"Irregular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was out and listening intently. Louder and fiercer the reports came, though still irregular. Now and then, in the intervals, a low, quick crepitation reached us, an undertone that no soldier could fail to recognize as distant musketry. Ominous sounds they were, portending—what? What, indeed, if not actual battle? If a battle, then certainly an ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 1/2 years old. The memory now flashes across me of the pleasure I had in the evening on a blowy day walking along the beach by myself and seeing the gulls and cormorants wending their way home in a wild and irregular course. Such poetic pleasures, felt so keenly in after years, I should not have expected so ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... be upsetting," reflected she; and she laid it aside, glancing now and then at the bold, nervous, irregular hand and speculating about the contents and about ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... He wrote partly in the weak and sentimental strain of the poets between 1822 and 1832. Browning, on the contrary, sprang at once into an original poetic life of his own. Pauline was unfinished, irregular in form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was also entirely fresh and distinct. The influence of Shelley echoes in it, but much more in admiration than in imitation of him. The matter, the spirit of the poem were his own, and the verse-movement ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... doctor emphatically. "It was a fad of his. He had hundreds of them. He cut all his paper like that," as he pointed to a stack of sermon paper still unused on another and smaller table. Father Brown went up to it and held up a sheet. It was the same irregular shape. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... of middle age with a brutal, heavy-jawed face and a low, receding forehead. His lips, a little apart, showed yellow, irregular teeth, of which two at the front of the lower jaw had been broken, and the scar of an old wound, running from the corner of his left eye down to the centre of his cheek, added to the sinister and ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... has been fully described by Layard—see Early Adventures, vol. II, p. 295. It is of comparatively recent date, not unlike the shrines of Mussulman saints, and is surmounted by a high conical dome of irregular brickwork, somewhat resembling in shape a pine cone. The reader is referred to the beautiful pictorial illustrations of Daniel's reputed tomb, of the ruins of Susa, and of Schuster and its bridges in Mme. Dieulafoy's La Perse, la ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... vehicle, foot-passenger, or horseman; we had heard that all the neighboring population had assembled in Babylon to celebrate your birthday, gaze with wonder at the splendor of your court, and enjoy your liberality. At last the irregular beat of horses' hoofs, and the sound of bells struck my ear, and a few minutes later I distinctly heard cries of distress. My resolve was taken at once; I made my Persian servant dismount, sprang into his saddle, told the driver ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... investigation of the Carnaby affairs, and the withdrawal of a good deal of money from my companies, which would seriously hamper me. I have once or twice had to slightly exceed my duties as trustee, and Alton would approve of steps I have taken which a lawyer or accountant would consider irregular. Of course, if you had any knowledge of business I could make it more clear to you, but I can only tell you that I am anxious about Alton's safety for my own ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... marked in early stages. Disease develops slowly. There is a loss of flesh, a short dry cough, irregular appetite, rapid breathing, weakness, bloating, diarrhoea, the milk is lessened and is watery and blue in color. The coat is rough and back arched. Whenever an animal is suspected of having tuberculosis, have a competent person give the ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... there was no attempt at good military formation. At route step and in irregular columns, the regiment moved forward by platoons. Unknown officers stood along the way to direct, for the regiment's platoon leaders had no knowledge of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... formidable bulwark against the forces of revolution. Any attacks on British Masonry as at present constituted and directed are therefore absolutely opposed to the interests of the country. But at the same time it behoves Masons to beware of the insidious attempts that are being made by irregular secret societies to infiltrate the Craft and pervert its true principles. The present satisfactory condition of Freemasonry in England is owing not only to its established statutes, but to the character of the men who control it—men who are not, as ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... and harmony. The worlds born of these suns (planets) all originated in like manner, since the parts lying along the circumference of the suns, by their motion in space cooled off the sooner, broke away in irregular masses, and while contracting into globular shapes and revolving upon their own axis, yet by the force of attraction and their original motion bound to the bodies, whirl around these and with these move on in space. And though these balls of glowing gas, as the earth for ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... altitude towards its western extremity, and a deep bed of rolling sandhill country, covered with desert vegetation, surrounded it on all sides. Nearer to us, north-westerly, and stretching nearly to west, lay the dry, irregular, and broken expanse of an ancient lake bed. On riding over to it we found it very undefined, as patches of sandhills occurred amongst low ridges of limestone, with bushes and a few low trees all over the expanse. There were patches of ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... subject, and nothing could move her out of her groove. She was a good woman and a kind-hearted one, but the sense of humour was lacking in her. She disliked all that she did not understand, and under the comprehensive term Bohemianism, she embodied all that was irregular and ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... year younger than Isabella; she was handsome, but her countenance, at first view, gave the idea of hopeless indolence; she did not learn the French and Italian irregular verbs by rote as expeditiously as her sister, and her impatient preceptress pronounced, with an irrevocable nod, that Miss Matilda was no genius. The phrase was quickly caught by her masters, so that Matilda, undervalued even by her sister, lost all confidence in herself, and with the hope of ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... screw, which is horizontal and forms a knob in the axis of the vise. The consequences are, first, that on tightening the nut of the horizontal screw vise the pressure is only exerted on the side, and greatly tries the vise itself while obtaining an irregular pressure; secondly, that as the piece to be worked is held obliquely, however skilled the workman may be, he always finds himself cramped in the execution of his work, particularly if of a ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... gentleman's residence, comprising four entertaining rooms and eight bedrooms, glass, stabling, and grounds of four acres, artistically laid out'. But never mind the agent; take it from me that that house is ideal. Long, low, irregular rooms just waiting to be made beautiful; no set garden, but a wilderness of flowers, and a belt of real woodland; dry soil, all the sun that is to be had, and an open country-side agreeably free from villadom. I was tempted—badly tempted, but could not face settling ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of the mole irregular rocks stood up above the sea-level. On the shore stood several houses, square and rude, which resembled nothing that I had ever seen in house architecture. No one was stirring, but the moon was there and the sea and the gleam of the moonlight on the rippling ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... of this market-place—a space inclosed on all sides by various shops or stores, and for some unaccountable reason styled "Market Square," since its irregular outline much more resembled a truncated triangle—stood the town pump, on the spot originally occupied by the meeting-house of the First Church, already mentioned. On two sides of the pump were set the wonted hand-carts of two superannuated individuals, whose gingerbread, ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... of the music. As he rode closer to the trees it grew clearer. It was unlike any song he had ever heard. It was a strange improvisation with a touch of both melancholy and savage exultation running through it. Calder found himself nodding in sympathy with the irregular rhythm. ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... and irregular in shape, but good taste and moderate expenditure had converted it into a rustic boudoir of no mean pretensions. Cretonne hangings concealed the rough walls, and a few small pictures served to confine their bright folds to the uneven surface of earth ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... in spite of what held him to more interesting riddles; it appeared to be several lengths of pole strapped together and wrapped up in paper. Fisher took it under his arm and began to pick his way across the turf. The ground was growing more tumbled and irregular and he was walking toward a mass of thickets and small woods; night grew darker every moment. "We must not talk any more," said Fisher. "I shall whisper to you when you are to halt. Don't try to follow me then, for it will only spoil the show; one man can barely ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... they meant and how to express it in good English, though their spelling was irregular. In his instructions the Founder anticipated reforms made by the Commissioners of 1853 and 1882. They had the benefit of two and a half centuries' experience of national and academical life to guide them: Nicholas Wadham foresaw things and needs not foreseen or understood by his contemporaries ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... occupants, consisted of several seal and walrus skins, the former dressed without the hair, and the latter with the thick outer coat taken off, and the rest shaved thin, so as to allow of the transmission of light through it. These were put together in a clumsy and irregular patchwork, forming a sort of bag of a shape rather oval than round, and supported near the middle by a rude tent-pole composed of several deer's horns or the bones of other animals lashed together. At the upper end of this is attached another short piece of bone at right angles, for the purpose ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... miracle pleased her as it would please a child, without setting her to find out how it was done. She would consult a wizard, taking the chances of his having occult sources of information, with the same irregular faith in the unlikely with which some ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the frontier during the late war may be called the irregular forces of the army, soldiers in all respects except in being enrolled and placed under officers. They fought and marched, stood on guard and were taken prisoners. They viewed the horrors of war and were under fire although they did not wear the army ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... was in the dim light, eerier it was now in the dark, with those hoarse mutterings from beneath, and those thunderous reverberations pealing at irregular intervals through the unknown spaces above. He had his pipe, but his habitual caution deterred him from seeking its comfort, and he was glad he had abstained, and glad at having extinguished the fire, when suddenly he heard the sound of shrill ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... whom he served. But he ventured to interfere on behalf of one of the subordinates in his office, who had been refused a stipend to which Mr. Wyatt considered him entitled. Then, he presumed to oppose the Council in respect of an irregular purchase of a large tract of land from the Mississauga Indians. Finally, he went so far as to profess a high degree of respect for the manly and independent conduct of Judge Thorpe. The secret conclave speedily ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... of the rock was riddled with rough, irregular holes, as though Titans had been using it for a target. Around and above it a bevy of blue rock-pigeons—circling, dipping, and darting with a strong rush of wings—shone like iridescent jewels, green and blue and grey, against the unstained turquoise of the sky, whose intensity ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... preliminary dangers were surmounted, the prospect beyond was anything but inviting: the country to the north of the Taurus was a vast tableland, more elevated than the summits of the highest mountains in this country, and scattered over with solitary lakes, irregular mountain masses and tracts of desert, where the population was rude and spoke an almost endless variety of dialects. These things terrified Mark, and he drew back. But his companions took their lives ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... imperative has less force than the second. In the first conjugation the second form always terminates in -au, even when the first form is irregular. The last syllable of the imperative is often lost, especially when ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... it more," said Holmes as he refreshed himself with a glass of claret and some biscuits in the intervals of his toilet. "However, as you know, my habits are irregular, and such a feat means less to me than to most men. It was very essential that I should impress Mrs. Hudson with the reality of my condition, since she was to convey it to you, and you in turn to him. You won't be offended, Watson? You will realize that among your many talents ...
— The Adventure of the Dying Detective • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in Nature comes from Osiris,—order, harmony, and the favorable temperature of the seasons and celestial periods. From Typhon come the stormy passions and irregular impulses that agitate the brute and material part of man; maladies of the body, and violent shocks that injure the health and derange the system; inclement weather, derangement of the seasons, and eclipses. Osiris and Typhon were the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians; principles ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... came irregularly to Shoulder-blade creek, but even irregular deliveries may bring bad news. Halloway received a letter, one day, containing a summons which he could not disregard. He had spoken contemptuously to Brent of money-grubbing, but his inflated wealth carried certain ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... same laws are less frequently evaded in this respect, but are more frequently evaded in another and even more detestable manner, jealousy finds its motives in the passions of society rather than in those of primitive instinct. In most irregular connections the hatred of the lover for his rivals far exceeds his love for his mistress; if he fears a rival in her affections it is the effect of that self-love whose origin I have already traced out, and he is moved by vanity rather than affection. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... seaport of Denmark, the seat of a bishop, and chief town of the amt (county) of its name, on the south bank of the Limfjord, which connects the North Sea and the Cattegat. Pop. (1901) 31,457. The situation is typical of the north of Jutland. To the west the Linifjord broadens into an irregular lake, with low, marshy shores and many islands. North-west is the Store Vildmose, a swamp where the mirage is seen in summer. South-east lies the similar Lille Vildmose. A railway connects Aalborg with Hjorring, Frederikshavn and Skagen to the north, and with ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... obtained for the same amount; that there are large tracts which even the improvements of the adjacent lands will never raise to that price, and that the present uniform price, combined with their irregular value, operates to prevent a desirable compactness of settlements in the new States and to retard the full development of that wise policy on which our land system is founded, to the injury not only of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Martin van Buren • Martin van Buren
... one act could have encouraged this feeling more than his relieving Floyd and Pillow from command, for abandoning their posts and leaving a junior officer to capitulate in their stead. Certainly the action of these generals at Donelson was somewhat irregular in a strictly military view. But the people argued that they had done all that in them lay; that they had fought nobly until convinced that it was futile; that they had brought off five thousand effective ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... left them, for they continually changed the angle, compelled by the undergrowth to do so. Twigs leaped at them and stung their faces, Tim's cheeks were splashed with mud, Uncle Felix's clean white flannels showed irregular lines of dirty water to his knees. It was altogether a tremendous affair in which rescue and escape were madly mingled with furious attack and terrified retreat. Everything was moving, and in all directions at once. They rushed headlong through ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... one into a kind of very human church, a church in the midst of the market-place, like those churches in Italy, in which people seem so much at home. The verse is quaint, homely, not so archaic when it is spoken as one might suppose in reading it; the metre is regular in heat, but very irregular in the number of syllables, and the people who spoke it so admirably under Mr. Poel's careful training had not been trained to scan it as well as they articulated it. "Everyman" is a kind of "Pilgrim's Progress," conceived with a daring and reverent imagination, so that God himself ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... seldom, and only when such hospitality was altogether unavoidable, did Louis XI permit any of his court to have apartments. A scutcheon, bearing the fleur de lys, hung over the principal door of the large irregular building; but there was about the yard and the offices little or none of the bustle which in those days, when attendants were maintained both in public and in private houses, marked that business was alive, and custom plenty. It seemed as if the stern and unsocial character of the royal mansion ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Seleucus, to see him, he observed in him all Sappho's famous symptoms, his voice faltered, his face flushed up, his eyes glanced stealthily, a sudden sweat broke out on his skin, the beatings of his heart were irregular and violent, and, unable to support the excess of his passion, he would sink into a state ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... not, indeed, appear to me to be just; probably because I do not understand what you mean. But in due time I doubtless shall; for so repeatedly have you used it, that it must stand for something real in my large and rich, yet irregular and unclarified nature. But though I like to hear you, as I say, and think somehow your reproof does me good, by myself, I return to my native bias, and feel as if there was plenty of room in the universe for my faults, and as if I could not spend time in thinking of ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to my disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. I even thought that I must have left the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... vast, billowy sea of foot-hills, clothed with forests of sombre pine and bright, evergreen oaks; and, lower down, dense patches of white-blossomed chaparral, looking in the enchanted distance like irregular banks of snow. Then the world-renowned valley of the Sacramento River, with its level plains of dark, rich soil, its matchless fields of ripening grain, traversed here and there by streams that, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... remind the thoughtful student of Scripture, and indeed of Nature also, that the singular analogy which Geologists think they discover between successive periods of Creation, and the Mosaic record of the first Six Days, is no difficulty to those who hesitate to identify those Days with the irregular Periods of indefinite extent. Rather was it to have been expected, I think, that such an analogy would be found to subsist between His past and His present working, when, 6,000 years ago, GOD arranged ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... that his system is truly applicable only to nations so small that the whole body of voters can be united in one meeting. These popular assemblies, he says, should be held frequently, at times fixed by law and independent of any summons, and also at irregular times when needed. Let no one object that such frequent meetings would take up too much time. He answers that "as soon as the public service ceases to be the principal business of the citizens, and they prefer to serve ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Anti-slavery labor, had become disorganized and scattered, and that for the last two or three years, the duties of this department had been performed by individuals on their own responsibility, and sometimes in a very irregular manner; that this had been the cause of much dissatisfaction and complaint, and that the necessity for a remedy of this state of things was generally felt. Hence, the call for this meeting. It was intended now to organize a committee, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... to light. The second class are the absent-minded, chatterboxes, persons engrossed in business or ambition, and others who seek to occupy themselves with two things at once, and eat only to be filled. Such, for example, was Napoleon; he was irregular in his meals, and ate fast and badly. But there again was to be traced that absolute will which he carried into everything he did. The moment appetite was felt, it was necessary that it should be satisfied; and his establishment was so arranged that, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... miles from the town of Belden, N. H., stands an irregular farm house that looks more like two dwellings forced to pass as one. One part of it is all gables, and tile, and chimney corners, and antiquity, and the other is square, slated, and of the ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... so obtained were kept for several weeks in the little boxes in which they had been deposited when caught. Every day each box was opened, the occupant examined, and its condition, if altered, noted on the cover. They generally spun a few irregular lines on which to hang, and so remained quiet except when the boxes were opened: then, of course, they tried to escape. Half a dozen of the larger ones were placed on the window-seats and in corners of the room, where they speedily constructed webs. By ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the difficult broken coast her trail lay; it crept painfully up over the slippery sides of melting glaciers, some of them a thousand feet high, and made sheer descents over places where the ice was splitting; it writhed about hundreds of irregular sounds and twisted fjords. ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is inevitably associated with a system ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... would have put it—he might want to 'pipe on' again at any minute. But he had to be so restrained and cautious that he would often pass the door of the Restaurant Bretagne without going in, and wander out of the purlieus of that region which always gave him the feeling of having been possessively irregular. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Beneath her feet was an ultramarine mist, around her were masses of black rock; but overhead was a glorious pink canopy, fringed by far flung circles of translucent blue and tenderest green. And this heaven's own shield was ever widening. Eastward its arc was broken by an irregular dark mass, whose pinnacles glittered like burnished gold. That was the Aguagliouls Rock, which rises so magnificently in the midst of a vast ice field, like some great portal to the wonderland of the Bernina. She had seen ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... of timber transversely, and then breaking this veneer into cubes. Later on improvements were introduced, and the wood fibre so produced was crushed to a fine degree, and then reformed into small irregular grains. Again, an advance was made in the form of the wood fibre used, the fibre being broken down by the action of chemicals under high temperature, and so producing an extremely pure form of woody fibre. The next improvement was to render the grains of the powder ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... is woven a woof of green, spreading in irregular patches in all directions. It is made by the chaparral, which is composed of a variety of desert plants that are native to the soil and can live on very little water. It consists of live oak, pinion, mesquite, desert willow, ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... footways, and pedestrians, instead of skirting the walls, invariably took the middle of the road, leisurely wending their way among the vehicles. Pierre was very fond of those old districts with their winding lanes, their tiny squares so irregular in shape, and their huge square mansions swamped by a multitudinous jumble of little houses. He found a charm, too, in the district of the Esquiline, where, besides innumerable flights of ascending ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... words and wilder thoughts bursting from his lips and dashing through his mind; his course as irregular and as reckless as his fancies; now fiercely galloping, now pulling up into a sudden halt, Ferdinand at length arrived home; and his quick eye perceived in a moment that the dreaded arrival had not taken place. Glastonbury was in the flower-garden on one knee before a vase, over ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... du Parc, for a Protestant church, and were informed that there was not any in the place. We learned, however, afterwards that there was one, but too late to profit by the information. We walked out in the cold to find some church, and, entering a large, irregular Gothic structure, much out of repair, we pressed towards the altar where the funeral service of the Catholic Church was performing over a corpse which lay before it. The priests, seven or eight ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... mile or two off. There were severe frosts at night, and occasionally light flurries of snow; but the hardy beasts evidently cared nothing for any but heavy storms, and seemed to prefer to lie in the snow rather than upon the open ground. They fed at irregular hours throughout the day, just like cattle; one band might be lying down while another was feeding. While traveling they usually went almost in single file. Evidently the winter had weakened them, and they were not in condition for running; for on the one or two occasions ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... married, on August 20, 1748, at the age of thirty-eight, Catherine Elizabeth Textor. In December, 1750, was born a daughter, Cornelia, who remained until her death, at the age of twenty-seven, her brother's most intimate friend. She was married in 1773 to John George Schlosser. Goethe's education was irregular. French culture gave at this time the prevailing tone to Europe. Goethe could not have escaped its influence, and he was destined to fall under it in a special manner. In the Seven Years' War, which was now raging, France took ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... sometimes screaming with the rage of a hurt animal close at hand. Groups of soldiers ran swiftly past me, quite silent, their heads bent. Somewhere on the high road I could hear motor-cars spluttering and humming. At irregular intervals Red Cross men would arrive with wounded, would ask in a whisper that was inhuman and isolating whether there were room on my carts. Then the body would be lifted up; there would be muttered directions, the wounded man would cry, then the other ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... endanger their clothes by rolling on park grass. Instead, she led him to a tea-room behind a candy-shop on Tottenham Court Road, a low room with white wicker chairs, colored tiles set in the wall, and green Sedji-ware jugs with irregular bunches of white roses. A waitress with wild-rose cheeks and a busy step brought Orange Pekoe and lemon for her, Ceylon and Russian Caravan tea and a jug of clotted cream for him, with ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... An abandoned tunnel—an irregular orifice in the mountain flank which looked like a dried-up sewer that had disgorged through its opening the refuse of the mountain in red slime, gravel, and a peculiar clay known as "cement," in a foul streak down its side; a narrow ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... (in 1589) he was appointed governor of the Philippine Islands. Arriving there in May, 1590, he at once began the task of providing suitable fortifications for Manila, and a body of paid troops in place of the irregular and unpaid soldiers who had hitherto been the only dependence of the Spanish colony. In October, 1593, he formed a naval expedition to recover the fortress at Ternate; but on the way thither he was treacherously slain, with nearly all the Spaniards in his galley, by the Chinese rowers thereon. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... street—if street that could be called which was an irregular cluster of poor cottages of many heights and ages, some with their fronts, some with their backs, and some with gable ends towards the road, with here and there a signpost, or a shed encroaching on the path—was ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Captain's firm step and martial bearing. He was apt—like his grandfather—to hold his own will to be other people's law, and (happily for the peace of the nursery) this opinion was devoutly shared by his brother Nicholas. Though the Captain had left the army, Robin continued to command an irregular force of volunteers in the nursery, and never was colonel more despotic. His brothers and sisters were by turn infantry, cavalry, engineers, and artillery, ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... was about thirty. His small, round, gray eyes had a sleepy expression, and at the same time gazed calmly out from under the dirty white lambskin of his cap, which hung down over his face. His thick, irregular nose, standing out between his sunken cheeks, gave evidence of emaciation that was the result of illness, and not natural. His restless lips, barely covered by a sparse, soft, whitish moustache, were constantly changing their shape as though they were trying to ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... of the Ilissus Ionic, and are decorated with a colonnade, completed with a well-proportioned entablature from the same beautiful order. Mr. Elmes, in his critical observations on this terrace, thinks the attic story "too irregular to accompany so chaste a composition as the Ionic, to which it forms a crown;" he likewise objects to the cornice and blocking-course, as being "also too small in proportion for the majesty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... knew of my presence and were comfortably awaiting me deep within the zone occurred to me, and so I was very cautious as I cased the layout and decided to make my entry at the point where the irregular boundary of the dead area was closest to ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... name of science. Stripped of disguise this love of thoroughness is nothing but an indolent resolve to make things easy for the teacher, and, worse still, for the examiner. Live teaching is hard work. It demands continual freshness and a mind alert. The dullest man can hear irregular verbs, and with the book he knows whether they are said right or wrong, but to take a text and show what the passage means to the world, to reconstruct the scene and the conditions in which it was written, to show the origins and the fruits of ideas or of discoveries, demand qualities ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... unfortunate Mr. Phunky had sat down when Serjeant Snubbin had winked at him, or if Serjeant Buzfuz had stopped this irregular cross-examination at the outset (which he knew better than to do; observing Mr. Winkle's anxiety, and well knowing it would, in all probability, lead to something serviceable to him), this unfortunate admission would not have been elicited. The moment ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Wytschaete. Here are Shelley Farm, White Horse Cellars and St. Eloi, with the British front line shown by faint dashes, crossing the road that runs through White Horse Cellars, at figure 2. The German trenches, indicated by irregular black lines, are close to the British front at this point, but run sharply away down to Piccadilly Farm and beyond on the left. The trenches on this map are corrected to February 20th, 1916. Sniper's ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... nutshell, a resume of what the busy imagination of Ibsen was at work upon up to his thirtieth year. His earliest new-year's gift to the play-goers of Bergen was St. John's Night, 1853, a piece which has not been printed; in 1854 he revived The Warrior's Barrow; in 1855 he made an immense although irregular advance with Lady Inger at Oestraat; in 1856 he produced The Feast at Solhoug; in 1857 a rewritten version of the early Olaf Liljekrans. These are the juvenile works of Ibsen, which are scarcely counted in the recognized canon of his writings. None of them is ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Froeken Jensen had the most irregular and ungainly features that ever crippled a woman's career; her nose was—But no! I won't describe her, poor girl. She was about twenty-six years old, but one of those girls whose years no one counts, who are old maids at seventeen. Well, you can fancy what a fix I was in. It ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... inglorious function, with the wife on one hand and the lover on the other. He is not ill-looking; he has hair of a ruddy gold, which naturally curls, and his eyes are dark, a combination which I always regard as the mark of some congenital deficiency, physical or moral; his features are irregular but pleasing; the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish; his address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling quality, a deliquescence of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grace the grey stone walls and massive towers of feudal masonry. Rising from a green eminence gently sloping to the lake, the stately pile cast its shadow far and dark over the beautiful waters; by its side, from the high and wooded mountains on the background, broke a waterfall, in irregular and sinuous course—now hid by the foliage, now gleaming in the light, and collecting itself at last in a broad basin—beside which a little fountain, inscribed with half-obliterated letters, attested the departed elegance of the classic age—some memento of lord and ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... begin. The regimentation of industrial workers who have got regular work is not so very difficult. That can be done, and is being done, by themselves. The problem that we have to face is the regimentation, the organisation, of those who have not got work, or who have only irregular work, and who from sheer pressure of absolute starvation are driven irresistibly into cut-throat competition with their better employed brothers and sisters. Skin for skin, all that a man hath, will he give for his life; much more, then, will ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... took roundabout ways, and presently he was where he could see long gray walls of vapor where lay battle lines. The voices of cannon shook him. The musketry sounded in long irregular surges that played havoc with his ears. He stood regardant for a moment. His eyes had an awestruck expression. He gawked in ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... was reached, and the beating, rather irregular, was plain enough to cause some alarm. The boat was beyond the open mouth and at one side, so that it could not be seen by ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... telegraphed the right letter to a young lady by putting his finger with a significant smile to his eye. Many years later, however, and after his entrance into public life, Lincoln himself spelt apology with a double p, planning with a single n, and very with a double r. His schooling was very irregular, his school days hardly amounting to a year in all, and such education as he had was picked up afterwards by himself. His appetite for mental food, however, was always strong, and he devoured all the books, few and not very select, which could be found in the neighbourhood of "Pigeon Creek." Equally ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... a signal to advance, and we stood forward in an irregular line. The sergeant looked around us sternly till his eye lighted upon the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... something of the hybrid in him; he is a new animal, arising from the coming together of many unfamiliar elements and it is well known that the reproduction of abnormal growths, whether animal or vegetable, is irregular and not to be depended upon, even when they are not ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the entrance, in a kind of sentry-box, Quantrelle the Red acted as concierge. He was a man above the peasant class, ridiculously long and spare, with an unbroken record for thirty years of drunkenness and quarrelling. His narrow head was covered with irregular tufts of scarlet hair, and in his forehead were heavy furrows which curved down over the nose and waved upward and back to the temple. His eyebrows were red tufts standing fiercely out over his little red-brown eyes, and his nose, ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... lonely journeying, and dreading to meet these strange cousins into whose home life he had been so abruptly forced. Now, as he looked at Allie's slight, girlish figure, and at her bright, happy face which not even her irregular features could render plain, he felt a sudden sense of relief, and secretly wished that all the family might be as attractive as his genial uncle and the pleasant cousin who had given ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... two members represented the borough until it was unkindly abolished by the reforms of 1832. Some of its members came of old Surrey families—Carews, Mores, Oglethorpes, Onslows, Evelyns; and some of its elections were highly irregular. One of the most successful pieces of jobbery stands to the credit of the year 1754, when the Tory sitting members, General Oglethorpe and Peter Burrell, were opposed by two Whigs, James More Molyneux and Philip Carteret ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... all the difference; and I shall expect you both to make as much progress as possible, because, although I shall take you both out there, and shall teach you whenever I find time, your lessons must of necessity be short and irregular. And now you can all go out into the garden and talk ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... mixtures which did not become his sallowness. He smiled very rarely, and when he did smile, his long upper lip unfastened itself with an effort and showed a horizontal wrinkle halfway between the pointed end of his nose and the irregular, nicked row ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... is one variously known as box-elder, ash-leaved maple, or negundo. Of rapid growth, it makes a lusty, irregular tree. Its green-barked, withe-like limbs seem willing to grow in any direction—down, up, sidewise—and the result is a peculiar formlessness that has its own merit. I think of a fringe of box-elders ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... a loaf from the oven when about half baked, and lightly pull the partially set dough into pieces of irregular shape, about half the size of one's fist. Do not smooth or mold the pieces; bake in a slow oven until browned and ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... O Athenians, whether they inhabit a great city or a small one, is governed by nature and by laws. Of these, nature is a thing irregular, unequal, and peculiar to the individual possessor; laws are regular, common, and the same for all. Nature, if it be depraved, has often vicious desires; therefore you will find people of that sort falling into ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... having been "done," though the agent played the part of interpreter. It was a strange commercial drama in which Anton had now to take a share. Men from every portion of Europe were here, and trade had many peculiarities, which to German eyes seemed irregular and insecure. Nevertheless, habits of duty exercise so great an influence even over weaker natures, that Anton's perseverance more than once won ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... permitted and commanded to go with a light. We cry mystery long before the region of mystery comes. True mystery casts no shadows around. It is a sudden and awful gulf yawning across the field of knowledge; its form is irregular, but its lips are clean cut and sharp, and the mind can go to the very verge and look down the precipice ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... this fatigue had stamped itself was clearly one of remarkable vigour, physical and mental. A massive head covered with strong black hair, curly at the brows; eyes grayish-blue, small, with some shade of expression in them which made them arresting, commanding, even; a large nose and irregular mouth, the lips flexible and kind, the chin firm—one might have made some such catalogue of Meynell's characteristics; adding to them the strength of a broad-chested, loose-limbed frame, made rather, one would have thought, for country ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hunt from one to two thousand Indians, some mounted and others on foot. They encompassed a large space where the buffalo were contained, and, closing in around them on all sides, formed a complete circle. The circle at first enclosed measured say six miles in diameter, with an irregular circumference determined by the movements of the herd. When the “surround” was formed, the hunters radiated from the main body to the right and left, and the ring was entire. The chief then gave the order to charge, which was communicated ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... thing enough," Mr. Cradock told her, as it were reassuringly. "Nothing to fight shy of, or be afraid of. But something to be regulated of course.... Now, the thing is to oppose to this irregular desire of your daughter's for this man a new and a stronger set of desires. Fight one group of complexes with another. You can't, I suppose, persuade her to be analysed? There are good analysts ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... office of tribune against the law, and, therefore, nothing done by him was valid. Cato was displeased at this, and opposed Cicero, not that he commended Clodius, but rather disapproved of his whole administration; yet, he contended, that it was an irregular and violent course for the senate to vote the illegality of so many decrees and acts, including those of Cato's own government in Cyprus and at Byzantium. This occasioned a breach between Cato and Cicero, which, though it did not come ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Barnabas had been like some of us, he would have had a very different style of exhortation. He would have said, 'This irregular work has been well done, but there are no authorised teachers here, and no provision has been made for the due administration of the sacraments of the Church. The very first thing of all is to give these people the blessing of bishops and priests.' Some of us would ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... were erected for the accommodation of pilgrims and other visitors. Hereford contained the shrines of St. Ethelbert and St. Thomas Cantelupe, but its chief relic of antiquity is the house that remains of the "old Butchers' Row," which was originally a large and irregular cluster of wooden buildings placed nearly in the middle of the locality known as the High Town. All but one of these houses have been taken down, and the one that remains shows window-frames, doors, stairs, and floors all made of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... and give their sanction to what is being done. On the other hand, for unauthorised persons or any self-constituted bodies or conferences to attempt to pre-judge such questions and to carry on negotiations either with regular or irregular representatives of other nations is pernicious. Such action is likely both to lead to confusion and to hamper the action of the authorised representatives of the nation, and is really opposed to sound principles of democracy, which must be based on the duly expressed will of the nation ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... the highest merely in the scale of its creatures but the lord of all." He is not a parasite but the paragon of the globe. He has faith in the unchangeableness of the laws he is mastering while suffering from them. He confidently declares there is nothing fitful, nothing capricious, nothing irregular in their action. The greater the calamity the more earnest his effort to ascertain its causes and learn the lessons ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... most common in Melbourne. First and foremost, owing to the more limited area of the business part of the town, the Sydney buildings are much loftier. Melbourne and Adelaide always look to me as if some one had taken his seat upon the top of them and squashed them down. Sydney is taller and more irregular. It climbs up and down a whole series of hills, and protrudes at all kinds of unexpected points. The city proper has no very definite boundaries, and you hardly know where the city ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... of the towers; but this only enhanced its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything, than its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes of little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second stories, but bulged outward ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... France. Officially I believe they are recorded as "missing", but they did not go astray on any battle-field. They have been gathered from their homes or from hotels or offices or even the busy streets. I will not conceal from you that the service of our Underground Railway is a little irregular from England and France. But from Switzerland it is smooth as a trunk line. There are unwatched spots on the frontier, and we have our agents among the frontier guards, and we have no difficulty about passes. It is a pretty device, and you will soon be privileged ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Mother,—You see I know not how to date my letter. My calendar in this sequestered spot is as irregular as Robinson Crusoe's after he had missed one day in his calculation. I have no intelligence to send you, unless a battle between a drunken attorney and an impudent publican which took place here yesterday may deserve ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... as she spoke, moving with perfect confidence down the irregular trail skirting the bank of the creek, her left hand grasping the pony's bit firmly, the other shading her eyes as though to aid in the selection of a path through the gloom. It was a rough, uneven, winding ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... saw many old sea- shells strewed on the surface of the ground, similar to those found on other parts of the coast of Patagonia. At San Josef, ninety miles south in nearly the same longitude, I found, above the gravel, which caps an old tertiary formation, an irregular bed and hillock of sand, several feet in thickness, abounding with shells of Patella deaurita, Mytilus Magellanicus, the latter retaining much of its colour; Fusus Magellanicus (and a variety of the same), and a large Balanus (probably B. Tulipa), all now found ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... between defectiveness and irregularity, is the first instrument of criticism for coming to true views concerning the proportion of the regular and irregular verbs. ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... contraband trade which might result from the introduction into the brain of a symptom of thought. We have already said night was closing in, the shops were being lighted, while the windows of the upper apartments were being closed, and the irregular steps of a patrol of soldiers forming the night-watch could be heard in the distance. D'Artagnan continued, however, to think of nothing, and to look at nothing, except the blue corner of the sky. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas |
