"Luckless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... between two hills," the Dutch called it Sleepy Haven Kill, hence Sleepy Hollow. "Far in the foldings of the hills winds this wizard stream," writes the grand sachem of all the wizards, who wove the romance of the headless horseman and the luckless schoolmaster so tightly about the spot that they are to-day part and parcel of it. The bridge over which the scared pedagogue scurried was some rods further up the stream than is the present crossing, for in those days the ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... aunt should have let my luckless love-affair alone. I had been in a way to tell her of it, but now I wanted no interference. I feared to talk even to Jack Warder of my dear Darthea. That he saw through me and her I have, after many years, come to know, as these pages must have shown. If to speak of ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... principle, he would on no account interfere to prevent the taunts and abuse with which the luckless valet was assailed on all sides. Thus poor Roque had a fresh opportunity of discovering the little a man is likely to gain by following the impulse of a good heart, and the very extraordinary way men have of acknowledging a service, even ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... little nod of acquiescence, and looked across the room to where the luckless Euphemia sat edged in a corner behind a row of painfully conversational elderly gentlemen, who were struggling with the best intentions to keep up a theological discourse with the Rev. Marmaduke. Euphemia was the eldest Miss Bilberry. She was overgrown and angular, ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a first-flight man to hounds, and probably has appeared in silk on a racecourse. The match terminates as might be anticipated: Sylla, under the laudable impression that she is making her advantage in the weights tell, gallops her luckless mare pretty nearly to a standstill, and Lionel, though winning as he likes, good-naturedly reduces it to a half length, whereby his defeated antagonist lays the flattering unction to her soul that, ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... processive, Yet superconscious; a Clairvoyancy That knows not what It knows, yet works therewith.— The cognizance ye mourn, Life's doom to feel, If I report it meetly, came unmeant, Emerging with blind gropes from impercipience By listless sequence—luckless, tragic Chance, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... this strange monotonous life with that old brute of a Major brought him some new perception of those words, "Neither do I condemn thee"? But when he stopped reading, I, true to my character, forgot his affairs in my own, as we sat talking far into the night—talking of that luckless month at Mondisfield, of all the problems it had opened up, and ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... in her arms; but she had long ago ceased to be embarrassed by the shabbiness of her toilette, or the inevitable disorder of her sitting-room. She found seats for her guests, and to do so pushed into the background the baby's cradle and an old easy-chair, in which the luckless Nina was sitting ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... him has been my constant love, Luckless the destiny I bade him brave, For since a parent did our vows reprove, Sorrow was all the gift ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... it my duty as the luckless husband of your long-suffering sister, to lay the foundation for the wabbly, rattly ramshackle stairs your pet assortment of moonstruck admirers will build ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... it. Needs must when the devil drives!" replied the man jauntily. He had a downcast, reckless, luckless air, yet in his face I thought I still saw traces of a ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... in quite another direction, and next minute had burst over the luckless heads of the three plotting Princes, while Dorothy floated ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... lovely, luckless Fatima, sitting at her cottage window, dreaming the dreams of girl-hood. She has received Bluebeard's message of love, and is awaiting his coming as the hero of her heart's romance. This "Traum" theme is almost precisely like the "Guileless Fool ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... view the pitiful remains of another human being, botched by Nature in the flesh, no less lamentably than Melrose in the spirit. The legal inquiry into Brand's flight and death was short and mostly formal; but the actual evidence—as compared with current gossip—of his luckless mother, now left sonless and husbandless, and as to the relations of the family with Faversham, hastened the melting process in the public mind. It showed a man in bondage indeed to a tyrant; but doing what he could to lighten the hand of the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he had ordered to attend upon him. The parties halted, as if to salute each other; but the Constable, observing that Eveline drew her veil more closely around her, and recollecting the loss she had so lately sustained on that luckless spot, had the judgment to confine his greeting to a mute reverence, so low that the lofty plume which he wore, (for he was now in complete armour,) mingled with the flowing mane of his gallant horse. Wilkin Flammock next halted, to ask the lady if ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... at the middle of the log, the ribbon, binding the slipper to Miss Fanny's ankle, had broken—probably on account of her struggles—and the luckless slipper had fallen into the stream. It was now scudding along like a Lilliputian boat, the huge rosettes of crimson ribbon standing out ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... the little fool!" interposed the old man hastily, "has she too tumbled in love with you? Has the luckless word already past to and fro ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... like to drive him from his foothold. In vain he peered through the darkness, looking to the right hand and to the left; there was no land to be seen, nothing but the great green waves, crested with foam, which came springing up like angry wolves, eager to swallow the gallant ship and her luckless crew. ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... was the wish of obliging the young ladies, or the desire of seeing her parents, I cannot pretend to say, but in a luckless hour Susan yielded, and the party soon ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... advisable to follow another course. He represented to her that Abonyi had committed the deed by some incomprehensible rashness, in a sort of delirium and that he desired nothing more ardently than to make amends for the consequences of the luckless act, so far as lay in human power. While speaking, he put his hand into his pocket and drew out a bank-note of large amount, which he laid ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... the train would be due in an hour, when luckless Bab nearly turned the rejoicing into mourning, the feast into ashes. She heard her mother say to Ronda, "There ought to be a fire in every room, it looks so cheerful, and the air is chilly spite of the sunshine," ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... Ah, luckless he, and born beneath the beam Of evil star! it irks me whilst I write! As erst the bard by Mulla's silver stream, Oft, as he told of deadly dolorous plight, Sighed as he sung, and did in tears indite. For brandishing the rod, she doth begin To loose the brogues, the stripling's late ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... left the room and Mr. Ryder sank comfortably in his chair, puffing silently at his long black cigar. The financier was thinking, but his thoughts concerned neither the luckless gas president he had just pitilessly crushed, nor the detective who had come to make his report. He was thinking of the book "The American Octopus," and its bold author whom he was to meet in a very few minutes. He glanced at the clock. A quarter to three. She would be here in fifteen minutes if ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... The signal made for leaving, And with his ship departed, Down-cast and broken-hearted; We spread our sails to follow,— And soon the breezes hollow, From shores we came to harry, Our luckless remnant carry. ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... presence of Catharine de' Medici and his uncle, Cardinal Bourbon, Henry reiterated his statements respecting the alarming reports that continually reached him. At one time he learned that it was decided that, should Margaret of Navarre bear a son, the luckless father would be put out of the way, in order that the child might inherit his dignities. At another time, in the very chamber of King Charles, the opinion had been boldly uttered, that, so long as a single ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... Witches'; 'The Star-Chamber,' a historical story of the time of Charles I.; 'The Constable of the Tower'; 'The Lord Mayor of London'; 'Cardinal Pole,' which deals with the court and times of Philip and Mary; 'John Law,' a story of the great Mississippi Bubble; 'Tower Hill,' whose heroine is the luckless Catharine Howard; 'The Spanish Match,' a story of the romantic pilgrimage of Prince Charles and "Steenie" Buckingham to Spain for the fruitless wooing of the Spanish Princess; and at least ten other romances, many of them in three volumes, all appearing between 1840 and 1873. Two of these ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... whether it be worse for an inspector or for the school inspected by him, that he should have no opportunity for food from breakfast to four o'clock, when he staves off death by inviting disease in the shape of the malefic bun; for him or for certain luckless pupil-teachers that, after dinner, he should be "in for [them] till ten o'clock." With this kind of thing when on duty, and no home when off it, a man must begin to appreciate the Biblical passages about partridges, and the wings of a dove, and so forth, most heartily and vividly long ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... was rebuilt with red brick in the Georgian era. The coaches often called there, and Charles Dickens stayed the night and describes it as one of the best inns in England. He tells of Squeers conducting his new pupils through Grantham to Dotheboys Hall, and how after leaving the inn the luckless travellers "wrapped themselves more closely in their coats and cloaks ... and prepared with many half-suppressed moans again to encounter the piercing blasts which swept across the open country." At the "Saracen's Head" in Westgate Isaac Newton used to stay, and there ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... of his kinsman, who, jealous of the youth and personal attractions of the man apparently destined to be his heir, grew uneasy at the thought of benefitting a person he had learned to hate; and suddenly resolving to cut off at once the presumptuous expectations which the luckless exile might have cherished, exerted the influence procured by his wealth to form an alliance with the most peerless beauty which the city boasted. A new source of anguish added to the misery already sustained by the wretched Gonzago; his arm was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... head merely, but through his heart, his love, his humanity. His humor is full of compassion, full of the milk of human kindness, and does not separate him from his subject, but unites him to it by vital ties. How Sterne loved Uncle Toby and sympathized with him, and Cervantes his luckless knight! I fear our humorists would have made fun of them, would have shown them up and stood aloof superior, and "laughed a laugh of merry scorn." Whatever else the great humorist or poet, or any artist, may be or do, there is no contempt in his laughter. And this point ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... occupant were such as to demand but little from the sole domestic, but Phileas Fogg required him to be almost superhumanly prompt and regular. On this very 2nd of October he had dismissed James Forster, because that luckless youth had brought him shaving-water at eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit instead of eighty-six; and he was awaiting his successor, who was due at the house ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... Luckless members of the Fairport Guard who had not had the precaution to tie on their head-gear, might be seen breaking rank and running indecorously in various directions in pursuit of hat or cap, while the skirts of the captain's ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Prime Minister. He was desired to attend at his next levee; he attended, and was overlooked. He complained to his friend, who repeated the complaint to the archbishop, who desired him to appear at his levee; but was so much occupied with higher people, that the clever but luckless Abbe was again overlooked. He made a third experiment, on the promise that he should obtain audience; but he found the Archbishop enveloped in a circle of epaulets, grands cordons, and mitres. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the word. The churchwarden shouted and waved his hat and with the soft grey dawn gradually growing brighter, and a speck or two of orange appearing high up in the east, the line went slowly onward towards Lenby, pausing from time to time for pools to be examined and for the more luckless of the party to struggle out ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... blessed light of day. I was horrified at the haggard, careworn appearance of my crew, who had all, excepting the two Kanakas, aged perceptibly during that night of torment. But we lost no time in getting back to the ship, where I fully expected a severe wigging for the scrape my luckless curiosity had led me into. The captain, however, was very kind, expressing his pleasure at seeing us all safe back again, although he warned me solemnly against similar investigations in future. A hearty meal and a good rest did ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... saluted her courteously, and asked for whom she was weeping. She prayed him to speak softly, for "Yonder," said she, "is a monstrous giant that will come and destroy you should your voice reach his ears. Luckless wretch, what brings you to this mountain?" asked the widow. "Fifty such knights as you could not hold ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... to Mrs. Abbott that such a task as this might, even temporarily, be undertaken by herself; her one desire was to get rid of the luckless brats, that their vulgarity might not pain her, and the care of them ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... of her resources, and with flushed cheek and knitted brow she moved about among her willing assitants with all the importance of a Bechamel, a Felix, the maitre-d'hotel of Cardinal Fesch with his two turbots, or luckless Vatel who fell upon his sword and died because he had no turbot at all; or even, rising in the grandeur of the comparison, we may liken her to Domitian, who, weary of persecuting Christians, one day called the Roman Senate together to decide with him upon the sauce with which another ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... this incident seemed to her to possess an equal importance with all other happenings large or small: for the events of her individual experience had so distorted her perceptions of the ascending values of life, that her own luckless pursuit of happiness appeared of no greater importance in her eyes than the child, with the crooked back, making her choice of sweets. Her own emotions, indeed, interested her no longer, but she was aware of a dull curiosity concerning the crippled child. Would her whole life become misshapen ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... hostility to anything that savored of recognition of the negro as the equal of white men. It was traditional in Wellington that no colored person had ever entered the front door of the Carteret residence, and that the luckless individual who once presented himself there upon alleged business and resented being ordered to the back door had been unceremoniously thrown over the piazza railing into a rather thorny clump of rosebushes below. If Miller were going as a servant, to hold ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... reason or other no traces of it exist in any of our laws so far as I have discovered, was in accordance with the 'good old plan,' pursued probably ever since the origin of universities. I refer—'horresco referens'—to the punishment of boxing or cuffing. It was applied before the Faculty to the luckless offender by the President, towards whom the culprit, in a standing position, inclined his head, while blows fell in quick succession upon either ear. No one seems to have been served in this way except Freshmen and ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... and timid, scared like a luckless creature whom life never wearies of persecuting. She was becoming almost blind, and little Celine had to lead her. The girl's fair, thin face wore its wonted expression of shrewd intelligence, and even now, however woeful her rags, it ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... art thou watching, most luckless of all men living? Is not this thy house and is not thy wife there within and thy child, such a son as men wish to ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... These days are a great blessing to men on earth; but the rest are changeable, luckless, and bring nothing. Everyone praises a different day but few know their nature. Sometimes a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother. That man is happy and lucky in them who knows all these things and does his work without offending the ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the world; attended my mother in her time of trial and trouble, and nursed me with the gentlest care. Yet Sue had a tongue, and could use it too when occasion, in her judgment, required its employment. But she always took the side of right and virtue against wrong and vice, and woe betided the luckless wight who fell under the ban of her just displeasure. She would belabour him, not with her hands, but by word, look, and gesture, till he shrieked out for mercy and promised never again to offend, or took to ignominious flight like a thief with a posse of constables at his heels. Bill King was ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... Mejdel Yaba. This village occupies a commanding position overlooking the Plain, and, in Crusading days, was a fortress. That phase of the battle proved an artillery action pure and simple. The whole artillery of a Division, with several heavies added, was concentrated on that luckless spot. It afforded a spectacle not soon to be forgotten. When the infantry arrived, they found the work all over; the Turks had all been killed by the bombardment or fled from the village, most of the latter having been cut off and killed by our machine guns. Before leaving, the ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... kind of character. He is like a College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notion is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed suddenly, with that unalterable, luckless notion of his, at the head not of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex, deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old decent regulations; nay, that their salvation will lie in extending and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... I, whose nobleness is shadowed by an unequal yoke! Hapless am I, to whose pedigree is bound the lowliness of a peasant! Luckless issue of a king, to whom a common man is equal by law of marriage! Pitiable daughter of a prince, whose comeliness her spiritless father hath made over to base and contemptible embraces! Unhappy child of thy mother, with thy happiness marred by consorting ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Harry Luckless, the hero of the Author's Farce, it is impossible not to surmise the figure of young Fielding himself; a figure gay and spirited as those of his first comedy, but, by now, well acquainted with the hungers and ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... "Poor luckless Jannette! the epithets 'divine' and 'heavenly' which have so often been applied to thee are now transferred to miserable daubings with oil and clay. Dame Nature, your triumph has been short. Poor ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of that poor wretch.... I, who have surely the right, beg you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny? For there is no other way to think of it. None. I have the right to say it, since for years he was my wife's lover, since he killed her, since he broke up all the pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There is no priest ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... The luckless Tom found his own feet beautiful on the mountains, and, treading the heights with airy steps, appeared to himself wonderful and glorified—he was waltzing with Miss Betty He breathed the entrancing words to himself, over and over: it was true, he was waltzing ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... ended, the funeral of the living soul goes forth, all the people following. Psyche, bitterly weeping, assists not at her marriage but at her own obsequies, and while the parents hesitate to accomplish a thing so unholy the daughter cries to them: "Wherefore torment your luckless age by long weeping? This was the prize of my extraordinary beauty! When all people celebrated us with divine honours, and in one voice named the New Venus, it was then ye should have wept for me as one dead. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... from the leash, the Kasanumi rushed at that luckless periscope, about which a few bubbles of foam were just beginning to gather at the moment when our stem, towering over it, hid it from my sight. The next instant our hull swept over it and of course snapped it clean off, although we felt no shock whatever, ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... home workers in particular, to come to close quarters on this cardinal point. It is obviously the stronghold of the English heterogenist. 'Water,' he says, 'is boiling merrily over a fire when some luckless person upsets the vessel so that the heated fluid exercises its scathing influence upon an uncovered portion of the body-hand, arm, or face. Here, at all events, there is no room for doubt. Boiling ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... ago, I was walking along a narrow old road which leads from Le Crotay, a fishing-village in Picardy, to the town of St. Valery-sur-Somme. It was in the month of February, and one of those luckless days on which cold, wind and rain all seem banded in league against the comfort of mankind: the sky, dull and lowering, presented to the eye nothing but a bleak, cheerless desert of gray, relieved only by troops of dark, inky clouds, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... harm that he thought he had better not go away again. Indeed it would be displeasing to God, "qui mit son corps pour son peuple sauver," if he, Joinville, abandoned his people. And he reports only in the briefest abstract the luckless "voie de Tunes," or expedition to Tunis. But of the earlier and not much less unlucky Damietta crusade, in which he took part, as well as of his hero's life till all but the last, he has written ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... pitch-fork, goat and prong, Mounted on these we whirl along; Who vainly strives to climb to-night, Is evermore a luckless wight! ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... them, and the travel of its meditations is daily and customary; insomuch that the very thought of all others which one was born to utter he may forget to mention, as presuming it to be no news. Indeed, if a man of fertile soul be misled into the luckless search after peculiar and surprising thoughts, there are many chances that be will be betrayed into this oversight of his proper errand. As Sir Martin Frobisher, according to Fuller, brought home from America a cargo of precious stones which after examination were thrown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... was once a beauteous youth, But, luckless, in the wave his face beholding, Himself he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... hangman burst into tears as he thrust the unfortunate nobleman off the step? and did not a universal sob of pity break from the vast crowd assembled to see the last of the noble cavalier, victim to an unfortunate tradition of loyalty? What wonder then if we sympathise with this luckless hero of romance? The weak-knee'd villain of this historical drama was 'Charles (his friend),' in which character, be it allowed, this sad dog of a Merry Monarch not infrequently appeared. Thank you much, Mr. MOWBRAY MONTROSE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... The luckless Girshel was feebly prodding his elbows into Siliavka's chest, and feebly kicking.... His eyes were ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... terrible in their red and black war-paint; and a well-filled boat lagging in the rear, with smallpox on board, was driven to shore by the Indians. The occupants were massacred; but the Indians at once contracted the disease and died by the hundreds. This luckless sacrifice of "poor Stuart, his family and friends," while a ghastly price to pay, undoubtedly procured for the Cumberland settlements comparative immunity from Indian forays until the new-comers had firmly established themselves ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... under arrest. I was told that the widow of the luckless Girshel came to fetch away the clothes of the deceased. The general ordered a hundred roubles to be given to her. Sara I never saw again. I was wounded; I was taken to the hospital, and by the time I was well again, Dantzig had surrendered, and I joined ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... wing, and with an unresisted power forces the bird to fall in a slanting direction upon the nearest shore. Pouncing downwards, the eagle is soon joined by his mate, when they turn the body of the luckless swan upwards, and tear it open ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Firmin, with the Little Sister (out of Philip) and Miss Evangeline to take care of the patients, besides cells for Charles Reade's heroes and heroines, and the apothecary (out of Romeo and Juliet) to mix more honest doses than he gave to luckless Romeo. ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... they were, after all, only seven miles from Glatz, and that in the neighbouring town of Wunschelburg a hundred soldiers were quartered, with orders to capture all deserters from the fortress. This time, however, fortune favoured the luckless Trenck, and though he and Schell were both in uniform, they rode unobserved through the village while the rest of the people were at church, and, skirting Wunschelburg, crossed the Bohemian frontier in the course ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... is too often left out of sight by those who write elementary works. But the good service thus rendered is far more than counterbalanced by the host of erroneous conceptions which at once arise at the introduction of this luckless term. This notion of an "imaginary ether" should be at once and forever discarded by every writer on physics. The very word should be remorselessly expunged from every discussion of the subject. It is one of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... living creatures, greatly relishing the larvae of the May flies, or any other luckless insect infants it ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley
... 't was all for thy locks so bright, And 't was all for thine eyes so blue, That on the night of our luckless flight Thy brother bold ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... what was left. 'I have swallowed all I can, I cannot swallow more, it is a physical impossibility,' he seemed to say; and his stern officer reiterated her commands with secret imperative signals. Luckless dog! but in mere humanity we came to the rescue ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... waters with astonishing ease; the servants returned to their duties, but not without grumbling and no end of savage glances, all of which were levelled at the luckless Deppingham. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... mother, with maternal partiality, admitted that her daughter sang. After dinner the Bishop had candles placed on the piano, and begged the shrinking vocalist to give them an exhibition of her skill. The luckless victim protested that she could not sing at all, but presently, despite her objections, she was blushing on the fatal music stool, and was faltering out a desperate something which was at all events intended to ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... our groves and meadows, the bobolink was the envy of my boyhood. He crossed my path in the sweetest weather, and the sweetest season of the year, when all nature called to the fields, and the rural feeling throbbed in every bosom; but when I, luckless urchin! was doomed to be mewed up, during the live-long day, in ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... watch over the machinery of the will and attend to the winding up? Or is this infusion of strength, whereby to continue its operations, a sudden tightening of those invisible cords which bind the All-Father to the spirits he has created? Truly, there is no Oedipus for this vexing riddle. Many luckless theories have been devoured by the Sphinx; when will metaphysicians solve it? One tells us vaguely enough, "Who knows the mysteries of will, with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death, utterly, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... away each autumn a smoked supply of eels from the river. Game of all sorts he could get with little trouble at any time, wild ducks and geese, partridges, for there were in those days no game laws to protect them. In the early winter, likewise, it was indeed a luckless habitant who could not also get a caribou or two for his larder. Following the Indian custom, the venison was smoked and hung on the kitchen beams, where it kept for months until needed. Salted or smoked fish had ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... rather than the less clever Seagrue, who had begun to excite sympathy for what he called his luckless plight and that of his companion, before they had left the railroad camp. Among the five evil-doers who had been rounded-up and deported for the jail at Medicine Bend, and now accompanied the two gamblers, Rebstock spread every story he ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... "but also we might very well find, that the Good we can attain is so small, and the Evil so immensely preponderant, that we ought to labour rather to bring to an end an existence so pitiful than to perpetuate it indefinitely in the persons of our luckless descendants." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... imagine the placid pretty faces of the patient pampered blondes and brunettes, if these same devoted ones, now so interesting as lovers, were to come home some luckless evening as prosy husbands and say "Eva," or "Bee," or "Ada, it's all up with us now, the bailiff will be here in the morning, I knew this sort of high life couldn't last—" and then to fling himself down in democratic contempt on the parlor ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... While the luckless Perle drifted aimlessly about, driven slowly onward by varying winds under a cheerless sky, sickness visited them: some were stricken with scurvy; some had lost the use of their limbs and lay helpless, moaning and weeping hour after hour; vermin devoured them, and when their garments ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... All know the Glugs quite well by sight. And they say, "Our test is the best by far; For a Glug is a Glug; so there you are! And they climb the trees when it drizzles or hails To get electricity into their nails; And the Glug that fails Is a luckless Glug, ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... The luckless lover laughed, a reckless, demoniac peal. "Two can play at that game!" he told her. "You're so high and mighty that a Mertzheimer isn't good enough for you. But you better look out—we've ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... vividness the lazy cathedral town and the lurid opium-eater's den.[288] Something like the old lightness and buoyancy of animal spirits gave a new freshness to the humour; the scenes of the child-heroine and her luckless betrothed had both novelty and nicety of character in them; and Mr. Grewgious in chambers with his clerk and the two waiters, the conceited fool Sapsea, and the blustering philanthropist Honeythunder, were first-rate ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... not suppose all the stories that have been written of mirages are true, but it is certain that many strange tricks have been played on the eyesight of observers by these phenomena, and more than one luckless prospector, or cattleman, has followed these visions, only to be tantalized in the end by finding, just as Nort and Dick did, that they ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... entering the service of Pope Paul III.; an offer which after some hesitation he determined to refuse. In the autumn of this same year he resumed his teaching at Pavia, a fact which sanctions the assumption that this luckless seat of learning must have been once more in funds. In the year following, in 1547, there came to him another offer of employment accompanied by terms still more munificent than the Pope's, conveyed through Vesalius[112] and the ambassador of the King of Denmark. "The ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... observed the little dog dragging along the cock, just killed, which, with an air of triumph, he laid at my mother-in-law's feet. Highly exasperated at the literal fulfilment of her hastily-uttered wish, she snatched a stick from the hedge, and attempted to give the dog a beating. The luckless animal, seeing the reception he was likely to meet with, where he expected marks of approbation, left the bird and ran off, she brandishing her stick, and saying, in a loud angry tone, 'I'll pay ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... expect that this sum would, at all events, afford to pay for a permanent and resident clergyman, with a roof over his head, "be it ever so humble;" but no, the parish is but the receptacle for the luckless, roaming deacon, and its poor parishioners are ever doomed to be as sheep without a shepherd, ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... news of his death, panic went through the markets like a hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide. In Europe also not a few took with their own ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... and luckless trial of a notary's office I was apprenticed to an engraver, a petty tyrant, whose injustice taught me to lie and to steal. Restless, dissatisfied, and in perpetual terror of my master's savagery, I here reached my sixteenth year. But one day, finding the city gates closed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the vital interests of the Commonwealth. But, while striving to avert all possibilities of Caesarism, they now sinned against that elementary principle of strategy which requires unity of design in military operations. Bonaparte's retort was unanswerable, and nothing more was heard of the luckless proposal. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Congress should add to the titles it is preparing against McClellan's successful advance. The "Butcher Cumberland" not only hounded on his troops with the tempting price of thirty thousand pounds for the Pretender dead or alive, but every adherent of the luckless Jefferson Davis of that day was in peril of life and wholesale confiscation. The House of Hanover not only broke the backbone of the Rebellion, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... rolled in the dust. Another shot, another Gothic chief slain, and again a shout of triumph. Then the signal to shoot was given to the soldiers, and hundreds of bolts from Wild Ass and Balista were hurtling through the air, aimed not at Gothic soldiers, but at the luckless oxen that drew the ponderous towers. The beasts being slain, it was impossible for the Goths who were immediately under the walls and exposed to a deadly discharge of arrows from the battlements, to move their towers either backward or forward, and there they ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... three of these strays. They were the usual flotsam and jetsam, but on the roadside near a hop garden he came upon a group of an aspect so unusual that it attracted his attention. Its unusualness consisted in its air of exceeding bustling cheerfulness. It was a domestic group of the most luckless type, and ragged, dirty, and worn by an evidently long tramp, might well have been expected to look forlorn, discouraged, and out of spirits. A slouching father of five children, one plainly but a few weeks old, and slung in a dirty shawl at its mother's ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bloody star reached the zenith; but the same hatred was there years later, when he turned the governor sent to the colony by the Dominion out of the territories, and set up an authority of his own. Well might the French historian, cognisant of the fate of the luckless suitor, and the consequences of the rejection, ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... gentlemen are content with Locke and Mill; and at most know something of Coleridge and Maurice. Mr. Watson compares these meetings to those at Newman's rooms in Oxford as described by Mark Pattison. There a luckless advocate of ill-judged theories might be crushed for the evening by the polite sentence, Very likely. At the Cambridge meetings, the trial to the nerves, as Mr. Watson thinks, was even more severe. There was ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of the race of man? Our eyes till now that aspect ne'er beheld, Where fame is reap'd amid the embattled field; Yet far before the troops thou dar'st appear, And meet a lance the fiercest heroes fear. Unhappy they, and born of luckless sires, Who tempt our fury when Minerva fires! But if from heaven, celestial, thou descend, Know with immortals we no more contend. Not long Lycurgus view'd the golden light, That daring man who mix'd with gods in fight. Bacchus, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... cause, not only declares that the unhappy girl was guilty throughout, but lugs God into the tragedy, and makes Him responsible for what was, perhaps, the cruellest and most devilish of all the many murders perpetrated by Henry VIII. The luckless lady was but a child at the time she was devoured by "the jaws of darkness." At most she was but in her twentieth year, and probably she was a year or two younger than that age. Any other king than Henry would have pardoned her, if for no other reason, then for this, that he had coupled her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... but never, Say I, should we dissever Old places and old names; Guard the old landmarks truly, On the old altars duly Keep bright the ancient flames. For me the face of Nature, No luckless nomenclature Of grace or beauty robs; No, when of town I weary, I'll make a strike in Erie, And buy a ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... not one of the hitherto recorded experiments can be looked upon as proving the existence of magnetic currents at all.' The pendulations, it seems, are caused solely by 'slight mechanical impulsions, unconsciously or half consciously conveyed to the instrument by the luckless experimentalist.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... For I at dawning day will scour the booths Of bibliopoles, Aquinii, Caesii and Suffenus, gather all their poison-trash And with such torments pay thee for thy pains. 20 Now for the present hence, adieu! begone Thither, whence came ye, brought by luckless feet, Pests of the Century, ye ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus |
