"Hairbreadth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not speedily quieted. I looked back with wonder on my hairbreadth escape, and on that singular concurrence of events which had placed me, in so short a period, in absolute security. Had the trunk fallen a moment earlier, I should have been imprisoned on the hill or thrown headlong. Had its fall been delayed another moment, I should have been pursued; for ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... tell you that I was not at all abashed or alarmed in addressing so grave a set of men as their Honors the Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States." In attending the circuit courts of Mississippi he had experiences of the roughest sort and many a hairbreadth escape. He wrote: ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... a cry of pain and terror, slipped to the ground, his nerve completely shaken. The sorrel lashed out with his hind feet, and missed his head by a hairbreadth. Pedro turned to run, stumbled, ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... harbour, and then sailed out with the Arabic, the Mongolian, the Victorian, and two freighters, amid a whole flock of cruisers and destroyers. The protecting fleet stayed with us two nights and three days. On the French boat the barber practically had no news of sudden deaths and hairbreadth escapes which had happened while we slept. We sailed into the Gironde River peacefully, almost joyously. But we left the Mersey with a story that a big fleet of destroyers hovered at the river's mouth; that the Belgic had been beached out there on a shoal by a "sub," and that we would be lucky ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... mounted high The giddy driver seems to fly, Were themes for harmless satire fit, And gave fresh force to Jenny's wit. Whate'er occurred, 'twas all delightful, No noise was harsh, no danger frightful. The dash and splash through thick and thin, The hairbreadth 'scapes, the bustling inn, (Where well-bred landlords were so ready To welcome in the 'squire and lady,) Dirt, dust, and sun, they bore with ease, Determined to be ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... standard of truthfulness shown by even the most enlightened pagans" have either forgotten the days when they read stories of adventure, or else have not, in reading this scene, realised properly the strain of hairbreadth peril that lies behind the comedy of it. A single slip in Iphigenia's tissue of desperate improvisations would mean death, and not to herself alone. One feels rather sorry for Thoas, certainly, and he is a very fine fellow in his way; ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... Revolution by Gov. Tryon to capture or murder Washington. They communicate their knowledge to Gen. Putnam and are commissioned by him to play the role of detectives in the matter. They do so, and meet with many adventures and hairbreadth escapes. The boys are, of course, mythical, but they serve to enable the author to put into very attractive shape much valuable knowledge concerning one phase of ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... ungrudgingly. He was a daredevil, who had taken his life in his hands a hundred times. Yet always he came through smiling, and brought back with him the man he went after. The whisper ran that he bore a charmed life, so many had been his hairbreadth escapes. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... After his hairbreadth escape from Varden, Rudge hid himself in a narrow street. When the next dawn came, as he searched for some dark den in which he might lie sheltered till another night, he saw Simon Tappertit issuing ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... he pointed out, there were innumerable discretions in his valour. He knew to a hairbreadth how far he might go, and he went no farther. He respected existing prejudices because they existed. He didn't ask awkward questions; he didn't raise problems; he had the British capacity for doing serious things ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... area of Five-Mile Point, after his recapture, Deerslayer was bound to a tree, and became a target for the hairbreadth marksmanship of Huron tomahawks, preliminary ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... it?—to escape without having learned anything of the "Terror's" secrets would not have contented me at all. Although I could not thus far flatter myself upon the success of my campaign, and though I had come within a hairbreadth of losing my life and though the future promised far more of evil than of good, yet after all, a step forward had been attained. To be sure, if I was never to be able to re-enter into communication with the world, if, like this Master of the World who had voluntarily ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... am riding I can't give my mind to them. It would be doing me knight service if you keep your eyes fixed upon them, and remember them every minute of the day, and tell me directly I drop one. They have had such hairbreadth escapes, haven't they, Unity?' she continued to the parlour-maid who was ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... because they stood highest in his esteem, and he owed most to them, Thomas Burke and David Hogg. Essentially alike, they seem to have been outwardly very different. Thomas Burke, a somewhat wild youth, had enlisted early in the army. His adventures and hairbreadth escapes in the Forty-second, during the Peninsular and other wars, were marvelous, and used to be told in after-years to crowds of wondering listeners. But most marvelous was the change of heart that brought him back an intense Christian evangelist, who, in season, and out of ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Kennedys' in a pleasantly excited frame of mind and a cab. I just missed being late by a hairbreadth. The house was a big one, and everybody pertaining to it was big, except the host. Mark Kennedy was a little, thin man with a bald head. He didn't look like a political power, but that was all the more reason for his being ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the gravest importance; there can be little doubt that they accounted for a considerable proportion of the deaths on the field. On the other hand, the neck as a region offered some of the most striking examples of hairbreadth escape of important structures. Consideration of a number of the vascular lesions (see cervical aneurisms, p. 135) also shows conclusively that in no region did the small size of the bullet more materially influence the ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... floated into others more entrancing. All the hairbreadth escapes of the heroine of the movie serial were hers, adapted by her native logic to fit within the bounds of possibility,—though I must admit they bulged here and there and threatened to overlap and ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... then? Did I stir by a single hairbreadth? Who does not know? I scarcely let myself breathe. I could not believe that such a thing of pure ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the map, and cowboys were kicking up their last dust before vanishing, but she had supposed that they had left compensations in their wake. On the principle that adventures are to the adventurous, her life should have been a whirl of hairbreadth escapes. ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... destructive and its toll of life heavy. A sentry usually watched for and gave warning of the approach of one of these missiles, and the scene which followed his stentorian "Look out!" was somewhat animated. Hairbreadth escapes from destruction were numerous. Two ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... to headland we made rapid, easy traverse, thoroughly enjoying the ride, munching chocolate and raisins, speculating about the seasons when it had been possible to cross direct from Nome to Saint Michael on the ice, and exchanging stories we had heard of the disasters and hairbreadth escapes attending such overbold venture. Only this winter three men and a dog team were blown out into Bering Sea by a sudden storm, and lay for four days in their sleeping-bags drifting up and down on an ice cake, until at last they were blown ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... of its sports, and the tales of hairbreadth escapes from elephants, which I had read in various publications, were sources of attraction against which I strove in vain; and I at length determined upon the very wild idea of spending twelve months ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... were originally accompanied on the part of the onlooker by trembling, perspiration and palpitation of the heart, when lived over again in memory, are again accompanied by all these bodily activities. Your memory of a hairbreadth escape will bring to your cheek the pallor that marked it ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton
... George did not abate when Lawrence came home from the war; it rather increased than otherwise. For his ears were regaled with many stories of army life, in which bravery, peril, bloodshed, and hairbreadth escapes were strangely mixed. There was a singular fascination in these tales of war to George; and he never tired of listening to them. The more he heard, the more he enjoyed playing soldier. He was constantly learning military tactics, too, from the lips of his brother. Being a bright, intelligent ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... In all these hairbreadth escapes—of which the king spoke with infinite humour and good feeling—one name was perpetually introduced:—George—George Villiers, Villers, as the royal narrator called him; for the name was so pronounced formerly. And well he might; for George Villiers had been his ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... fully written romance, which bristles with thrilling passages, exciting adventures, and hairbreadth escapes." ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... and then the criticism becomes a mere "notice," as it were, the relation of a journey where nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the hairbreadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the sufferings, too! I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen running ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... and lighting of the inevitable pipe, conversation would become general. The news of the day—not always, as may be imagined, very recent—was commented upon, and then, as now, political questions were sagely and earnestly discussed. Stories, mainly of adventure, were told; hairbreadth escapes from Indian massacre recounted and the battles of late wars fought again beneath the spreading branches of the trees. Meanwhile, the boys and girls wandered off in separate and smaller groups, singing and playing and making love much ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... was, by the story of this hairbreadth escape, I asked Mrs. Gilmour more about those fearful weeks of suspense, and she assured me that they had been perfectly calm, and that they were entirely resigned to God's ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... those romantic heroes who can go through three volumes of hairbreadth escapes without the faintest hint of that blessed institution, dinner; therefore, like "Lady Leatherbridge," he "partook copiously of everything," while the two women beamed over each mouthful with an interest that enhanced its flavor, and urged upon him cold meat and cheese, pickles and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... nephew made from this point scientific explorations; discovered a strait, called after him the Strait of James Ross, and on the northern shore of this strait, on the main land of Boothia, planted the British flag on the Northern Magnetic Pole. The ice broke up, so did the Victory; after a hairbreadth escape, the party found a searching vessel and arrived home after an absence of four years and five months, Sir John Ross having lost his ship, and won his reputation, The friend in need was made a baronet for his munificence; Sir John was reimbursed ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... a youthful blunder. It was not really a tale. I introduced, in order to provide interest, all sorts of accessories— aunts, parsons, gamekeepers, nurses, a fire and some hairbreadth escapes, but they were none of them essential and they were all manufactured. The only parts not worthless were those which ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... a scant reading knowledge of French and no training, had rivaled in technique the foremost craftsmen of the Latin races. In the six years since I met him, a stranded reporter, he stood in the firing line during two wars, knew hairbreadth 'scapes on land and sea, and established himself as the first writer of his time in the picturing of episodic, fragmentary life. His friends have charged him with fickleness, but he was a man who was ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... last long journey; but even at this distance of time, my eyes are dimmed with tears when I remember how he used to unlock that storehouse for my pleasure, and ransack his memory for stories either of his own personal perils by flood and field, or of the hairbreadth 'scapes of earlier travellers. For it was his amusement to amuse me; his happiness to make me happy. And I in return loved him with all my childish heart. Nay, with something deeper and more romantic than ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... to be no more than a faithful narrative of five years spent on the goldfields and in the far interior of Western Australia. Any one looking for stirring adventures, hairbreadth escapes from wild animals and men, will be disappointed. In the Australian Bush the traveller has only Nature to war against—over him hangs always the chance of death from thirst, and sometimes ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... head rests on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which had filched from his store of life but a moment? Me, who so loved and so cherished him—me he would have doomed to the pitiless cord of my servant, the Strangler, if my death could have lengthened a hairbreadth the span of his being. But what matters to me his crime or his madness? I loved him, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the deck of the one and his wig on that of the other, hoisted a cask to his maintop, to show his occupation, and bore away under an extraordinary pressure of canvass, without receiving injury. To account for these and other hairbreadth escapes, popular superstition alleged that Yawkins insured his celebrated buckkar by compounding with the devil for one-tenth of his crew every voyage. How they arranged the separation of the stock and tithes is left to our conjecture. The buckkar was perhaps called ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the boundless domains of the fur companies, and by the Indian tribes friendly to the peltrie trade. As these hardy, bronzed men sat around the hearth, while the juicy haunch of venison roasted on the spit by the blazing logs, relating blood-curdling tales and hairbreadth escapes, they were a necessary phase of times long passed away, but which will always have a picturesqueness especially ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... years he was hounded by revengeful Indians, who had an uncanny way of ferreting out his whereabouts no matter where he went. Often he sighted them while working in the fields and would be forced to flee to some other place. This continued with many hairbreadth escapes, until he was forced to move several ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... first tormented him and made him shrink from being left alone with his father had quite vanished. He had argued himself into a state of mental tranquility where further punishment for his misdemeanor seemed superfluous. After his hairbreadth escape from disaster there was no danger, he argued, of his repeating the experiment, and was not this the very lesson all punishments sought to instill? If he had achieved this result without bothering his father ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... dull work. After awhile, however, we heard voices, and the tramp of the horse, and then the barge-master and Mr. Johnson's foreman and other men kept coming and going on deck, and for a quarter of an hour we had as many hairbreadth escapes of discovery as the captain himself could have had in the circumstances. At last somebody threw the barge-master a bag of something (fortunately soft) which he was leaving behind, and which he chucked on to the top of my head. Then the driver called to his horse, ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... it ceased to be audible at all. Presently a dial announced the impossible, and they gazed at a device that seemed to be doing nothing whatever. The gyros appeared quite motionless. They spun with such incredible precision that it was not possible to detect that they moved a hairbreadth. And the whole complex device looked ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... the life of man in all conditions and at all times. But Spenser could never have seen in England such a strong and perfect image of the allegory itself—with the wild wanderings of its personages, its daily chances of battle and danger, its hairbreadth escapes, its strange encounters, its prevailing anarchy and violence, its normal absence of order and law—as he had continually and customarily before him in Ireland. "The curse of God was so great," writes John Hooker, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continually recruited. What adventures they have by flood and field, and what hairbreadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, on an average, about four or five thousand a month, or one hundred and fifty a day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders, benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... forms, as told by light and shade, are invariably clear, distinct, and speaking. The stones and gravel of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above; the bushes receive grays and yellows from the ground; every hairbreadth of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue of the sky or the gold of the sun, like a star upon the local color; this local color, changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified by the hue of the light, or quenched in the gray ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... journeyed south, by boat and horse, making his way steadily toward the distant plains where the Texans were waging their life-and-death fight. Texas was a wild place in those days, and the old hunter had more than one hairbreadth escape from Indians, desperadoes, and savage beasts, ere he got to the neighborhood of San Antonio, and joined another adventurer, a bee-hunter, bent on the same errand as himself. The two had been in ignorance ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... anchor; her weatherliness astounded us quite as much as did her speed, for she looked up a good three points higher than did our square-rigged neighbours, while her oil-smooth wake trailed away astern as straight as a ruled line, with no apparent inclination to trend a hairbreadth towards her weather quarter. She seemed to make no leeway ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... they were, handsome, magnificently built, and well skilled in the use of their simple tools. In the use of the adze they were particularly proficient, and able to plane a section of wood to within a hairbreadth of thickness by the use of this alone. They liked to use it for the most delicate work, so certain are they of their accurate manipulation, and on one occasion when I supplied a bandage to bind ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... of their rule. Wallace's name was frequently mentioned, and Archie always spoke with enthusiasm of his hero; and he could see that, although Mistress Bradfute said but little, she fully shared his views. It was but natural that Wallace's name should come so often forward, for his deeds, his hairbreadth escapes, his marvellous personal strength and courage, were the theme of talk in every Scotch home; but at Lanark at present it was specially prominent, for with his band he had taken up his abode in a wild and broken country known as Cart Lane Craigs, and more ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... were, she looked upon them with incredulous horror, as things in which she could hardly have had any part or lot. Then returned her wanderings and homeless miseries, when often a haystack or a heap of straw in a shed was her only joy—whisky always excepted. Last of all came the dread perils, the hairbreadth escapes of her too adventurous voyage on the brander;—and after all these things, here she was, walking in peace by the side of wee Sir Gibbie, a friend as strong now as he had always been true! She asked herself, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... reading a novel backwards. The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the denoument one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously-guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display. In the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... has already been said in these pages more than once—he is a lover of romance with an unfaltering respect for reality. We all meet with strange experiences once in our lives, with "things you could put in a story," as the phrase is; but we none of us have hairbreadth escapes every morning before breakfast. The romantic is as natural as anything else; it is the excess of the romantic which is in bad taste. It is the piling up of the agony which is disgusting. It is the accumulation upon one impossible hero of many exceptional adventures ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... over what is practically the long known and historic overland stage-road, over which so many thousands of gold-seekers and emigrants came in the days of California's gold excitement. Every mile has some story of pioneer bravery or heroism, of hairbreadth escape from hostile Indians or fortuitous deliverance from storm or disaster. It was over this route the pilgrims came who sought in Utah a land of freedom where they might follow their own peculiar conceptions ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... realise when I met him on the barrack-square at Limerick how fate would throw us together upon the scorching sands and rocky ridges of Gallipoli, nor could either of us foresee the hairbreadth escapes and queer corners in which we found ourselves at Suvla Bay ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... do business together today. You c'n be easy an' go a door further. We just dragged ourselves across the lake ... a hairbreadth an' we would've been stuck in the ice. We couldn't get forward an' we couldn't get backward. You can't give away somethin' you ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... have followed a man in the woods merely to study the queer creature, but without intent to do him harm. Nevertheless the timid traveller who discovers he is "pursued by a Cougar" may manage to persuade himself that he has had a hairbreadth escape. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... time and recuperate themselves; for they were nearly exhausted by their efforts to escape from the bloody scalping-knives of the Scarred-Arms. They kindled a fire, around which the six warriors huddled, telling each other, as is the savage wont, of their numerous hairbreadth escapes and single combats with the common enemy; also trying to devise some means of eluding the Scarred-Arms, who they knew to be still searching ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the thick rain;' he is gone, before the man can call after him. He bilks Revolutionary Committees; rides in carriers' carts, covered carts and open; lies hidden in one, under knapsacks and cloaks of soldiers' wives on the Street of Orleans, while men search for him: has hairbreadth escapes that would fill three romances: finally he gets to Paris to his fair Helpmate; gets to Switzerland, and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the lake. A canoe can be paddled only in almost smooth water, and we were frequently stormbound on some desolate island or point of land for two or three days at a time. When, after many adventures, some of which looked like hairbreadth escapes, we reached the Saskatchewan River, the eclipse was only three or four days ahead, and it became doubtful whether we should reach our station in time for the observation. It was to come off on the morning of July 18, and, by dint of ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... that very discourse He also said: "He that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.'' "Go, preach,'' He commanded. "Woe is me if I preach not,'' cried Paul. Hostile rulers and priests and mobs and the bitter Cross did not swerve Him a hairbreadth from His purpose; nor did the rending of the early disciples in the arenas of Nero, the burning of a Huss and a Savonarola, the pyres of Smithfield, the dungeons of the Tolbooth and the thumb-screws of the Inquisition quench the zeal ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... whatever came into my head to the man who seemed foremost among them. I spoke in English, though I was very sure that he would not understand. I said that I had no idea what country I was in; that I had stumbled upon it almost by accident, after a series of hairbreadth escapes; and that I trusted they would not allow any evil to overtake me now that I was completely at their mercy. All this I said quietly and firmly, with hardly any change of expression. They could not understand me, but they looked approvingly to one another, and ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... terrors of the voyage across the Adriatic arose fresh to my imagination. After many other adventures, he returns safe to [Sidenote: INGENIOUS MIMICRY.] Aleppo, his native city, no richer than he set out; but, like the monkey who had seen the world, "full of wise saws," and strange assertions. His hairbreadth escapes, the unlucky scrapes he gets into, the blunders he is incessantly committing from his imperfect knowledge of the languages of the various nations among whom he is thrown, the continual equivoque and play upon words, his absurd ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... you have ever slipped, though only an inch, while climbing over roofs, you will know that sudden, stabbing, sinking feeling that came to Aladdin and stopped the beating of his heart by the hairbreadth of a second. He had been proceeding chin on breast, and head bent against the wind, or he would have seen it before, for it was a notable landmark in that part of the world, and showed him that he had been making way, not toward his destination, but ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... intimately associated with the bringing to justice of the Camden Town Gang—a group of daring and successful criminals which had baffled the London police for two years. Neale had read all about Starmidge's activities in both cases, and of the hairbreadth escape he had gone through in connection with the second. And he had formed an idea of him—which he now saw to be a totally erroneous one. For Starmidge did not look at all like a detective—in Neale's opinion. Instead of being elderly, and sinister, and close of eye and mouth, he was ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... foraging from dawn till dark. Pairs and trios might be seen chasing each other, and from time to time they showed off in various feats of flight. A favorite sport was to dart down suddenly from a great height toward some perching crow, and just before touching it to turn at a hairbreadth and rebound in the air so fast that the wings of the swooper whirred with a sound like distant thunder. Sometimes one crow would lower his head, raise every feather, and coming close to another would gurgle out a long note like. What did it all mean? I soon learned. They ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was Ban of Craiova before he ascended the throne of Wallachia. This step he accomplished through intrigues at Constantinople with the aid of his father-in-law, whereby he succeeded in deposing his predecessor Alexander. Some marvellous tales are told concerning the hairbreadth escapes of Michael in his struggles for the ascendency, one being that, when he was captured by Alexander and ordered for execution, the headsman was so terrified at the majesty of his countenance that he dropped the axe and fled, and no one else was to be found willing to undertake the ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... that years could not remove it; the proved character of every man and officer on board; the implicit trust and the adoration we felt for our commander; the ludicrous situations which would occur even in the extremest danger and create mirth when death was staring you in the face; the hairbreadth escapes, and the indifference to life shown by all—when memory sweeps along those years of excitement even now, my pulse beats ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... he were in the centre of indifference and life had little interest for him. Yet there never was a man more ready for action, or more quick to seize upon and solve the nodus of any new emergency. The Prussian anecdote-books are full of his exploits and hairbreadth escapes, a number of which are represented around the base of the statue. He combined the intelligence of the skilful general with the physical dexterity ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... and that, leaving no part uncolored, the town of Dornbirn grew scandalized at a mad peasant's audacity. The authorities took it in hand, and a solemn gendarme visited Hans Jakob with strict orders from government to desist from such perilous, hairbreadth inventions for the future. Poor Hans! he now regarded himself not only as the laughing-stock of the whole country, but as a ruined man. He had spent all his savings on his first venture; but neither ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... hairbreadth escapes he went through in that memorable flight for duty and freedom will no doubt be found accurately recorded in his book on the war, which I know to be "in the making" at the present moment. Suffice it to say that he reached the farm of a friend near Silkatsnek in safety, where, he had ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... against the ornament of the Surgical Ward of St. Isidore's. He was tired: the languid summer air thus early in the year would shake any man's nerve. But the head nurse understood well that such a wavering of will or muscle must not occur again, or the hairbreadth ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... successful chase. As the appetites of those who had passed the day in the exciting toil were keen and the viands tempting, the first half-hour passed quickly, as all such half-hours are wont to pass, in garrulous recitals of personal exploits, and of the hairbreadth escapes of deer, which, had fortune not been fickle, should have now been present as trophies of the skill of the hand by which they fell. It was only after personal vanity was sufficiently appeased, and when the hunger even of a border-man could ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... that only in some kinds, to be used but in carrying materials. With their breasts and whole bodies, indeed, most of them round off the soft insides of their procreant cradles, till they fit each brooding bunch of feathers to a hairbreadth, as it sits close and low on eggs or eyeless young, a leetle higher raised up above their gaping babies, as they wax from downy infancy into plumier childhood, which they do how swiftly! and how soon have they flown! You look some sunny morning into the bush, and the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... serene critic may take exception to this form of reasoning and produce examples of genius, such as Wordsworth, who lived a strictly pious life, never offending any moral law by a hairbreadth; but Wordsworth was not made like Byron; he had not the personality of the poor wayward cripple who at one time had brought the world to his feet, neither had Wordsworth to fight against such wild hereditary complications ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... hearts of Tristan and Iseult, has been treated in many ways by the different poets and prose writers who have handled it. In many of the older versions we have lengthy descriptions of stolen interviews, hairbreadth escapes, and tests of love, ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... heroic interest and adventure. Her defence of Bromeham Castle against the intrusion of her uncle of Cumberland,—her riding cross-legged to meet the judges of assize, when she acted in person at Appleby as High Sheriff by inheritance of the county of Westmoreland,—her hairbreadth escapes and dangers during the great rebellion, are characteristics of the woman, so striking in themselves, that they would require little adventitious ornament from the writer, who should take them as incidents for poem or romance. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... time than usual on his hands, before he was considered quite well enough to go into the school-room and employ himself with the others. He was allowed, however, to sit up and to read as many story-books as he liked. They were full of stirring adventure and hairbreadth escape. It was quite a common everyday thing in them for a boy to save a person's life and risk his own. Why could not something of the same nature happen ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... said Ken, but though he spoke quietly enough, he, too, felt a thrill. For five long hours they had been pushing east, or rather south-eastwards. They had crossed the main road leading to Great Maidos, they had had hairbreadth escapes sufficient to last most folk for a lifetime, and now at a little after one in the morning, they had crossed the whole peninsula, and were facing the famous Narrows, with their double cordon of forts on both sides ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... from a hideous reptile; another from the coils of a serpent; a third from having his skull cracked in by a fallen fruit, and afterwards split open by the beak of an angry bird. Now, after all these hairbreadth perils and escapes, to be poisoned by eating the flesh of this very bird—to die in such simple and apparently causeless fashion; though it may seem almost ridiculous, it was to them not a whit the less appalling. And ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... "he'll go and tell—tell the Fort girls of his hairbreadth escape from the claws of ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... ran into them—one of those innumerable hairbreadth escapes that make the streets of New York as exciting as a battle—and as dangerous. For a few minutes Ursula's mind was deflected. But a fatality seemed to pursue the subject of the pale obscurity whose very name he was uncertain whether ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... sycophantic lackey, and every political and religious renegade in the kingdom. His fury was that of an angry bull tormented by gnats. His worst passions were aroused, his most violent prejudices confirmed. But the abuse did not divert him by a hairbreadth from his preconceived plan. He proceeded with deliberation to carry on in "The Romany Rye" the story so abruptly suspended at the close of the hundredth chapter of "Lavengro." The first chapters of "The Romany Rye" (which was not ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... Shabbatai Zebi, "that the sinfulness of the world can be overcome only by a super-abundance of sin." This paved the way for the last of the long list of Messiahs, Jacob (Yankev Leibovich) Frank of Podolia. His experiences, adventures, and hairbreadth escapes, his entire career, beginning with his return from his travels in Turkey, through his conversion to Catholicism (1759), to the day of his death as "Baron von Offenbach," would furnish material for a stirring drama. As if to counteract ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... wonderful child heroine, and called her Juliet and told a little fresh piece of her history every day. Never was there such a child for impossible adventures and hairbreadth escapes; what that unfortunate little creature went through was known only ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... machine. I saw you from the train window as you came through the cut. You handled the gear like an imported chauffeur, but it was steep there on the approach, and the car began to skid. I saw in a flash what was going to happen; it made me limp as a rag. But there was a chance,—the merest hairbreadth, and you took it." He waited a moment, then said, smiling: "That was a picture worth snapping, but I was too batty to think of it in time. You see," he went on seriously, "the leading character in this story is you. And it means a lot to me. I was going to be fired; honest I ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... kept us busy for a few days; but whatever of thankfulness we were capable of feeling was aroused by this hairbreadth escape from death through the wicked neglect of the most elementary duty of any ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... cast, whether in the form of plays or of novels. The mere sight of the printed page, broken up in dialogue, was anguish. Yet it was not the excitement of the fiction that I dreaded, for I consumed great numbers of narratives of travel, and was not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, or shipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly serpents; it was the dramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up to in the speech of his characters that I could not bear. I found a like impossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his arm, and heard a heavy thud at his side. It was a ripe Durian which had fallen from an immense height and missed him by a hairbreadth. ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... hairbreadth escape—for that night, at any rate, though other thrills were in store. The chauffeur was greatly surprised when bidden to go on from St. Albans to London, and take the High Barnet road to the City; but Fenley produced a five-pound ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... him exceedingly: but to bear the second is perhaps the severest test to which any buoyant spirit can be put. And from the very beginning of his career as a novelist Scott had this burden upon his shoulders. He bore the chains very lightly at first with a hundred hairbreadth 'scapes which made the struggle—as even that struggle can be made while the sufferer is strong and young—almost exhilarating, with a glee in the relief and the power to surmount every difficulty, and a faith strengthened by numberless examples of the certainty—however ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... in the country roads the unsteadiness of our Jehu did not so much matter, for he was sober enough to keep the horse upon the road, though hardly fit to steer him past other vehicles. However, it was marvellous how we did get on. What hairbreadth escapes we had! It was useless attempting to remonstrate with the fellow. He was in that quarrelsome and mischievous humour which would brook no protest. Once, very soon after starting, in passing a country cart we as nearly as possible upset ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... man has arrived another may also succeed'; enthusiasm is taken for predestination, and each one thinks himself created by God on purpose to be a famous leader. In the meanwhile you live in Toledo, dreaming of glory, of hairbreadth enterprises, of gigantic battles and noisy triumphs. But when, with the two stars on your arm you go to a regiment, the first thing that comes to meet you at the barrack gate, even before you receive the salute ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... narrow escape. 'Tis the luck of the Le Moynes. Perhaps you know the motto of our house?—'By hairbreadth ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... seemed to refresh us all. There was again a difficulty in starting, but, once fairly under way, the road was not so steep and the horses went better. I was now so tired, and had grown so accustomed to hairbreadth escapes, that, however near we went to the edge of the precipice, I did not feel capable of jumping out, but sat still and watched listlessly, wondering whether we should really go over or not. After many delays we reached Head-quarter House, where the warmth ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... Mississippi and the Missouri. In that fascinating history we read of the romantic and thrilling experiences of Parkman and his companions in their summer journey across the plains of Nebraska and through the mountain ranges of Wyoming, Montana, and Oregon. We read of their hairbreadth escapes from the Indians; their chase of the buffalo and other wild animals of the far Western country; of the wearisome weeks that they spent in crossing the deserts where absolute loneliness reigned; and finally of their arrival, after months of hardship, in the vast Oregon country, which ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... and mossy surface, under the friendly stars. The outcast and his strange brethren had played fair: this was the long roof, and close ahead rose the wall of some higher building, an upright blackness from which escaped two bits of light,—a right angle of hairbreadth lines, and below this a brighter patch, small and ragged. Here, louder, but confused with a gentle scuffing of feet, sounded the voices of the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... new serial story began, and the hairbreadth escapes of that immortal Monkey which it recorded were breathlessly followed by Wee Willie Winkie's army of bairns all over the world; and when it was concluded, so numerous were the entreaties for a sequel, that compulsion had to be resorted to in order to secure the ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... to the venture a hairbreadth escape or two and many insurmountable obstacles which would, of course, be triumphantly surmounted by the hero. But fact will have it otherwise, and the chronicler of events must not be blamed if the hegira of John Ivan Jewel ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... I didn't want to lose that club, for it had done good service in past autumns, and had gone through a great many hairbreadth escapes. ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... John Williams's The Redeemed Captive, both famous in their day, and still of lively interest. In the third group are the fighting stories, such as John Mason's History of the Pequot War. The adventures and hairbreadth escapes recorded as sober facts in these narratives were an excellent substitute for fiction during the Colonial period. Moreover, they furnished a motive and method for the Indian tales and Wild West stories which have since ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... can expect to have hairbreadth escapes from the running gauntlet continuously, without suffering a shattering internal panic, while catastrophes of fatal injury to life and limb have become ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the cavalry, Stuart, Hampton, Ashby, Fitz Lee and others, were heroes and household names to the whole army. Their brilliant courage and dare-deviltry, their hairbreadth escapes, and thrilling adventures, their feats of skill, and grace were themes of pride and delight to us all. These cavaliers were the "darlings of the army." Still, the army would guy the cavalry ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... lines are graven on my memory from those days, not by the thrilling experiences—"th' hairbreadth 'scapes"—but by the fellowship of the men I knew. An American general said to me recently that scouts were born, not made. It may be so, but it is surprising what opposite types of men became our best scouts. There were ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... winter through and most of the summer, and brought it nearer to the condition of Red Indian fighting, which was our favourite reading and our example of heroism. Again and again we studied the adventures of Bill Biddon, the Indian spy, not only on account of his hairbreadth escapes when he eluded the Indians after a miraculous fashion and detected the presence of the red varmint by the turning of a leaf on the ground, but also in order to find out new methods of deceit by which we could allure our Indians into narrow places, or daring methods of attack by which we ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... though his description reminds us more of the musk ox of the barren lands than of the buffalo. He describes the summer as very dry and game as very scarce, on the first part of the trip; and this also applies to the half-barren lands west of Reindeer Lake. Hairbreadth escapes were not lacking on the trip of the boy explorer. Once, completely exhausted from a swift march, Kelsey fell asleep on the trail. When he awoke, there was not a sign of the straggling hunters. ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... death in the Strand—seeing that the stake is precisely the same—should be quite as enthralling as a hairbreadth 'scape on the plains of Texas, even though the gambler wears a top-hat ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... defenselessness &c adj., exposure &c (liability) 177; vulnerability; vulnerable point, heel of Achilles^; forlorn hope &c (hopelessness) 859. [Dangerous course] leap in the dark &c (rashness) 863; road to ruin, faciles descensus Averni [Lat.] [Vergil], hairbreadth escape. cause for alarm; source of danger &c 667. rock ahead [Approach of danger], breakers ahead; storm brewing; clouds in the horizon, clouds gathering; warning &c 668; alarm &c 669. [Sense of danger] apprehension &c 860. V. be in danger &c adj.; be exposed to danger, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Warden, with confidence. "He was a friend. Do you know that was one of the most hairbreadth escapes of my life? If Fletcher Hill had caught me, he wouldn't have shown much mercy—any more than he would now," he added, with a half-laugh. "He's ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... After numerous hairbreadth escapes, the chief surmounted the third line of fortifications, followed by his troops; the enemy's standard was hurled down, and the British flag hoisted in its place; the ramparts were manned by the conquerors; ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... he made his way toward the distant plains where the Texans were waging their life and death struggle against the Mexicans. More than one hairbreadth escape did the old hunter have from Indians, desperadoes and wild beasts, but he finally got to the neighborhood of San Antonio, and fell in with another adventurer, a bee-hunter, also on his way to join the Texans. They soon learned that a great Mexican army ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... figuring out just what the relation was. The impression her manner gave to one who was merely a casual observer was that she deliberated and thought before speaking in order that her statements might not deviate by a hairbreadth ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... for any other purpose than the one to which it was applied, and landed in the midst of the ruins caused by the dreadful explosion of gun-powder that had taken place the previous year: it had occasioned a fearful destruction of property and loss of life, and many hairbreadth escapes were recounted to us. We were told, indeed, that two children, after being buried for five days, were dug out alive; two officers were blown out of the window of an hotel, one of whom was uninjured, the ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... be insisted on, only with much greater effect and insistence, by this charming woman of the world. Her mother, still living, had passed her time in the disturbed and exciting atmosphere of plots and counterplots; and she herself could tell him story after story of heartrending tragedies and of hairbreadth escapes, which had happened to her own relations and friends. From her he acquired those aristocratic longings which always characterised him, and through her influence he made acquaintance with several people of high position and importance, and thus was enabled to make an occasional appearance ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of Bidwell's Bar, the road, hitherto so smooth and level, became stony and hilly. For more than a mile we drove along the edge of a precipice, and so near, that it seemed to me, should the horses deviate a hairbreadth from their usual track, we must be dashed into eternity. Wonderful to relate, I did not "Oh!" nor "Ah!" nor shriek once, but remained crouched in the back of the wagon, as silent as death. When we were again in safety, the driver exclaimed, in the classic patois of New England, "Wall, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... said: "Our life was as full of romance as heart could desire. We had a flute and a guitar, good horses, a beautiful country, splendid residences inhabited by friends who loved us, and plenty of hairbreadth 'scapes from the roving bands of Federals who were continually visiting that Debatable Land. . . . Cliff and I never cease to talk of the beautiful women, the serenades, the moonlight dashes on the beach of fair Burwell's ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... of their party, the savages did not come too near, but stood drawing their bows from time to time, and sending their arrows up in the air, so that they might fall nearly perpendicularly upon the deck. Many times over the men had hairbreadth escapes from arrows which fell with a sharp whistling sound, and stuck quivering in the boards, while the mate made the crew ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... vulnerability; vulnerable point, heel of Achilles[obs3]; forlorn hope &c. (hopelessness) 859. [Dangerous course] leap in the dark &c. (rashness) 863; road to ruin, faciles descensus Averni [Lat][Vergil], hairbreadth escape. cause for alarm; source of danger &c. 667. rock ahead[Approach of danger], breakers ahead; storm brewing; clouds in the horizon, clouds gathering; warning &c. 668; alarm &c. 669. [Sense of danger] apprehension &c. 860. V. be in danger &c. Adj.; be exposed to danger, run into danger, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... bacilli shooting their little arrows at one at every breath. If men realised these things—truly realised them—they would see that there is no need to go to the North Pole in order to live dangerously. A walk from Charing Cross to St Paul's would then be seen to be as rich in hairbreadth escapes as a voyage to an island of head-hunters. The man who lives the most thrilling life I know is a man who rarely stirs beyond his garden. Every time he is pricked by a thorn or gets a little earth in his finger-nail, he rushes into the house to bathe his hands ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... concentrated their fire upon these people. They were pursued and shot like game. Liberal rewards were offered for their leaders. Yet they stood by their Covenant; they would not yield an hairbreadth. Fidelity to Christ swallowed up every other consideration; it was the burning ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... will differ (he proceeded), the one sort from the other, in this very quality. Here you have a leader who, incapable of kindling a zest for toil and love of hairbreadth 'scapes, is apt to engender in his followers that base spirit which neither deigns nor chooses to obey, except under compulsion. They even pride and plume themselves, [5] the cowards, on their opposition to their leader; this same leader who, in the end, ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... upon the coffin. A wavering recollection of the incidents that led me hither, and of the stunning blow which I had received, occurred to me. I saw into what error appearances had misled these men, and shuddered to reflect by what hairbreadth means I ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... knew that with such men words are of little avail. The disease was entrenched too strongly in the very centre of the man's being. It seemed at moments as if all his strange adventures and hairbreadth escapes had been sent to do him harm, and not good; to pamper and harden his self-confidence, not to crush it. Therefore Campbell seldom argued with him: but he prayed for him often; for he had begun, as all did who saw much of Tom Thurnall, to admire and respect him, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... the observation and dissection of character and manners we find in the true "novel." Rather be it said that it is one in which the hidden soul is made patent under the touchstone of blood-stirring incidents, of hairbreadth risks, of recklessness or fierceness. There are soaring passions, secrets of the innermost heart, that can only be set free in desperate situations—and those situations are not found in the tenor in every-day, well-ordered life: they ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... after many hairbreadth escapes, a sheltered harbour was reached on the west side of the channel in Hall's Basin, north of Lady Franklin's Sound, in latitude 81 degrees 44 minutes north. Here the Discovery was secured for the winter, while the Alert, as it had been arranged, pushed onwards, for the ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston |
