"Fitfully" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gathered, by a not unnatural trick of imagination, about this man—whose manners, sentiments, and character seemed to have so much in common with her own. This idea still presented itself to her mind fitfully and vaguely, like a dream; yet from that dream, which always ended in a sigh, Julie awoke to greater wretchedness, to keener consciousness of the latent anguish brooding beneath her ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... time, but a change wrought avowedly "that all might enjoy equal liberty" is especially notable in the twelfth century. Cases like Kebel's were everywhere sounding the knell of feudal privilege and of national division, long before freedom fronted John by the sedges of Runnymede. Slowly and fitfully through the reign of his father the new England which had grown out of conquered and conquerors woke to self-consciousness. It was this awakening that Abbot Sampson saw and noted with his clear, shrewd eyes. To him, we ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the leisure of Sunday would secure her a more appreciative welcome. The wind no longer blew from the chill and still snowy North, but from lands that had long since responded to the sun's genial power. Therefore, the breeze that came and went fitfully was like a warm, fragrant breath, and truly it seemed to breathe life and beauty into all things. During the morning hours the cluster buds of the cherry burst their varnished-looking sheath, revealing one-third of the little green stems on which ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... tired, and almost parched for a drink. He had dozed fitfully through the night, and his eyes smarted and burned under ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... contracted for the construction of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway in Ohio, a work of 244 miles. Operations were at once commenced, and were pushed forward with varying success, funds of the company coming in fitfully. In 1860, the same firm took contracts for the construction of the Pennsylvania portion of the line, ninety-one miles, and next for the New York portion. Work on both these contracts was commenced in February, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... this being a narrow turning. Many-storied buildings, looking like warehouses, were on either side of this; their height was such that the merest strip of sky could be seen when Mavis looked up. She then came to an open door. Above this was a fanlight, which fitfully lighted a passage terminating in a flight of uncarpeted stone steps. It was all very uninviting. The girl looked about for someone of whom to make further inquiries. No one came in or went out; all that Mavis could see was one or two over-dressed ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... thrilling. But when middle age arrives, often prematurely, they forget the thrill and excitements; they become obsessed by certain other lesser things that are deficient in any kind of Cosmic Vitality. The thrill goes out of life: a light dies down and flickers fitfully; existence goes on at a low ebb—something has been lost. From this numbed condition is born much of the blind anguish ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... towards freeing Scotland. It may be that God has willed it that this cruel blow, which has been struck at me, shall be the means of bringing this about. Hitherto, although I have hated the English and have fought against them, it has been but fitfully and without order or method, seeing that other things were in my heart. Henceforth I will live but for vengeance and Scotland. Hitherto the English have regarded me as an outlaw and a brigand. Henceforth ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... painful silence; they seemed to be deprived of the power of speech or action by the Squire's vehemence; the wind howled about the house fitfully, and was still, ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... rain—the ceaseless downpour which had for the time flooded everywhere—had passed, and water in abnormal places rather trickled than ran. We were now beginning to be in the sloppy rather than the deluged stage. There was plenty of light to see by, for the moon had begun to show out fitfully through the masses of flying clouds. The uncertain light made weird shadows with the shrubs and statues in the garden. The long straight walk which leads from the marble steps is strewn with fine ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... slept fitfully on his bench until the young thugs of the day watch straggled in. Then he achieved the change of his uniform to civilian garments, with only the accustomed minor maltreatment at the hands of these tormentors. True, with sportive affectations—yet ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the external air; echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman's skull, a number of men laboured like giants. Others, reposing ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... within three years—within two—within one. How can we stand amazed at poor Rick? A young man so unfortunate," here he fell into a lower tone, as if he were thinking aloud, "cannot at first believe (who could?) that Chancery is what it is. He looks to it, flushed and fitfully, to do something with his interests and bring them to some settlement. It procrastinates, disappoints, tries, tortures him; wears out his sanguine hopes and patience, thread by thread; but he still ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... daisies—Bert had thought that a too-expensive paper—scarred with great gouts of smoke, and she saw the tangled pipes of her own bathroom curve and drop down in a blackened mass, and all the time her arm encircled Anne, and the child's heart beat less and less fitfully, and Nancy's soul was steeped ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle Of the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street, And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... new presence came into Olga's room, and the figure of her dread appeared no more before her waking eyes. Not at first did she realize the change, for it was only fitfully that her brain could register any definite impression. But one day when strong hands lifted her, something of familiarity in the touch caught her wavering intelligence. She looked up and saw a rugged ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... light was cautiously removed, and everybody took care to keep out of its reflection. By this time the crisis of the position was at hand, the cavalry exhibited very variable inclinations, some to run away, others to shoot Booth without a summons, but all excited and fitfully silent. At the house near by the female folks were seen collected in the doorway, and the necessities of the case provoked prompt conclusions. The boy was placed at a remote point, and the summons repeated ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... departing—the smile Of the sunset gave token the tempest had ceased; And the lightning yet fitfully gleamed for a while On the cloud that sank sullen and ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... fitfully, but the far challenge and the halting of the waggon usually awoke her in darkness feebly lit by the rays of a candle-set lantern, swung up inquiringly by the corporal of some guard. And, "Pass forward, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... fitfully, sang fitfully, moved about the house uneasily; and at last, when it grew late, and she was bored and Wade did not arrive, she pronounced to herself that he had been detained ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... dark excepting where our candles cast a faint glimmer about our immediate neighbourhood, and far below we now hear the voices, as well as the rattling of the convicts' chains, more continuously and distinctly, and see numerous lights dancing about fitfully in small clusters. Those are the candles of the convicts who are cutting rock-salt in gangs on the floor of the cave.[75] Continuing our descent down another flight, or rather series of flights, of stairs, we at length arrive at that floor which is ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... uncomfortable night for all of them. The floor was their only bed, and their only covering some empty bags that had contained supplies. But even under these circumstances they managed to doze off fitfully. ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... deep-voiced, soft-footed, mountain carpenters who worked leisurely and fitfully with Creed were always mightily amused by the exactness of ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... fitfully and twist, Shutters rattle and carpets heave, Slime is the dust of yestereve, And in the streaming mist Fishes might seem to fin a passage if ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Where the steep upland dips into the marsh, Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing, Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank. The friend of all the winds, wide-armed he towers And glints his steely aglets in the sun, Or whitens fitfully with sudden bloom Of leaves breeze-lifted, much as when a shoal 120 Of devious minnows wheel from where a pike Lurks balanced 'neath the lily-pads, and whirl A rood of silver bellies to the day. Alas! no acorn from the British ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... lay hope. Battling for life during harrowing months of imprisonment and danger and hardship it had fitfully flickered and flamed only to sink after each renewal to smaller proportions than before and now it had died out entirely leaving only cold, charred embers that Jane Clayton knew would never again be rekindled. Hope was dead as she faced Lu-don, the high priest, in her prison quarters ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... seen through the mist of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream: 'Tis the Star-Spangled Banner; O, long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the home of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... man was a giant with moon-splendid eyes. There was a power about the face, the power of darkness. The sun never shone upon it—only the moon, the moon. But for her wan glimmer it was without light. Kit thought of a wild night at sea, the moon gleaming fitfully on savage waters. The ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... on her solicitously, and in silence, now and then stealing furtive glances at her from under the shadow of their black sombreros. The dark night settled down like a blanket. There were no stars. The wind moaned fitfully among the pines, and all about that lonely, hidden recess was ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... place flared the camp fires of the Onondaga "long-house," and the resinous scent of the burning pine drifted across the fetid London air. I saw the tall, copper-skinned fire-keeper of the Iroquois council enter, the circle of light flung fitfully against the black surrounding woods. I have seen their white bishops, but none so regal, so august as he. His garb of fringed buckskin and ermine was no more grotesque than the vestments worn by the white preachers in high places; he did not carry a ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... sincere religious feeling which showed itself in the general conduct of society. Europe was just emerging from that gloom which had settled down so closely upon the older civilizations after the downfall of the glory that was Rome, and the light of the new day sifted but fitfully through the dark curtains of that restless time. Liberty had not as yet become the shibboleth of the people, superstition was in the very air, the knowledge of the wisest scholars was as naught, compared with what we know to-day; ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... with the phrase she knew had all power over me. We shivered miserably throughout the night. Now and again I fitfully slept, but the pain of the cold always aroused me. How Maud could stand it was beyond me. I was too tired to thrash my arms about and warm myself, but I found strength time and again to chafe her hands and feet to restore the circulation. And still she pleaded with ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... conscious of a coming tempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wall they have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdriven with dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay, now leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully and fretfully upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shuddered with electric gleams which were not actual lightning. Heaven seemed to be descending on the sea; one might have fancied that some powerful charms were drawing down the moon with ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... had never been quite re-established between them since the day of his tactless juvenile proposal—for so he saw it now. They had only met that once, when he was home for Christmas. On the second occasion, they had missed. Throughout the War they had corresponded fitfully; but her letters, though affectionate and sisterly, lacked an unseizable something that affected the tone of his response. He had been rash enough, once, to presume on their special relation. But he was no longer a boy; and he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... scene was weird beyond description. Outside, the wind moaned a sad dirge; great bats and black moths, the size of birds, flitted about in the midnight darkness. These, ever and anon, made their way inside and extinguished the candles, which flickered and dripped as they fitfully shone on the shrunken features of the corpse. He had been a reprobate and an assassin, but, luckily for him, a pious woman, not wishing to see him die "in his sins," had sprinkled Holy Water on him. The ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... drowned, as one of the effects of the poison is complete blindness. The symptoms are thus described. Profuse sweating, with a heaving of the flanks, the ears droop, the eyes glaze, set, and the animal finally turns stone blind. He then lies down, struggles fitfully for several hours, and never rises again. This was a heavy blow. Ten of their horses were now gone, eight of which were picked, and the best of the whole number, besides being the best conditioned, ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... The bees droned fitfully over the scented grass, aimlessly swinging in the heat. Siegmund watched one gold and amber fellow lazily let go a white clover-head, and boom in a careless curve out to sea, humming softer and softer as he reeled ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... servant-attended class, was a mere blowing off of steam by an active but valveless engine of a mind. But this pretense enabled her to justify herself for long mornings and afternoons at the Country Club with Henrietta. They talked of activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed. And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... specks. She paled to the lips, then slowly flooded as with a tide of sanguine. She withdrew herself from him; simply dropped him off her. She said nothing; but she watched him steadily, while within her the masked fire gleamed and fitfully leapt. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... conversation was also proceeding, but fitfully. Miss Nugent's consternation when she closed the door behind her and found herself face to face with Mr. Hardy was difficult of concealment. Too late she understood the facial contortions of Mr. Wilks, and, resigning herself to the inevitable, ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... gymnastic practice could do to remedy the defect. For some thirty years, gymnastics, first introduced into this country, I believe, at the Round-Hill School at Northampton, then under the charge of Messrs. Cogswell and Bancroft, had languished and revived fitfully at Cambridge. It was during one of the languishing periods that I began my practice. For some five or six weeks I kept it up with enthusiasm. Then I began to grow less methodical and regular in my habits of exercise; and then to find excuses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... her stepdaughter looked under any supposedly ingenious personal experiment. She had always been lovely about the stepdaughter's material braveries—had done, for her, the very best with them; but there had ever fitfully danced at the back of Maggie's head the suspicion that these expressions were mercies, not judgments, embodying no absolute, but only a relative, frankness. Hadn't Charlotte, with so perfect a critical ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... phantasm. It made her suspicious of Mr. Arbuton's behavior towards her, and observant of little things that might very well have otherwise escaped her. The bantering humor, the light-hearted trust and self-reliance with which she had once met him deserted her, and only returned fitfully when some accident called her out of herself, and made her forget the differences that she now too plainly saw in their ways of thinking and feeling. It was a greater and greater effort to place herself in sympathy with him; ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... his character to the life. Slender, swarthy, melancholy eyed, and darkly bearded; with feminine features, mellow voice and, alternately languid or vivacious manners. A child of the South in nature as in aspect, ardent, impressible, and proud; fitfully aspiring and despairing; without the native energy which moulds character and ennobles life. Months of discipline and devotion had done much for him, and some deep experience was fast ripening the youth into ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... when Tom opened the door she looked out, over his head, into the deepening night. A few stars had struggled through the clouds, and the moon shone fitfully above the island. It looked very big and black and peaceful, and Mrs. Beauchamp paused for a moment and ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow
... companion. As they swept down the plain, they were joined by like processions, that slowly defiled from every ravine and canyon of the mysterious mountain. From time to time the peal of a trumpet swelled fitfully upon the breeze; the cross of Santiago glittered, and the royal banners of Castile and Aragon waved over the moving column. So they moved on solemnly toward the sea, where, in the distance, Father Jose ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... shorter, and the advance breath of the long, tight winter was beginning to add a new snap to the air. The noises of the camp drifted up over the grade fitfully, dreamily; some new hunger that might have been called homesickness was urging a new tone into the ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... entered the large open circle in the interior of the tent. A crackling fire of resinous pine boughs burned brightly upon the ground in the centre, illuminating redly the framework of black, glossy poles, and flickering fitfully over the dingy skins of the roof and the swarthy tattooed faces of the women who squatted around. A large copper kettle, filled with some mixture of questionable odour and appearance, hung over the blaze, and furnished occupation to a couple of skinny, bare-armed ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Roger slept fitfully in the sand at the bottom of the valley, waking and rising at the first peep of dawn. Peter had fared rather well. There were grass tufts growing at the roots of the great cacti, around about. Roger ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... brilliancy. The scene was picturesque in the highest degree. The flickering firelight, our Serbians in their quaint dresses moving about the gnarled roots and antlered branches of the trees, upon which the light played fitfully, and the mystery of that outer rim of darkness, all helped to impress the fancy with ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... the candles burned in their sockets, flickering fitfully. The room grew darker and the figures, cloaked and hooded, seemed to melt back into the shadows from whence they had emerged, less and less distinct, until finally the shadow was one, more and more vapoury, filling ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... Betty slept fitfully, her dreams haunted by Miss Trumbull's expression of outraged virtue surrounded by curl-papers. She rose at four, almost mechanically, rather glad than otherwise that she had some one with whom to talk over the events of the night. But although she admired Senator North the more for his distinguished ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... moon fitfully shone occasionally and an odd star or two peeped out here and there; while our good ship was bowling along under her topgallants, which had been set again by the commander over the double-reefed topsails, with her courses and jib and spanker, and the foretopmast ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... was Dupont de Nemours,(23) who saw a temporary popularity of the Physiocrats in the early years of the French Revolution, when the Constituent Assembly threw the burden of taxes on land. But the fire blazed up fitfully for a moment, only to die ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... fitfully and were glad when at last they woke to find the sun shining in their windows. For once Amy and Grace did not have to be coaxed or wheedled or forced to get out of bed, but dressed quickly and were ready almost as soon as Mollie ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... after this thrilling event that Mrs Massey was on the forecastle talking with Peggy Mitford. A smart breeze was blowing— just enough to fill all the sails and carry the ship swiftly on her course, without causing much of a sea. The moon shone fitfully through a mass of drifting clouds, mingling its pallid light with the wondrous phosphoric sheen ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... just sinking behind a broken bank of heavy, blue-gray clouds. On the inner surfaces through which streamed its last rays patches of blood-red lining showed. A lurid glow was thinly suffused over the stretch of land between, against which were outlined the gray top branches of trees, moving fitfully to and fro. She stood for a few moments, waiting, listening for Mrs. Mosby. The shadows deepened and lengthened; they came creeping over the grass toward her, in their van the fading glow. All at once, as it were out of the twilight, the sunlight settled momentarily on the field at the bottom ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... talked more fitfully, with intervals of brooding silence. But he was not morose in his fits, and when he excused himself for sulking, she warmly denied that he did any such thing. "I expect you are studying the motor," she said; and he laughed. "I'm very capable ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... members of the fisherman's family, were strangely and wildly lit up by the blaze of the fire and by the still brighter glare of a resin torch stuck into a block of wood in the chimney-corner. The red and yellow light played full on the weird face of the old man as he lay opposite to it, and glanced fitfully on the figures of the young girl, Gabriel, and the two children; the great, gloomy shadows rose and fell, and grew and lessened in bulk about the walls like visions of darkness, animated by a supernatural specter-life, while the dense obscurity outside spreading before ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... laughing minx was finding a way with her own elbows. It was a strange light that was spread over the piazza. There were the pale stars breaking out above, and the dim waving lanterns below, leaving all objects indistinct except when they were seen close under the fitfully moving lights; but in this recess there was a stronger light, against which the heads of the encircling spectators stood in dark relief as Tito was gradually pushed towards them, while above them rose the head of a man wearing a white mitre with ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... attack; But those behind cried, "Forward!" And those before cried, "Back!" 420 And backward now and forward Wavers the deep array; And on the tossing sea of steel, To and fro the standards reel; And the victorious trumpet-peal 425 Dies fitfully away. ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... gilded, their deeply projecting roofs or eaves tiled with shells cut into panes, which let the light softly through, while a sky of deep bright blue fills up the narrow slit between. Then in the shadow below, which is fitfully lighted by the sunbeams, hanging from all the second stories at every possible interval of height, each house having at least two, are the richly painted boards of which I wrote before, from six to ten feet long, some black, some heavily ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... it was strange and terrible to Lady Channice to see how little she had really known this man. Their meetings, their talks together, were like the torchlight that flashed and wavered and only fitfully revealed. From the first she had listened, had assented, to everything he said, hanging upon his words and his looks and living afterward in the memory of them. And in memory their significance seemed so to grow that when they next met ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Day and night, all the same of aspect here in the starry vault of space. But with the ship's routine it was day. And then another time of sleep. I slept fitfully, worrying, trying to plan. Within a few hours we would be ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... Papists nor Dissenters, protested against Indulgences as unconstitutional, and clamoured for a rigorous administration of that penal legislation against Nonconformists which they had purchased with so many and such lavish supplies. As a matter of fact, these penal laws were very fitfully enforced. In London they were often totally disregarded, and we read of congregations numbering two thousand openly attending Presbyterian services. The Lord Mayor for the time being took his orders direct ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Somerville's book, and is cruelly incomplete without the other half. What a garden of roses was Mrs. Somerville's life, according to some comfortable critics! "All that for which too many women nowadays are content to sit and whine, or fitfully and carelessly struggle, came naturally and quietly to Mrs. Somerville. And the reason was that she never asked for anything until she had earned it; or, rather, she never asked at all, but was content to earn." Naturally and quietly! ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... said the sheep who were straggling over the shorter grass of the High Park, feeding fitfully in their short, uneasy way—crop, crop, crop—and then a pause, to move forward their own length ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... who are certainly not sensitive. Then his yell grew maudlin. "Why did God make me thus? Why do I grunt and sweat under the burden of a weary life? Give me, ah, give me the days that are gone!" Then he fell alongside of the bench, and presently his long, gurgling snore sounded fitfully. "Let him sweat there till closing time; he'll be quiet enough," said Mr. Landlord; and sure enough the orator lay until the hour had struck. He shivered when he rose, and his knees were like to ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... a loft over the kitchen of the house, and left to her contemplations. The place was nearly dark, and she was jaded for want of sleep, the past night's excitement having shaken her nervous system, and soon she began to doze fitfully, and dream ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... my secret, the darkness was closing in upon us when I discovered the volume, and the room was only fitfully illuminated by the flame that brightened and ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... branches that he fed it with, were not branches from the Tree of Life,—but from another tree that grew in Paradise,—and they were wet with the unhealthy dews of night, and more unhealthy wine; and thus, amid smoke and ashes the fire burned fitfully, and went out with a glare, which ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... back and fro in the little room, for hour after hour, till his head whirled, and his legs ached. Out of doors there was fitfully glinting sunshine upon the wet roofs; a pale blue now and then revealed amid the grey rack. Two years ago he would have walked twenty miles on a day like this, with eyes for nothing but the beauty and joy ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... The silver crucifix shone fitfully ahead, while the chanting of the priests, winding in and out after the holy symbol, fell upon the ear. And the young girl gazed with pity as the remains of the Marquis de Ligne, her ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the present century. On All Souls' Night the women-folk gathered together at the parish church, each with a candle in her hand; the sexton then came round and lit the candies, and as these burnt brightly or fitfully, so would the coming year prove prosperous or adverse. When the last candle died out, they solemnly march round the church twice or thrice, then home in silence, and in their dreams that night, their fated husbands ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... interrupt, through the entire course of the narrative. Nor did she break the silence for a time after he had concluded, staring thoughtfully, the while, down into the grate, where a smouldering back log glowed fitfully. ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... forwarder in the blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at our hotel that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the day had been so hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold and wet. It was fitfully put on and off during the chilly week that ensued, though in our fifth-story garden, to which we sometimes resorted, there was a mildness in the air that was absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing; any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... enlarge the circle of their acquaintance, by the growing intensity of the increasing blaze. Some of them, being ladies, their white robes waving in the mountain breeze, and the light shining full upon them, present, you observe, a beautiful appearance. The pale pillars of the portico flash fitfully into view, now seen and gone, like columns of mist. The swarthy African who kindled the fire regards it with perspiring face and grinning ivories; and lo! the man who hath mastered the quintupled glass of metamorphosed eau-de-vie, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... or chanted. He himself says that his verse construction is "apparently lawless at first perusal, although on closer examination a certain regularity appears, like the recurrence of lesser and larger waves on the seashore, rolling in without intermission, and fitfully rising and falling." There is little doubt that he carried in his ear the music of the waves and endeavored to make his verse in some measure conform to that. He says specifically that while he was listening to ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... only fitfully broken by the firelight, we ate our supper under what shelter the low cliff afforded. Our boyish spirits were much subdued and awed by the peril we had passed through and the sombre scene ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... reader may have noticed, was no premature man,—a manly boy, but still a habitant of the twilight, dreamy, shadow-land of boyhood. Noble elements were stirring fitfully within him, but their agencies were crude and undeveloped. Sometimes, through the native acuteness of his intellect, he apprehended truths quickly and truly as a man; then, again, through the warm haze of undisciplined tenderness, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shine, and colored his pale cheeks. His face was imperious, his laugh mocking and cruel. He was leaning on one elbow, holding in one hand, thinned with debauchery, a wide gold cup, enriched with pearls. He looked at it leisurely and fitfully, still fixing his piercing gaze on the two prisoners, who were placed in such a manner that Albinik almost ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... experience. One night, upon my grandmother's pressing invitation, I walked out on Bruntsfield Links, and kicked stones into the golfers' holes for something to do. It was full moon, I remember, and away to the north the city slept while St. Giles jangled fitfully. I had come there to be away from the little white house, where Irma was passing through the first peril of great waters which makes women's faces different ever after—a few harder, most ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,—a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... and informed them by signs of my desire, they all burst into a fit of foolish laughter. But most mysterious of all was a serenade which often, and always upon the darkest nights, sounded beneath my window. A guitar was played fitfully, soft, low chords being heard from time to time. Once I imagined I heard some one down below call up, "Pst! pst!" I sprang out of bed and, putting my head out of the window, called, "Holla! who's there?" But no answer came; I only heard the rustling of the shrubbery, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Eve comes with no joyous jangling of bells; the sun stoops to the sea, glaring lividly through whirls of snow, and the vessel roars through the water; black billows rush on until their crests topple into ruin, and then the boiling white water shines fitfully like some strange lambent flame; the breeze sings hoarsely among the cordage; the whole surface flood plunges on as if some immense cataract must soon appear after the rapids are passed. Every sea that the vessel shatters sends up a flying waterspout; and ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... He rallied, however, more than once, and regained his good spirits and gave hope to those who had any real wish for his recovery that the reign had not yet quite come to an end. In some of his better moods he showed glimpses of that higher nature which was wont to assert itself fitfully now and then at many periods of his career. More than once he prayed fervently in these later days that his life might be spared until the Princess Victoria should come of age. Almost to the end the usual festivities were kept up at Windsor Castle, and the Queen, by his wish, visited the race-course ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... nor the training to study dispassionately from day to day all those complex phenomena which go to make up modern nationalism. Guided in its conduct almost entirely by a policy of personal predilections, which is fitfully reinforced by the recollection of precedents, it is small wonder if such mountains of mistakes choke every Legation dossier. Determined to having nothing whatever to do, save in the last resort, with anything that savours of Radicalism, and inclining naturally towards ideals ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... closed eyes already sunken by keen suffering, hair damp with the cold dew on his forehead, a scarlet spot on either cheek, gray lines about the mouth, and pale lips parted by the painful breaths that came in heavy gasps or fluttered fitfully. This was what Christie saw, and after that long look she knew the truth, and sunk down beside the bed, crying with an ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... the house then, and gone within into light and comfort, and again feverishly he execrated her for not waiting for him, the cold and the rain and the dark notwithstanding. Again fitfully he began to see those leaping points of light; but it was only here and there. Whenever he focussed his attention upon them they eluded him. For these also he held his wife in some fashion responsible. What did ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... in the Veldt in South Africa, talking and laughing over their camp fire. A few Kaffir drivers and huntsmen were similarly engaged at a second fire at some little distance. The light of the burning wood revealed fitfully the shape of the great waggon in the background, and the sound of munching behind it told of the presence of the team of oxen which had dragged it northwards from Bulawayo. Later on, when they trekked up into the lion-zone, the district in which lions and other dangerous beasts might be expected ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... impatiently expecting his return. Often did she listen at the door to try if she could hear the tramp of the horse's footsteps approaching. But in vain; no sound met her ear except the sad wail of the night wind, moaning fitfully through the tall bushes which surrounded the ancient dwelling, or the sullen roar of a little dark river, which wound its way through the lowlands at a small distance from where she stood. Tired with watching, at length she ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... and was just too young and too enterprising to be welcome to gentlemen bent more on amusing themselves than pleasing him. He was roughly admonished when he spoilt sport or ran into danger; his cousin Charles was fitfully good-natured, but generally showed that he was in the way; his uncle Kit was more brief and stern with him than 'Sweet Honey's' pupil could endure; and Honor was his only refuge. His dreariness was only complete when the sedulous ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... earliest dawn. The morning only showed itself along the lower edge of a bank of purple clouds pierced by the misty peaks of Tahiti. The tropical day seemed too languid to rise. Sometimes, starting fitfully, it decked the clouds with faint edgings of pink and gray, which, fading away, left all dim again. Anon, it threw out thin, pale rays, growing lighter and lighter, until at last, the golden morning sprang ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... slipped on his skis, went ahead and set a good pace. Although the sky had become overcast and snow fell fitfully, our progress was rapid towards the rising slopes of the land on the eastern side of the glacier. Over the last three miles of the day's journey the surface was raised in large, pimply masses surrounded by wide fissures. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... sheltered corner, as if to get away from the wind; the changed livery of the shops—the golden tissues of summer, the delicately-tinted shawls, and gossamer ribbons, and flaunting muslins, woven of nobody knows what—whether of "mist and moonlight mingling fitfully," or of sunset shadows overshot with gold, giving way to gorgeous velvet, and fur, and sumptuous drapery glowing and burning with the tints of autumn, and, like distant fires seen through a fall of snow in mid-winter, full of comfort and warmth; and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... Baireuth to Cleve,—making a huge southward elbow on the map, with Baireuth for apex or turning-point:—in this manner he will make the times suit, and have a convergence at Cleve. To Baireuth;—who knows if not farther? All summer there has gone fitfully a rumor, that he wished to see France; perhaps Paris itself incognito? The rumor, which was heard even at Petersburg, [Raumer's Beitrage (English Translation, London, 1837), p. 15 (Finch's Despatch, 24th June, 1740).] is now sunk dead ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... at the Arsenal between three and four o'clock waked her. She sprang to her feet and looked out the window. The street lamps flickered fitfully in the drizzling rain. No one was passing. There ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... many waning inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of environment—a tour in Scotland, or abroad—shook him into his old thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the Lyrical Ballads, the poems of 1804, and the Prelude, and the Excursion, Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it is now, and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find themselves ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked fitfully along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by gazing and ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the casement and in at the door— All through the long night hear it fitfully roar, The mitre ethereal silently flies So keen and so cutting through ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... come up and obscured the stars and a drizzle of rain was falling. The car went forward at a good pace and Desmond, after one or two ineffectual attempts to make out where they were going, was lulled by the steady motion into a deep sleep. He was dreaming fitfully of the tossing Channel as he had seen it but a few hours before when he came to his senses with a start. He felt a cold draught of air on his face and his feet were dead ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... heart thrilled with strange memories and the sense of an abiding presence of something weird and ghostly. Here were the old roads, there were the vacant hutments. Here were the worn paths across the fields where the men had gone. The evening breeze whispered fitfully across the untrodden grass and one by one the strong mountains, as though fixing themselves more firmly in iron resolve, cast off the radiant hues of evening and stood out black and grim ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... moment, the perspiration standing in great beads upon my face. Oh, how I loved her then! how my half-blinded eyes feasted upon her sweet, sad face, the flames casting a ruddy glow upon it, and playing fitfully amid the masses of her dark, tangled hair! There swept across my mind every memory of our past, and she was again with me in her girlhood, before sorrow had stamped her with its seal, and she had turned me away tenderly as ever a woman could. And now she was doomed to death by my hand; ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... a thoroughbred, its strength almost spent, with the end of the race in sight. Across the white gleaming decks, as the bows swung from port to starboard and back again, following the channel, purple-black shadows slipped like oil. A languid land-wind blew fitfully down the estuary, in warm puffs dense with sickly-sweet jungle reek. The day was hot and sticky with humidity; a haze like a wall of dust coloured the skies ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... triads of sooty chimney swallows that rumbled nightly in the great brick flues of the farmhouse, and at first almost terrified me, but at length furnished the thalamian refrain that most surely lulled me asleep; the red-headed woodpeckers that with sharp cries and concave stoop of flight moved fitfully, from tree to tree, tapping this one loudly, that one low and dull, and whose nest hole in the dead maple on the hillside was re-occupied year after year, till at last the stub blew down and broke short off at the hole itself; the king-fishers that with the same stooping flight, sprung ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... with him to his room, fronting on Twenty-third Street, on the parlor floor; and he slowly, as if it were a task, unlocked the door. There was a sparkle of autumnal crispness in the air, and he had a fire, that glittered and threw shadows about fitfully. There was not much to say. It was plain at last that Mr. Blaine was fading, that he had within a few weeks failed fast. His great, bright eyes were greater than ever, but not so bright. His face was awfully white; not that brainy pallor that was familiar—something ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... restlessly tossed, though he soon ceased his wild talking and slept lightly and fitfully. The men watching him were wakeful, too, and as I lay trying to sleep and trying not to see the swaying lantern and the fantastic shadows, I heard at intervals snatches of their ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... one bright eve ere summer in autumn sank At stardawn standing on a grey sea-bank He felt the wind fitfully shift and heave As toward a stormier eve; And all the wan wide sea shuddered; and earth Shook underfoot as toward some timeless birth, Intolerable and inevitable; and all Heaven, darkling, trembled like a stricken thrall. And far out of the quivering east, and far ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the lanthorn-bearer only fitfully, but to the terror-stricken women he appeared to be preternaturally tall and broad, with wide caped coat pulled up to his ears and an old-fashioned tricorne hat on his head; his face was entirely hidden by a black mask, and his hands by black ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... had dipped behind the mountains when the little train steamed down the valley. All were subdued, and Greta, with a nodding head, slept fitfully. Christian, in her corner, was looking out of the window, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... starts and gives an involuntary little cry as the lightning flashes before her eyes, and the thunder seems to shake her as she kneels. She turns paler and paler as the storm continues, and can scarcely hear the concluding psalms, prayers, and exhortation, for her fear of the lightning which fitfully and at intervals slants through ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by "glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to any revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominant object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo—I recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... his anticipations, the address of the Assembly finally proved effective, and he was permitted to walk forth from the jail a free man. His paper came forth from week to week, but its tone was evidently modified and subdued. Something of the old spirit occasionally flashed forth, but fitfully and transitorily only, like the flicker of a lamp before its extinction. It was clear that the editor had not forgotten the indignity and mental suffering he had undergone, and throughout the remaining years ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... boat, and we were rowed across a subterranean lake which was nothing more or less than liquid salt. We were in an enormous cavern, lighted only by candles here and there on the banks of the lake. The walls glittered fitfully with the crystals of salt, and there was not a sound except the dipping of the oars ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... the cunning use of what she calls ethical propaganda. Why ethics, or morals, should be good enough to inspire sympathy, but not good enough to inspire war, is one of the mysteries of German thought. No German, not even any of those few feeble German writers who have fitfully criticized the German plan, has any conception of the deep, sincere, unselfish, and righteous anger that was aroused in millions of hearts by the cruelties of the cowardly assault on Serbia and on Belgium. The late German Chancellor became uneasily aware that the crucifixion of Belgium ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Through an open door in the back, the Banquet Hall is seen in faint moonlight, which shines fitfully through a deep bow-window in the opposite wall. To the right, an entrance- door; further forward, a curtained window. On the left, a door leading to the inner rooms; further forward a large, open fireplace, which casts a glow over the room. It is a ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... the morning of the second day of the new year. The mercury hovered a few degrees above zero. The winds that swept down from the North were keen and biting, and the mist-like snow fell fitfully. An old man, his once tall form bent by the burdens and sorrows of sixty odd years, his step slow and shuffling, his clothes unkempt and tattered, his long beard flowing down upon his breast, his eye still bright and in his face lingering traces ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... cried, "Forward!" And those before cried, "Back!" And backward now and forward Wavers the deep array; And on the tossing sea of steel To and frow the standards reel; And the victorious trumpet-peal Dies fitfully away. ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... autumnal day had drawn to a close. A wild, stormy, rainy night then set in, but still the royalist party—citizens and soldiers intermingled—all armed to the teeth, and uttering fierce cries, while the whole scene was fitfully illuminated with the glare of flambeaux and blazing tar-barrels, kept watch in the open square around the city hall. A series of terrible Rembrandt-like nightpieces succeeded—grim, fantastic, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Christmas eve in the year of our Lord 1653. The snow, which had fallen fitfully throughout the day, shrouded in white the sloping roofs and narrow London streets, and lay in little, sparkling heaps on every jutting cornice or narrow window-ledge where it could find a resting-place. But in the west the setting sun shone clearly, firing the steeples ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... would move her lips. Any one looking in upon her so might well have wondered where were the friends and companions of this beautiful, lonely woman, shut into this small room, in the silence of a twilight that hung damp and gray outside, and that the smouldering fire lighted but fitfully within, while the low murmur of flames fitfully ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... But where could she go? She looked about her. High walls arose on either hand, with a murky sky above. A stone walk filled the space between and ran down the length of the church to a big iron gate. The lights of the street glistened fitfully on the puddles of wet in the depressions of the paving-stones. The street looked quiet, and only one or two people were passing. Was that gate locked also, and if so could she ever climb it, or break through? Somehow she must! She shuddered at the thought ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... locomotive waiting on the side-track, and the sibilant hiss of steam that mingled with the moaning of the wind whirling a white haze out of the obscurity. Beyond the track, and showing only now and then, the lights of the wooden town blinked fitfully; on the other hand and behind the depot was an empty waste of snow-sheeted prairie. The temperature had gone up suddenly, but the agent shivered as he felt the raw dampness strike through him, and, closing the ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... kept that fond boyish promise? Yes, before Heaven; yes, praise be to God! His life had been hers; his blood, his fortune, his name, his whole heart ever since had been hers and her children's. All night long he was dreaming his boyhood over again, and waking fitfully; he half fancied he heard Father Holt calling to him from the next chamber, and that he was coming in and out ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... then shrank again. In him was taking place the last struggle of life with annihilation; the mainspring of existence had already burst, but the wheels still moved with an uneven motion, catching and entangling in each other. The spark of memory hardly glimmered in him, but fitfully flashed like falling stars through the darkness of night, which thickened over his soul, and reflected themselves in his dying face. His wife and daughter were sobbing on their knees by his bed-side; his eldest son, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Abel's face, and he walked up and down the room, no longer carelessly, but fitfully; stopping sometimes—again starting more rapidly—then leaning against the mantle, on which the clock pointed to midnight—then throwing himself into a chair or upon a sofa; and so, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines on the stream, 'Tis the star-spangled banner' oh, long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... north winds beat and clamor at the door; The drifted snow lies heaped along the street, Swept by a blinding storm of hail and sleet; The clouded heavens no guiding starlight lend But o'er the earth in gloom and darkness bend; Gigantic shadows, by the night lamps thrown, Dance their weird revels fitfully alone. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... after life, so vividly recurs to him, with its bygone souvenirs of mirth, when he is sitting up all night at a bad case in the mud cottage of a pauper union. There are its blue walls, its wainscot and its pillars, its lamps and ground-glass shades, within which the gas jumps and flares so fitfully; its two looking-glasses, that reflect the room and its occupants from one to the other in an interminable vista. There also is Mr. Rhodes, bending courteously over the backs of the visiters' chairs, and hoping everybody has got everything to their satisfaction, or bestowing an occasional ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... simply. Lydia Constantinovna sat bowed and motionless, as if fearing to move, clasping her knees with both hands. When Ivanov ceased speaking she rose noiselessly and went towards the door. She stood on the threshold a brief moment then, went out. The candle still burnt fitfully in the drawing-room. The ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... was golden on the lake, the birds of the upland were clustering over reeds and rushes, for the sake of plentiful seed and convenient water. Many of them sang fitfully, the notes of almost all of them were melodious, and the day was a long, happy dream. There was but little left to gather until ginseng time. For that the Harvester had engaged several boys to help him, for the task of digging the roots, washing and drying them, burying part of ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... was beginning to sweep down to us from the mountains; but it was blowing only in puffs as yet, for the night would not be upon us for several hours. Borne faintly and fitfully upon this uncertain wind came to us the strains of "Rory O'More"; with which melody, as we inferred, Dennis was beguiling his solitude while he explored the route that we were to take the next day. Pablo, sitting comfortably on the grass, his back propped against ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... sighing fitfully; the clouds gathered and formed an army which stormed the zenith and threatened to overwhelm the pure light of the planet. The lesser stars vanished, two or three falling in their haste and losing themselves forever in infinity. The night thickened; ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... city and town, who can barely manage to hobble from house to house seeking work. The pain endured while under the operation is so severe and continuous that the poor girls never sleep for long periods without the aid of strong narcotics, and then only but fitfully; and it is from this constant suffering that the peculiar sullen or stolid look so often seen on the woman's face is derived. The origin of this custom is involved in mystery to the Westerns. Some say that ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... an hour there was not a sound in the forests of Drowned Valley except in the dead timber where unseen woodpeckers hammered fitfully at the ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... the wheel, covered the tired man with blankets from below, and went fishing in the lazaretto for something to eat. But by the day following he found himself forced to give in, drowsing fitfully by the wheel and waking ever and anon to ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... was only half asleep, kicked out in such an alarming manner, that for some seconds, his boots gyrated fitfully all over the family hearth, filling the whole circle with consternation. For, when Mr Bull did kick, his kick was tremendous. And he always kicked, when the Bulls ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... evening, as the sun was sinking below the eastern horizon, Captain Servadac was lounging moodily against the taffrail. From the heaven above, where stars kept peeping fitfully from behind the moving clouds, his eye wandered mechanically to the waters below, where the long waves were rising and falling with the ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... was at last indicted from political motives and perhaps personal also, the large minority in his favour, all show that thought was normally free, and that the mass of intolerance which existed was only fitfully invoked, and perhaps most often to serve other purposes. I may mention the case of the philosopher Aristotle, who some seventy years later left Athens because he was menaced by a prosecution for blasphemy, the charge being a pretext for attacking one who belonged to a certain political ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... flickering of sheet lightning became more frequent, while occasional flashes of forked lightning emanating from a point low down upon the south-western horizon, began to light up the surroundings for a fraction of a second with their transient glare. Soon low moaning sounds became fitfully audible far aloft, and little scurrying gusts of hot wind came sweeping across the lagoon, causing the fire on the knoll to roar and blaze with sudden intensity, while the sparks flew ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... of his troops, by a short stay at Orleans, the Admiral moved towards Paris. Since the commencement of the war, negotiations had been going on fitfully. When the court thought that the Huguenots were formidable, they pushed on the negotiations in earnest. Whenever, upon the contrary, they believed that the royal forces would be able to crush those of the Admiral, the negotiations at once came ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... or more she broke fitfully into murmurs and complaints, but presently, as we neared Chiswick, sleep came to her ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... dull and heavy, and carried a peculiar odour not unlike brimstone. This singular condition of the atmosphere was not without its effect on the men, who felt listless and disinclined to work. A sense of impending peril seemed to be hanging over all. The wind, too, was gradually dying away, and came fitfully and at intervals in hot, sulphurous puffs. The sea, which had been sparkling in thousands of tiny wavelets in the rays of the sun, began to assume a dark and oily appearance; and a long swell was beginning to make itself felt, causing the sails, as they drooped against the masts, to flap noisily ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... after supper, and still talked fitfully about "tithes." It seemed to be a subject which fitted in comfortably to the pauses in a long pipe. But when he had finished his "thimbleful" of tobacco, and shaken out its ashes carefully, he looked at Phyllis with a face full of renewed interest, ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... drawing-room. Everything was wretched. However many ghosts might be in the house, it seemed to Hugh that there was no soul in it except in one room. The wind sighed fitfully, and the rain fell in slow, soundless showers. Mr. Arnold felt the vacant oppression as well as Hugh. Mrs Elton having gone to Lady Emily's room, he proposed back gammon; and on that surpassing game, the gentlemen expended the best part of two dreary hours. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... later the German doctor arrived. Mrs. Armitage was asleep; so Eckhardt would not awaken her at the time. The boy, however, had slept but fitfully, and every now and then awakened with a sob of pain. The nurse stripped him, and Eckhardt soon found out what was wrong—a serious ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... trellis of the veranda, where Lottie ought to be sitting to receive the morning calls of the young men who were sometimes quite as early as Kenton's present visit in their devotions, and the sound of Ellen's piano, played fitfully and absently in her fashion, ought to be coming out irrespective of the hour. It seemed to him that his wife must open the door as his steps and his son's made themselves heard on the walk between the box borders in their upper orchard, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the clock. It was very early, but to go back to bed was hardly worth while. The sun was already beginning to glint through the fog. She dressed, and, passing softly the door of the room where Mellony slept,—rather fitfully of late,—began to make ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... middle watch; and by that time the sea was running high, and they were plunging through the darkness under a double-reefed mainsail, the moon every now and then clearing an open space in the storm—clouds that were driving like smoke before it, so that he could fitfully distinguish objects over the deck, even to the look-out man's looming figure out upon ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... be a lull, and the shepherds would begin to breathe more freely. Then there would come a stormy night, when the heavens were veiled in the cloak of crime, and the wind moaned fitfully over meres and marches, and another victim would be added to ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... be revealed to her! Suddenly she became aware that one of the tall figures had stopped in the trail beside her pile of driftwood. In a tone singularly pleasing he was humming the air of the funeral lament, fitfully, experimentally at first, then as the haunting monotony of the strain became familiar, with a certain easy confidence. Jean forgot to be afraid. Almost unconsciously she found herself humming in unison with the motionless figure. Even when ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... merely a flight of poetry. A few of the singing-men and singing-women had lingered behind their fellows and raised their voices fitfully and blew a careless note upon the organ. Yet it lifted my soul higher than all their former strains. They are gone—the sons and daughters of Music—and the gray sexton is just closing the portal. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the table, rinsing the blood away, and another attendant skilfully dressed and bandaged the second wound as he had done the first. Two baymen brought a stretcher and the lad was taken to a bunk. Here he was given a drink that, after five minutes, caused him to doze and dream fitfully of the battle through which he ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... a storm in the night, after the unusual stillness of the afternoon, accompanied by heavy rain. Now the sun shone fitfully, and the disordered gardens and lawns were strewn with branches and countless leaves which chased each other, bowling along on their edges and dancing in mad eddies ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... had passed over soil, but of crystal purity and wonderfully blue in places where shafts of sunlight penetrated to great depths—for now the sun was high above the horizon ahead, and shining in an almost clear sky. Presently we began to notice the wind again. It came fitfully, first from one quarter and then another, rapidly increasing until, at times, it rose into a tempest. It lifted the water in huge combing waves, but the car ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... for the third time to reach the peak, and I leave him wrapped in his blanket with the bag of provisions, and go on alone into the wild, grey, shifting, whirling mist above, and soon find myself at the head of a rock ridge in a narrowish depression, walled by massive black walls which show fitfully but firmly ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... slept fitfully, being always afraid to sleep, and something weaker when she woke from it. The Professor and I took in turns to watch, and we never left her for a moment unattended. Quincey Morris said nothing about his intention, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... the subject of books fitted for public libraries. At the outset, it is most important that each selection should be made on a well considered plan. No hap-hazard, or fitfully, or hastily made collection can answer the two ends constantly to be aimed at—namely, first, to select the best and most useful books, and, secondly, to economize the funds of the library. No money should be wasted upon whims and experiments, but every dollar should be devoted to the acquisition ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... watching the fiery vapours rolling up out of the infinite darkness, and in dreading the descent into the crater. The heavy clouds were crimson with the reflection, and soon after midnight jets of flame of a most peculiar colour leapt fitfully into the air, accompanied by ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird |
