"Gantlet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... silent, unsmiling, like onlookers at an accident. Captain Winfree looked over this civilian crowd. Each person wore, pinned to a lapel, perched in a hatbrim, or worn like a corsage, a small white feather. "We'd best hurry, Peggy," he said, urging her toward the gantlet. ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely mechanical and momentary "scare." The case would be different if the young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On the stage, every bullet should have its billet—not necessarily in the person aimed at, but ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... accustomed to a mark that stood still. It was all so sudden! There were twenty people who were just going to shoot her when the doe leaped the road fence, and went away across a marsh toward the foot-hills. It was a fearful gantlet to run. But nobody except the deer considered it in that light. Everybody told what he was just going to do! everybody who had seen the performance was a kind ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... was good-looking, very blond, with big, innocent blue eyes; and while he was never molested personally,—a short, sharp tussle with a cook had proved him to be a man of muscle,—behind his back his walk was mimicked, his precise attitudes were openly bantered. But Ambroise stood this torture gantlet equably. He had lived long enough among Germans to copy their impassive manner and, coupled with a natural contempt for his fellow-monkeys in the cage, he knew that perhaps in a day a new man would receive all these unwelcome attentions. Moreover, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... aboard a liner, and her bonds in the purser's safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean, through such a gantlet of lurking demons as old ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... run that gantlet; and so, in the very nature of the case, it would rarely happen that you could publicly punish the guilty party. "Well, then," says the critic, "you would better hold your peace." Let us consider that a ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... were finished and launched; and, trusting their lives on board these frail vessels, they descended the Mississippi, running the gantlet between hostile tribes, who fiercely attacked them. Reaching the Gulf, though not without the loss of eleven of their number, they made sail for the Spanish settlement on the river Panuco, where they arrived safely, and where the inhabitants met them with a cordial welcome. Three ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the New Market a rare and unheard-of spectacle—a spectacle, general, as yet unknown in Germany. You have brought it with you from Russia. You are going to make two men run the gantlet of rods—not two soldiers convicted of crime, but two writers, who have only sinned in spirit against you, who have only exercised the free and highest right of man—the right to say what they think. ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... rider, and then he watched the other lines creeping together. How slowly fire moved, he thought. The red stallion would have every chance to run between those lines, if he dared. But a wild horse feared nothing like fire. This one would not run the gantlet of flames. Nevertheless, Slone felt more and more relieved as the lines closed. The hours of the night dragged past until at length one long, continuous line of fire spread level across the valley, its ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... this rare bird I have in mind is simply a handsome girl, who doesn't enjoy being stared at by the students,—in a word, my little helper, Miss Olmstead,—and I've told her to travel by my own cross- roads, because she comes in all of a flutter, mornings, after running the gantlet of those ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... almost the first pulsation of that minute, wherein silence on one side or the other generally becomes indecent; so edging herself a little more toward him, and raising up her eyes, sub-blushing as she did it, she took up the gantlet, or the discourse (if you like it better), and communed with my uncle ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... finished they could sell their horses to tow the boats, their grain and fodder to feed the horses, and their provisions for the passengers. On reflection he thought that if he took all that away from them he would have to run the gantlet again, and he could not afford to do that. There never was anything done with the plan until a few years ago, when Mr. Welch, president of the Camden and Amboy Railroad and Canal, invented exactly the same thing and put it in practice on ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... replied Pearce. "He's sure been runnin' a gantlet. His strike stopped work in the diggin's. What do you think of that, Kells? The news spread like smoke before wind. Every last miner in camp has jest got to ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... hateful he found the Spaniards, and how villainous the American hotel-keepers. His superlatives of censure were in such constant employment that they began to have a threadbare sound before he left us; and as he has it in prospective to run the gantlet of all the inn-keepers on the continent of Europe, to say nothing of farther lands, where inn-keepers would be a relief, there is no knowing what exhaustion his powers in this sort may undergo before he reaches ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... a joke, they will only laugh! But if, by any chance, they show fight, fire at once,' replied the old man, leading the way. Waring followed, his mind anything but easy; it seemed to him like running the gantlet. He held his pistols ready, and glanced furtively around as they skirted the town and turned down towards the beach. 'If any noise is made,' Fog had remarked, 'I shall know ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... to admit of the larger men-of-war passing, and the passage was defended by Fort Moultrie, a very formidable work. Admiral Arbuthnot, with the Renown, Romulus, Roebuck, Richmond, Blonde, Raleigh, and Virginia frigates, with a favorable wind and tide ran the gantlet of Fort Moultrie, succeeded in passing up without great loss, and co-operated on the sea face with the attack of the ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... man who offers stamped paper to sell!" they shouted. "Beat an alarm!" quavered Hutchinson to the militia colonel.—"My drummers are in the mob," was the reply; and when Hutchinson attempted to disperse the crowd, they forced him to run the gantlet, in the Indian fashion which was too familiar to New Englanders, and caught him several raps as he ran. "If Oliver had been there he'd have been murdered," said Governor Bernard, with conviction; "if he doesn't resign—!" But Oliver, much as he loved the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... for different terms. A veto on all its acts was vested in a President elected in a manner not employed in the choice of either branch of the legislature, serving for four years, and subject to removal only by the difficult process of impeachment. After a law had run the gantlet of both houses and the executive, it was subject to interpretation and annulment by the judiciary, appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate and serving for life. Thus it was made almost impossible for any political ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... than in our day. Intensity of feeling is diminished in our high-pressure age. The critic cuts a book to pieces and shakes hands with the author afterwards, and the victim must keep on good terms with his slaughterer, or run the gantlet of innumerable jokes at his expense. If he refuses, he is unsociable, eaten up with self-love, he is sulky and rancorous, he bears malice, he is a bad bed-fellow. To-day let an author receive a treacherous stab in the back, let him avoid the snares set for him with base hypocrisy, and endure ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... That town he must and would have. He might have marched past it and left it in the rear, though not without great loss and danger, for the pass was narrow and commanded by the guns of Guntz, and he would have had to run the gantlet of a hailstorm of iron balls. But he had no thought of passing it; his honor was involved. Guntz must be his and its insolent garrison punished, or how could Solyman the Magnificent ever hold up his head among monarchs and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... first third of a reel before he has an idea of the merits of a production, his ten cents is spent, and much of his time is gone. It would take five hours at least to find the best film in our town for one day. Meanwhile, nibbling and sampling, the seeker would run such a gantlet of plot and dash and chase that his eyes and patience would be exhausted. Recently there returned to the city for a day one of Griffith's best Biographs, The Last Drop of Water. It was good to see again. In order to watch ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... compliments, we unceremoniously introduce him into another cypripedium blossom, to which, if he were more obliging, he would naturally fly. He loses no time in profiting by his past experience, and is quickly creeping the gantlet, as it were, or braving the needle's eye of this narrow passage. His pollen-smeared thorax is soon crowding beneath the overhanging stigma again, whose forward-pointed papillae scrape off a portion of it (Fig. ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... He had for his pains an insult and a suit of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to his yacht, running the gantlet of a hundred ridicules. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... I was longing to slip into my home before I ran the gantlet of all the streets opening on the Santa Fe Trail. I never did know what Dever's "errant" was, that led him to swing some miles to the west, out of the way to the ford of the Neosho above the old stone cabin where Father Le Claire swam his horse in the May flood ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... their mounts toward the shelter of the western hills, drawing farther away from their eastern enemies, they were forced to a nearer approach to the ranch house, to run the gantlet of its concealed sharp-shooters. A galloping horse, with its rider, does not offer an easy mark; fifteen of them, the objective of twenty rifles, form a better target. And when Mart Cooley's ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart |
