"Speculator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immediate interest in his welfare, and also warranted his putting the question, as to what were Alexander's views and intentions in visiting the Cape: for Mr Fairburn knew from the letter that he was heir to Sir Charles Wilmot, and therefore that he was not likely to be going out as a speculator ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... speculator insists that virtue lies in a constant and fierce struggle between the will and the passions, between ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... button—the extent of his winter trousseau—and, wrapping it carefully, placed the ostensible change in the pocket of confiding juvenility. Setting the youngster's face homeward, and patting him benevolently on the back—for Chicken's heart was as soft as those of his feathered namesakes—the speculator quit the market with a profit of 1,700 per cent. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... hand-gallop. At Miranda, which was crowded with soldiers, there was a diligence that plied to San Sebastian by tacit arrangement with the knights of the road—that is, the adherents of Don Carlos. As the fares were very expensive, I suspect the speculator who ran the coach was heavily taxed for the privilege, and recouped himself by shifting the imposition to the shoulders of passengers. The day was fine, the roads were good, the vehicle was well-horsed, and we got away from the boundary of ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... combustion in that mighty mine on which stood in thin and fatal security the throne of France. Rousseau, the most impassioned of all romancers, the great corrupter of the female mind. Buffon, a lofty and splendid speculator, who dazzled the whole multitude of the minor philosophers, and fixed the creed of Materialism. Moutesquieu, eminent for knowledge and sagacity in his "Spirit of Laws" striking all the establishments of his country into contempt; and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... recognizable, from Hawthorne's description, as the man of one idea, who has spent his whole life seeking the gem; a scientific experimenter who wishes to grind it up for the benefit of his crucible; a cynical sceptic who has come to disprove the existence of the great gem; a greedy speculator who seeks the carbuncle as he would prospect for a silver-mine; an English lord who wishes to add it to his hereditary possessions; and finally a young married couple who want to obtain it for an ornament to their new cottage. The interest of the reader immediately ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... register. But, from the constant arrangements of the universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil, and ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... many of the gifts which lead a speculator to success. He was quick in observing, just in estimating, prompt and fearless in acting. But in finance there is always the element of luck, which, however one may eliminate it, still remains, like the blank at roulette, ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... don't know the history of it, but can only guess that once on a time some enterprising speculator, fired by the sudden Third-Empire blaze of Biarritz, conceived the project of starting a rival watering place, here to the South, and that they were to make its beginning with a colossal Hotel. At any rate, here, rounding a desolate point of the foreshore, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... think I can persuade them to a private arrangement by which they will receive the principal in liquidation of all demands. This may be considered a very fair basis for an arrangement, since the results of the speculation could only accrue from the business capacities of the speculator, and did not belong to a fund which the proprietor had resolved not to appropriate, and which must therefore, have been entirely unproductive. I do not promise you that they will accept, but it is not improbable. They are men ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... interior; in this manner the goods obtained from the Company's posts along the coast, or from foreign trading ships, pass from hand to hand in barter, until they eventually reach the borders of New Caledonia, where the trade still affords a very handsome profit to the native speculator. ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... I have been all my life a speculator and observer in all domestic matters, having them so confidentially under my eye in our own household; and so, if I write on a pure woman's matter, it must be understood that I am only your pen and mouth-piece,—only giving tangible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... cooking a bit, Doctor," Billie was saying. "Especially with Nancy, although I suppose I am really her assistant. She makes things exciting enough. I think she's a kind of culinary speculator and takes a lot of chances, but she's awfully lucky. She takes all sorts of rag-tag ends of things, chops them into bits and turns out what she ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... surpassed in fertility. After leaving the bottom the country is rather hilly and barren. Traveled twenty-two miles and lodged at Waterloo, a town without houses. Only two families in the place. Every land speculator produces one or more of these dirt-cabin villages. Indeed, two-thirds of the travelers met with are land speculators. The inhabitants of this part of the country appear to be a wretched set of beings. Their great-coats are made out of a blanket, with a cap or hood out of the ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden; demands any great powers of mind, I will not inquire: perhaps a surly and sullen speculator may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason. But it must be at least confessed, that to embellish the form of nature is an innocent amusement; and some praise ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... I know? I can no more tell you the whys and wherefores of myself than I can lift myself up by the waistband and carry myself into the next county, as some one challenged a speculator in perpetual motion to do. I am too much a pessimist to respect my own affections. Do you know what ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... vice of theft. So it is with gambling. It is giving the natural tendency to chance, to risk an illegitimate play. The person who is afraid to risk anything accomplishes but little in any way, is seldom a speculator, and never a gambler. Usually the gambler is the man who is naturally full of hazard, who loves to run risks, to take chances. Nor will one find a more practical and useful tendency in one's make-up than this. See the discoverer of America and his brave crew for days and ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... another brilliant cantatrice, in the very dawn of her great career fell into the nets of a shrewd and unprincipled operatic speculator. Signor Lanari, an impressario of Florence, recognized the future success of the inexperienced young girl, and decoyed her into an engagement for six years on terms shamefully low, for Giulia's modesty did not appreciate her own remarkable powers. ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... was by freebooting, fighting came to be regarded as an end desirable in itself; so in these days the mere effort to accumulate has become a source of enjoyment rather than a means to it. The same truth is to be witnessed in aberrant types of character. The infatuated speculator and the close-fisted millionaire are our substitutes for the mediaeval berserkir,—the man who loved the pell-mell of a contest so well that he would make war on his neighbour, just to keep his hand in. In like manner, while such crimes as murder and ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... stamp duties, a high rate of postage, and the heavy deposits of caution-money required by the government as security for good behavior, is within the reach of all who care to pay for it, and has turned the fourth page of every journal into a harvest field alike for the speculator and the Inland Revenue Department. The press restrictions were invented in the time of M. de Villele, who had a chance, if he had but known it, of destroying the power of journalism by allowing newspapers to multiply till no one took any notice of them; but he missed his opportunity, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... castle. Between the corner towers, upon that part which runs immediately parallel with the Seine, there is a noble terrace, now converted into garden ground—which commands an immediate and extensive view of the embouchure of the river. It is the property of a speculator, residing at Havre. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... when you move such principles to practice. Mark me! you'll have to pull down the iron walls of the south, make planters of different minds, drive self out of mankind, and overthrow the northern speculator's cotton-bag love. You've got a great work before you, my dear madam,—a work that'll want an extended lease of your life-time. Remember how hard it is to convince man of the wrong of anything that's profitable. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... kind, I shall be very glad to taste your native wine; but first let us sit here awhile and breathe the fresh sea-air." And he pointed to a modest cafe, "On the Sands," which a bold speculator had improvized only a few weeks before, by making a small inclosure of planks and setting up ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... anyway, I won't say why, I daren't.... But we all saw to-day when he came in that that man is not of our sort. Not because he had his hair curled at the barber's, not because he was in such a hurry to show his wit, but because he is a spy, a speculator, because he is a skin-flint and a buffoon. That's evident. Do you think him clever? No, he is a fool, a fool. And is he a match for you? Good heavens! Do you see, ladies?" he stopped suddenly on the way upstairs to their rooms, "though all my friends there are drunk, yet they are all honest, and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... "Joseph was a very rich man, and all due to his own clever and careful investments. A bit of a speculator, but always on the right side of the market. Why, he fairly had a corner in X.Y. stock. Just that deal—and it will go through in a few days—means a fortune in itself. I ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... much less of a success, being an exceedingly foolish as well as reprobate person, who not only deserts a beautiful, charming, and affectionate wife, but treats his lower-class loves shabbily, and allows himself to be swindled and fooled to the nth by an adventuress of fashion and a plausible speculator. On the other hand, one of this book's rather numerous grisettes, Ninie, is of the more if not most gracious of that questionable but not unappetising sisterhood. Dubois, the funny man, and Jolivet, the parsimonious reveller, who generally manages to make his friends pay the bill, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the world, how was it with them? But one thought, one desire, filled their hearts; one object, one intention, was their aim. What of the speculator and extortioner of the South, Christian as well as Jew, Turk as well as Infidel! From the hour that the spirit of avarice swept through the hearts of the people, the South became a vast garden of corruption, in which the pure and uncorrupted were as pearls among rocks. From the hour that ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... light, took a book from his pocket: The Speculator's Manual of Proudhon, and set to reading it attentively and to marking the passages that struck him ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... soul enter heaven at the very same moment? Is heaven in the atmosphere? He who asserts it is a very bold speculator. Is it out in the ether? If so, where? And how is it our telescopes cannot detect it? If heaven is a place, as it must be if it exists at all, it cannot very well be within the astronomical universe. Now the farthest stars are inconceivably ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... greedy listeners. The Bourse was buoyant. Everything went up more rapidly than it had gone down. England was happy—as well she might be—for she had stumbled into the greatest triumph in her history. When bankers and merchants shook hands with the Hebrew speculator, they noticed—though they did not understand—an unusual warmth of pressure. It was not rejoicing with the nation; it was the imaginary clutch of six millions more of gold. Thus it is seen that the great wealth of the Rothschild was not always used to the best advantage of mankind as a Christian ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... men who devote life with unwavering energy to the pursuit of what I may call private and personal ends. Thus the man of business lives for the acquisition of riches; the scholar and the scientist, of knowledge; the statesman, of power; the speculator, of excitement; the libertine, of pleasure; and so forth. Few are they who ever dream of devoting life as a whole to the pursuit of an end which is potentially attainable by all men, and which is therefore worthy of Man as Man. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... man kept me to breed chil'en for market, and sold 'em as fast as they got big enough; last of all, he sold me to a speculator, and my ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... trust me to call on Louvier on your behalf? I shall but inquire if he is inclined to take on himself the other mortgages; and if so, on what terms. Our relationship gives me the excuse for my interference; and to say truth, I have had much familiar intercourse with the man. I too am a speculator, and have often profited by Louvier's advice. You may ask what can be his object in serving me; he can gain nothing by it. To this I answer, the key to his good offices is in his character. Audacious ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was an earl's son (in this age of commonplace events) going to Australia with five thousand pounds, as sheep farmer and general speculator. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the farmer is equally true of the middle-man,—whether the middle-man acts as factor, jobber, salesman, or speculator, in the markets of grain. These traders are to be left to their free course; and the more they make, and the richer they are, and the more largely they deal, the better both for the farmer and consumer, between whom they form a natural and most useful link of connection,—though by ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... history. The South African Republic was to develope within a few years from a condition of great poverty into a rich and prosperous State, a country calculated in every respect to awaken and inflame the greed of the Capitalistic speculator. Within a few years the South African Republic was ranked among the first gold-producing countries of the world. The bare veldt of hitherto was overspread with large townships inhabited by a speculative and bustling class brought together ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... listened to considerable talk of financial investment and adventure. He heard, for one thing, of a curious character by the name of Steemberger, a great beef speculator from Virginia, who was attracted to Philadelphia in those days by the hope of large and easy credits. Steemberger, so his father said, was close to Nicholas Biddle, Lardner, and others of the United States Bank, or at least friendly with them, and seemed to be able to obtain from that organization ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... it, they much mistook the man. He entertained their principles sincerely and not the less that they were found impracticable; for the miscarriage of his experiment no more converts the political speculator, than the explosion of a retort undeceives an alchymist. But Bletson was quite prepared to submit to Cromwell, or any one else who might be possessed of the actual authority. He was a ready subject in practice to the powers existing, and made little difference ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... obligatory use of salt and, like the collectors of the taille, these are "jointly responsible for the price of the salt." Others below them, ever following the same course as in collecting the taille, are likewise responsible. "After the former have been seized in their persons and property, the speculator fermier is authorized to commence action, under the principle of mutual responsibility, against the principal inhabitants of the parish." The effects of this system have just been described. Accordingly, "in Normandy," says ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... poor labourer, who, after a few years of hard toil, can sit down in his own log-house, and look abroad on his own land, and see his children well settled in life as independent freeholders. It is a grand country for the rich speculator, who can afford to lay out a large sum in purchasing land in eligible situations; for if he have any judgment, he will make a hundred per cent as interest for his money after waiting a few years. But it is a hard country for the poor gentleman, whose habits have rendered ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:—"I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... strenuous week much had happened, and much more was scheduled to happen. For one twenty-four-hour day the ex-speculator in Mr. Colbrith held out against the sharp attacks of the reawakened lust of conquest. Then, from Jack's Canyon on the Transcontinental, from men-clustered construction trains on the extension, over the passes from Summit Lakes, and across the brown ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... in each case the reconcilers argued on the basis of their own ideas and of the philosophies of their time. The early physicist thought that myth concealed a physical philosophy; the early etymologist saw in it a confusion of language; the early political speculator supposed that myth was an invention of legislators; the literary Euhemerus found the secret of myths in the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island. Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan philosophers, touched with Oriental pantheism, recognised in myths ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... not far away. Cedar sprays and branches of balsam draped the pillars, the red folds of the beaver ensign hung above our heads, and as usual the assembly was democratic in character. Men in broadcloth and in blue jean sat side by side—rail-layer, speculator, and politician crowded on one another, with stalwart axe-men, some of whom were better taught than either, and perhaps a few city absconders, to keep them company; but there was only good-fellowship between them. The enthusiasm increased with each orator's efforts, until the surveyor ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... but this gentleman was very seldom indeed in the bosom of his family. Letters—and remittances—came from him from the most surprising quarters of the globe. His profession was that of speculator at large, and, with small encouragement of any kind, he toiled unceasingly to support his wife and daughters in their elegant leisure. At one time he was eagerly engaged in a project for making starch ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... this has not been because the stockholders combined to oust their trustees, but because they thought they saw a good chance to sell their stock to those who would pay high for the control, or to participate in these combinations. There have been a good many cases where an enterprising speculator has managed to get hold of a majority of the stock and change the control, and powerful bankers can sometimes get proxies enough to put a stop to bad management; but spontaneous movements of this kind on the part of the mass of the stockholders ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the Railway King, originally a linen-draper in York, the great speculator in the construction and extension of railways, in connection with which he made a huge fortune; acquired civic honours, and was nearly having a statue raised to his honour, but certain frauds being exposed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... an innkeeper, but this business, honest enough in itself, only veiled the man's real trade, in which he defied alike the laws of honesty and of his country. The other was by turns a gentleman of property, a merchant, a cattle owner, or a speculator, in all of which characters he acted excellently, and succeeded in making the acquaintance of men whom ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... for blocks around except a little stucco Grecian temple, one of those decorative contrivances that served as ticket booths or soda-water booths at the World's Fair. This one, larger and more pretentious than its fellows, had been bought by some speculator, wheeled outside the park, and dumped on a sandy knoll in this empty lot. It had an ambitious little portico with a cluster of columns. One of them was torn open, revealing the simple anatomy of its construction. The temple looked as ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories the night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in harmony with savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator, all things are men and animals. 'Ils se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees,' says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada. {55b} 'The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird,' ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... in brief, a gambler. Not in a dishonest, or even suspicious sense, but a pure gambler. He is a gigantic agricultural speculator; his system is, as he candidly told you, credit. Credit not only with the bank, but with everybody. He has actually been making use of you, his casual and unexpected visitor, as an instrument. You are certain to talk about him; the more ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... of public distress did Tom Walker set up as usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy and adventurous, the gambling speculator, the dreaming land-jobber, the thriftless tradesman, the merchant with cracked credit—in short, everyone driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices hurried ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... ideas, an aptness for intuitions, and sometimes a seemingly positive preference for the bird in the bush," which latter may account for that skilful Yankee versatility so perfectly exemplified in the chaplain, poet, editor, merchant, speculator, politician, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... turn for the most striking example of the playwright's powers. This first appeared as Le Faiseur (The Speculator), being originally written in 1838-40. Justice compels us to state, however, that another hand is present in the perfected play. In the original it was a comedy in five acts; but this was revamped and reduced to three acts by M. d'Ennery, before its presentation at the Gymnase ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... index, the FTI [England], the over-the-counter index, NASDAQ index. [person or firm trading securities] broker, stockbroker, jobber, stock dealer, odd-lot dealer; specialist. [person who buys or sells stocks] investor, speculator, operator; bull, buyer; bear, short seller; scalper, arbitrager[obs3], arbitrageur[obs3]; stockholder, share-holder, stockholder of record; bond holder, coupon-clipper [derogatory]. investment; speculation. V. speculate, invest, trade, trade stocks, play ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... this chapter may well be prefaced by an extract from Herbert Spencer on the treatment of offspring. He first supposes that some future philosophic speculator, examining the course of education of the present period, should find nothing relating to the training of children, and that his natural inference would be that our schools were all for monastic orders, who have no charge of infancy and childhood. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the cause of others before "Messire le Bailli;" he is very eloquent in trying to show that in the time of their ancestors the cows had a free right of pasture in such and such a meadow, or the sheep on such and such a ridge; then there is the miser, and the speculator, who converts all his possessions into ready money, so as to purchase grain against a bad season; but of course the harvest turns out to be excellent, and he does not make a farthing, but runs away to conceal his ruin and rage. There is also the villain who leaves his plough to become a poacher. ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... cash," the woman said. "It is a good thing for the wife of a speculator to be in possession of a lot of fine diamonds. It would have been a precious good thing for us, too, if Reggie had not ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... schooner sailed for another swing about the French groups of islands. Llewellyn and David were associates in planting, curing, and shipping vanilla-beans, but were roisterers at heart, and ever ready to desert their office and warehouse for feasting or gaming. Polonsky was a speculator in exchange and an investor in lands, and was reputed to be very rich. He, too, would leave his strong box unlocked in his hurry if cards or wassail called. These same white men were sib to all their fellows in the South Seas except a few sour men whom avarice, satiety, or a broken ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... discovered by their China, whaling, and sealing voyages many sources of wealth, and who are at this moment reaping rich rewards for their toil, while 999 out of every thousand of the European world know nothing at all about it. Nevertheless there is yet a vast field open to the speculator, which must ever promise ample recompense for his ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... meddle. Such grand struggles are between the shepherds. Thus, as the defaulters are guilty of having wanted to win too much, very little sympathy is felt as a rule for the misfortunes brought about by the coalition of the Nucingens. If a speculator blows his brains out, if a stockbroker bolts, if a lawyer makes off with the fortune of a hundred families—which is far worse than killing a man—if a banker is insolvent, all these catastrophes are forgotten in Paris in few months, and buried under ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... first blacks met with. They are almost too low in the scale of humanity to be fit for slaves. Mr Baker gained much information about the slave trade of this part of the world. Most of those engaged in this nefarious traffic are Syrians, Copts, Turks, Circassians, and some few Europeans. When a speculator has determined to enter into the trade, he engages a hundred and fifty to two hundred ruffians, and purchases guns and ammunition, and a few pounds of glass beads. With these he sails up to Gondokoro and, ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... a number of gentlemen on horseback there were riding up and down, and how few of them wanted their horses held! A good city speculator or a parliamentary commissioner could have told to a fraction, from the crowds that were cantering about, what sum of money was realised in London, in the course of a year, by holding horses alone. And ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the ticket speculator and of the merchant of "Offish'l Score Cards" were heard upon every side. The street cars poked their blunt noses through the crowd which closed in again behind them like water about the stern of a ship. Violets blossomed or crimson chrysanthemums bloomed upon every coat and wrap, or hung ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... still more ruinous to those in moderate and, most of all, to those in straitened circumstances. With the masses of the people, the purchase of every article of supply became a speculation—a speculation in which the professional speculator had an immense advantage over the ordinary buyer. Says the most brilliant of apologists for French revolutionary statesmanship, "Commerce was dead; betting took ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... Every eligible spot on the coast becomes the resort of country-goers, till it is no longer the country. All local advantages are taken advantage of, till they disappear. The citizen, charmed with the countryness of the spot, builds his box by the water-side; the speculator runs up lines of houses; a handsome inn rises in the midst; and benevolent individuals hasten to the new centre of attraction, loaded with every kind of commodity men stand in need of, and are likely ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... nothing on earth but enter a room. If you happen to hit your foot against a stool, or trip over a rug, or call a lady "sir," the girls giggle and the boys nudge each other, as if it were extremely amusing. But to blow up a confiding Wall street speculator, and to be swindled out of all your money by a pretty widow, is enough to make a sensitive man a raving lunatic. I had all this to think of as I was whirled along toward home. So absorbed was I in melancholy reflection, that I did ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... it is when we find that even in these new ages the Creeds, which so many fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the finest and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast, but of the subtle artist and the daring speculator. Blessed it is to find the most cunning poet of our day able to combine the rhythm and melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to the martyrs at the stake, to see in the science and the history of the nineteenth century new ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... in the fourth place, a willingness to be saved. "What must I do to be saved?" This man is not asking this question to gather material for a future argument. He is no speculator. He is no trifler. He is not even asking it because he is intellectually curious. He is not simply asking that he may know the conditions of salvation. He is asking with the earnest purpose in his ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... sort is fast disappearing, alas! As a class it has never held that position in the East that it had in the West. In the older states the manufacturer and the speculator have had precedence. Fortunes built on slaves and rum and cotton have brought more honor than those made in groceries and dry goods. Odd snobbery of trade! But in that broad, middle ground of the country, its great dorsal column, the merchant found his field, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the management of his farm to his capable wife, while he made politics his profession, with literature and lecturing as avocations. His frequent and brilliant lectures no less than his voluminous writings* attest his amazing industry. Democrat, Republican, Liberal-Republican, and Anti-Monopolist; speculator, lawyer, farmer, lecturer, stump-speaker, editor, and author; preacher of morals and practicer of shrewd political evasions; and always a radical—he was for many years a force to be reckoned with in the politics of his State and of ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... made up the Page family. Virginia's father had been a banker and grain speculator. Her mother had died ten years before, her father within the past year. The grandmother, a Southern woman in birth and training, had all the traditions and feelings that accompany the possession of wealth and social standing that have never been disturbed. She was a shrewd, careful business woman ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... am doing, stand or fall, will never be my undoing—I am no speculator. How do your silver mines go on, Sir Ulick? I hear all the silver mines in Ireland ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;—Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated cellar-hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra), and one of the earliest ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... can present us with a faint trace of the long-faded civilization of their Aztec kindred, while the former have only borrowed a few of the rudest arts of the white, and are protected from extinction merely by the barrier of a frontier more and more violently assailed each year by the speculator and the settler, and already passed by the railway. If we cannot exactly say that the Indian, alone of all the throng at the exhibition, goes home uninformed and unenlightened, what ideas may reach his mind will ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... somebody, but clearly they constitute an activity for specialists who study conditions, becoming relatively expert in determining how and when to act. These specialists are drawn principally from two classes: First, the professional speculator, who knows his markets and makes a business of buying and selling future risks; such men perform a great service in handling our seasonal crops and in other directions, and are entitled to a reasonable profit. ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... Castanier went forthwith in search of the said Claparon, a merchant who had a reputation for taking heavy risks that meant wealth or utter ruin. The money lender walked away as Castanier came up. A gesture betrayed the speculator's despair. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... this his daughter had found herself enormously wealthy at his death, which had occurred only a few weeks after the death of her husband. It was supposed that the marriage of an enterprising English speculator's daughter to a poor foreign nobleman had been matter of arrangement merely. As soon as the Countess's widowhood was a little further advanced she would, no doubt, be the mark of all the schemers who came near her, ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... that the Major remembered seeing by the Pool—perhaps a trifle less aggressive, but making up for that by an even increased self-confidence. Duplay had thought of his former successful rival as a broken man. He was not that. He had never thought of him as a speculator in building land. Seemingly that ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... her head at him. "No," she said; "you certainly wouldn't while I had any say in the matter. You're rather a good farmer, but I haven't met one yet who made a successful speculator. Some of our friends have tried it—and you know where it landed them. I expect those broker and mortgage men must lick their lips when a nice fat woolly farmer comes along. It must be ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Mr. Hill Burton. It is one thing for the collector to be able to reflect that the money he expends on books is not lost, and that his family may find themselves richer, not poorer, because he indulged his taste. It is quite another thing to buy books as a speculator buys shares, meaning to sell again at a profit as soon as occasion offers. It is necessary also to warn the beginner against indulging extravagant hopes. He must buy experience with his books, and many of his first purchases are likely to disappoint him. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... the one they themselves profess—the vanity of the learned to display a various and recondite erudition—the passion of the ingenious to harmonize conflicting traditions—and the ambition of every speculator to say something new upon an ancient but inexhaustible subject, so far from enlightening, only perplex our conjectures. Scarcely is the theory of to-day established, than the theory of to-morrow is invented ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... event, before the country about the lakes and on the Genesee river was visited, save by an occasional land speculator, or by defaulters who wished by retreating to what in those days was deemed almost the end of the earth, to escape the force ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... Wagner something more than the use of certain instruments, the bass-clarinet, for instance. The old operatic speculator indubitably was responsible for Wagner's grand demands upon the scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pompous spectacles fired the younger man not only with "Rienzi." They indubitably gave him the courage to create an operatic art that celebrated the new gold and power and magnificence, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... converted, and after careful and prolonged re-examination of the question, Professor Dana, the greatest living authority on coral reefs, had rejected them. As Professor Judd said, "If this be a 'conspiracy of silence,' where, alas! can the geological speculator seek for fame?" Any warning not to publish in haste was but advice to a still unknown man not to attack a seemingly well-established theory without making sure of his ground. (Letter ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... came a man of Practical Business Sense. He was an industrious Swiss by the name of Necker who had made himself rich as a grain speculator and the partner in an international banking house. His ambitious wife had pushed him into the government service that she might establish a position for her daughter who afterwards as the wife of the Swedish ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... minute...." Ere he finished there stalked in a wild-eyed individual clad in boots, the slouch hat of the mining man, a suit of handsome broadcloth, mud-bespattered and a heavy golden watch chain with the usual nugget charm. He was a clean-cat type of mining speculator from Nevada. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... was a rash speculator, and on that memorable "Black Friday," the idol he had worshiped, the god of gold, proved itself to be nothing but clay, and was as dust in his hands. He could not rally from the shock; pride, ambition, courage, were all annihilated; ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... speculator, traveler, s. Isaac, and brother of Esau. Was mother's pet. Became proficient as a character impersonator, but never went on the stage. Left home suddenly. Slept on a stone and had hard dreams. Later married, and was responsible for Joseph and his ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... "Why, who would, dear, if not a woman, or a speculator, and I'm not a speculator; and neither are you, and that's the reason you didn't think of them. So, Mr. Parker, as there is so much pressure, and if you don't mind continuing to act as reporter as well as compositor until after to-morrow, and if it isn't too wet—you must take an umbrella—would ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... practice; the discontents of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature, and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional history and by every speculator ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... which had been made at the birth of the first-born of Madame de Bourgogne, and which had amounted to a large sum. The want of money indeed made itself felt so much at this time, that the King was obliged to seek for resources as a private person might have done. A mining speculator, named Rodes, having pretended that he had discovered many veins of gold in the Pyrenees, assistance was given him in order that he might ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... quietly, added fresh fuel to the rumor blaze. Finally Boston became so excited over the situation that I came out with a public statement in which I frankly showed what I was trying to do. In all such affairs, however, the explanations of any man known in his business as a stock speculator or manipulator are never accepted as true. It is assumed that such announcements are merely blinds to disguise his real purpose; that they are feints or manoeuvres in his campaign. So when I declared that I was ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... depression of trade with Mr. Ezra P. Bayle, a shoddy American millionaire, who promptly replies, 'Depression of fiddle-sticks, Prince'; in another passage he naively inquires of the same shrewd speculator whether the thunderstorms and prairie fires of the West are still 'on so grand a scale' as when he visited Illinois; and we are told in the second volume that, after contemplating the magnificent view from St. Ives he exclaimed ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... getting Russia on her feet again and out of her economic crisis. It is bad enough if an unskilled workman is so employed. It is far worse if a skilled workman finds he can do better for himself as a "food speculator" than by the exercise of his legitimate craft. From mines, from every kind of factory come complaints of the decreasing proportion of skilled to unskilled workmen. The superior intelligence of the skilled worker offers him definite advantages should he engage in these pursuits, and his actual ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the profane speculator falls ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... practical, and entertaining illustration, admitting a degree of co-operation by those who attended to see and hear; and an abundance of commodious places for religious instruction on the Sabbath, where there should be wise and zealous men to impart it. Our speculator has a right to suppose a high degree of these qualifications in his public teachers of religion, when he is to imagine a parallel in this department to the skill and ardor displayed in the supposed military operations. He may add as subsidiary to such an apparatus, everything ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... persons occupying lands not thus reserved were by the decision quieted in their possession, so far as any claim of the city or State could be urged against them. Property to the value of many millions was thereby rescued from the spoiler and speculator, and secured to the city or settler. Peace was given to thousands of homes. Yet for this just and most beneficent judgment there went up from a multitude, who had become interested in the sales, a fierce howl of rage and hate. Attacks full of venom were made upon Judge Baldwin and ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... can have nothing to object; especially in view of what the writer goes on to say, and that on his own side of the hedge—somewhat qualified though his admission may be:—"The whites, it is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a series of ages." Our speculator grows profoundly philosophic here; and in this mood thus entertains his readers in a strain which, though deep, we shall strive to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... Shakespearian description of that Anthony, whom the modern British public, with its new critical lights, calls a "sentimentalist and speculator!"—holding Shylock to be the real hero, and innocent victim ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was here for a speculator! Never, perhaps, before or since, has such an opportunity occurred. Williams, with his unrivalled influence over the Maoris, might have bought up large tracts of land near the new site. If the charges against him are true, this ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... replaced by a covered market. The large convent of St Thomas was the headquarters of the national guard; while that of the Trinity had been appropriated to the reception of works of art, the spoils of the other convents. One had been sold to a private speculator, who let it out in chambers; another was the refuge of military invalids; a third, the convent of St Catalina—which was set fire to while the Duke of Angouleme was attending, in the year 1823, a mass celebrated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... inevitably as the gamblers, grafters, and organizers of "fake" companies. Several times he had made fortunes, but it was impossible for him to stay rich. He was always ready to back a drilling proposition that looked promising, and no independent speculator can continue to ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... honorable, as that of the intelligent, devoted, faithful American wife and mother, wisely governing her household. And what are the interests of the merchant, the manufacturer, the banker, the broker, the speculator, the selfish politician, when compared with those confided to the Christian wife and mother? They are too often simply contemptible—a wretched, feverish, maddening struggle to pile up lucre, which is any thing but clean. Where is the superior merit of such a life, that we ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... croaking came from the vicinity of Louis Stout, who throughout had been as appreciative a listener as though he were occupying an orchestra chair and had bought his seat from a speculator. ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... known, and mapped down in the charts. We had several passengers—two missionaries and their wives, newly married. I thought them inferior to John; but they were good men, humble too, with their hearts in the work. We had also another gentleman, a merchant or speculator of some sort. What he was going to do I could never make out. His heart was in his business, and he seemed to consider it of greater importance than anything else. This made him look down with undisguised contempt on the missionaries and their work, nor could ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... nod, however, and an affectionate smile, and indicated with his blue pencil a chair on the other side of the table. He had once made three hundred rupees in tea shares, and that gave him the air of a capitalist and speculator gamely shrewd. Tapping the table with his blue pencil he asked Miss Howe how the world ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... playgoers this indispensable preliminary conception of sanctity seems wanting. They talk of actors as mimes and mummers, and, I fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars, whose main business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city speculator when what he calls the serious business of the day is over. Passion, the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive sexual excitement: such phrases as "impassioned poetry" or "passionate love of truth" have fallen quite out of their vocabulary and been replaced by "passional crime" and the ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... actor, the wives numbered four. Ordinarily in Canada—certainly in eastern provinces—a third is the wife's reserve unless she sign it away. How four wives could each have a third was a poser for the speculator and the knot was cut by ignoring the wife's claims. Now that the fevered mad mania of speculation is over this remissness of the law in two provinces ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... don't want any of your fluctuating incomes for my girl. I don't care if you earned ten thousand pounds this year. So long as you can't guarantee that to last, you're no better than a speculator—a hand-to-mouth, don't-know-where-you-are-to-morrow sort of person. Now, that sort of thing won't do, Mr. Vernon. Before you next think of marrying a girl in my daughter's position, let me give you this bit of advice: learn to paint your pictures ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... do not mean book-speculator, does not smoke a pipe? I refuse to believe that any book-lover could possibly sit in an easy chair before the fire and pore over Browne's 'Hydriotaphia,' Sidney's 'Arcadia,' More's 'Utopia,' or ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the love of displaying force, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... seeking opportunities for self-exploitation, and he even aspired to fame as an author and philosopher. The staid business men of Pittsburgh early regarded Carnegie with disfavor; his daring impressed them as rashness and his bold adventures as the plunging of the speculator. Yet in all its aspects Carnegie's triumph was a personal one. He was perhaps the greatest commercial traveler this country has ever known. While his more methodical associates plodded along making steel, Carnegie went out upon the highway, bringing in orders by the millions. ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... living beings, which were among the earliest products of the dawning intellectual activity of man. In those early days positive knowledge was not to be had, but the craving after it needed, at all hazards, to be satisfied, and according to the country, or the turn of thought, of the speculator, the suggestion that all living things arose from the mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from some more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient resting-place for his curiosity. The myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... is almost as if a statistician told the tale of Horatius at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the obfuscation is achieved by "a teacher of languages," endlessly lamenting his lack of the "high gifts of imagination and expression." In "Youth" and "Heart of Darkness" the chronicler and speculator is the shadowy Marlow, a "cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are two separate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there are hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic manner. And almost always ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the heathen world began to flow in a theologic channel. All the great heathen thinkers henceforth are theologians. In the times of Nero, for instance, Epictetus the slave, the regenerator of Stoicism, is no mere speculator concerning entities and quiddities, correct or incorrect. He is a slave searching for the secret of freedom, and finding that it consists in escaping not from a master, but from self: not to wealth and power, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... learned the fact of my having been hired to a negro speculator, or a "soul-driver" as they are generally called among slaves, no one can tell my emotions. Mr. Walker had offered a high price for me, as I afterwards learned, but I suppose my master was restrained from selling me by the fact that I was ...
— The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave • William Wells Brown
... has the same set routine of experience. It springs up on land selected and laid out by a real estate speculator. The flimsiest and most combustible of buildings are rushed up. When the town has about five thousand inhabitants and these fire-trap buildings are close enough to burn one another, a fire breaks out and sweeps the whole thing away, destroying ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... favor of its being an animal, though a harmless one; for there had been a land-speculator through the village a few weeks previously, who distributed circulars of a "Female Academy" for the accomplishment of young ladies. These circulars distinctly stated "the use of the piano to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... part of this bitter persecution was the fact that the elder had lent money to almost all the principal members of the congregation. The bold speculator had never been appealed to in vain by any one in difficulty. Some had had a hundred, some fifty, some twenty, some ten—farmers whose corn had been a loss instead of a profit, whose hops had sold for less than the cost of picking them, little tradesmen who had a bill to meet, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... were ten to one that the "Vanderbilt" would sink and destroy her. Mr. Lincoln asked me to name the sum of money for which I would undertake the service; I replied to him that nothing would induce me to become a speculator upon the necessities of the government, and that I would not mention a sum as the value of her charter, but that I would make a gift of her to the government for the service proposed. The President replied, "I accept her." I left him promising that the "Vanderbilt" ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... of the pen!—and it is natural therefore that they should ignore it as much as conveniently possible. A general, whose military tactics succeed in killing a hundred thousand innocent men receives a peerage and a hundred thousand a year,—a speculator who snatches territory and turns it into stock-jobbing material, is called an 'Empire Builder'; but the man whose Thought destroys or moulds a new World, and raises up a new Civilization, is considered beneath a crowned Majesty's consideration! 'Beneath,' ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the speculator and his victim had their knees under the same table—with a mug of hard cider between them. Mingled suspicion and avarice in Abijah's expression argued well for the success of the scheme. As is often the case, his love of money was only surpassed by the credulity with which he gave ear to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... traditional policy of the United States, which rests primarily upon the Monroe Doctrine, and upon the principle of non-interference with European affairs. Finally, a scurrilous attempt has been made by the Republican party to attack Wilson in the flank, by getting a notorious Stock Exchange speculator publicly to proclaim that members of the Administration, who knew beforehand of Wilson's action, had taken advantage to speculate heavily upon it. As this man could, however, produce no proofs, ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... he had sparingly heard) for that it was by some compared to the so much fam'd Spa in Germany. I was not nice to give way to the summons of his desire: the match was soon made, and the next day, accompanied with a worthy Knight and judicious admirer, and curious speculator of rarities, and three other physitians of allowable knowledge, we set forwards for Knaresbrough, being about fourteen miles from Yorke. We made no stay at the towne, but so soone as we could be provided ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... must have an active influence on the ensuing events. I suppose him to have been an American, but to have fled his country and taken refuge in England; he shall have been a man of the Nicholas Biddle stamp, a mighty speculator, the ruin of whose schemes had crushed hundreds of people, and Middleton's father among the rest. Here he had quitted the activity of his mind, as well as he could, becoming a local antiquary, etc., and he has made himself ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... $4,000. He said that the last time he was sold he only brought $1,500. He was born in Alabama. When he was bought he was carried from Alabama to Virginia. It was Col. Elmore who took him. He wanted to go to Alabama again, so Col. Elmore let a speculator take him back and sell him. He stayed there for several years and got homesick for South Carolina. He couldn't get his marster to sell him back here, so he just refugeed back to Col. Elmore's plantation. Col. Elmore ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... latitudinarianism of those times more than Dodwell. Yet no man had more reason to rejoice in it. For, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, a speculator who had dared to affirm that the human soul is by its nature mortal, and does, in the great majority of cases, actually die with the body, would have been burned alive in Smithfield. Even in days ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... speculator no doubt would buy it at a low price during the Slump, stock it with more cattle, work it up during a good season or two, and, when cattle stations boomed once more, sell it at an immense profit. That was what he himself would have done had he been a speculator in similar conditions. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Hardy, instead of being what he is, had only been a cold-hearted speculator, looking merely to the profit, and saying to himself: 'To make the most of my factory, what is needed? Good work—great economy in the raw material—full employment of the workman's time; in a word, cheapness of manufacture, in order to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... yourselves the trouble, excellency," returned Signor Pastrini, with the smile peculiar to the Italian speculator when he confesses defeat; "I will do all I can, and I hope ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... back any change," said the Western man. "He said he bought the tickets of a speculator at two dollars and a ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... volumes with anecdotes of a similar nature; for, in these countries, in which men of illustrious deeds abound, one is never disturbed in society by the fussy pretension and swagger that is apt to mark the presence of a lucky speculator in the stocks. Battles, unlike bargains, are rarely discussed in society. I have already told you how little sensation is produced in Paris by the presence of a celebrity, though in no part of the world is more delicate respect paid to those who have earned renown, whether in ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... frowned, and Cynthia vanished, to be replaced by the Wall Street speculator who had "made a pyramid in Milwaukees." Whence, then, had Cynthia telephoned? Of course, his alert mind hit on a missed mail as the genesis of the run to Hereford early on Sunday, but he asked himself why he had not been told of a changed address. He could not guess that Cynthia would ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... remark also on a class of offences which are still most inadequately punished: "I hope you will follow up your idea about the defective state of the law in reference to women, by some remarks on the inadequate punishment of that ruffian flippantly called by the liners the Wholesale Matrimonial Speculator. My opinion is, that in any well-ordered state of society, and advanced spirit of social jurisprudence, he would have been flogged more than once (privately), and certainly sentenced to transportation for no less a term than the rest of his life. Surely the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... found in his genuine friendship for the Indian, which eventually profited him much, it is true, but, from this time henceforth, was lifelong. He stood in somewhat of a contrast to Blunt, whom General Steele thought unprincipled[933] and who in Southern parlance was "an old land speculator,"[934] and to Curtis, who was soon to show himself, as far as the Indians were concerned, in his true colors. While Phillips was absent from Fort Gibson, Curtis arrived there. He was making a reconnoissance of his command and, as he passed over one reservation after another, he doubtless coveted ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... conversing on military topics, made even the Emperor Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has long been proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the difference is immense between the speculator and the operator, and that the generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in the camp ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... opportunity of operating in the share-market, in which he was known to have extensive dealings. The directors of the railway appear to have been perfectly aware that their servant was living far beyond his salary, but they considered him to be a very successful speculator. Upon this splendid bubble being blown up, Redpath fled to Paris; but, finding that the French authorities were not inclined to protect him, he returned to London ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... golden balance of philosophy the most abstruse—a balance which even itself requires weighing previously, or he will have done nothing that can be received for an estimate of the composite Coleridge. This astonishing man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poet, a profound political speculator, a philosophic student of literature through all its chambers and recesses, was also a circumnavigator on the most pathless waters of scholasticism and metaphysics. He had sounded, without guiding charts, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour. "If," wrote the younger historian, "the tendency of trade to assume a form of mere self-interest be irresistible," etc. "And is it?" comments the elder. "Let us all get prussic acid, then." A recent speculator preferred cyanide of potassium. But if "mere self-interest" comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support from political economy. When Carlyle drew up a petition to the House of Commons ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul |
