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Nocturnal   Listen
adjective
Nocturnal  adj.  
1.
Of, pertaining to, done or occuring in, the night; as, nocturnal darkness, cries, expedition, etc.; opposed to diurnal.
2.
Having a habit of seeking food or moving about at night; as, nocturnal birds and insects; raccoons are nocturnal.; of animals.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nocturnal" Quotes from Famous Books



... had only been able to decipher "Italy." My lady made many inquiries and often spoke of him; but when month after month passed and no news came, she gave him up, and on Lillian's account feigned to forget him. Contrary to Hester's fear, she did not seem the worse for the nocturnal fright, but evidently connected the strange visitor with Paul, or, after a day or two of nervous exhaustion, returned to her usual state of health. Hester had her own misgivings, but, being forbidden to allude to the subject, she held her peace, after emphatically declaring that Paul would yet ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott

... the terror and amazement; whilst the person to be admitted, overwhelmed with dread, and sweating through fear, heard, trembling, the mysterious volumes read to him, if in such a condition he was capable of hearing at all. These nocturnal rites gave birth to many disorders, which the severe law of silence, imposed on the persons initiated, prevented from coming to light, as St. Gregory Nazianzen observes.(65) What cannot superstition effect upon the mind ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... who look so grave and sour all day, are doing o' nights; but I see and say nothing, not thinking it decent to lay open their vile and abominable lives to the public; for when I catch them thieving, or practising any of their nocturnal tricks, I wrap myself up in a cloud, that I may not expose to the world a parcel of old fellows, who, in spite of their long beards, and professions of virtue, are guilty of every vice, and yet they are always railing at and abusing me. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian

... mercury, their slumbers were beset with nightmare visions of Iroquois forays, scalpings, butcherings, and burnings. As dreams were their oracles, the camp was wild with fright. They sent out no scouts and placed no guard; but, with each repetition of these nocturnal terrors, they came flocking in a body to beg admission within the fort. The women and children were allowed to enter the yard and remain during the night, while anxious fathers and jealous husbands shivered ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... night for plums, grapes, and pears in the orchards of his neighbors. His own family did not raise fruit; they thought it too much trouble to cultivate the trees. But Alfred openly boasted of having the best fruit that the neighborhood afforded. One of Alfred's cronies in these nocturnal raids was a boy, named Harvey Yeatton, who lived at the village, six or seven miles away; almost every year he came to visit Alfred for a week or ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... only to a minor extent dwell in the open light. Very many species haunt the semi-obscurity of trees or groves, hide among the grasses, lurk under bark, sticks, and stones, or dwell through most of their lives underground. Hosts of others are nocturnal. To only a small percentage of insects can sight be of any great utility, while hearing seems also to be of slight importance. Smell is probably the principal sense through which these animals gain ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... house during the day, late in the evening she took her departure, carrying away some meat. For several days she continued her visits in the same manner, taking care never to leave home empty-mouthed at night. Her proceedings having excited attention, she was followed by two men, in one of her nocturnal retreats, and traced to the top of a wheat stack, at some distance. On obtaining a ladder, her surviving kitten was found, in a curiously constructed hole, sleek and plump, but as wild as a young tiger, and would allow no one to touch it. A few ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley

... animal found in Ceylon is the little loris[1], which, from its sluggish movements, nocturnal habits, and consequent inaction during the day, has acquired the name of the "Ceylon Sloth." There are two varieties in the island; one of the ordinary fulvous brown, and another larger, whose fur is entirely black. A specimen of the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... summer heat came imperceptibly, or it could never have been borne by white men. It changed the lives of the fugitives, making them partly nocturnal in habit. The nights had the balmy coolness of spring, and would have been delightful for sleep, but that would have made the ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... She was feeling the child's jersey, as Lupin had done, no doubt to see if he had succeeded in his nocturnal mission; and she questioned him in ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc

... The nocturnal visitors seemed unacquainted with the building, for, after two or three steps had been taken, one lighted a match. It was evident to the detective that these visitors were reading the names on the doors as they progressed along the corridor, ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler

... the 17th of February, the Christino general having put up his infantry in the hamlets of Zubiri and Urdaniz, and the detachments of cavalry that accompanied him, at a large venta or inn between those two places, Zumalacarregui resolved upon a nocturnal attack. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... engaged for the rest of the day on business so urgent that I had not leisure to think much on the nocturnal adventure to which I had plighted my honor. I dined alone, and very late, and while dining, read, as is my habit. I selected one of the volumes of Macaulay's Essays. I thought to myself that I would take the book with me; there was so much of ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... Their merry wakes and pastimes keep: What hath night to do with sleep? Night hath better sweets to prove; Venus now wakes, and wakens Love. Come, let us our rights begin; 'Tis only daylight that makes sin, Which these dun shades will ne'er report. Hail, goddess of nocturnal sport, Dark-veiled Cotytto, to whom the secret flame Of midnight torches burns! mysterious dame, 130 That ne'er art called but when the dragon womb Of Stygian darkness spets her thickest gloom, And makes one blot of all the air! Stay thy ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... swelled up the hill-died away—resumed its thunder—and was at length hushed. The trumpets and kettledrums of the cavalry were next heard to perform the beautiful and wild point of war appropriated as a signal for that piece of nocturnal duty, and then finally sank upon the wind with ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... of this dream of adventure—one involving a snow-house, with appropriate episodes such as nocturnal attacks by bears, wolves, and the like, and then we planned ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... received this last report of the progress of affairs in Paris, Bernard, upon whom the burden of exile sat none the more lightly as the days went on, turned out of the Strand into one of the theatres. He had been gloomily pushing his way through the various London densities—the November fog, the nocturnal darkness, the jostling crowd. He was too restless to do anything but walk, and he had been saying to himself, for the thousandth time, that if he had been guilty of a misdemeanor in succumbing to the attractions of the admirable ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... through a sky sown with stellar lights. The combined lights of these singular bodies surpassed the light of our terrestrial moon, by reason of their closeness to the surface of Mars, while the more rapid motion of the inner satellite causes the most weird and beautiful changes of effect in the nocturnal glory they both ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... appropriateness in her answering Owlett's standing question on matrimony in the affirmative. This did not soothe Stockdale, its tendency being rather to stimulate in him an effort to make the pair as inappropriate as possible, and win her away from this nocturnal crew to correctness of conduct and a minister's parlour in some far-removed ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... seethed, emitting a low, hissing sound in unison with that of the wires. The men took up their tea and returned to their chess. Vera Lvovna returned from the drawing-room; and, taking a seat on the sofa beside her husband, sat there without stirring, with the fixed, motionless eyes of a nocturnal bird. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak

... with," which, when we remember the nature of its contents, leaves small doubt of the sender's guilt. "A supposition," says Mr. Bleackley, "that does not explain [these] two damning circumstances must be baseless." The nocturnal manifestations experienced by Cranstoun, and interpreted by his friend Mrs. Morgan as presaging Mr. Blandy's death, must also be explained. Further, it would be interesting to know how the defenders ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead

... star, that brightly beamest, Glittering on the skies nocturnal, Hide thine eye no more from me, Hide thine eye ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... frequently in North America, with preparations which had no other object in view. A steamship, halting just beyond the line of sight, might undoubtedly have received Napoleon at certain seasons of the year without difficulty, could he only contrive to elude the nocturnal vigilance of the sentinels about the house of Longwood: and that this was impossible, or even difficult, General Gourgaud himself does not hesitate to deny. The rumours of these plots reached from time to time Sir Hudson Lowe; and, quickening ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... of Iphigenia far from her own land on Euripos' shore so sting her mother to the arousal of a wrath of grievous act? Or had nocturnal loves misguided her, in thraldom to a paramour's embrace? a sin in new-wed brides most hateful, and that cannot be hidden for the talk of stranger tongues: for the citizens repeat the shame. For prosperity must sustain an ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar

... circumstances. He temporized and succeeded in tiring out Narvaez and his troops, who retired to Zempoalla. Then Cortes, having taken his measures with consummate prudence, and the surprise and terror of a nocturnal attack which he organized compensating for the inferiority of his troops, he made prisoners of his enemy and all his soldiers, his own loss amounting to but two men. The conqueror treated the vanquished well, and gave them the choice between returning ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... centuries. But doubtless our archaeologists are so much wiser than the Athenian Senate of Five Hundred, who investigated the affair the day after it happened, that a perusal will be exceedingly edifying. Now, then, for a solution of this classic mystery of the nocturnal iconoclasm; which, in my humble opinion, only the brazen lips of Minerva Promachus ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... One night as I was wandering slowly along the path leading through the groves of Pen y Coed I was startled by an unearthly cry—it was the shout of the dylluan or owl, as it flitted over the tops of the trees on its nocturnal business. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... days after this nocturnal decision that the knouting had taken place at which our readers have assisted. It was for some slight fault, and Gregory had been the victim; Vaninka having complained to her father about him. Foedor, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... sub-varieties of the pigeon, amounting to at least one hundred and fifty, is partly due to their remaining, differently from other domesticated birds, paired for life when once matched. On the other hand, breeds of cats imported into this country soon disappear, for their nocturnal and rambling habits render it hardly possible to prevent free crossing. Rengger[182] gives an interesting case with respect to the cat in Paraguay: in all the distant parts of the kingdom it has ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... Mrs. Banks' nocturnal ramble with Mr. William Green, was a feeling of great bitterness against her old friend, Captain John Barber. Mr. Green, despite her protests, was still a member of the crew of the Foam, and walked about Seabridge in broad daylight, while she crept forth only after sundown, and saw a hidden ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... advantages—that it will not readily ignite under the torch of the mischievous wayfarer: "Naturale sepimentum," says he, "quod obseri solet virgultis aut spinis, praetereuntis lascivi non metuet facem." It is not easy to see the origin or advantage of this practice of nocturnal travelling, (which must have considerably increased the hazards of a journey,) excepting only in the heats of summer. It is probable, however, that men of high rank and public station may have introduced the practice by way of releasing corporate bodies in large towns from the burdensome ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various

... them to do it, the others maintained a straight face and listened with interest. Breakfast over, Dick was wandering around the camp when he discovered the beans he had set to soak when he was roused by the shot that killed the nocturnal visitor. Immediately he remembered that he had forgotten to do this before retiring, hence he must have done ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle

... two about the gentleman who paid me this nocturnal visit. Though he has probably long since forgotten the humble circulator of the Bible in Spain, I still bear in mind numerous acts of kindness which I experienced at his hands. Endowed with an intellect of the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... on this more truly sea-like sea, distant from the great crowd and from the thronging houses, the real fishermen who live by the sea were alert and at work, or were plunged in the quiet sleep that is a preparation for long hours of nocturnal wakefulness. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... Canada porcupine, Hystrix pilosus. A nocturnal rodent quadruped, armed with barbed quills, his chief defence when ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain

... that every great city must have been built by night. At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. At least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work by night (journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers, and such mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning) must ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... a-fishing in the morning, secure your bait to-night. Worms are nocturnal, and they come out of their holes at night, provided it is not too dry on top. The ideal time for scooping them in is about dusk, after a long warm rain. Get a lantern and with it carry your bait can half ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort

... swamp is cleared, yet on the smoother road Their speed they slack not till they reach the house Of a poor drunken settler then abroad On his nocturnal revels, while the spouse Was left to mourn his oft-indulged carouse, And tremble for his safety from the cold. No sense of danger e'er could him arouse From his sad sunken state. Drink had such hold On his gross appetite ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd

... the third brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in the solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... his best to entertain the Queen with stories of revenants in Gascony and elsewhere, and with reminiscences of his eleven years' captivity at Pignerol, and his intercourse with Fouquet; but whenever in aftertimes Anne Woodford tried to recall her nocturnal drive with this strange personage, the chosen and very unkind husband of the poor old Grande Mademoiselle, she never could recollect anything but the fierce glare of his eyes in the light of the lamps as he put her ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... lesser kin must have made night resonant here, and it is reasonable to surmise that owls hooted in the cedar-trees that hung over the tawny sedges of the swamp. "Jack-o'-Lantern" was the only inhabitant who burned gas hereabouts in those times, and he manufactured his own. The nocturnal raccoon edged his way through the alders here, in the old summer nights, and the muskrat built his house among the reeds. Not a raccoon nor a muskrat is the wayfarer likely to meet with here to-night; but the gray rat of civilization is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... not think it advisable to mention the disagreeable fact, that in your neighbour you think you have found out the nocturnal disturber of your family." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... morning following Whitmore's strange nocturnal excursion, Collins's alarm clock set up an ear-splitting din at a most unwonted hour. On retiring the previous night Collins had set the alarm for seven-thirty, an hour at which he usually attained his deepest sleep. Only on rare occasions ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin

... countries where everything goes by contraries. And it is here that the parrot group has developed some of its strangest and most abnormal offshoots. One would imagine beforehand that no two birds could be more unlike in every respect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious cockatoos and the sombre, nocturnal, solitary owls. Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is, to put it plainly, a lory which has assumed all the outer appearance and habits of an owl. A lurker in the twilight or under the shades of night, burrowing for its nest in holes in the ground, it has dingy brown plumage like the owls, with ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... lunar snow-clad mountains, into her highly attenuated atmosphere. Solar light, being electric, is not developed as light until reaching the atmosphere of a planet or satellite, or their more solid substance, which would explain why solar light is not diffused through space, and thus account for nocturnal darkness. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... that she was forced to part with her confidential minister, and continued to be ruled by his counsels. She had secret nocturnal meetings in the palace with both Harley and Mrs. Masham, to the chagrin of the ministers. The court became the scene of intrigues and cabals. Not only was Harley dismissed, but also Henry St. John, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord

... silence of the midnight hour rang the chimes of the village clock, from the tall steeple-tower of the quaint old church of Wimbledon, while several ambitious chickens rose from their neighboring perches, piped a shrill answering salute, and sank to their nocturnal slumbers again. But nor clock nor chanticleer disturbed Wimbledon. Still she slept on beneath the blossoming stars; and by their soft, inspiring light, with your permission, gentle reader, we'll enter ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... were leading him to a hut where he might be confined and guarded against the coming of the nocturnal orgy that would mark his torture-laden death. He halted as he heard the notes of Tantor's call, and raising his head, gave vent to a terrifying scream that sent cold chills through the superstitious blacks and caused the warriors who guarded ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited the meadows and forests. It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children. The fairies are now believed by naturalist to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church of England saw three near Colchester as ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... answer us, but kept on down the marshy road at such a rate, that their horses' feet struck fire at every stretch, which made us, with reason, begin to suspect they were thieves, having had warning of such; or rather, that they were nocturnal spectres, who, as we were afterwards told, are frequently seen in those places: there were likewise a great many Jack-a-lanterns, so that we were quite seized with horror and amazement! But, fortunately ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton

... the heavenly viaticum,* he prepared for the entrance into another life, and asked how near the time was when the brothers were to be awakened to sing the nocturnal praises ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... than moonlight ever was upon the Earth. Even at lunar sunset the Earthlight was sixteen times brighter. At midnight, when the Earth was full, it would be bright enough for any activity. Actually, the human beings on Luna were nearly nocturnal in their habits, because it was easier to run moon-jeeps in frigidity and keep men and machines warm enough for functioning, than it was to protect them against the more-than-boiling heat ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... away and went to Mr. Waters' room. The door was ajar, and, entering, he found the apartment vacant. An open window showed by what means Mr. Waters had made his escape. Charles hastened to inform the nocturnal visitors, and a scene ensued that can be as well imagined as described. Charles was upbraided for aiding a criminal to escape. Mr. Joel Martin, the brother of the overseer shot in Virginia, was enraged that his brother's slayer should, after years of search, ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... civilized man follows with admiration. She shows just the right abhorrence of water for a creature that is not able to swim. She knows just what enemies to fly from and when to turn and fight, using with inborn dexterity her formidable claws. She prefers nocturnal excursions and sociabilities, having eyes which make it safe to be venturesome in the dark. She has certain vocal expressions of her emotions, which man in vain attempts to eradicate with all the agencies of domestication. She has special arts to attract her mate, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... attended. Cannon, indeed, as usual, announced the intelligence, but their sound conveyed a deep melancholy to the heart; the bells were rung, but their peals inspired no hilarity, and seemed little less than the mournful knells of death; nocturnal illuminations were displayed, but the transparencies which they discovered, amidst the gloom, presented only so many sad memorials of the universal loss, expressed by ingenious devices to the hero's memory, which the spectators beheld with sensations of augmented ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... unceasing toil and anxiety of mind, in which his days had hitherto been passed: his frame, which, though tall, had never been robust, was too weak for the vehement and sleepless soul that dwelt within it; and the habit of nocturnal study had, no doubt, aggravated all the other mischiefs. Ever since his residence at Dresden, his constitution had been weakened: but this rude shock at once shattered its remaining strength; for a time the strictest precautions were required barely to preserve existence. A total cessation ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... they had been following an ignis fatuus,— and half resolved to give over the pursuit,—it needed only what had occurred to cause a complete abandonment of their nocturnal navigation. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... mysterious influence that we do not fully comprehend which makes sleep at night more restful than sleep during the daylight. Those who go to bed at midnight or thereafter use several hours of daylight in the early morning for sleeping. I realize that there are nocturnal animals and that the human race has developed nocturnal habits to a certain extent, but the human race and the animal life of the world generally have followed the habit through the ages of sleeping at night. Without doubt a revolutionary change in this habit has more or less effect upon ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... of horrors speaks eloquently of a forlorn hope! Sweep the walls with light, Kennedy; all those filthy things are nocturnal and they will retreat before us ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... I shall treat of the Birds of the Night under two heads, including, beside the true nocturnal birds that go abroad in the night to seek their subsistence, those diurnal birds that continue their songs during a considerable portion of the night. Some species of birds are partly nocturnal in their habits. Such is the Chimney Swallow. This bird is seldom out at noonday, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... there was the mournful hooting of the nocturnal bird, which had flown away, but on such downy-feathered wings that it made ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker

... couple of rockets left a long trail of yellow against the night. It was the Cape Horner, and presently Vandover made out her lights, two glowing spots moving upon the darkness, like the eyes of some nocturnal sea-monster. In a few minutes she showed a blue light on the bridge; ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... pendant drapery uplifted as in imprecation. The boys, in awe-struck attitude, pointed to the vapoury spectre, and prognosticated fearsome rain and wind. It all came during the night. Next morning one of the boys was eager to declare that the nocturnal tempest was due to Tom, who had eaten the porcupine. We had seen his weird mother-in-law, aged and decrepid, preparing it for supper. When Tom appeared, he was duly denounced, and challenged with the responsibility of the storm. "No!" he cried with scorn. "Me no eat 'em that ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... falling fine as dust, as a black sifted snow-shower, a snow made of shadow; and the melancholy of the landscape, the grand nocturnal solitude of these lofty, unknown regions, had a charm profound and disquieting. I do not know why I fancied myself no longer in Switzerland, but in some country near the pole, in Sweden or Norway. At the foot of these bare mountains I looked for wild fjords, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... presence could only be recognized by the formation of a halo round the moon." These clouds sometimes range themselves, even by day in a similar manner to the beams of the Aurora, and then disturb the course of the magnetic needle in the same manner as the latter. On the morning after every distinct nocturnal Aurora, the same superimposed strata of clouds have still been observed that had previously ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... washing-basins against the iron door of the lavatory, and then if any one comes he'll make clang enough to wake the dead; and while he's amusing himself with this, there'll be lots of time to 'extinguish the superfluous abundance of the nocturnal ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar

... accused confess any thing, was of course put in requisition. Monstrelet, in his chronicle, says that they were tortured until some of them admitted the truth of the whole accusations, and said, besides, that they had seen and recognised in their nocturnal assemblies many persons of rank; many prelates, seigneurs, governors of bailliages, and mayors of cities, being such names as the examiners had themselves suggested to the victims. Several who had been thus informed against were thrown into prison, and so horribly ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... the day, disturbed by occasional howls from the quadrangle, where the men were snowballing a little, and, later, by the scraping shovels of the navvies who had been sent in to remove the snow, and with it the efficient cause of nocturnal disorders in St. Gatien's. ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... was that rippling of the ropes through the blocks, as our mainsail rose up high against the moon and filled proudly with the steady northeast breeze we had been waiting for. The water began to talk along our sides, and the immense freshness of the nocturnal sea took us in its huge embrace. The spray began to fly over our bows as we nosed into the glassy rollers, one of which, on the starboard side, admonished us, by half swallowing us, that only the mighty-limbed immortals might dance with safety on ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... so strange in the dark, and there were all sorts of queer sounds—she could not tell what they were—like the noises of animals. She stood close to me, looking about her with an air of greater security but without any demonstration of interest in me as an individual. Then I guessed that nocturnal prowlings were not in the least her habit, and I was also reminded (I had been struck with the circumstance in talking with her before I took possession) that it was impossible to ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James

... finished, Deborah sent Ephraim stumbling out of the room to bed, muttering remonstrances, his eyes as wild and restless as a cat's, his ears full of the nocturnal shouts of his play-fellows that ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... nocturnal visions delights in joking, and though impalpable arms may seem to surround the sleeping spinster and a tender kiss may be imprinted upon her lips, it is not once in seventeen days that the caresses are bestowed by the writer of the letter. It ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... but in reality millions and billions of miles separate each star from its neighbors. Nevertheless they form real assemblages, whose members are far more closely related to one another than is our sun to the stars around him, and if we were in the Milky Way the aspect of the nocturnal sky would be marvelously different from its ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... this change (I presume), drop the name of Bellman for that of Watchman, to whom the silent policeman has succeeded? Was the dog the usual aide-de-camp of the Bellman? Are there any other instances in which the dog is mentioned as assisting the Bellman in his nocturnal guardianship? ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various

... and, outside the villages, sparsely populated. The professional hunter was still a familiar figure, and among his trophies were heads and pelts of the larger kinds of game. Tales variously credible of nocturnal meetings with savage animals in lonely roads were sometimes current, passed through the customary stages of growth and decay, and were forgotten. A recent addition to these popular apocrypha, originating, apparently, by spontaneous generation in several households, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... of sleeping things hung over the Haymarket, and the three long, dingy arcades lay huddled and lifeless in the night, black and threatening against a cloudy sky. Presently, among the odd nocturnal sounds of a great city, the vague yelping of a dog, the scream of a locomotive, the furtive step of a prowler, the shrill cry of a feathered watchman from the roost, the ear caught a continuous rumble in the distance that changed ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... Fool! taint not with such talk the public mind. For not a Trojan here will thy advice Follow, or shall; it hath not my consent. 365 But thus I counsel. Let us, band by band, Throughout the host take supper, and let each, Guarded against nocturnal danger, watch. And if a Trojan here be rack'd in mind Lest his possessions perish, let him cast 370 His golden heaps into the public maw,[6] Far better so consumed than by the Greeks. Then, with the morrow's dawn, all fair array'd In battle, we will give them at their fleet ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... of his ideas are the cruder conceptions that semen is the equivalent of thought, and that thoughts of women cause him to have nocturnal emissions. Semen comes from food; to the sacrament he gives a definitely sexual significance, and it was following communion that he ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... bags of earnest-money, Pratinas parted with the lanista, and he and Lucius Ahenobarbus found themselves again in the now entirely darkened Campus Martius. Lucius again feared brigands, but they fell in with no unpleasant nocturnal wayfarers, and reached the city without incident. Ahenobarbus seemed to himself to be treading on air—Cornelia, villas, Drusus's money—these were dancing in his head in a delightful confusion. He ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... the end was to be. He kept indoors by day, trying to work, trying to read, marveling somewhat that he did not fall sick and die. At night he set out on long walks, which took him he cared not where, and often detained him till the gray lights of morning began to tremble through the nocturnal blue. But even by night he shunned the neighborhood in which the Vervains had lived. Their landlord sent him a package of trifles they had left behind, but he refused to receive them, sending back word that he did not know ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... leaf; autumnal equinox; Indian summer, St. Luke's summer, St. Martin's summer. midnight; dead of night, witching hour, witching hour of night, witching time of night; winter; killing time. Adj. vespertine, autumnal, nocturnal. Phr. midnight, the outpost of advancing day [Longfellow]; sable-vested Night [Milton]; this gorgeous arch with ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... a dead wildcat of truly awesome size. In its clenched teeth it still held the young nestling—the object of its nocturnal climb into the tree. Alec's unexpected shot had hit true and had done for the ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... life may wear to us when we are floating down the current of such dreamy thoughts as these! It seems like some vast nocturnal shipwreck in which a hundred loving voices are clamoring for help, while the pitiless mounting wave is silencing all the cries one by one, before we have been able, in this darkness of death, to press a hand or give the farewell kiss. Prom such a point ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... my watch, I found that I had been longer a witness of these trials of skill and fortune, than I had been aware; and on leaving the booth, perceived that the sun had sunk behind the western mountains, and that the earth began to beam with her nocturnal splendour. Those who had come from a distance, were already hurrying back with their carts; and here and there light cars, of various forms and colours, and drawn by dogs, were conveying those away ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... Cleek," put in Narkom, "that strangulation is merely part of the procedure of the rascal who makes these diabolical nocturnal visits. In other words, that he is armed with some quick-acting infernal poison, which he forces into the mouths of his victims. That paralysis of the muscles of the throat is one of the symptoms of prussic acid poisoning, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... not to reveal the spot where Sand was buried until such time as they were freed from their oath. Then the grave was covered again with the turf, that had been skilfully taken off, and that was relaid on the same spat, so that no new grave could be perceived; then the nocturnal gravediggers departed, leaving ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... within; the wine had coloured Gotthold's cheek; dim forms of forest trees, dwindling and spiring, scarves of the starry sky, now wide and now narrow, raced past the windows; through one that was left open the air of the woods came in with a nocturnal raciness; and the roll of wheels and the tune of the trotting horses sounded merrily on the ear. Toast followed toast; glass after glass was bowed across and emptied by the trio; and presently there began to fall upon them a luxurious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... took the precaution of carefully guarding their sheep. On one night of October they killed three calves in a farmer's field, four miles from the Frost farm. Several parties set off to hunt them, but they escaped and lived as outlaws, subsisting from nocturnal forays until snow came, when they were tracked to a den beneath a high crag, called the "Overset," up in ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... public-houses could not be more than a relaxation to a man of Peace's active temper, who had once tasted what many of those who have practised it, describe as the fascination of that particular form of nocturnal adventure known by the unsympathetic name of burglary. Among the exponents of the art Peace was at this time known as a "portico-thief," that is to say one who contrived to get himself on to the portico ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... impossible, unthinkable—and yet there, in the white glare of the electric light beneath us, was that dark figure with the bent grey head, and the twitching elbow. What inhuman hypocrisy, what hateful depth of malice against his successor must underlie these sinister nocturnal labours. It was painful to think of and dreadful to watch. Even I, who had none of the acute feelings of a virtuoso, could not bear to look on and see this deliberate mutilation of so ancient a relic. It was a ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... The moon is endowed with life and will, "stooping", "riding", "wand'ring", "bowing her head", not as a frigid personification, and because the ancient poets so personified her, but by communication to her of the intense agitation which the nocturnal spectacle rouses in the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... and water, eaten sitting on the floor of the Hall, for an assault upon a brother student; if blood was shed, the penalty was double. The statutes of the Spanish College were severe for the fourteenth century, and they penalise absence from lecture, unpunctuality, nocturnal wanderings and so forth, as strictly ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait

... away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some one moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... his night solitudes—when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune—when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light—it was after ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... that an early wolf-totem may have been associated, because of the animal's nocturnal wanderings in forests, with the underworld whence, according to Celtic belief, men sprang and whither they returned, and whence all vegetation came forth. The Gallo-Roman Silvanus, probably an underworld god, wears a wolf-skin, and may thus be a wolf-god. There were various types of underworld ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... parlor, to 20 or 25 pounds for the dog intended as a man's companion, suitable to tackle any kind of vermin, and to be an ideal watch dog in the house should any knights of the dark lantern make their nocturnal calls. ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell

... a memory of having been "once in Elysium." Still, Elysium should have no mosquitoes, and they are nearly insupportable here; big spotted fellows, with a greed for blood, and a specially poisonous bite, taking the place at daylight of the retiring nocturnal host. The Chinese attendant is not careful, and lets mosquitoes into my net, and even one means a ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... a certainty either that the particular toad-in-a-hole had or had not access to air and food, the ordinary conditions of toad life are exactly those under which the delusive appearance of venerable antiquity would be almost certain frequently to arise. The toad is a nocturnal animal; it lives through the daytime in dark and damp places; it shows a decided liking for crannies and crevices; it is wonderfully tenacious of life; it possesses the power of hibernation; it can live ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... from evil. Among the Lower Lillooets, the girl's mask was often made of goat-skin, covering her head, neck, shoulders and breast, and leaving only a narrow opening from the brow to the chin. During the nocturnal hours she performed many ceremonies. Thus she put two smooth stones in her bosom and ran, and as they fell down between her body and her clothes, she prayed, saying, "May I always have easy child-births!" Now one of these stones represented her future child and the other ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... Smith set out on his nocturnal march from Lechmere Point by an unfrequented path across marshes, where at times the troops had to wade through water. He had proceeded but a few miles when alarm guns, booming through the night air, and the clang of village ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving

... cattle and provisions, so that they could not procure any subsistence without the utmost difficulty, and at the point of the sword. The historians reckon at 10,000 the number of those who sank under these misfortunes; the cold and the nocturnal combat had cut off as many more, and 6000 had perished at the assault of Delphi: there remained then to the Brenn no more than 35,000 men when he rejoined the main body of his army, in the plains watered by the Cephisus, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... be made. It is painful to speak of my father as I must now do; but there is no help for it. Of late years he has been subject to strange mental hallucinations, which have bordered close upon madness, if they have not reached that terrible point. Nocturnal vigils, fastings, and prayers have affected his health. He has denied himself sufficient rest, and has only partaken of food barely sufficient to sustain nature, and no more. The consequence has ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... distich in an elegy in which he narrated a nocturnal promenade between Rome and Tibur. Observe the word Scythiae instead of Scythicis, and especially, feriat, which is the true reading,—the printed texts say noceat. Thus an excellent correction has been preserved for us ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier

... Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the Cascos by the hand as for a final separation. Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal roadside; I was told by one they were like so much mist, and as the traveller walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another described them as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from none could I obtain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the present uncivilised state of Ireland is, that very little English capital travels there. The man who deals in steam-engines, and warps and woofs, is naturally alarmed by Peep- of-Day Boys, and nocturnal Carders; his object is to buy and sell as quickly and quietly as he can, and he will naturally bear high taxes and rivalry in England, or emigrate to any part of the Continent, or to America, rather than plunge into the ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith

... rocking-chair by the kitchen fire Uncle Noah, alert and excited, waited until he heard the Colonel and Mrs. Fairfax go up to bed; then, chuckling to himself, he extinguished the kitchen lights, and, carrying one of his Christmas bundles, plodded across the field to Job's nocturnal hermitage. The light of a match revealed the tyrant roosting glumly on the ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple

... is not probable that the plugs or piles of stones serve to conceal the burrows from scolopendras, which, according to Hoffmeister, {31} are the bitterest enemies of worms, or from the larger species of Carabus and Staphylinus which attack them ferociously, for these animals are nocturnal, and the burrows are opened at night. May not worms when the mouth of the burrow is protected be able to remain with safety with their heads close to it, which we know that they like to do, but which costs so many ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin

... the prospect. She did not mind in the least what the English might have to say about it afterward; but to have her little house the center of nocturnal feuds, with her husband using his six-shooters, and heaven only knew what bloodshed resulting, was more of a prospect ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... am I a beast for? If you had happened, says Fra Lippo, to catch Cosimo in a frolic like this, of course you would have said nothing; but you think a monk is a beast if he indulges in these nocturnal pleasures. Yet why should the fact that I break monastic rules make you consider me a beast? Just let me tell you how I happened to become ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... Cook's Court to Chancery Lane. And thus jealousy gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. Once there (and it was always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in Mrs. Snagsby's breast, prompting her to nocturnal examinations of Mr. Snagsby's pockets; to secret perusals of Mr. Snagsby's letters; to private researches in the day book and ledger, till, cash-box, and iron safe; to watchings at windows, listenings behind doors, and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... are worked out with great difficulty, except in such cases as the nocturnal animals, which simply become one with their surroundings. Mice, rats, moles, and bats wear overcoats that are very inconspicuous, and when suddenly approached they appear almost invisible. Some of the North American Indians claimed that buffaloes made their calves wallow in the ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon

... daily to see me. I told him that I had some rare new fun in my head, and we planned that I should feign to be worse than usual. Burrill knew that our people had made efforts to stop our nocturnal expeditions, and he agreed with me that the thing should be kept secret. On that last night he left the house early, saying that he would spend a couple of hours at 'Old Forty's,' and then meet me at ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... been, it does not follow that Miss Dickenson, in full flight to her own couch, would not have come upon the Earl in the lobby near Mr. Torrens's quarters, with a candle-lamp in his hand, which he carried about in nocturnal excursions to make sure that a great conflagration was not raging somewhere on the premises. He seemed, Miss Dickenson thought, to be gazing reproachfully at it. It was burning all right, nevertheless. She wished ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... to him to go and see the boatman and order him away so that afterward the man could say he had been sent off duty, and the story of a nocturnal river trip would not appear too incredible. It was a small concession to ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... all during the night that followed. Moses, being well looked after, found no opportunity to slip his tether, and surprise them with a nocturnal visit. Doubtless it was not from lack of trying that he failed to make a second attack upon the oat-sack in the wagon, for fond memories of that other occasion must still linger with him, to judge from the pitiful whinnies he gave ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton

... trees lay long nocturnal shadows; over the pond where there was more light, being free from shade, hung a faint vapory cloud, and over yonder in the meadows, where a pool of water, concealed by the mossy moorland, had formed, the mists had gathered still more thickly and hung like a gray-white veil over all the heath. ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... for, on the one hand, it is not likely that birds, which cannot see in the dark, would take the risk of dashing their brains out against the cliffs and crags of the canyons by following them at night; yet they may depart from their usual habit of nocturnal migration, and make the journey up the gorges and vales by day. On the other hand, the nights are so cold in the elevated regions that the little travellers' lives might be jeopardized by nocturnal flight over the passes and peaks. There is one thing ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... Susan could not help stealing inquiring looks at Lucy. Surely the participant in such a nocturnal adventure must bear some signs of it upon her face. Lucy had suddenly become a disturbing and incomprehensible problem. In trying to readjust her conception of the practical and energetic girl, Susan found herself confronted with the artifices of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... royal oak, had a variety of indispositions ready prepared; and, thanks to them, she was unable to go out, and her maids of honor were obliged to remain indoors also. There was not the slightest chance or means of paying a nocturnal visit; for, in this respect, the king had, on the very first occasion, experienced a severe check, which happened in the following manner. As at Fontainebleau, he had taken Saint-Aignan with him one evening, when he wished to pay La Valliere a visit; but he had found no one but Mademoiselle ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... whole," I remarked, "it seems to me that the residential side of the hotel is admirably suited to the nocturnal adjustment of small differences!" ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... time the Hofbauer and Anton are equipped in their gala attire for church, Moidel and the maids, in spite of their nocturnal labors, following them briskly; so that they have not only said their prayers and endeavored to understand the sermon, but actually joined in a procession before the guests arrive. The sweet notes of a processional ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... dressed, and never awkward. After dinner he would occasionally play another rubber; but twelve o'clock always saw him back into his own rooms. No one knew better than Mr. Maule that the continual bloom of lasting summer which he affected requires great accuracy in living. Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... walking with dignity across the open country; sitting on their haunches to stare with great yellow eyes at these strangers passing by. Here they had never been annoyed or hunted; so here they had not become as strictly nocturnal as nearer settlement. In all their magnificence they stalked abroad, lords of the veldt. Kingozi's finger itched for the trigger. There is no more exciting sport than that of lion shooting afoot. It is a case of kill or be killed; for a ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al

... leaves it to the Church to inflict excommunication, both on men and women who have recourse to charms, and who believe they go in the night to nocturnal assemblies, there to pay homage to the devil. The Capitularies of the kings[141] recommend the pastors to instruct the faithful on the subject of what is termed the Sabbath; at any rate they do not command that these persons should receive corporeal punishment, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... this theory all the more probable, images and symbols of the cat were dedicated to the moon, the moon being universally regarded as the quintessence of everything supernatural, the very cockpit, in fact, of mystery and spookism. The nocturnal habits of the cat, its love of prowling about during moonlight hours, and the spectacle of its two round, gleaming eyes, may, of course, as Plutarch seems to have thought, have suggested to the Egyptians ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... Tina could get out of him. She noticed, too, what her blind infatuation had prevented her observing before, that there was a fierce expression in his eyes when he set out on these nocturnal rambles, and that on his return the corners of his mouth and his long finger-nails were always smeared with blood. Furthermore, she noticed that although he was concerned about the appetites of herself and the children, he ate very little ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... trance-sleep with visions. The graduates and candidates in the faculty sought to fall into trances, in the dreams of which they realised their waking aspirations. They entertained no doubt, however, that their visits to the Devil and their nocturnal exploits were genuine; and they seem to have wilfully shut their eyes to the possibility of their having never left their beds. For, with a skill that should have betrayed to them the truth, they were used to prepare a witch-broth to promote in some way their nightly expeditions. And ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... the same moment the sound of a violent scuffle smote the nocturnal air. It appeared that Jim, presumably laboring under an unfortunate misapprehension, had not received his visitor with that refined hospitality due from one gentleman to another. Even more inexplicable, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... just as the "setting sun's pathetic light" had been succeeded by the grey twilight of the evening, that we bore the body of our unfortunate companion. The door was closed, but Grace being accustomed to nocturnal visitors, speedily answered the first summons and presented herself. She was evidently of immense age, being nearly bowed double, and her figure, with her silvery hair, confined by a blue checked cotton handkerchief, and palsied hand, as tremblingly she rested upon her staff and eyed the ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... audibly to himself, down the starlit streets. The direful potion burnt like fire in his veins, for its effect was made, perhaps, still more sudden from the wine he had drunk previously. Used to the excesses of nocturnal revellers, the citizens, with smiles and winks, gave way to his reeling steps; they naturally imagined him under the influence of the Bromian god, not vainly worshipped at Pompeii; but they who looked twice upon his face started in a nameless fear, and the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... the scene, at the nocturnal prowlers and promenaders, at the solitary veiled and seated figure, and he smiled. In all his agony ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... quiet that was almost pulseless fell upon the plantation. Place-du-Bois slept. Perhaps the only night in the year that some or other of the negroes did not lurk in fence corners, or make exchange of nocturnal visits. ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... have painted, feature by feature, these nocturnal scenes on the Orinoco, because, having but lately embarked on it, we were as yet unaccustomed to their wildness. They were repeated for months together, every night that the forest approached the edge of the river. Despite the evident danger by which one is surrounded, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... adventures were very diverting and naturally pleasing, but others involved so many dangers and such hardships that it is indeed surprising that the Caliph should ever again have ventured on these nocturnal ramblings. ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin

... see. If in sickness for succor we thirst, Is there balm in the dreams that have burst? Stars of hope and of longing eternal, That we saw o'er life's sorrows arisen, Shall they sink in death's terrors nocturnal, Only turn into worms ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... their fire; but as soon as night fell they would creep silently up through the bushes until they were so near to the camp that the pickets of the marines could smell the smoke of their cigarettes, and yet could neither see them nor hear them. Then the nocturnal skirmishing would begin again. There were six successive attacks from different directions on the night of the 11th, and a still greater number on the night of the 12th, with more or less desultory skirmishing during the day, so that for a period of forty-eight hours the gallant marines had ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... we had not stayed. The valley seemed populated with lions, but in general they were, for some reason, strictly nocturnal. By day they inhabited the fastnesses of the mountain ranges. We never succeeded in tracing them in that large and labyrinthine country; nor at any time could we induce them to come to kills. Either their natural prey was so abundant that they did not fancy ready-killed ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... that these Kirghiz, mere novices in the art of war, are rather nocturnal thieves and plunderers of caravans than regular soldiers. As M. Levchine says, "a firm front or a square of good infantry could repel ten times the number of Kirghiz; and a single cannon might destroy ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne

... stove before they could be put on, and which, if left under the stove too long, would dissolve into gum that no household art could ever harden again. Some decorous gentlemen among us can also remember that, in the nocturnal combats of their college days, a flinty India-rubber shoe, in cold weather, was a missive weapon of a highly ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... him how Sir Anthony had thrown it unread into the fire. Gedge's nocturnal waylaying of him in my front garden was another unsuccessful attempt to tighten the screw. Like Randall and myself, he ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... many butterflies and of some moths are specially arranged for display, so that they may be readily seen. During the night colours are not visible, and there can be no doubt that the nocturnal moths, taken as a body, are much less gaily decorated than butterflies, all of which are diurnal in their habits. But the moths of certain families, such as the Zygaenidae, several Sphingidae, Uraniidae, some Arctiidae and Saturniidae, fly about during ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... how sure Henry felt that this curious nocturnal expedition on the part of Charles, his father-in-law, M. Kratzky and the Calvinist pastor had to do with the mystery of the delegates. He knew it beyond a doubt. Nor was he surprised. It came as a consummation of his suspicion and his hopes. Of Charles Wilbraham's villainy he had long been all ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... of insects and frogs, in such innumerable quantities that the din made by them collectively was so loud as to resemble the sound of an iron foundry or a battle-ship in course of construction, the sounds produced by the millions of nocturnal singers being quite metallic and reproducing exactly the sound of hammers driving rivets into the steel plates of a ship. Whether it was done purposely or accidentally I do not know, but those little water creatures of the Arinos seemed to keep excellent ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... this point. One thinks that embalming was supposed to keep the soul in the body until after the funeral judgment and interment, but that, when the corpse was laid in its final receptacle, the soul proceeded to accompany the sun in its daily and nocturnal circuit, or to transmigrate through various animals and deities. Another imagines that the process of embalming was believed to secure the repose of the soul in the other world, exempt from transmigrations, so long as the body was kept from ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... X. In that nocturnal council debate grew loud and warm. When Eurybiades had explained his change of opinion and his motives for calling the chiefs together; Themistocles addressed the leaders at some length and with great excitement. It was so evidently the interest of the Corinthians to ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... published at Ayr. In 1844 he became connected with the Witness newspaper; but in the following year removed to Glasgow, to assist in the establishment of the first Scottish daily newspaper. With that journal, the Daily Mail, he continued two years, till severe nocturnal labour much affecting his health, obliged him temporarily to abandon literary pursuits. He has been a contributor to Tait's Magazine, and was intrusted with the literary superintendence of Major De Renzy's "Poetical Illustrations and Achievements of the Duke of Wellington," a work to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... winks a feeble eye, She smiles into corners. She smoothes the hair of the grass. The moon has lost her memory. A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, Her hand twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and old Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain. The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums And dust in crevices, Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot

... fallen, than this prey roused the appetites of the whole forest, the howl and growl of wild beasts was heard at their banquet on the donkey throughout the night. Lightening played over the woods; the "violent snapping of the branches proclaimed the nocturnal movements of the elephant and hippopotamus;" the loud roar and startling snort were constantly heard; and by morning every vestige of the dead animal, even to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... case was a bad one. The public prosecutor represented the nocturnal combat as an attempted assassination. Fortunately Andres, whom a good constitution and Militona's unremitting care speedily restored to health, interceded for him, representing the affair as a duel, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... the people assured him that the ghost vanished at once. Oberlin went home, and the poor man, taking the hint which in his address to the count he had intended to convey, applied to business with his former alacrity, and never again complained of his nocturnal visiter. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various

... time for recreation. But who cares for, or thinks about, the wandering Romany? True, Police-Constable Argus receives authority by which he, sans ceremonie, commands them to 'move on,' should he come across any by the roadside in his diurnal or nocturnal perambulations. But it often occurs that the object for which they 'camped' in the spot has been accomplished. The farmer's hedge has been made to supply them with fuel for warmth and for culinary purposes; his field has been trespassed upon, and fodder stolen for their overworked and cruelly-treated ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... his father was surprised and indeed annoyed as well as startled to see him: he was in no mood for such a visit. He felt also strangely afraid of the child, he could not have told why. Wretched about one son, he was dismayed at the nocturnal visit of the other. The cause was of course his wrong condition of mind; lack of truth and its harmony in ourselves alone can make us miserable; there is a cure for everything when that is cured. No ill in our neighbours, if we be right ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... the nocturnal animals from their slumbers in the straw— the wingless apteryx, like a little armless man with a very long nose; the huge misshapen earthy-looking ant-bear, and those four-footed Rip Van Winkles, the quaint, rusty, blear-eyed armadillos. But the giant ant- eater was the most wonderful, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... in good time that nocturnal emissions are quite normal, when not too frequent, and indicate not lost manhood or the danger of it, but merely the fact that the sexual glands are now for the first time all developed and active. This is one of the simplest ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various

... and removal of the sediment by filtration through fresh and clean sand. For the wealthy, the water may be distilled in an alembic, if such an apparatus is obtainable. Avicenna says that bad water may be corrected by the addition of vinegar. Exposure to the midday sun and to the nocturnal cold, constipation and diarrhoea should be avoided, and prompt attention should be given to ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... France was incensed by a nocturnal desecration of the statue of Duguesclin which stands at Dinan in the very lists in which five hundred years ago the Breton hero met and vanquished 'Sir Thomas of Canterbury.' The indignation of France ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... of a cannon will waken the vibrations of harp-strings. Around where they stood was the peace of the night and sleep. The perfume of violets and hyacinths, and of myriads of opening buds seemed shed by the moon with her silvery rays through the soft, dewy air; a few nocturnal insects droned hither and thither, and "drowsy tinklings ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy

... As in all flying squirrels, the four legs were connected by a sheet of skin called the "patagium" which is continuous with the body. This acts as a parachute and enables the animal to sail from tree to tree for, of course, it cannot fly like a bat. As these huge squirrels are strictly nocturnal, they are not often seen even by the natives. We were told by the Lutzus on the Mekong River that by building huge fires in the woods they could attract the animals and ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews

... head porters nudged each other. Perhaps they had heard such owls hoot before at night, and perhaps they knew that Jeekie, who had "passed Bonsa," could only be harmed by the direct command of Bonsa speaking through the mouth of the Asika herself. Still they might have been interested in the nocturnal conversation of those two owls, which, as is common with such magical fowl in West Africa, had transformed themselves into human shapes, the shape of Jeekie and the shape of an Asiki priest, who was, as it happened, a blood ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... their javelins four hundred bears and three hundred lions. On the same occasion thirty knights belonging to the military fought in the arena. The emperor sanctioned such proceedings openly. Secretly, however, he carried on nocturnal revels throughout the length and breadth of the city, insulting the women, practicing lewdness on boys, stripping those whom he encountered, striking, wounding, murdering. He had an idea that his incognito was impenetrable, for he used ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio

... until we reached the Brooklyn shore. He declined to pass the rest of the night at my house, and while I waited with him till the boat should leave the wharf to take him back, the night editor of the Courier and Enquirer, a clever and accomplished gentleman, came on board on the way to his nocturnal labors. I introduced them to each other; they were at once in good accord; I saw them off and went homeward. A day or two after I learned that when they reached the New York shore, Verplanck volunteered to stroll down to the Courier office ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant

... closeted with Goldmark, Old Man Curry was entertaining another nocturnal visitor. It was the Bald-faced Kid, breathless, his ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan

... famous yew alley of Baskerville Hall. The evidence of the Barrymores shows that this had been his custom. On the fourth of May Sir Charles had declared his intention of starting next day for London, and had ordered Barrymore to prepare his luggage. That night he went out as usual for his nocturnal walk, in the course of which he was in the habit of smoking a cigar. He never returned. At twelve o'clock Barrymore, finding the hall door still open, became alarmed, and, lighting a lantern, went in search of his master. The day had been wet, and Sir ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle



Words linked to "Nocturnal" :   diurnal, biology, biological science



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