been ten ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... the subject from a Vienna newspaper, which I will now read to you, translating as I go. You can see for yourselves; it is printed in the German character." And he held the cutting out for verification, much as a conjurer passes a trick orange along ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... investigation. Eight of the winning votes were faggot votes manufactured out of the Cow Inn, of Haslemere, which inspired Dr. William King, Principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, to a ballad of forty-two verses, entitled The Cow of Haslemere, or The Conjurer's Secretary at Oxford. Dr. King liked politics in poetry to be hot and ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... now!' says some great fool, When London had a grand illumination, Which to that bottle-conjurer, John Bull, Is of all dreams the first hallucination; So that the streets of colour'd lamps are full, That Sage (said john) surrenders at discretion His purse, his soul, his sense, and even his nonsense, To gratify, like a ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... gentleman, Duchess," I admitted, "but he did not come with me. I can tell you, however, that now he is here he can be made very useful in entertaining your guests—he is a conjurer of very remarkable powers, and I've no doubt whatever but that he would be only too happy to exercise them for the ...
— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow
... refrain from "asserting" anything at all on the subject. If "God" is outside ourselves ("a Being, not us but dealing with us and through us," p. 6) we cannot leave him hanging in the void, like the rope which the Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up into the air till it hooks itself on to nothingness. If we are to believe in him as a lever for the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... wished heartily he did but know who had treated him in that manner by leaving such an unwelcome legacy, as it were, in his very teeth, that he might punish them accordingly; which his customer observing when the conjurer demanded his business, "Nothing at all," said he, "for I'm sure if you can't find out who has defiled your own door, it is impossible you should discover anything relating to me," and with this caustic remark ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... her since I put her in the cab at Baltimore. Outwardly I presume I was calm, for no one turned to stare at me, but every atom of me cried out at the sight of her. She was leaning, bent forward, lips slightly parted, gazing raptly at the Japanese conjurer who had replaced what McKnight disrespectfully called the Columns of Hercules. Compared with the draggled lady of the farm-house, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Nowadays the image of the world, with all its sheets of detailed news, all its network of communications, sets too deep a mark upon one's spirit. We tend to believe that a man is lost unless he is overwhelmed with occupation, unless, like the conjurer, he is keeping a dozen balls in the air at once. Such a gymnastic teaches a man alertness, agility, effectiveness. But it has got to be proved that one was sent into the world to be effective, and it is not even certain that a man has fulfilled the higher ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the case, the rest may perhaps come round,—that is, if she gets through her present illness. A dry cough's the trumpeter of death. If that's true, she's not long for this world. As to this little fellow, in spite of the Dutchman, who, in my opinion, is more of a Jacobite than a conjurer, and more of a knave than either, he shall never mount a horse foaled by an acorn, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... like yokels at a conjurer. He made us no answer but looked from one to the other of us with the alertness of an angry viper. We were two, but without swords. I knew he was thinking how easiest to ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with himself whether he should leave the town that night, or, procuring a lodging, wait till the morning. At last, the moon shining very bright helped him to come to a resolution of beginning his journey immediately, to which likewise he had some other inducements; which the reader, without being a conjurer, cannot possibly guess, till we have given him those hints which it may be now proper ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... perpetually consulted by my juvenile friends about this little puzzle. Most children seem to know it, and yet, curiously enough, they are invariably unacquainted with the answer. The question they always ask is, "Do, please, tell me whether it is really possible." I believe Houdin the conjurer used to be very fond of giving it to his child friends, but I cannot say whether he invented the little puzzle or not. No doubt a large number of my readers will be glad to have the mystery of the solution cleared ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... — N. bungler; blunderer, blunderhead[obs3]; marplot, fumbler, lubber, duffer, dauber, stick; bad hand, poor hand, poor shot; butterfingers[obs3]. no conjurer, flat, muff, slow coach, looby[obs3], lubber, swab; clod, yokel, awkward squad, blanc-bec; galoot[obs3]. land lubber; fresh water sailor, fair weather sailor; horse marine; fish out of water, ass in lion's skin, jackdaw in peacock's feathers; quack ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Nature's flinty bosom. Mosquito-proof tents; pails that will not leak; fleece-lined sleeping-bags; cooking outfits made up of pots and pans of every size, each shaped to disappear mysteriously into the next, like a conjurer's outfit, the whole swallowed up ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... which had passed current for two hundred years. The same ignorant indifference to useful learning which made Roger Bacon, the great philosopher of the thirteenth century, "unheard, forgotten, buried," represented him after his death as a conjurer doing tricks for the amusement of a king. "The Famous Historie of Frier Bacon," is written in a clear and simple style, very similar to that of "Thomas of Reading," and recounts: "How Fryer Bacon made a Brazen Head to speake, by the which hee would have walled ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the original, Schiller has an allusion of very questionable taste, and one which is very obscure to the general reader, to a conjurer of the name of Philadelphia who exhibited before Frederick ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... shook the saucepan vehemently, in order to dislodge some more of its contents into my already full dish. As I did so, my treacherous wrist, strained by the weight of the saucepan, gave way, and with the rapidity of a conjurer's trick I found the great black saucepan seated,—yes, that is the only word for it,—seated in the midst of my heap of rice, which was now covered by fine black powder from its sooty outside. All the rice was utterly and completely ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... focussing, and from the difference between the images on our two retinas. We are unaware of the method by which we arrive at these inferences, and even when we know that the double photograph in the stereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed two converging sheets of looking-glass beneath his table, we can only say that the photograph 'looks' solid, or that we 'seem' to see ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... they will be, these gods, in their day, each of them an old bearded simian up in the sky, who begins by fishing the universe out of a void, like a conjurer taking a rabbit out of a hat. (A hat which, if it resembled a void, wasn't there.) And after creating enormous suns and spheres, and filling the farthest heavens with vaster stars, one god will turn back and long for the smell of roast flesh, another will call desert tribes to "holy" wars, and a ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... gone. Dishes less false but equally fair had followed. Now, with the air of a conjurer, the waiter just showed them an entremets which he hastened to ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... with him, Li Koo. In proof of it, he said, spreading out his hands, here he was. "We make cakies—li'l cakies—many, lovely li'l cakies," said Li Koo, observing doubt on the gentleman's face; and from somewhere on his person he whipped out a paper bag of them as a conjurer whips a rabbit out of a hat, and offered them to ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... an extra big and beautiful one and Fuller's best. "And besides the chocs., a piece of good news! You're all asked to a party at Mrs. Leslie's. She's going to have all sorts of games and things, with prizes for every one, and a conjurer ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... at that. He was a sort of Pariah and could not be fitted into their time-honored customs. Then, too, he did not pursue any regular trade. "He expects to be an artist." At that time that was as good as to be a robber, or a tramp or a conjurer. ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... face, his forehead, and, finally, his whole head and neck, manipulating the huge handkerchief in a masterly manner almost worthy of an expensive conjurer. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... other side, but the slope was empty and even with our glasses we could not discover a sign of life on the plain, which stretched away to the horizon apparently as level as a floor. It had been swallowed utterly as though by the magic pocket of a conjurer. ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... instantly followed, and all was dark again. I peeped through the crevice in the fence, and saw the main fuse spitting out sparks like a conjurer. Assured that the train had not failed, I took to my heels, fearful lest the fuse might burn more rapidly than we calculated, and cause an explosion before I could get home. This, luckily, did not happen. ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a poky little house in Brompton somewhere, and there was no dancing, only boshy games and a conjurer, without any presents. And, oh! I say, at supper there was a big cake on the table, and no one was allowed to cut it, because it was hired. They're so poor, you know. Skidmore's pater is only a clerk, and you ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... starving poet took occasion To seek this conjurer's abode; Not with encomiastic ode, Of laudatory dedication, But with an offer to impart, For twenty pounds, the secret art Which should procure, without the pain Of metals, chemistry, and fire, What he so long had sought in vain, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... draft a constitution... As nothing is easier than to perfect a daydream, all perturbed minds gather, and become excited, in this ideal realm. They start out with curiosity and end up with enthusiasm. The man in the street rushes to the enterprise in the same manner as a miser to a conjurer promising treasures, and, thus childishly attracted, each hopes to find at once, what has never been seen under even the most liberal governments: perpetual perfection, universal brotherhood, the power of acquiring what one lacks, and a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... before our eyes. They looked strange enough to us and only accented our isolation and the odd semi-civilisation in which we were living. There were comments all around the room in exactly the spirit of children before a conjurer at a party.... The smell grew steadily stronger and stronger... my head swam a little and I seemed to see Rasputin, swelling in his black robe, catching us all into its folds, sweeping us up into the starlight sky. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... exhibitions not unlike a modern juggler's tricks and how the master stopped them. His motives are clear: these performances had nothing to do with the essence of his teaching. If it be true that he ever countenanced them, he soon saw his error. He did not want people to say that he was a conjurer who knew the Gandhara charm or any other trick. And though we have no warrant for doubting that he believed in the reality of the powers known as iddhi, it is equally certain that he did not consider them essential ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... shouted the war-whoop, and suddenly the warriors came rushing in from all quarters, preceded by the old squaw trumpeters squalling like mad. The conjurer sprang to his feet, and was ready to sink into the earth when he beheld the ferocious-looking fellows that surrounded him. I stepped up, took him by the hand, and quieted his fears. I told the chief that he was a friend of mine, ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... Price's History of Cornwall, a book published about ten years ago, the Virga Divinatoria, or Divining Rod, has a degree of credit given to it. This rod is of hazle, or other light wood, and held horizontally in the hand, and is said to bow towards the ore whenever the Conjurer walks over a mine. A very few years ago, in France, and even in England, another kind of divining rod has been used to discover springs of water in a similar manner, and gained some credit. And ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... a second time before his amazed audience, twisted it this way and that, with the air of a conjurer displaying his smartest trick, attached it finally to the lapel ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... or sounds, let us say, which the necromancer was uttering, only sounded but too much like "hokey-pokey kickeraboo abracadabra," and the rest of the mysterious sounds with which the conjurer at juvenile parties seeks to invest his performance with additional wonder, for the benefit ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... even ran out into the street to find out who she was; but she vanished like the lady in the conjurer's trick. But it seemed to me that, while she sang in Italian, she herself was not ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... unconsciously during the whole performance. But after the curtain was down, the polite husband was the soul of attendance upon the beautiful wife—her coat, her opera glasses, her trappings of various sorts flew in and out of his eager hands as though he were a conjurer playing with them for an audience. For he was a proud man, and she was a vain woman, and they were striving to prove to a disapproving world that the bargain they had made was a ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... coefficient we can give our statement a false air of mathematical certainty and so muddle up the essential question that the truth is lost from sight like a pea under a thimble. Now you see it and now you don't. The thing is, in fact, a mere piece of intellectual conjuring. The conjurer has slipped the phrase, "quantity of labor," up his sleeve, and when it reappears it has turned into "the expense of hiring labor." This is a quite different thing. But as both conceptions are related somehow to the idea of cost, the ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... women who could stretch their necks to the length of their arms, or thrust their lips up to cover their eyebrows, and a hundred other curious tricks. The price of admission was one rin each to children, and finally they chose the conjurer's booth, and saw him spout fire from his mouth, swallow a long sword, and finally exhibit a sea-serpent, which appeared to be made ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... una febbre?" "Illustrissimo, si!"—Folk now beginning to wink approvingly at our sagacity, we were looking exceeding grave, when a pair of Sicilian eyes set in a female head put us quite out by evidently taking us for a conjurer, and so setting at once our ethics, our pathology, and our Italian dictionary at fault. Still the surgeon congratulates the room on the "lumi" brought to it by the strange doctor, approves of the prescription, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... four-and-twenty years, in order 'to conquer, with sweet pleasure, despair.' The earth becomes too small for this dramatist. Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, have to respond to his inquiries. Like some of his colleagues, Marlowe is a sceptic: he calls Moses a 'conjurer and seducer of the people,' and boasts that, if he were to try, he would succeed in establishing a better religion than the one he sees around himself. The apostle of these high thoughts, not yet thirty years old, breathed his last, in consequence ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... seal'd in me more strange forms and faces Than children see in dreams, or thou hast read In arras, puppet-plays, and gingerbread, With angled schemes, and crosses that bred fear Of being handled by some conjurer; And nearer, thou wouldst think—such strokes were drawn— I'd been some rough statue of Fetter-lane. Nay, I believe, had I that instant been By surgeons or apothecaries seen, They had condemned my raz'd skin to be Some walking ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... better be errand-boy or lackey, than waste my talents on such an ungrateful world. I'll turn conjurer—fire-eater—mountebank; set the fools agape at fairs and pastimes. Anything rather than killing—starving by inches. Why, the criminals at hard labour in the fortress have less work and better fare. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... but he was probably not more than eighty. He was a little, dried-up old man, whose weazened, dwarfish appearance, while it was calculated to inspire awe in the minds of the superstitious, was not without its pathetic suggestions. The child had been told that the old African was a wizard, a conjurer, and a snake-charmer; but he was not afraid, for, in any event,—conjuration, witchcraft, or what not,—he was assured of the protection ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... to group, with M. Kratzky at his elbow, moved Charles Wilbraham, complacent, proud, triumphant, like a conjurer who has done a successful trick. "Here is the rabbit, gentlemen," he seemed to be saying. His colleagues on the Secretariat watched him cynically. Wilbraham had put this job through very well, but how bad it had been for him! Emphatically they did ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... Matteo went home and delivered the answer to the serpent, he said, "Go to-morrow morning and gather up all the fruit-stones you can find in the city, and sow them in the orchard, and you will see pearls strung on rushes!" Cola Mateo, who was no conjurer, neither knew how to comply nor refuse; so next morning, as soon as the Sun with his golden broom had swept away the dirt of the Night from the fields watered by the dawn, he took a basket on his arm and went from street to street, picking up all the stones of peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... second reading of the message, "the boy's a conjurer. This is important enough to send to Mr. Clive at once. But I'll make a copy of it first in case ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... am a believer in hypnotism, thought-reading, and theosophy (I have been a bit of an amateur conjurer myself). ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... names; unutterable names; names which reduce "arms! and George! and Brunswick!" into tameness and insignificance. If such means of defending Christianity are successful, I shall no longer doubt that it was possible for the Devil Asmodus to have been corked up in a bottle by the hard words of a conjurer.] ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... he's the only man; A Necromancer and a Conjurer That works for young Mountchensey altogether; And if it be not for Friar Benedick, That he can cross him by his learned skill, The Wench is gone; Fabell will fetch ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... feats, his hair-breadth escapes, his imminent deadly breaches, and the poor, foolish, childish old world renews the excitements of its nonage. Perhaps this is a work of beneficence; and perhaps our brave conjurer in his cabalistic robe is a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the pocket indicated, and with the air of an inexpert conjurer whose trick has succeeded contrary to his expectations produced a silver-plated fork. He regarded it with surprise; then he looked ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... it wonderful? as the conjurer says when he cuts your watch out of an onion. Mr. Conjurer returns your watch in safety, but it retains that delicate perfume which only the time it chronicles can wear away. Many an ingenious traveler has stepped out of his hotel to watch this magic spectacle for ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... and examining them for an hour at a time. He was also very much given to voyages of discovery, dark continents having a peculiar fascination for him. Even the lion's mouth had no terror for him. I once produced him from the interior of a brand-new top hat like a conjurer an omelette. Again, we were very much surprised at breakfast one morning to see Peter walk out of a rabbit-pie in which he had ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... to obtain a complete view of our party. We called out that we had come to have an interview with them, but some of the Manganja who followed us shouted "Our Chibisa is come:" Chibisa being well known as a great conjurer and general. The Ajawa ran off yelling and screaming, "Nkondo! Nkondo!" (War! War!) We heard the words of the Manganja, but they did not strike us at the moment as neutralizing all our assertions of peace. The captives threw ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... distress was so great that, forgetting his dignity and safety, he dismissed his attendants, laid aside his royal robes, was unable to eat bread, and, dressed like the meanest of his people, he took his journey to the abode of the conjurer. In this state of mind, prepared for imposition, he arrives during the night at her residence. He prevails with her, by much solicitation, and probably by ample rewards, to call up Samuel. To discompose still further the disordered mind of Saul, she ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... municipality. The Duke of Wellington was there. He had in his hand an extraordinary sort of hat which had something of a shape of a folding cocked hat, with divers red crosses and figures on it, so that it resembled a conjurer's cap. I understand it is a hat given to his Grace by magnanimous Alexander; St Nicholas perhaps commissioned the Emperor to present it to Wellington, for his Grace is entitled to the eternal gratitude ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... he said. "I'm not a conjurer. If everybody stood well back I used to be able to produce an egg, broken or unbroken according to the temperature of my hands, from a handkerchief about six feet square. People were very nice about it, very nice. But an inability to introduce a quart ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... only wanted to say I was sorry your Mamma wasn't so well, and to ask how she finds herself this evening—and I've fetched her along a bit of sweetbrier, very sweet to smell it is. Twopence indeed," said he, and produced a bunch of sweetbrier from his hat, "just like a conjurer," as Phyllis ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... matter may occur which are capable of examination, and which, under skilled experiment, will resolve their secret. Nothing it more bewildering than a good conjuring trick till we know how it is done, and Nature is the supreme conjurer. We have not found out all her tricks, and never shall do so; but we very well know that a solution to all of ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... and stuck out his elbows. Then he opened the packet and inserted his thumb and fore-finger, slowly, gingerly, like a conjurer performing a sleight-of-hand trick before a puzzled audience, and, beaming all over his face, extracted from the tobacco a glittering object which he held ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... being sung by the Indian congregation, the notes of which reached us as we neared the margin and landed upon the rocky beach. We welcomed this as a pleasing omen, and rejoiced at it as one of the grand evidences of the Gospel's power to change. Not many years ago the horrid yells of the conjurer, and the whoops of the savage Indians, were here the only familiar sounds. Now the sweet songs of Zion are heard, and God's praises are sung by a people whose lives attest the genuineness of ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... "Well, that old conjurer knows that the marshal set out in good spirits, and he seems acquainted with M. Robert. How could he be informed of all this? I cannot tell," added the soldier, with a thoughtful air; "but it is only another reason to be on ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... for going about," said the latter, "though I s'pose if you can eat and drink as much as you want it don't matter. I s'pose you mightn't be a conjurer from London, sir?" ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... seemed to do any thing or say very much. Now and then Mr. Roy read aloud bits out of his endless newspapers—he had a truly masculine mania for newspapers, and used to draw one after another out of his pockets, as endless as a conjurer's pocket-handkerchiefs. And he liked to share their contents with any body that would listen; though I am afraid nobody did listen much to-night except Miss Williams, who sat beside him at her sewing, in order to get the benefit of the same lamp. ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... truth and spirit in seizing and embodying the real life about it, the shabby little San Carlino Theatre—the rickety house one story high, with a staring picture outside: down among the drums and trumpets, and the tumblers, and the lady conjurer—is without a ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... serious examples been to deceive the eye, our painting would rank with legerdemain and Maskelyne's famous box trick; for it is to be doubted if it could ever so well have attained its end as even a second-rate conjurer can. I have cited a passage in which Reynolds confronts the work of great artists with the illusions of the camera obscura (see p. 237). The adept musical performer who reproduces the noises of a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... a low-bred wretch. It was in vain that I told him he was a great merchant, that he had a great deal of money, and that he played like a child. 'He a merchant,' cried Brinon. 'Do not believe that, sir! May the devil take me, if he is not some conjurer.' 'Hold your tongue, old fool,' said I; 'he is no more a conjurer than you are, and that is decisive; and, to prove it to you, I am resolved to win four or five hundred pistoles of him before I go to bed. With these words I turned him out, strictly enjoining him not ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... making any bargain. At this time we had very heavy winds, both by day and night, so that we were in fear of another tuffoon, on which account all the fishers hauled their boats ashore, and every one endeavoured to secure the roofings of their houses. A week before this, a bose, bonze or conjurer, had predicted to the king that this tempest was to come. About this time our surgeon, being in his cups, came into a house where a bose was conjuring for a woman who wanted to know if her husband or friends would return from sea. So when the bose was done, the surgeon gave him three-pence ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... vanished in the air. Where he went to was a mystery. There was no hole; no depth of water; no hiding-place anywhere that I could discover or that the dog could discover, and yet the mink had disappeared. It was like some conjurer's trick. ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... steady system! Come across the street, here, and, entering by a little shop and yard, examine these intricate passages and doors, contrived for escape, flapping and counter- flapping, like the lids of the conjurer's boxes. But what avail they? Who gets in by a nod, and shows their secret ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... the man with the cool head and the keen sight and nerves of iron, who sat up in his loft, with his hand on a magic wand, and played with trainfuls of his fellowmen—a mere question of life or death to be answered over and over again; played with them as the conjurer tosses his handful of pretty globes into the air and catches them without one click of the ivories. It was a forcible reminder of Clapham Junction; the perfect system that brings order out of chaos, and saves a little world, but a mad one, from the total annihilation that ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... seems to have nothing to do with it. Tell any other human being about a girl dreaming of the fairies and her practical brother from America, and he would settle it in some obvious way and satisfy some one: send her to America or let her have her fairies in Ireland. Now the Duke thinks a conjurer would just meet the case. I suppose he vaguely thinks it would brighten things up, and somehow satisfy the believers' interest in supernatural things and the unbelievers' interest in smart things. As a matter ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... in the midst of strange facts in this little conjurer's room. Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor invalid's chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over in the Mayflower. All this is just what I mean to, find out while I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my patient. The simplest ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... A very blind phrase. Hawaiians disagree as to its meaning. In the author's opinion, it is a word referring to the conjurer's art.] ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... divine man. He is bard and prophet, seer and savior. He is the acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of insight into the method of nature, and devoid of religious emotion, was to him but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe "the jingle man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The intellectual content of Poe's works was negligible. He was a wizard with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in life, he did not contribute to our ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... her clean soul. "The world is good and pure, but many men are corrupt. Panawe, my husband, has travelled, and he has told me things I would almost rather have not heard. One person he met believed the universe to be, from top to bottom, a conjurer's cave." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... messenger, for no man may stop him; and he can travel cheaply for whom there is free entertainment on every road. "For the belly one will play many tricks"; and Asirvadam, in financial straits, may teach dancing to nautch-girls; or he may play the mountebank or the conjurer, and with a stock of mantras and charms proceed to the curing of murrain in cattle, pip in chickens, and short-windedness in old women,—at the same time telling fortunes, calculating nativities, finding lost treasure, advising as to journeys ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... lay on the stone floor; a quantity of combustibles, nearly consumed, with various half-burnt books and papers, were sending up an expiring flame, and filling the chamber with stifling smoke. Just within the threshold lay the reputed conjurer. He was bleeding, his clothes were scorched, and he appeared lifeless. Antonio caught him up, and bore him down the stairs to a chamber, in which there was a light, and laid him on a bed. The female domestic was despatched for such appliances ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... is very true, sir. And then her going in disguise to that conjurer, and this cunning woman: where the first question is, how soon you shall die? next, if her present servant love her? next, if she shall have a new servant? and how many? which of her family would make the best bawd, male, or female? what precedence she shall have by her next match? and ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... up the big square cuffs of his sleeves, as a conjurer will do, and again repeated the names. This time, however, at each name, he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Walker was seized with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine the man's right forearm for a bullet mark. The longing grew on him. The witch doctor went steadily ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the Chevalier; and the sneer-much like that which would await a person now who scrupled at joining in table-turning or any form of spiritualism—purpled Berenger's scar, now his only manner of blushing; but he instantly perceived that it was the Chevalier's desire that he should consult the conjurer, and therefore became the more resolved against running into ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot where the good God cooks the future." The theatre offered for a time another form of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, and compared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took up with the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he fell under the spell of the Abbe Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Paris and fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world with his unheard-of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... Limayrac really thought himself a prophet, when in good truth he was not even a conjurer. Stiffening himself up on his stumpy legs, he stared as hard as he could through his eye-glass, and from his giant's height of four feet ten, at everybody who pretended to believe there was a God in heaven. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new phase—and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. Jim's development was not so rapid, but Jennie's perception of it was. She began to feel proud of the fact that a man who could make his impractical notions seem so plausible—and ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... Devil's all this? Good Mr. Conjurer, stand by—and don't fright the Gentlewoman with your elegant Profundities. [Puts ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... taking a trip northward, this warm weather," replied the conjurer, "across the Connecticut first, and then up through Vermont, and may be into Canada before the fall. But I must stop and see the breaking up of the ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the whole process of those affairs, as the conjurer's assistant knows how the tricks are done. Even when Stradella was at home, in his own room, his man had always been able to tell whether he was in love or not. When he was not, he industriously composed oratorios, or motets, or some other kind of serious ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... been intended for, the sacks of sheeting Aunt Lucile had been sewing industriously all day, covered with burlaps and stuffed with hay to serve as cushions, the cheese-cloth tacked up in gathers over the windows and hemmed with pins,—all this, revealed at once, had the surprise of a conjurer's trick, or, if one were predisposed that way, the entrancement of ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... said this had a power similar to that of the magic words of Oriental tales which held the life of an entire city in suspense, leaving persons and objects immovable in the very attitude in which the powerful conjurer surprised them. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Well then, the Major has come, my dear Cleek, to ask you to help in unravelling a puzzle of singular and mystifying interest. Now you may or may not have heard of a Music Hall artiste—a sort of conjurer and impersonator combined—called Zyco the Magician, who was once very popular and was assisted in his illusions by a veiled but reputedly beautiful Turkish lady who was billed on the programmes and posters ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... self-confidence vanished. Only one of them, who had repeatedly asserted that he could end the contest with one word, but had still been held back by his associates, who themselves thought him too wild, broke through at last and placed himself, with an inflamed visage, and all the motions of a conjurer, before the people's priest, and cried out: "Zwingli, I conjure thee, by the living God, to tell us the truth." The latter answered very calmly: "That shalt thou hear. Thou art as clownish and seditious a peasant, ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... Moved, as the boughs above him swayed, And clothed him, till he seemed to be A figure woven in tapestry, So sumptuously was he arrayed In that magnificent attire Of sable tissue flaked with fire. Like a magician he appeared, A conjurer without book or beard; And while he plied his magic art— For it was magical to me— I stood in silence and apart, And wondered more and more to see That shapeless, lifeless mass of clay Rise up to meet the master's hand, And now contract and now expand, And even his slightest touch ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Fizzy's conjuring tricks, which were not very bewildering to children who had once had a real conjurer from the Stores, as these had, and then a charade played by Mary, Horace, Fizzy, and Shrimp for the others ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... thoughts she uttered a little cry of surprise; but, smiling affably, and in no way disconcerted, he raised his big hat from his head. On account of the softness of the felt this could only be accomplished by passing the arm over the head and seizing the crown as a conjurer would a pocket-handkerchief. The movement was large and unctuous, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... that he did not see, and therefore omits, an essential circumstance, while he misstates other circumstances. I am informed by Mrs. Steel, the author of The Potter's Thumb and other stories of Indian life, that, in watching an Indian conjurer, she generally, or frequently, detects his method. She says that the conjurer often begins by whirling rapidly before the eyes of the spectators a small polished skull of a monkey, and she is inclined ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... took pleasure in complimenting this strange stiff beauty, partly because it threw her a little off her balance. But as he went upstairs to his floor he drew a deep breath and whistled, saying to himself: "So she has got into the hands of that conjurer upstairs with his golden eye." For, little as he knew or cared about the new religion of Kalon, he had heard of his special notion ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... surprise, which for a moment had so much in it of bitter realism that it drove the blood from my wife's cheeks. I could not follow Dawson's movements; his hands flickered like those of a conjurer, there came a sharp click, and the handcuffs were upon my wrists! I stared at them speechless, wondering how they got there, and, looking up, met the coldly triumphant eyes of the detective. I realised ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone |
