"Average" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as a man full of human interests and sympathies. He rarely spoke of himself, even in the most casual way. Most of those with whom he mingled knew merely that he was an agent of the government, and that he kept his own counsel. His wife was to him a type of the average American woman,—pretty, self-complacent, so nervous as to require kind, even treatment, content with feminalities, and sufficiently intelligent to talk well upon every-day affairs. In her society he smiled at her, said "Yes," good-humoredly, to almost everything, and found slight ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... blue gingham dress and her checked apron, her straight hair drawn back from her plain face, was certainly no vision to cause the heart of the average man to pump faster. But as Amos looked at her he saw suddenly something lovelier than her face. She walked to the gate, smoothing the shawl of Mrs. Reist, patting the buff sash of ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... duration of the outward voyage with the present vessel has been 41-1/4 days, including a short stay at Stromness in the Orkneys. The homeward voyage has been accomplished on an average in 23 days, including the coarse up channel to the West India Dock. The whole voyage, including the stay on the coast and visit to six stations there, ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... possessed with an idea, often exaggerated and superstitious, of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule, little or no opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it, they are eager to "read it up," as they might any other machine. That is the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or problems. The intelligent novice, standing ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... he was before, and as he had become after I as Tootmanyoso had reigned about one hundred of your years. Man's life had been lengthened from your average age to one which before the employment of the means enjoined and carried out in my reign ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... of life is uncertain as the patient offers little resistance to intercurrent affections such as influenza and pneumonia. If the average course of the disease is represented by a curve, the greatest height is reached during the second half of the first year and then descends. For the next two to four years it fluctuates with occasional exacerbations of symptoms due to fright ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... such, or much greater exertions, a person who is acquainted with the nature of the soil in this country, and who reflects on the fertility of the lands already in cultivation, and the barrenness of those that are not cultivated, will be very much disposed to doubt whether the whole average produce could possibly be doubled in twenty-five years from the present period. The only chance of success would be the ploughing up all the grazing countries and putting an end almost entirely to the use of animal ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... the great voyager and trader of the Upper Missouri, who, for the last twenty years, has made frequent trips from St. Louis to Fort Benton, has never found the snow drifted enough to interfere with travelling. The average depth is twelve inches, and frequently it does ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... foolish argument that the average newspaper man would make," said Quinlan scornfully. "Mallard is news because the newspapers make news of him—and for no other reason. Let them quit, and he isn't news any more—he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all, he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease to exist, and ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... their dunnage for liquor and weapons, and after finding plenty of both, I bundled the entire outfit into the forecastle and let them sort it the best they could, with the result that they all struck a fair average in the way of clothes. Those who were too drunk to be of any use I let alone, and they made a dirty mess of the clean forecastle. The rest I turned to with some energy and soon had our towing ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... article of considerable value in the jewellery, and have been rated at no less a sum that 1,200 francs daily. 70,000 watches are annually made, only one-twelfth of which are in silver. More than fifty distinct branches are comprised in the various departments, and each workman, on the average, earns about three shillings a-day.—Mr. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... American public—or about any mass of humanity, for that matter—a thing of importance had to be presented dramatically. This, in a sense, was the duty of the elected public servant—to recognize this somewhat childish failing of the average intelligence and make allowances for it. You can do this, of course, Senator Crane told himself, when ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... remarkably protected by their assimilative hues. The stone-chats, the larks, the quails, the goatsuckers and the grouse, which abound in the North African and Asiatic deserts, are all tinted and mottled so as to resemble with wonderful accuracy the average colour and aspect of the soil in the district they inhabit. The Rev. H. Tristram, in his account of the ornithology of North Africa in the first volume of the "Ibis," says: "In the desert, where neither trees, brushwood, nor even undulation of the surface ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... The average worshiper may hurry over his prayers, but the devotee of vanity must not make haste with her toilet. It was quarter of eleven when Annabel was dressed, but since the results were satisfactory, she was untroubled over her lack of punctuality. It was Diantha who fidgeted, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... they will not admit even the possibility of its justice, and will not give it the slightest attention, nevertheless I will endeavor, as well as I can, to show why I believe that Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author.... ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... heresy that the sanctity of the office entitles the incumbent to make a football of the restrictions of prudence and discretion? Elise, I hold that pastors should be as circumspect, as guarded as Roman vestals; and untainted society, guided by even the average standard of propriety, tolerates no latitudinarians among its Levites. I grieve that it is necessary for me to add, that I honour and bow ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... hills is like the Pachadh of Dera Ghazi Khan a broad expanse of strong clayey loam or pat seamed by torrents and cultivated by means of dams and embanked fields. The climate is intensely hot in summer, and the average rainfall only amounts to ten inches. Between one-fourth and one-fifth of the area is cultivated. The ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... giddiness; for some of them might well enough have had their heads turned by a gentleman, and one so handsome, and with a tongue that liked better to say "Angel!" to a woman than anything more suited to the average of the sex. But no girl in the village could think herself for a moment the favoured maiden; for if one had the loveliest eyes in the world, the next had a cheek of roses and velvet, and the third walked like a goddess, and the fourth charmed his soul out of his body every ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... the comment it inspired. In these old and generous letters, which antedate the railroad and the telegraph, critics have discovered one of the most delicate and informing of the lost arts—the epistolary. But to the average hand, wearied by heavy tools, the lightsome goose quill, committing its owner to dubious spelling and clumsy penmanship, and exposing the interior of his intellect, was a dreaded thing. When old Black Hawk signed ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... drinking—from entire ox horns; but a few were still munching bread or gnawing beef bones. There was about an average of two dogs to one man; and these sat in expectant attitudes till a spent bone was flung to them, and then they went for it by brigades and divisions, with a rush, and there ensued a fight which filled the prospect with a tumultuous chaos of plunging heads and bodies and flashing tails, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... do not know whether this was merely an effort at concealment, or an awakened recognition of her duty; but, after the fashion of her sex,—and perhaps in contrast to his,—she was kinder that evening to the average man on account of HIM. He did not, however, notice it; nor did her absence interfere with his now healthy appetite; he finished his meal, and only when he rose to take his hat from the peg above him did he glance around ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was a character, as are many other warrant officers. They must, indeed, besides being sober and steady and good seamen, be somewhat above the average as to intellect to obtain their appointments, while their eccentricities and peculiarities have generally not till then been noticed. Possessing but a limited amount of education, the boatswain of the Plantagenet endeavoured, on attaining his present rank, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... had given me a turn. The hem of her skirt seemed to float over that awful sheer drop, she was so close to the edge. An absurd thing to do. A perfectly mad trick—for no conceivable object! I was reflecting on the foolhardiness of the average girl and remembering some other instances of the kind, when she came into view walking down the steep curve of the road. She had Mrs Fyne's walking-stick and was escorted by the Fyne dog. Her dead-white face struck me with astonishment, so that I forgot to raise my hat. I ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... passed the night. Here I stayed during the heat of the day, more on the horse's account than my own, and towards evening resumed my journey, leading the animal by the bridle as before; and in this manner I proceeded for several days, travelling on an average from twenty to twenty-five miles a day, always leading the animal, except perhaps now and then of an evening, when, if I saw a good piece of road before me, I would mount and put the horse into a trot, which the creature seemed to enjoy as much as myself, showing his satisfaction ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... trip to Bristol for money) for a hundred guineas. Since that he has had a number of commissions in portraits and is barely able to support himself; indeed, he tells me this evening that he has but L20 left. He is a very economical and a most excellent young man. His expenses in a year are, on an average, from L230 to L250; Mr. Allston's (single) expenses not less than L300 per annum, and I know of no artist among all my acquaintance whose expenses in a year are less ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... how much more native intelligence has the white man. Rarely did I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice, still less ask him to repeat the answer. His replies came back sharp and swift as a pelota from a cesta. West Indians not only must hear the question an average of three times but could seldom give the simplest information clearly enough to be intelligible, though ostensibly speaking English. A Spanish card one might fill out and be gone in less time than the negro could be roused from his racial torpor. Yet of the Spaniards on the Zone ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... president of The Federation of Women's Clubs, now brought to Bok's attention the conditions under which the average rural school-teacher lived; the suffering often entailed on her in having to walk miles to the schoolhouse in wintry weather; the discomfort she had to put up with in the farm-houses where she was compelled to live, with the natural result, under those conditions, that it was almost impossible ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... to instruct all young people of both sexes that worthy marriage and parenthood are the highest destiny for average mortals, and they acted on this precept, many of the problems of the day would be solved, the numbers of superfluous women would be greatly reduced, the social evil would perceptibly diminish, the physique of the race would improve, ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... honest, good man. Everybody else, even those who knew her history, thought otherwise; but Mary continued firm in her resolution. As for all the rest of the personages introduced into these pages, they passed through life with an average portion of happiness, which is all that can ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... of Demos is concerned with Richard Mutimer, a young socialist whose vital force, both mental and physical, is well above the average, corrupted by accession to a fortune, marrying a refined wife, losing his money in consequence of the discovery of an unsuspected will, and dragging his wife down with him,—down to la misere in ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... have been useful had she kept it to tie up currant bushes with, when it would have served the double purpose of supporting the branches and frightening away the birds—for it is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative ...
— Reginald • Saki
... been a hard winter, as winters go, but the loss of cows had been above the average and the crop of calves below, and Billy for the first time faced squarely the fact that, in the cattle business as well as in others, there are downs to match the ups. In his castle building, and so far in his ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... the fact that, owing to irregular apportionment, the Government demanded annually from the Jews a larger quota of recruits than was justified by their numerical relation to the general population in the Pale of Settlement. On an average, the Jews furnished twelve per cent of the total number of recruits in the Pale, whereas the Jewish population of the Pale formed but eleven per cent of the total population. The Government further refused to consider the fact that, owing to inaccurate registration, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... heartless and frivolous. She was better fitted to lead and to influence than to be influenced or led. And hence, though not swayed by any habitual sense of moral responsibility, the tone of her character seemed altogether more elevated than the average of fashionable society. ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... deal past the average age, you know,' cried Mr. Filer breaking in as if his patience would bear some trying, but this really was carrying matters a little ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... accepted by the government from the builders," replied Bill. "But you can bet your life we don't often go down that far. When we do, the water is oozing through the thin steel hull and dropping in globules from the sides and top of the vessel. From sixty to a hundred feet is our average plunge." ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... "beats" has been but briefly alluded to in previous lessons, and not analytically discussed as it should be, being so important a feature as it is, in the practical operations of tuning. The average tuner hears and considers the beats with a vague and indefinite comprehension, guessing at causes and effects, and arriving at uncertain results. Having now become familiar with vibration numbers and ratios, the student may, at this juncture, more readily understand the phenomenon, the ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... owe it. All the roads in England, within a few years, were remodelled, and upon principles of Roman science. From mere beds of torrents and systems of ruts, they were raised universally to the condition and appearance of gravel walks in private parks or shrubberies. The average rate of velocity was, in consequence, exactly doubled—ten miles an hour being now generally accomplished, instead of five. And at the moment when all further improvement upon this system had become hopeless, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... years since Tommy had seen any of Mary's writing. A sentence caught his eye, and he read straight through. After all, there are things permitted an officer of the law which might be unseemly in the average citizen. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... unusual talent for avoiding school-reader English and the arts of declamation and for preparing a difficult subject to enter the average brain. The underlying secret of his power was soon apparent to me. He stood always for that great thing in America which, since then, Whitman has called "the divine aggregate," and seeing clearly how every measure would be likely to affect its welfare, ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... one answer to the newspaper men who wrote to me or called at my house. Late in autumn there was an average of three applications a week. One or two gentlemen, I believe, imagined that M. Zola was staying very near me, and, failing to learn anything at my place, they tried to question one or two tradesmen in the neighbourhood. One of these, a grocer, became so irate at the frequent inquiries as to whether ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... to stand up and use it with both hands. She had got into the habit of relieving herself by an audible gasp each time she drove the pestle down. It was not a necessary gasp, only a remonstrative one, as it were, and conveyed more to the intelligent listener than most of the girl's average conversation did. This gasp was also one of the disagreeable sounds which had saluted the ears of Hester on her first ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... their campaign expenses. An analysis of the lists showed that the bulk of the anti-suffrage campaign fund was made up of personal contributions, four-fifths of them from men, and more than three-fifths of the total from 135 men, whose average donation was $235. The slogan of their campaign had been that women did not want to vote. The official figures showed that those who claimed to speak for "80 per cent. of the women" received 80 per cent. of their contributions from men, and not from the rank and file of men but chiefly ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... ten days were spent in rescuing the unfortunate people from the tops of the houses, trees, and patches of rising ground on which they had taken refuge. Then, having done all they were able, and the river having now fallen nearly to its average level, they continued their voyage ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... property of individuals in the world of history. It would be wearisome to enumerate the jurists who have subscribed to this theory in one shape or another, and it is the less necessary to attempt it because Blackstone, who is always a faithful index of the average opinions of his day, has summed them up in his 2nd book ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... The great employers will often do something towards improving what they call the "conditions" of their workers; but a worker might have his conditions as carefully arranged as a racehorse has, and still have no more personal property than a racehorse. If you take an average poor seamstress or factory girl, you will find that the power of chastising her through her property has very considerable limits; it is almost as hard for the employer of labour to tax her for punishment as it is for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tax her for revenue. The ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... whom nevertheless their captain dared not punish properly; who spoilt the good soldiers, and increased the dislike of the reservists for the service. Otherwise the punishment-register might exceed the average demanded, and "that would cause unfavourable conclusions as to the discipline of the battery and the capability of ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... The average age at which women are married is twenty years and at forty they cease to belong to ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... that's not a fair average," the girl objected. "Of course, in the colony one has to be careful, considering that half the shepherds and stockmen are convicts, and I must own that the natives are nearly all thieves; but how could it be otherwise, when England sends all its rogues out to us? You ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... New-Jerusalem, 2 Unitarian, 2 Universalist, 2 Jews' Synagogues, 15 Baptist, 13 Methodist, 17 Episcopalian, and 34 Presbyterian churches, including the Scotch and Reformed Dutch. The remainder are Lutheran, Moravian, Friends, German Reformed, and Independents. The average number of regular attendants is estimated, by such as have made it a subject of special examination, not to exceed 400 to each house; which makes the number of those statedly attending public worship 40,400. After deducting 50,000, for children, for the sick, and for others necessarily ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... permit of travel and residence among them, and favorably disposed to receive instruction in case there should be anyone to impart it to them; the encomenderos shall be allowed to collect a certain portion of the tributes—as, for example, the third part, if the encomiendas are of average size (for, if they are large, it is a great deal to collect the third part), and one half, if they are small—by which we understand a population of three hundred Indians, or a less number. The tributes thus collected are granted ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... there was nothing remarkable in Honor, she was neither more nor less than an average woman of the higher type. Refinement and gentleness, a strong appreciation of excellence, and a love of duty, had all been brought out by an admirable education, and by a home devoted to unselfish exertion, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a tender smile; but he did not see it, for he was gazing at a man who came down the steps from the neighboring cable railway. The newcomer was about thirty years old, of average height, and strongly made. His face was deeply sunburned and he had eyes of a curious dark blue, with a twinkle in them, and dark lashes, though his hair was fair. As he drew nearer, Blanche was struck by something that suggested the family likeness ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... mental delineation of the ideal. By such exercises of mind, a wholesome environment can be built up, even if at first the process seems almost mechanical. But instead of such self-building, out of an infinitude of divine material, the average man is inclined to vacate the control of his being, put his body into the keeping of his doctor, and his soul [himself] into the care of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... my book I find that I am now a member of ten Billsbury Cricket Clubs, to most of which I am a Vice-President. Not bad, considering that my average in my last year at school was four, and that I didn't play more than half-a-dozen times at Oxford. TOLLAND says there are many more Foot-ball Clubs than Cricket Clubs—a pleasant prospect for me in the Autumn. Have also had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... advisers. It was an undertaking shrewdly conceived, skilfully planned, and energetically set going. Beatrice knew the public to which her advertisements appealed; she understood exactly the baits that would prove irresistible to its folly and greed. In respect that it was a public of average mortals, it would believe that business might be conducted to the sole advantage of the customer. In respect that it consisted of women, it would give eager attention to a scheme that permitted each customer to spend her money, and yet to have it. In respect ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... 3' N. The extreme length of Niphon, in a slight curve from N.E. to S.W. is about 815 English miles; or, continuing the measure to the S.W. extremity of Kiusiu at Cape Nomo, about 1020 miles. The breadth is very irregular, but cannot exceed 100 miles on the average.—E.] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... Each girl is expected to turn out 1,800 daily. The wages are $7 a week. In the paper-box factory, more than 200 girls are employed, but I can not ascertain their wages, and therefore suppose them to be low. I know individuals who earn here $6 a week, but that must be above the average. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... closer in the grain, and more valuable than that of the elephant. It is remarkable, moreover, for the extreme hardness of its enamel, which is quite incapable of being cut, and will strike fire with a steel instrument. The large teeth of the hippopotamus weigh on the average 6 lbs., and the small ones about 1 lb. each. Their value ranges from ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... rather the expression of his face that added that mythical year or so. He looked at once self-reliant and reserved. At first glance one might have thought him conceited, in which case one would have done him an injustice. Kenneth had traveled a good deal and had seen more of the world than has the average boy of his age, and this had naturally left its impress on his countenance. I can't honestly say that he was handsome, and I don't think you will be disappointed to hear it. But he was good-looking, with nice, quiet gray eyes, ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... in the forenoon of August 7th, and a few hours later, after making two trips back and forth, we arrived with our baggage on the bank of our new river. At last we had a real river to travel on, its average width being between 100 and 150 yards. None of us, of course, then knew that our real river was the Beaver, and that in taking to it we had stumbled upon an old Indian route to Lake Michikamau. If we had known this, it would have made a great ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... British, American, and German Governments, it is now very well known that in the middle of the Atlantic basin there is a ridge, running north and south, whose depth is less than 1,000 fathoms, while the valleys east and west of it average 3,000 fathoms. At the Azores the North Atlantic ridge becomes broader. The theory is that a part of the ridge-plateau was the Atlantis of Plato that "disappeared swallowed by the waves." (Nature, xv, 158, 553, xxvii, 25; Science, ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... undistinguished are very important by their numbers. These are they who make the look of the artificial world. They are man generalised; as units they inevitably lack something of interest; all the more have they cumulative effect. It would be well if we could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity in the clothing of his average body. Unfortunately he will be slow to be changed. And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are their national customs—and the ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... Moon on the occasion of every "Opposition" (or "Full Moon"). But inasmuch as the Moon's orbit does not lie in quite the same plane as the Earth's, but is inclined thereto at an angle which may be taken to average about 5-1/8 deg., the actual facts are different; that is to say, instead of there being in every year about 25 eclipses (solar and lunar in nearly equal numbers), which there would be if the orbits had identical planes, ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... hold mothers' meetings, teach night-schools, hold Bible-classes separately for men, women, and children; hold special classes for working women and girls who are kept busily employed during the day, and during the winter months have a weekly average of more than nine thousand attendants on their services. They are solving the problem of "how to save the masses" by resolving the masses into individuals, and then influencing these individuals by the power of ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... a man past middle life, but noted for his practical common sense. Like all others of this noted family, he never rose high in either social or political circles. They were simply farmers or small tradesmen, with more than average intelligence, patriotic and honest as their great progenitor, who came over ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... these, of course, were the very poorest class, who lived then, as now, in those mud hovels, which are the astonishment and reprobation of foreign tourists. There were 24,000 families who had "one chimney," and 16,000 who had more than one. The average number appears to be four. Dublin Castle had 125, and the Earl of Heath's house, twenty-seven. There were, however, 164 houses in Dublin which had more ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... measure of the largest of them, one was six feet six inches in height, several were five feet five inches, but the average was five ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Blackwell's Island for three months, and of course when there he would be unable to annoy Rose, or contrive any plots for carrying her off. This would be a great relief to Rufus, who felt more than ever how much the presence of his little sister contributed to his happiness. If he was better than the average of the boys employed like himself, it was in a considerable measure due to the fact that he had never been adrift in the streets, but even in the miserable home afforded by his step-father had been unconsciously influenced ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... tall and fair, with reddish hair that massed itself above his forehead in a shiny curl, and was supplemented by a waving auburn mustache. His scrupulous dress, in the fashion of the foppish clerk, gave an air of distinction to the circle on the steps. Most of this circle were so average as scarcely to make an impression at first sight,—a few young women who earned their livelihood in business offices, a few decayed, middle-aged bachelors, a group of widows whose incomes fitted the rates of the Keystone, and several families that had given up the struggle ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Councillor Barlow in reply; "And how are you going to get new blood, with transfer fees as high as they are now? You can't get even an average good player for less than L200. Where's the money to come from? Anybody want to lend a thousand or so ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... good or bad, there are fifty prisoners, who, on an average, bring you in a thousand ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... leaked under the pressure, 1,200 pounds to the square inch being the maximum the 8-thread pipe would stand. This trouble has been remedied by the 9-thread, taper-cut pipe of the present day, which is tested at the mill to 1,500 pounds pressure, while the average duty required is 1,200 pounds; as the iron used in the manufacture of this line-pipe will average a tensile test strain of 55,000 pounds per square inch, the safety factor is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... well-invented narrative. Virtue must be represented as producing, at the long run, happiness; and vice, misery; and the accidental events, that in real life interrupt this tendency, are anomalies which, though true individually, are as false generally as the accidental deformities which vary the average outline of the human figure. They would be as much out of place in a fictitious narrative, as a wen in an academic model. But any direct attempt at moral teaching, and any attempt whatever to give scientific information will, we fear, unless managed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... advertisements are vulgar is not an error. Again, it is true that the English poor are harried and insecure, with insufficient instinct for armed revolt, though you will be wrong if you say that they are occupied literally in shooting the moon. It is true that the average Englishman is too much attracted by aristocratic society; though you will be in error if you quote dining with Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In more ways than one you forget ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... love their lives just as much as we do, and they long to go back and spend their days amongst their loved ones. It is only rare that cowardice is seen, and it is rarer still for them to make any boast; the average Englishman is not given to boasting; he has his duty to do, and he just does it, saying ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... ideas they had applied to my education they saw something of a triumph for themselves. Certain it is, I was not loath to let myself be persuaded that I had great intellectual powers, and that I was a man very much above the average. My dear instructors were soon to gather the sad fruit of their imprudence, and it was already too late to check the flight of my ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... can scarcely speak English, while Mr. Gilfillan speaks the Chippewa as fluently as his mother-tongue. They have few quarrels, no thieving, no drunkenness, no abject poverty. They are not more perfect than others of human kind, but according to their light and sphere they are as good as a similar average of whites anywhere. The wise purpose is to make them kind, moral, educated and industrious Indians, not make-believe white men, and the work is doing and promising well ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... was found that there were in France at least five millions and a half of families, or about twenty-seven millions of souls, who were proprietary families, and that of these about four millions of families had each less than nine English acres to the family on the average. Of course, a vast majority of these twenty-seven millions of persons, though they might be interested in some small portion of the soil, were really poor, and multitudes of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... present. Man, as conceived by Montaigne, is of all creatures the most variable, unstable, inconstant. The species includes the saint and the brute, the hero and the craven, while between the extremes lies the average man, who may be anything that nature, custom, or circumstances make him. And as the species varies indefinitely, so each individual varies endlessly from himself: his conscience controls his temperament; his temperament betrays his conscience; external events ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... estimate I reckon there are at least from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsies in the United Kingdom. Apart from London, if I may take ten of the Midland counties as a fair average, there are close upon 3,000 Gipsy families living in tents and vans in the by-lanes, and attending fairs, shows, &c.; and providing there are only man, wife, and four children connected with each charmless, cheerless, wretched abodes called domiciles, this would ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... the taste, enterprise, and intelligence of the wide-awake American, but, for the sake of my message, I yield in some part to their warnings. Therefore I have so presented my material that the miscalled, and, I verily believe, badly slandered "average reader," may have his "popular" book by omitting the note on the Appreciation of Scenery, and the several notes explanatory of scenery which are interpolated between groups of chapters. If it is true, as I have been told, that the "average reader" would omit ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... all sinners in this regard the State is the chief offender. Under the Code of the National Board of Education a national schoolmaster or mistress is bound to teach cleanliness and decency by precept and example. He or she is paid an average wage (without allowances) of thirty shillings or one pound a week according to sex; and out of that an appearance befitting superior station has to be maintained—for in Ireland the schoolmaster has always ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... I got the puppy home. I imagine I had more pertinacity than the average Folk, or else I should not have succeeded. They laughed at me when they saw me lugging the puppy up to my high little cave, but I did not mind. Success crowned my efforts, and there was the puppy. He was a plaything such as none of the Folk possessed. He learned rapidly. When I played with him ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... the voice of infallibility has been solemnly lifted up. It is to the Pope in ecumenical council that we look, as to the normal seat of infallibility: now there have been only eighteen such councils since Christianity was—an average of one to a century—and of these councils some passed no doctrinal decree at all, others were employed on only one, and many of them were concerned with only elementary points of the Creed. The Council of Trent embraced ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... great conjuror; but at that moment, like Audrey, "he thanked the gods he was not poetical." If there be any one thing more than another to make an "every-day man" content with his average lot, it is the exhibition of ambitious inferiority, striving for distinction it can never attain; just given sufficient perception to desire the glory of success, without power to measure the strength that can achieve it; ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... the grading system—so much per bushel for this grade, so much for that, according to the fluctuations of supply and demand upon the world's markets. But the average farmer at that time knew little or nothing about what went on in the great exchanges of the cities; there was no means of learning the intricacies of the grain business and many farmers even did not know what a grain exchange was. All such a man ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... miles ought to be performed by a fast sailing ship in twelve weeks, at the rate of a thousand miles per week, which is the fair average running of a good ship on distant voyages; but it is better to allow something for light winds and calms near the Equator, and to say in round numbers one hundred days in all, which is ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... production has gone the growth in the average number of wage-earners in manufacturing establishments. Each city made a decided advance in the average number of wage-earners in manufactures during the twenty years from 1880 to 1900. In that period, out of fourteen cities, two increased over 300 per cent ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... operation was repeated at the regular distance of fifteen years. The lands were measured by surveyors, who were sent into the provinces; their nature, whether arable or pasture, or vineyards or woods, was distinctly reported; and an estimate was made of their common value from the average produce of five years. The numbers of slaves and of cattle constituted an essential part of the report; an oath was administered to the proprietors, which bound them to disclose the true state of their affairs; and their attempts to prevaricate, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... him I took him for a clergyman, and told him of it later. He felt rather flattered than otherwise by the mistake, and I have no doubt that his modest nature would at once refer to points on which the average clergyman would probably be his superior. Some artists are lost in admiration of their own works, so that the way to please them is to praise what they have done themselves; but the way to please Leslie ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... extreme inequality and roughness of the ground must also be taken into account when we are disposed, as I for one have often been disposed, to wonder beyond measure at the apathetic ignorance of average students in regard of the abundant treasure to be gathered from this wildest and most fruitful province in the poetic empire of England. And yet, since Charles Lamb threw open its gates to all comers in the ninth year of the nineteenth ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... lost in the maze of old Naples where he well knew the houses of his friends who would hide him. The man who is known to have committed that crime—Francesco Paoli—escaped to New York. We are looking for him to-day. He is a clever man, far above the average—son of a doctor in a town a few miles from Naples, went to the university, was expelled for some mad prank—in short, he was the black sheep of the family. Of course over here he is too high-born to work with his hands on a railroad or in a trench, and not educated ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... through every orchard beside her beloved Vertumnus; Pan and his sylvan brood sported behind the foliage of every copse. She would as soon have thought of questioning their presence as of doubting her own being. Marcia believed; the average Roman patrician affected to believe and indulged in his polite, Hellenic doubts; the Carthaginian priest, while he believed, with all Marcia's fervour, in a theology to which Marcia's was tender as the divine fellowship ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... senseless carousing, while to-morrow and next day will witness a fresh harvest of death from them. How we can become accustomed to anything! Awhile ago ten a day dying of cholera struck terror to all hearts; but now the tide has surged up gradually until the deaths average over a hundred daily, and everybody is getting accustomed to it. Gentlemen make themselves agreeable to ladies by reciting the number of deaths in this house or that. This together with talk of funerals, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... much is a boy worth in money? The United States Labour Bureau in 1914 estimated the average cost of rearing a boy to the age of sixteen was then $1,325. It must average at least $1,500 now. Well, fellows, that is what you cost; are you worth it? I am talking of actual, not sentimental, values. Father and mother wouldn't take a million dollars for ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... Royal Veterinary College at Dresden, while the chapters on Carriage and Wagon Building, Painting, Varnishing, are by Charles F. Adams, one of the most successful builders in Wisconsin. The language employed is so simple that any young man of average ability can, in a short time, become proficient in all of these useful and profitable occupations. Each chapter is fully illustrated, there being more than ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill
... floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed by a stately cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the encomiums of the faithful chum. He stood two inches taller than the average Give and Take athlete; his dark hair curled; his eyes and his teeth flashed whenever he bestowed his frequent smiles. The young men of the Clover Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as much as they did to its prowess, its ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... waived the matter of yesterday. "In a republic," she said, "the people think they can govern themselves. But they do it very badly. The average intelligence among people in the mass is ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and unembarrassed. That is the awful thing about women—they refuse to be emotional at emotional moments, upon some such ludicrous pretext as there being someone else there. But MacIan was in a condition of criticism much less than the average masculine one, being in fact merely overturned by the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... treatment of the inmates of the Orphan Asylum, at Albany, is one, upon which all, who have the care of young children, should deeply ponder. During the first six years of the existence of this Institution, its average number of children was eighty. For the first three years, their diet was meat once a day, fine bread, rice, Indian puddings, vegetables, fruit, and milk. Considerable attention was given to clothing, fresh air, and exercise; and they were bathed ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... the crypt are about 10 feet thick, and the aisle floor is on an average 8 feet below the level of the soil on the outside of the building. The centre part is divided by two rows of small columns, irregularly placed, from which spring arches carrying the floor of the choir above; the bases and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... some private good for the upbuilding of some community good. It is in such exercises that the fibre of democracy grows sound and strong. There is, after all, in this world no real good for which we do not have to surrender something. In the city the average voter is never conscious of any surrender. He never realises that he is giving anything himself for good schools or good streets. Under such conditions how can you expect self-government? No ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... any one for this. I did not have to rent a telephone. I could have let people come to the house. A great many do come to the house. On the average, it takes the person who comes to the house just one hour to state a proposition that could be put in a six-word telegram or 'phoned in one minute. The visitor always begins with a few neat remarks about "Pigs and Pigs," which is not the name of the story, tells how his grandmother laughed ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... reference, for the purposes of caution and public safety, underwent several important variations before passing into my hands. The reason of this precaution will be readily appreciated by the thoughtful however great may be the disappointment it provides to the adventurous. A memory of average length will recall the high percentage of disaster, of wrecked hopes and of ruin pursuant upon the gold rush to Klondyke at the close of the last century. Barely one man in a hundred made a living—barely one in a thousand saw the yellow specks in his shovel that shone so bright among ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... eyes. His clothes were new, but of rather poor material and ill- fitting, scarcely protecting him from the cutting wind. Because of his short legs and arms, his coat sleeves and trousers, cut for the average boy, were too long for ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... pursuits are neglected, if not totally shelved, for the time being. This transition stage requires great tact. He must not startle her by too sudden a development. Some women may like to be taken by storm, to be married by capture as it were, but the average girl likes to have time to enjoy being wooed and won. She basks in the gradual unfolding of his love; she rejoices over each new phase of their courtship; she lingers longingly on the threshold of her great happiness. She is intoxicated by the sense of her own power; she is touched ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... Since then, however, his money had given out, and he was obliged to content himself with the ordinary prison dietary. But Gurn was not fastidious; this man whom Lady Beltham had singled out, or accepted, as her lover had often given proofs of an education and an intelligence above the average, yet now he appeared quite at ease in the atmosphere of ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... "The average width of the river rather exceeds that of the Thames at Greenwich. In parts it is much broader; and then there is usually a green island, covered with trees, dividing it into two streams. Occasionally we stop for a few minutes at a small town, or village (I ought ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... stayed very long at Homewood, unless he were hopelessly unfit. From ten days to three weeks was the average stay: then, like ships that pass in the night, the "Once-Tireds," drifted away. But very few forgot them. Little notes came from the Fronts, in green Active Service envelopes: postcards from Mediterranean ports; letters from ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... being, up to that point, about three miles wide, with a fine deep channel averaging perhaps a quarter of that width up as far as abreast the southern extremity of Monpanga island, where this deep channel terminates, and the average depth of the entire stream dwindles to about six fathoms for the next fourteen miles, the channel at the same time narrowing down to a width varying from about two miles to less than half-a-mile in some parts, notably at the spot where it begins to thread its devious way among the ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... At the last annual sale at Rambouillet, the average price of a good Spanish ram was no more than 412 francs or L17 sterling. The ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... in the ca-on of San Francisquito, forty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles, and this was the first California mine that produced any considerable amount of metal. It was worked for ten years and then abandoned for richer diggings in the Sacramento Valley. The average yield for the ten years was probably about six thousand dollars. After the return of the Wilkes exploring expedition of 1842, James D. Dana, its mineralogist, mentioned places in California at which he had observed or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... mail coach roads had not then reached—where the post came in only three days in the week—and where the mail cart either broke down, lost a wheel, had a tired horse, was overturned, or robbed, at an average once a fortnight—our hero had no alternative but patience, and the amusement of calculating dates and chances upon his restless sofa. His taste for reading enabled him to pass agreeably some of the hours of bodily confinement, which men, and young men ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... addition to the large plantations, cultivated by several tenant farmers, the number of small farms tilled by independent owners or renters increased. Due to this tendency and to the opening of many small holdings in the Southwest, the size of the average farm diminished, so that the small farmer began to replace the plantation ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... answered, "that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to the tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist 'em into sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've added to the average life of ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... hundred pounds contain about eighty-five pounds of nutritious matter; of rice, ninety pounds; of rye, eighty; of barley, eighty-three; of beans, eighty-nine to ninety-two; peas, ninety-three; lentils, ninety-four; meat (average), thirty-five; potatoes, twenty-five; beets, fourteen; carrots, ten; cabbage, seven; greens, six; ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... clear that in 1850 as in 1860 the average Northern senator or anti-slavery minister or poet was ill-informed or careless as to the danger of secession, and that Webster and the Southern Unionists were well-informed and rightly anxious. Theodore Parker illustrated the bitterness that ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... assumed that the fortunate maiden who was destined to become his wife would join in the chorus with average ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... almost sorry that Larry fell from the skies to help out your gardening, for here is a young German who has come from a distance, with a note from a man I know well, applying for work at the quarry; but there will be nothing suitable for him there for several months, for he's rather above the average. He would have done very well for you, as, though he speaks little English, I make out that his father was an under-forester in the fatherland. As it is, I'm taking him to the farm with me for the night and will try to think of how I may help him ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a country which will one day produce the choicest race in history," he began, "you have a blend of nationalities. We have a little corner in Scotland where several strains were merged, and the men were finer and the women fairer than the average. But as for going to Belgium, I must tell you that we have many more desiring to go than we can possibly find ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... rebellion of manhood, and the disappointment of age, divulged in the storied lives of the few hundred names admitted to be British poets; and the reading of whose works is, as a rule, a task of weariness. The career of Gay is a very fair one as an average of the poetic. He mainly avoided the enumerated ills—enumerated ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... the water-clock should be employed for estimating the pulse frequency. His idea was that the amount of water which flowed while a hundred beats of the pulse were counted, should be weighed, and this weight compared with that of the average weight of water which flowed while a hundred beats of the normal pulse of a number of individuals of the same age and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... while if a sudden alteration occurred in our plans, a half-franc telegram told him the news, and our bread never failed to be at the right place on the right day. The bread sufficient for four people, carriage thereof, and a trifle for commission (i.e. paper and trouble) cost on an average 2 frs. 50 cents per diem, which was a little over 80 centimes each. Perhaps in time hotel-keepers will resort to this method; in fact, we were assured that it would be so; but in the meantime every traveller is recommended to do so ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... terrible tea toper," said Colville, stirring his cup in front of the old lady whom his relations to the ladies at Palazzo Pinti had interested so much. "I don't think I drink less than ten cups a day; seventy cups a week is a low average for me. I'm really beginning to look down at ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... concise and laconic of the great languages. Greek, French and German are all more expansive, more syllabically copious. Latin alone may be said to equal, or surpass English in concentration, because, although Latin words are longer on the average, by their greater inflection they cover a larger number of English words. This power of English to attain expression with a minimum expenditure of energy in written speech is one of its chief claims ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... that it would be so, and felt it a blessing that a suitable home had been vacant in their uncle's parish. Then, of course, notice had to be taken of the four other girls, whom Gwendolen had always felt to be superfluous: all of a girlish average that made four units utterly unimportant, and yet from her earliest days an obtrusive influential fact in her life. She was conscious of having been much kinder to them than could have been expected. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... patient, faithful, watchful work of the human hand guided at every instant by the human eye. And this Japanese tracery is by no means hideous. The plants and animals are well studied from reality, and truer than the average of popular designs in Europe a century ago, if not now. It is simple justice to add that for workmanlike thoroughness this structure does not suffer in comparison with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... great difference between a lot of rope-dancers and a company of players, or, if there should be, the advantage was quite in favour of the former. We see the same commercial spirit to-day, when the average manager rents his house for one week to an Irving or a Mansfield, and perhaps turns it over, the following Monday night, to the tender mercies of performing dogs and cats. 'Tis all grist that comes to his mill, and what cares he whether that grist ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man's refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the theory that the worst peace was better than the best war, and therefore she has suffered all the evils of the worst war and the worst peace. The average Chinaman took the view that China was too proud to fight and in practice made evident his hearty approval of the sentiments of that abject pacifist song: "I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier," a song which should have as a companion piece one entitled: ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... the accuracy of the shooting of American Indians; but here we have one who shot ever since childhood, who lived by hunting, and must have been as good, if not better, than the average. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... a living here for myself and my two children. You see what it is—just a novelty and notion store in a country town. I speak of this because it is the important thing. I have known for a long time that Theodore's playing was not the playing of the average boy, musically gifted. So what you tell me does not altogether surprise me. But when you say Dresden—well, from Brandeis' Bazaar in Winnebago, Wisconsin, to Auer, in Dresden, Germany, is a long ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... ancient name and wide estates gave greater opportunities for taking a large share in public affairs than when the fifth Earl attained his majority. It was natural, therefore, that a young man who was recognised by his friends as above the average should be regarded as a ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... when shorthanded we had used skilled nurses; but when Mrs. Fontenette grew haggard and we mentioned them, she said distressfully: "O! no hireling hands! I can't bear the thought of it!" and indeed the thought of the average hired "fever-nurse" of those days was not inspiring; so I served as her alternate when she would accept any and throw herself on the couch Senda had ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... quarterly expenditure of ammunition does not vary materially. In case we were at war, a single action might cause us to expend in a few hours as much as half a dozen quarterly peace allowances. There is a certain average number of days that a ship of a particular class is under way in a year, and the difference between that number and 365 is, of course, the measure of the length of time she is at anchor or in harbour. ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... of the work to be done in discharge of the obligation; but the obligation is universal. We are not at liberty to choose whether we shall do our part in spreading the name of Jesus Christ. It is a debt that we owe to God and to men. Is that the view of duty which the average Christian man takes? I am afraid it is not. If it were, our treasuries would be full, and great would be the multitude of them that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... was fastened a number of eagle feathers, and of course he wore two or three necklaces of beads and wampum. There was nothing unusual about the pony he was riding, except that it was larger and in better condition than the average Indian horse, but the one he was leading—undoubtedly his war horse—was a most beautiful animal, one of the ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... salt of the earth is something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate for the waste of human life as the journal of an average Quaker. Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... and other persons of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) the average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I accept the issue. We can only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellowmen, or it would make us ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... place in the East for "running a muck." There are said to be one or two a month on the average, and five, ten, or twenty persons are sometimes killed or wounded at one of them. It is the national, and therefore the honourable, mode of committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the fashionable way ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... off the sleigh, Chillingwood," said he. "Rainy-Moon's above the average Indian for honesty, but, nevertheless, we don't need to take chances. And," as the younger man rose and stretched himself, "food is good on occasions. What does Mr. Zachary ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... said that she had known a girl to live for a week on a five-cent loaf of bread a day, going from shop to shop in search of the one bit of work she was able to do. For by this time division of work had come in, and the average machine operator was paid as badly as the ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... a good daughter," said the Colonel sedately, "and is possessed of sense beyond the average of womenkind. She knows the advantages this match offers. Sir Charles Carew can give her a title, and a name that's as old as her own. He is a man of parts and distinction, has served the King, is familiar with the courts of Europe. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... it meets. Up to the beginning of the sixteenth century I have been more careful to explain the scattered relics of an earlier time than during the years when Rouen was filled with exquisite examples of the builder's art. After that century there is so little of distinction, and so much of average merit, that my story languishes beneath a load of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... possibilities were many of the observations that had been recorded. But these few appliances made up the meagre kit of tools with which the nineteenth century entered upon its task of acquiring the arts and conveniences now such an intimate part of "human nature's daily food" that the average American to-day pays more for his electrical service than ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Telephone system: above-average system domestic: trunk network depends primarily on microwave radio relay international: satellite earth station - 1 Intelsat ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the cavalry column reached the bridge over Lodge Pole Creek a march of about twenty-five miles had been made, which is an average day's journey for cavalry troops when nothing urgent hastens ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... and that is a very just complaint. It is true that most of the books on Socialism and other important subjects are written by students for students, but I shall try to avoid that difficulty and write as a plain, average man of fair sense to another plain, average man ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... astronomers was reporting to Ianito, referring to a sheet of calculations he held in nervous fingers. "Our orbital velocity has increased greatly," he was saying, "and the new path lies at an average distance of eighty-three erds from the mother planet. According to my figures it will require six more charges to free us from her pull and another to ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... and previous training, Goethe was indisposed to profit by professorial prelections, however admirable. He had brought with him to the university a store of miscellaneous information which deprived them of the novelty they might have for the average listener. "Application," he says, moreover, "was not my talent, since nothing gave me any pleasure except what came to me of itself." So it was that by the close of his first semester his attendance at lectures became a jest, and the professors the butt of his wit. It ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... "sup full of horrors." After a preliminary course of disagreeable and frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision, without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least (on an average) every second night in ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... to Meridian Street, and Mrs. Owen sent the horses into town at a comfortable trot. They traversed the new residential area characterized by larger grounds and a higher average of architecture. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... still unexplored, and Susie said: "Then lead me into the most far-away part of it!" And when he told her, during their first meal together, that the human brain was estimated to contain half a billion cells and that the number of brain impressions collected by an average person during fifty years of life aggregated three billion, one hundred and fifty-five million, seven hundred and sixty thousand, Susie sighed and said it was no wonder women were so contradictory. Which impressed me as very ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... who have no ambitions. Yes, there are obscure persons who devote their whole lives to their professions and who never ask for anything for themselves. But you can take my word for it that they are the exceptions, and that our Court of Mauleon, which you yourself have seen, represents about the average of our judicial morality. I exaggerate, you think? Well! Let us suppose that in all France there are only fifty Courts like this. Suppose there are only twenty—suppose there is only one. It is still one too many! Why, my young friend, what sort of an idea have you ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... hatching and nursing crime. Startling complication of statistics, obtained from the replies of over 1,000 prison governors in the United States to a circular letter addressed to them, and a summary shows that the general average of 909 replies received from the license states, gives the proportion of crime due to drink at no less than seventy-two per cent; the average from 108 officials in Prohibition states giving the per centage at thirty- seven. A considerable number of the latter ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... I'm wrong. I believe I want something that's very nearly impossible. I've always had a sort of ideal or dream of making an ordinary average married life ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... back and scanned the faces of his interviewers, faces that would have been oddly humanoid were it not for the elongated snouts and pointed, sharp-toothed jaws. The average Tepoktan was slightly under Kinton's height of five-feet-ten, with a long, supple trunk. Under the robes their scholars affected, the shortness of their two bowed legs was not obvious; but the sight of the short, thick arms ...
— Exile • Horace Brown Fyfe
... necessity of fitting a new social organization, as we did once fit the old organization, to the happiness and prosperity of the great body of citizens; for we are conscious that the new order of society has not been made to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity of the average man. The life of the nation has grown infinitely varied. It does not center now upon questions of governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It centers upon questions of the very structure and operation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... fully into the chemistry of food, bacteriology, etc., would tend to cause confusion in the mind of the average school girl, and possibly create a distaste for knowledge containing ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... clearly proven by Catholic and Protestant historians, that to deny it would be to betray a gross ignorance of history. Even at the present day, the Papal States, with a population of only about 2,000,000, contain seven universities, with an average attendance of 660 students, whilst Prussia, with a population of 14,000,000, and so renowned for her education, has only seven! Again, in every street in Rome there are, at short distances, public primary schools for the education of the children ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... day nor the completeness of night reached them, they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward and forward down the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... for twenty years), the barracks for a handful of black labourers, a big store and warehouse with sheet-iron roofs, and a bungalow inhabited by the manager and his two clerks. They are the white population. An average of one man out of the three is always to be found down with fever. The job at Goboto is a hard one. It is the policy of the company to treat its patrons well, as invading companies have found out, and it is the task of the manager and clerks to do the treating. ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London |
