"Moonless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... matters. If we look [Page 81] into our western sky soon after sunset, on a clear, moonless night in March or April, we shall see a dim, soft light, somewhat like the milky-way, often reaching, well defined, to the Pleiades. It is wedge-shaped, inclined to the south, and the smallest star can easily be seen through it. Mairan and Cassini affirm that they have seen sudden ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... the way up to the grim old Fort. The path lay through the woods, which only extended to the lower slopes of the bald knoll upon which it stood. The moonless night made no difference to him. He could have made the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... stone pillar of the gateway is one dirty little patch of snow; I saw it even in the moonless darkness. ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... The night was moonless but strewn with stars. A tonic north-east wind hummed over the high moors, and seemed to prick old Dapple, prescient of his own straw and rack, to his very best trot. It was a penetrating wind, too; but Doctor ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... her forehead was low and the roots of her hair were brushed back from it; her eyebrows, running from the very springs of her cheeks, almost met at the boundary line between a pair of eyes brighter than stars shining in a moonless night; her nose was slightly aquiline and her mouth was such an one as Praxiteles dreamed Diana had. Her chin, her neck, her hands, the gleaming whiteness of her feet under a slender band of gold; she turned Parian marble dull! Then, for the first time, Doris' ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... closed down, dark and moonless, with a heaviness in the air which was oppressive. Campbell had to grant men and horses a breathing period. He put out pickets, leaving the rest of them to lie with their mounts saddled and to hand. Drew loosened the girth, stripped ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... dappled through the tired foliage on to these benches which have rested many vagrants. Darkness has ceased to be the lawful cloak of the unhappy; but Mother Night was soft and moonless, and man had not despoiled her of her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... blacker night could dawn on night, With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred, A sense more tragic than defeat and blight, More desperate than strife with hope debarred, 60 More fatal than the adamantine Never Encompassing her passionate endeavour, Dawns ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... runner of the country-side had started on his hardest race: little less than three leagues and back, which he reckoned to accomplish in two hours, though the night was moonless and the way rugged. He rushed against the still cold air till it felt like a wind upon his face. The dim homestead sank below the ridges at his back, and fresh ridges of snowlands rose out of the obscure horizon-level to drive past him as the stirless air drove, and sink away behind ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... on for what seemed an interminable distance. It was quite moonless and only a few stars twinkled here and there through a veil of light clouds that had drifted up with the sunset. The grass underfoot was black, the sea was nearly as dark, and the inland country ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... glory of the moonlight or starlight, and the waking dreams that come to one upon the sea, when the canoe rests tranquil, the torch blazes, and the fish swim to meet the 10 harpoon. The night was moonless, but the sea was covered with phosphorescence, sometimes a glittering expanse of light, and again black as velvet except where our canoe moved gently through a soft and glamorous surface of sparkling jewels. A night for a lover, a lady, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... I might wait!" she said; "But the moon sinks in the tide; Thou seest it not; I see it fade, Like one that may not bide. Alas! I go out in the moonless shade; Ah, kind! let ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... him, and he has no mouth in consequence, and occasionally shies. But his merits are equally surprising; and I don't think I should ever have known Jack's merits if I had not been riding up of late on moonless nights. Jack is a bit of a dandy; he loves to misbehave in a gallant manner, above all on Apia Street, and when I stop to speak to people, they say (Dr. Stuebel the German consul said about three days ago), 'O what a wild horse! it cannot be safe ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were clad, over their armour, in frocks and hoods of up-country fashion; but Stephen was in his minstrel's raiment, save that he bore no fiddle, and had a heavy short-sword girt to him under his cotehardy. The night was moonless, but there was little cloud, so that there was a glimmer of starlight. As they opened the door, came forth from the ingle a tall man, unarmed as it seemed, and clad as a gangrel carle, and Stephen ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... and waited to see what their next attempt would be. He still cherished a hope of escape. He had crippled pretty well half of the attacking force, and if he could but hold them off till darkness came, there might be an opportunity of escape in the moonless night. ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... remained to be seen. Vaudreuil gave the chief command of them to a naval officer named Delouche; and on the evening of the twenty-eighth, after long consultation and much debate among their respective captains, they set sail together at ten o'clock. The night was moonless and dark. In less than an hour they were at the entrance of the north channel. Delouche had been all enthusiasm; but as he neared the danger his nerves failed, and he set fire to his ship half an hour too soon, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... began to take leave. Even when he was sitting in the carriage, the old man was still shy and constrained; but the warm soft air, the light breeze, and the light shadows, the scent of the grass and the birch-buds, the peaceful light of the starlit, moonless night, the pleasant tramp and snort of the horses—all the witchery of the roadside, the spring and the night, sank into the poor German's soul, and he was himself the first to begin a ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... on a night when the fire-flies flashed in every thicket under the starry gloom of a clear and moonless sky; and when the train stopped at little, silent stations the throb of nightingales fell ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... three days, waiting for a propitious, moonless night and roaming singly round the outskirts of the park. Once Beautrelet saw the postern. Contrived between two buttresses placed very close together, it was almost merged, behind the screen of brambles that concealed ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... fallen as heavily as could be expected on a clear, though moonless night, the four scouts set out through the timber toward the Graham cottage. All of them carried flashlights and clubs which might easily have been mistaken in the dark for mere walking sticks. The clubs were for protection against dogs or any other living being which might exhibit hostility ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... remained with them ten years, and then, longing to be something more than a farm hand, he packed his small belongings in a little box and at night, when all was still, he took the box under his arm and went out into the lonely darkness of the moonless night, without money, friends or education, to commence the struggle which ended in ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... begins to darken. At the opening of the Second Act we see him with Fleance crossing the court of the castle on his way to bed. The blackness of the moonless, starless night seems to oppress him. And he ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... music were enlivening the party within the close-drawn curtains, without were moonless night and thickly-falling snow; and the morning opened on one vast expanse of white, mantling alike the lawns and the trees, and weighing down the wide-spreading branches. Lord Curryfin, determined not ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... horse with the grace of a kitten. Her face was not so white as her companion's, but its color was entrancing. Her expression was animated, and her great brown eyes danced like twinkling stars on a clear, moonless night. ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... tables; and the wild strain of the Tsigane musicians, as they swayed to and fro in their red coats on the bandstand, floated towards the dome through the heavy summer air. In the near distance the fantastic shapes of chimney-cowls raised themselves against the starry but moonless sky, and miles away the grandiose contours of a dome far greater than Hugo's—the dome of St. Paul's—finished the prospect in solemn majesty. It was a scene well calculated to intensify a man's emotions, especially when a man stands to view ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... each and every scout from Homeport the unusual was a warning, a signal to alert mind and body. The runners in the night—that furred monkey race of hunters who combed the moonless dark of Astra when most of the higher fauna were asleep—were very distantly related to Sssuri's species, though the gap between them was that between highly civilized man and the jungle ape. The runners were ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... crossed the city, going back to the music store. It was a little after eleven o'clock. The night was moonless, filled with a gray blur of faint light that seemed to come from all quarters of the horizon at once. From time to time there were sudden explosions of a southeast wind at the street corners. McTeague went on, slanting his head against ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Tutonian garrison was increased, and Count von Balderdash, the commander-in-chief, himself took command. Six fleets were drawn up in the wide bay to await the coming of the war-lord. It was announced that he would make his entry at night, and that the hour of arrival had been timed for a dark moonless night. This was asserted to be for the better display of fireworks. Finally, one morning the Tutonian fleet of four or five large vessels was sighted in the distance. They steamed slowly up and down in the distance until ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... was the sky, the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... for safety to their armed horsemen; the four and six horse stages look to the armed guard, the wayfarer must look to his horse—and it should be a good one; the mountain rancher to his rifle, the cattle thief to the moonless night, the bandit to his wits, the gunman to his holster: these include practically all of the people that travel the Spanish Sinks, except the Morgans and the Mormons. The Mormons looked to the Morgans for ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... pound gate had long ago disappeared; in its place were two or three little bars that could easily be let down. The trespassers would naturally enter by that gap, and on a moonless night would not see the wire fence on top of the wall. They would have more trouble in getting out of the place than they had had in getting into it if the gap were to ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... for a moment to listen. The night was moonless and starry, except where a bank of clouds came drifting up from the south-west. A moist breeze, smelling of soft, mountain snow, gently stirred the trees about them. But from the shanty no sound could be discerned. They approached nearer, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... of the Indians lay under the shroud of this moonless night, and while the Faithful were harried on every side, and the champions of ungodliness prospered, the very air reeking with the smell of bloody sacrifices, a certain mall of the royal household, chief satrap in rank, in courage, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... was quiet. The gust had passed away, and only now and then a faint gleam of lightning in the east showed which way it had gone. The night was dark and moonless, and from the state of the tide Sam concluded it was near midnight. He was on the point of making loose his skiff to return homeward when he saw a light gleaming along the water from a distance, which seemed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... low tones, and then fell silent. The night had come, starless and moonless, favorable to the designs of Tandakora, but they felt intense satisfaction, nevertheless. It was partly physical. Robert's making of an easy road to the water, the coming of the pigeons, to be eaten, apparently sent by Areskoui, and the ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... overcast: nothing could be distinctly seen. The canal beneath the window looked like a black gulf; the opposite houses were barely visible as a row of shadows, dimly relieved against the starless and moonless sky. At long intervals, the warning cry of a belated gondolier was just audible, as he turned the corner of a distant canal, and called to invisible boats which might be approaching him in the darkness. Now and then, the nearer ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven; and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I have been laid up by the vagaries of an English spring, and during those days there have been developments, the true and sinister meaning of which no one can appreciate save myself. I may say that we have had cloudy and moonless nights of late, which according to my information were the seasons upon which sheep disappeared. Well, sheep have disappeared. Two of Miss Allerton's, one of old Pearson's of the Cat Walk, and one of Mrs. Moulton's. Four in all during three nights. No ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had no sun for a hundred and forty-two days, and the darkness was nearly as deep at noonday as an ordinary moonless night in England. On the 2nd of March the sun shone brightly, and the sledging was arranged for. The theatrical season had ended on the 24th of February. Many favourite farces were played, and the burlesque written by the chaplain met ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... from the immense throng. Word had passed through it that the military was approaching. Pandemonium seemed suddenly to have broken loose, and shouts, and yells, and oaths arose from five thousand throats, as the men sprung behind their barricades. It was a moonless night, but the stars were shining brightly, and, in their light, the sheen of nearly a thousand bayonets made the street look like a lane of steel. The Twenty-seventh Regiment of National Guards, led by Colonel Stevens, had been sent from the City Hall, and their ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... enchantment, yet to Rose, leaning out into the moonless night, the beauty of it brought only pain. She wondered, dully, if she should ever find surcease; if somewhere, on the thorny path ahead, there might not be some place where she could lay the burden of ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... to contend against the force of gravity; but as the weight of the car diminished the higher we ascended, our speed gradually augmented, and we knew that in the long run it would become prodigious. The night was moonless, and a thick mantle of clouds obscured the heavens; but the planet Venus was now an evening star, and after attaining a considerable height, we steered towards the west. Our course took us over the metropolis, which lay beneath us like a ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... remember right, having seen it himself) in his charming book, A Naturalist's Rambles in the China Seas. Our friend described the appearance as that of a sea of shining snow rather than of milk, heaving gently beneath a starlit but moonless sky. A bucket of water, when taken up, was filled with the same half-luminous whiteness, which stuck to its sides when the water was drained off. The captain of the Indiaman was well enough aware of the rarity of the sight to call all the passengers on deck to see what they would never see ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... had been born without one. This proved to him so distressing, and so completely interfered with his matrimonial prospects that he took refuge in the Puxerloch, where he was in shadow all day, and his peculiarity could not be noticed; he issued from it only on moonless nights, on one of which he carried off a peasant maid—and she never knew that he was shadowless, for he never allowed her to see his deficiency. Historically very little is known of the Schallaun castle, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... interest. The night was moonless, he knew that if a match were struck in the interior of the shop it would shine through the raised lath, and it was for that sight that his eyes strained and ached with intense concentration. The patience of the Chinaman made Coryndon feel that he was watching for ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... the car down the slope and across the moonless valley with small regard for her own or her companion's safety. It swerved from side to side, skidded and leaped with terrifying suddenness, but held its way as straight as the bird that flies, driven by a steady hand and a mind that had no thought for peril. ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... the pair had sufficiently refreshed themselves the gloom of the departing day was deepening into the darkness of a moonless, starless night; and as they entered their hut the first shimmer of sheet lightning which was the precursor of the coming storm flickered above the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... price of the horse from its aggregate bets, and arrange the remainder in a line of perhaps five figures. Whereupon the betting-men grow seedier and more seedy; some of the more mercurial go off in a fit of apoplectic amazement; some betake themselves to Waterloo Stairs on a moonless night; some proceed to the Diggings, some to St Luke's, and some to the dogs; some become so unsteady, that they sign the wrong name to a draft, or enter the wrong house at night, or are detected in a crowd with their hand in the wrong man's pocket. But by degrees everything ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill Of hours when life and death encountered still Passionate in it. They that lay below The tangled grasses or the drifted snow, Husband and wife, mother and little one, From that sad house less utterly were gone Than they that living had abandoned it. In moonless nights their Absences might flit, Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose And lily in the neglected garden close; But they whose feet had borne them from the door Would pass the footworn threshold ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... highest and most intellectual manly beauty. The forehead was high and broad and smooth, the eyebrows dark and firm but finely arched, the nose somewhat prominently aquiline, but well shaped, and with delicate, sensitive nostrils. The eyes were deep-set, large and soft, and dark as the sky of a moonless night, yet shining in the firelight with a strange magnetic glint that seemed to fasten Tremayne's gaze ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... with them. The glossy mass of her jet hair had been built into a coiffure of stately and becoming grandeur, into which diamond-headed pins were stuck until the whole scintillated as the stars in heaven upon a moonless night. ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... moonless skies Her pall of transient death has spread, When mortals sleep, when spectres rise, And nought is wakeful but ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... it was with a startled conviction that I was no longer alone in the little boxed-in office. In the murky indoor darkness of a moonless night I could barely distinguish the surroundings, the shelf-desk, the black bulk of the old safe, the three-legged stool, and at the end of the room the gray patch which placed the single window. Then, with a cold sweat starting from every pore, I saw the humped figure of a man beside ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not want to listen, so much was he afraid, and he did not want his hopes to crumble with each obstinate refusal of his father. He preferred to learn the truth at once, good or bad, later on; and he went out into the night. It was a moonless night, a starless night, one of those foggy nights when the air seems thick with humidity. A vague odor of apples floated through the farm-yard, for it was the season when the earliest apples were gathered, the "soon ripe" ones, as they are called in the language of the peasantry. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... cutting timber, and other rural avocations." [335] What is here said of the new world applies also to the old; for in England a current expression in Huntingdonshire is "a dark Christmas sends a fine harvest": dark meaning moonless. ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... real calamity, as nobody would ever have found me or even looked for me on that lonely coast. I therefore sat down where I was, on the corals where they seemed least pointed. I did not succeed at all in making a fire; the night was quite dark and moonless, and a fine rain penetrated everything. I have rarely passed a longer night or felt so lonely. The new day revived my spirits, breakfast did not detain me long, as I had nothing to eat, so I kept along the shore, jumping and climbing, and had to swim through several lagoons, swarming, as ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... briars or palms Even at the breathless blast as of a breeze Fulfilled with clamour and clangour and storms of psalms; Red hands rent up the roots of old-world trees, Thick flames of torches tossed as tumbling seas Made mad the moonless and infuriate air That, ravening, revelled in the riotous hair And raiment of the ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the splendid dreams, the best dreams that there are, Come always in the darkest nights without a single star? When the moonless nights are blackest the best dreams are about; I'll tell you why that should be so and how ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... passed. Tom must have grown pretty tired of squeaking. It was a moonless evening, though not very dark. I could see objects at a little distance through the crack, but could not see so far as the stump. It got rather dull, watching there; and being amidst nice cozy straw, I presently went to sleep, quite unintentionally. I must have ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... an element of dread. The fear of ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the Cascos by the hand as for a final separation. Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal roadside; I was told by one they ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... down, now crossing a shaft of light flung on the water from some lamp or fire, now blending with the ghostlike shadows which lay in the moonless night. It passed out of the town itself, and edged into the shade of the forest that swept continuously for so many ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... but moonless, and the thick-leafed masses of the oaks and hickories rose a wall of black to curtain half the hemisphere of starry sky. As always in our forest land, the hour was shrilly vocal, though to me the chirping din of frogs and ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... little he began to feel chilled, and began hopping around on hands and feet to start his blood moving. A little of this warmed him up considerably. This time he sat down in the fence corner. The night was moonless, but the stars were quite bright, enabling Phil to make out objects some distance away. He could see quite plainly the men gathered in front of the ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... felt much better and stronger. I looked around for my companions. The fire had gone out—no doubt intentionally extinguished, lest its glare amid the darkness might attract the eye of some roving Indian. The night was a clear one, though moonless; but the heaven was spangled with its sparkling worlds, and the starlight enabled me to make out the forms of the two trappers and the group of browsing horses. Of the former, one only was asleep; the other sat upright, keeping guard over the camp. He was motionless ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... into its arms Shall rush, with all the impatience of a man That's new come home; and, having long been absent, With haste runs over every different room, In pain to see the whole. Thrice happy meeting! 760 Nor time, nor death, shall ever part them more. Tis but a night, a long and moonless night; We make the grave our bed, and then are gone. Thus, at the shut of even, the weary bird Leaves the wide air, and in some lonely brake Cowers down, and dozes till the dawn of day, Then claps his ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... And the moonless dark, When I sat in sorrow Over Sigurd; Better than all things I deemed it would be If they would let me Cast my life by, Or burn me up As they ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... They cross Wyatt's Buildings and cross this house. It was a moonless night or we should have seen it at once! I watched him, saw him drop to this roof—and brought the men around to ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... and on the morrow betimes, the Sage drove together three or four milch goats that he pastured there, and went their ways over the plain, and so in due time entered into the lava-sea. But the first night that they lay there, though it was moonless and somewhat cloudy, they saw no glare of the distant earth-fires which they had looked for; and when on the morrow they questioned the Sage thereof, he said: "The Earth-fires ceased about the end of last year, as I have heard tell. But sooth it is that the foreboding of the Giant's Candle was not ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... kernels, bruising and destroying much more than they devour. Sometimes their ravages are a matter of serious concern to the farmer. But every such neighborhood has its coon-dog, and the boys and young men dearly love the sport. The party sets out about eight or nine o'clock of a dark, moonless night, and stealthily approaches the cornfield. The dog knows his business, and when he is put into a patch of corn and told to "hunt them up" he makes a thorough search, and will not be misled by any other scent. You ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... for that fleet. The situation seemed critical. Sailing just before dark, I headed northwest, apparently into the heart of the Caribbean Sea. This information, I have no doubt, was promptly communicated to Admiral Cervera. But as soon as the darkness of a moonless night had thoroughly set in, I changed the course to due south; and ran below Barbadoes and thence far to the eastward before I took the Oregon to the northward. We thus passed far to sea east of Martinique, and eventually turned into the north Atlantic beyond St. Thomas. I ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... 1851.—This evening I walked up and down on the Pont des Bergues, under a clear, moonless heaven delighting in the freshness of the water, streaked with light from the two quays, and glimmering under the twinkling stars. Meeting all these different groups of young people, families, couples and children, who were returning to their homes, to their garrets or their drawing-rooms, singing ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... clean, sharp stars of a moonless night. His keen senses tasted the pungent smoke and the softer feminine fragrance of the apple-blossoms. His nerves were stilled to pleasant ease, except when the laugh of the girl floated to him from the grape-arbour back of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... thing in the universe?" asks Hugo. "A storm at sea," he answers, and continues, "And what is grander than a storm at sea?" "The unclouded heavens on a starry and moonless night." "And what is grander than these midnight skies?" "The soul of man!" A spectacular climax such as Hugo loved; and still, with all its dramatic effect, the picturesque statement of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... the dark grayness of a moonless night. The cliff here was not more than twenty feet above the high tide, which surged and swept deep at its base. The grass upon the top was short; young fir-trees stood here and there. All this Caius saw. The woman he could not see at first. Then, in a minute, he did see her—standing on ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... our father will not condescend to follow our words of counsel, and nothing now remains but to bring him to a knowledge of the truth by the sacrifice of one of our own lives. To-night is fortunately moonless; and if I put on white garments and go to the neighborhood of the bay, he will take me for a stork and shoot me dead. Do you continue to live and tend our father with all the services of filial piety." Thus she spake, her eyes dimmed with the rolling tears. But the younger ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... its legion of gloom; and in the shadow of the great Castle of Caylus, rising like a rock itself out of the solid rock behind Lagardere, the moat was soon very dark indeed. There was little light in the moonless sky; there came none from the castle, which in its dim outline of towers and battlements might have been the enchanted palace of some fairy tale, so soundless, so lightless, so unpeopled did it ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "samir," one who enjoys the musamarah or night-talk outside the Arab tents. "Samar" is the shade of the moon, or half darkness when only stars shine without a moon, or the darkness of a moonless night. Hence the proverb (A. P. ii. 513) "Ma af'al-hu al-samar wa'l kamar;" I will not do it by moondarkness or by moonshine, i.e. never. I have elsewhere remarked that "Early to bed and early to rise" is a civilised maxim; most barbarians sit deep ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... residence in the scrub was lighted brightly in the midst of the 'close', solid blackness of that moonless December night, when the sky and stars were smothered and suffocated by ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... day by day, Scarce-rocking, her full-busted figure-head Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows: Then follow'd calms, and then winds variable, Then baffling, a long course of them; and last Storm, such as drove her under moonless heavens Till hard upon the cry of 'breakers' came The crash of ruin, and the loss of all But Enoch and two others. Half the night, Buoy'd upon floating tackle and broken spars, These drifted, stranding on an isle at morn Rich, but loneliest ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... dusk, moonless, windless. The sounds of the village street came in—laughter, a touch at a piano, a chiming clock. Bights starred and quickened in the blurred houses. Footsteps echoed on the board walks. The gate opened. The gloom ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... strange love's sake Rode Balen forth by lawn and lake, By moor and moss and briar and brake, And in his heart their sorrow spake Whose lips were dumb as death, and said Mute words of presage blind and vain As rain-stars blurred and marred by rain To wanderers on a moonless main Where night and day ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed, where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman's form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the winter's night, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... was clear, starlit but moonless, and the cliff as he reached it looked down upon him with majestic and sullen disdain. The ages had passed over and left it scarred and seared but still defiant and inaccessible. Renwick paused a moment to be ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... suddenly visioned—and Sherston was a man given to vivid visions—where he would have been now, at this moment, had his marriage indeed taken place this morning. He saw himself, on this beautiful starlit, moonless night, standing, along with his dear love, on the platform of a medieval tower, which, together with the picturesque farmhouse which had been tacked on to the tower about a hundred years ago, rose, close to the seashore, on a lonely ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... enough to stir them all, for the place was near at hand. Peetweet alone was for staying in camp, but when told that he might stay and keep house by himself he made up his mind to get all the fun he could. The night was hot and moonless, Mosquitoes abundant, and in trampling and scrambling through the gloomy woods the hunters had plenty of small troubles, but they did not mind that so long as Turk was willing to do his part. Once or twice he showed signs of interest in the trail, ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... this time in the small hours of a dark, moonless night. The pirates loaded the treasure into boats and pulled quietly for the Santa Theresa, a transport which lay like a black hulk in ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... matches, ran over the part I was to perform, and pressed my gun firmly, to be sure there was no mistake. My position was that of kneeling directly under the jack, which I was to light at the word. The night was clear, moonless, and still. Nearing the middle of the lake, a breeze from the west was barely perceptible, and noiselessly we glided before it. The guide handled his oar with great dexterity; without lifting it from the water or breaking the surface, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... till they reached a white house before which, on a hump, three palm trees grew from one trunk. Beyond was waste ground, and further away a stretch of sand and low dunes lost in the darkness of the, as yet, moonless night. Domini looked at the house and at Hadj, and wondered if it would ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... their cigarettes. The wind had fallen, leaving a peace in the ears like the cessation of a hateful turmoil. There was the promise of a cool night in the unusual clearness of the stars. Morgan rode away into the moonless night, leaving the town to take care of its own dignity ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... the aching Eye ye leave, Like those rich Hues that paint the clouds of Eve! Tearful and saddening with the sadden'd Blaze 65 Mine Eye the gleam pursues with wistful Gaze— Sees Shades on Shades with deeper tint impend, Till chill and damp the moonless Night descend! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the next dance, Lenox sought and found Honor Desmond, silently offered his arm, and led her through the verandah out into the starshine,—which is a reality in India, on moonless nights. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... we filled the still, deserted street, A column of dim gray, And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat Along the moonless way; The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet That ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... boat at midnight sent alone To drift upon the moonless sea; A lute whose leading chord is gone; A wounded bird that hath but one Imperfect wing to soar upon, Are like me ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... The night was moonless, with cold dashes of rain, and though the streets of Turin were well-lit no lantern-ray reached the windings of the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... barbarians of Spanish America, where a few master spirits, all old Spaniards, did indeed for a season stick fiery off from the dark mass of savages amongst whom their lot was cast, like stars in a moonless night, but only to suffer a speedy eclipse from the clouds and storm which they themselves had set in motion. We shall see. The scum as yet is uppermost, and does not seem likely to subside, but it may boil over. In Cuba, however, all was at ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... few feet out of water and were painted a dull gray. Their smokestacks could be lowered to the deck, and they burned anthracite coal, which made no smoke. They would leave Nassau at such a time as would enable them to be off Wilmington, N.C., or some other Southern port, on a moonless night with a high tide, and then, making a dash, would run through the blockading vessels. Once in port, they would take a cargo of cotton, and would run out on a dark night or during a storm. During the war, 1504 vessels of all kinds were ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... Philargyrus was still Furfur's tenant, I had an impassioned love-affair with one of Furfur's slave-girls. We used to meet here, at first on moonlit nights, and, later, when we each knew every inch of our way here and home again, more often on moonless nights. I always waded up and down the bed of the brook, so as to leave no scent for any dog to follow. I know this nook well and thought of it the instant I began to plan ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... upon San Francisco Bay, and again gone down in red gleam over the far-spreading Pacific, leaving the sky of a leaden colour, moonless ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... during that spell of foul weather were very dark and moonless, not because there was no moon, though she was now waning into her last quarter, but because of the quantity of clouds that muffled up the face of the heavens and hid the moon and the stars from us. But we made shift as ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... grown and stood wider, and oak and beech began to take the place of willow and elm. The continued tossing and pouring of the wind among the leaves sufficiently concealed the sounds of his footsteps on the mast; it was for the ear what a moonless night is to the eye; but for all that Dick went cautiously, slipping from one big trunk to another, and looking sharply about him as he went. Suddenly a doe passed like a shadow through the underwood in front of him, and he paused, disgusted at the chance. This part of the wood ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hands and feet. At last I felt a curtain, put it aside, and entered the black hall. There I found a great silent assembly. How it was visible I neither saw nor could imagine, for the walls, the floor, the roof, were shrouded in what seemed an infinite blackness, blacker than the blackest of moonless, starless nights; yet my eyes could separate, although vaguely, not a few of the individuals in the mass interpenetrated and divided, as well as surrounded, by the darkness. It seemed as if my eyes would never come quite to themselves. I pressed their balls ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... voyage, rude Boreas kindly retired, and spicy breezes from Africa rippled the sea with just sufficient force to intensify its heavenly blue, and fill out the great square-sail so that there was no occasion to ply the oars. One dark, starlight but moonless night, a time of quiet talk prevailed from stem to stern of the vessel as the grizzled mariners spun long yarns of their prowess and experiences on the deep, for the benefit of awe-stricken and youthful shipmates whose careers ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... The night was moonless and half cloudy. The wind shrieked among the rim rocks and boomed against the cliffs. Our lantern would not stay lighted. Time and again we crept beneath a rock slab and relighted it only to have it snuffed out the instant we emerged into the wind. Across the rocks we crept, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... soldiers were stationed in the town, and sentinels kept a very careful watch. On the Sabbath, as the people were returning from public worship, one or two Indians were seen on the neighboring hills, which led the people to suspect that an assault was contemplated. The night was moonless, starless, and of Egyptian darkness. The Indians, perfectly acquainted with the location of every building and every inch of the ground, crept noiselessly, three hundred in number, each to his appointed post. They spread ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Nagendra left Benares behind him. Oh, world-enchanting Benares! what happy man could have quitted thee on such an autumn night with satiated eyes? It is a moonless night. From the Ganges stream, in whatever direction you look you will see the sky studded with stars—from endless ages ever-burning stars, resting never. Below, a second sky reflected in the deep blue water; on shore, flights of steps, and tall houses showing a thousand lights; ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... the moon. It has been easily calculated that, when the light proceeding from a star becomes so diffused as to be as weak as the natural light proceeding from the whole of the stars, in a clear and moonless night, then the star is no longer visible for any ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the fence. The ring of light from the lantern was soon lost to his eyes, swallowed up in the dense darkness of a starless, moonless night. ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... a waking somnolence, lulled by the familiar, profound, withdrawn repose of the valley. He could distinguish Clare's form weaving back and forth in a low rocker; the moonless, summer night embraced, hid, all; there were no lights in the house at his back, no lights visible in the village beyond; only the impenetrable blackness of the opposite range and ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... listen, for he was afraid and did not want his hopes to crumble slowly with each obstinate refusal of his father. He preferred to learn the truth at once, good or bad, later on; and he went out into the night. It was a moonless, starless night, one of those misty nights when the air seems thick with humidity. A vague odor of apples floated through the farmyard, for it was the season when the earliest applies were gathered, the "early ripe," as they are called in the cider country. As Cesaire ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... lay below me, and all round it the village clustered in a soft black shadow unrelieved by a single light. The night was moonless, yet distinctly luminous, for the stars crowded the sky. The silence of deep slumber was everywhere; so still, indeed, that every time my foot kicked against a stone I thought the sound must be heard below in the village ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... acclaim When living, but their pleasure was in war; Triumphs and hatred followed: I myself Bore, men imagined, no inglorious part: The gods thought otherwise, by whose decree Deprived of life, and more, of death deprived, I still hear shrieking through the moonless night Their discontented and deserted shades. Observe these horrid walls, this rueful waste! Here some refresh the vigour of the mind With contemplation and cold penitence: Nor wonder while thou hearest that the soul Thus purified ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... men worked, screaming and shouting under the lights. It was a hot, moonless night; the end of it was darkened by clouds and a sudden squall that made Findlayson ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... and silently; one by one the fires are extinguished, and the plain is wrapped in the gloom of a moonless night. The swan utters its wild note, the gruya whoops over the stream, and the wolf howls on the skirts of the ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... steel from Welshland won. Then they show their tokened war-shields to the moon-dog and the stars, For the hurrying wind of the mountains has borne them tale of wars. Lo now, in the court of the warriors they gather for the fray, Before the sun's uprising, in the moonless morn of day; And the spears by the dusk gate glimmer, and the torches shine on the wall, And the murmuring voice of women comes faint from the cloudy hall: Then the grey dawn beats on the mountains mid ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... dark and moonless, there was an inconveniently brilliant gas-lamp close to the Major's door, and that strategist, carrying his round roll of diaries, much the shape of a bottle, under his coat, went about half-past nine that evening to look at the rain-gutter which had been weeping into his yard, and ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... window. This was a moonless night, and little enough illumination entered the room ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the great shed of glass and girders which is the station, the night being perfectly soundless, moonless, starless, and ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... figs and a rump of venison. During the breakfast Kali related his adventures, while Stas interpreted them in English for Nell who did not understand the Kiswahili language. The buffalo, as it appeared, fled far. It was difficult for Kali to find the tracks as it was a moonless night. Fortunately, rain had fallen two days before and the ground was not too hard; in consequence of this the heavy animal's hoofs left deep imprints upon it. Kali sought them with the aid of his toes and walked a long distance. The buffalo finally ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the stars that fled With twilight through the moonless mountain air, While youth with burning lips and wreathless hair Sang toward the sun that was to crown his head, Rising; the hopes that triumphed and fell dead, The sweet swift eyes and songs of hours that were; These may'st thou not give back for ever; ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... In melancholy moonless Acheron, Farm for the goodly earth and joyous day Where no spring ever buds, nor ripening sun Weighs down the apple trees, nor flowery May Chequers with chestnut blooms the grassy floor, Where thrushes never sing, and piping linnets ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... Arab and African chivalry—there, where for many a lustrum kings had reviewed devoted and conquering armies—assembled those desperate men; the loud winds agitating their tossing torches that struggled against the moonless night. ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cockroach came back and proceeded with its fell banquet. At length, weakened no doubt by loss of blood and frantic with the thought that a mere piece of determined vermin should thus habitually sup off me, I rose in the dead of a moonless night, turned on the electric light, selected a handy shoe, and then started to have it out, once for all, with that man-eating cockroach. He broke cover from under some curiosities, and went away at a killing pace. But I had stopped his "earths" all round the cabin, and after a ten minutes' ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... course he should pursue with her. And through all the debate Love stood off but a little way—a strong temptation, the stronger of a gleam of policy behind. At the very moment he was most inclined to yield to the allurement, a hand very fair even in the moonless gloaming was laid softly upon his shoulder. The touch thrilled him; he started, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... been for the moonless dark of it, you might have seen the same laborer who had been so concerned with tape-measures and distances near the Treasury Building, a long shallow basket stoutly woven of willow on his arm, making secretly for the mouth of the drain that once ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... dark. And the stair seemed ever so much longer than when he came up. Nor was that any wonder, for down and down he went, until at length his foot struck a door, and when he rose and opened it, he found himself under the starry, moonless sky at ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... now after dusk, and the hour had already deepened into the darkness of a calm, moonless, summer night; the hearth, therefore, in a short time, became surrounded by a circle, consisting of every person in the house; the door was closed and securely bolted;—a struggle for the safest seat took place, and to Bartley's shame be it ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... far more commonplace, which yet Willie liked well to look out upon, but which could not keep him long from his bed. There was, for instance, the moonless and cloudy night, when, if he had been able to pierce the darkness to the core, he would have found nothing but blackness. It had a power of its own, but one cannot say it had much to look at. On such a night he would say to himself ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence that lay about them, the night hush of the mountains and the sea. Hermione sat down on the seat in the terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars. There was a cool breeze blowing from Etna. Here and there upon the mountains shone solitary lights, and one was moving slowly through the darkness along the crest of a hill opposite to them, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... On the dark, moonless nights of the 3rd, 4th and 5th of August transports stole silently to anchor off the Cove, and many battalions of Kitchener's Army and batteries of Field Artillery came ashore. When the sun again ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... enormously profitable. Moonless and cloudy nights were of course the most favorable times for eluding the blockade; but the swift steamers, sitting low in the water and painted a light neutral tint, could not easily be detected by day at a little distance, especially as they burned smokeless ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... propitiate local devils than an endeavour to frighten them away by sheer terror. It was unquestionably a horribly uncanny performance, what with the white streaked faces and limbs, and the clang of the metal dresses; the surroundings, too, added to the weird, unearthly effect, the dark moonless night, the dim masses of forest closing in on the garden, and the uncertain flare of the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the eastern ridge of the Seely Hill when they found old Jerry Lance lying stone-dead in his house? And had I not predicted with an air of mysterious knowledge that Jourdan would recover when Red Mike threw him? The sky was moonless and he could not get out ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... be a dark, moonless night. Only a few feebly gleaming stars, thinly scattered over the firmament, enabled him to distinguish the canopy of the sky from the waste of waters that surrounded him. Even a ship under full spread of canvas could not have been seen, ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from the foot ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and silent night, moonless, very dark, and very tranquil. He went to the window to throw ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... held him in close bonds to-night. After a while, as it darkened, he rose from the fallen log upon which he had been sitting, and began to follow the little stream, still wrapped in far-away thoughts. The twilight had settled into a night that was moonless, but had that luminosity often seen on clear nights in late autumn. He could see all about him, even in the wood. As he reached another somewhat open space, coming upon it silently from behind a thick ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... was aware of silence heaped Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls; Aqueous like floating rays of amber light, Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep,— Silence and safety; and his mortal shore Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death. ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... multiplied. The ground gradually became softer, and the feet sank in it. Hamilcar did not turn back. He went on still at their head; and his horse, which was yellow-spotted like a dragon, advanced into the mire flinging froth around him, and with great straining of the loins. Night—a moonless light—fell. A few cried out that they were about to perish; he snatched their arms from them, and gave them to the serving-men. Nevertheless the mud became deeper and deeper. Some had to mount the beasts of burden; others clung to the horses' tails; the sturdy ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... in the appearance of things. The days became shorter and shorter; the sun running lower in its course each day, and giving less and less heat, and the nights so cold as to prevent our sleeping on deck; the Magellan Clouds in sight, of a clear, moonless night; the skies looking cold and angry; and, at times, a long, heavy, ugly sea, setting in from the southward, told us what we were coming to. Still, however, we had a fine, strong breeze, and kept on our way under as much ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... A moonless, cloudless night. The little praam takes the ground in the bay a few yards from the beach, and in the midst of a constellation of "jelly-fishes" spherical in form and varying in size. The larger are so many pale blue orbs floating lazily in a luminous mist, the only ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... been settled, there was nothing more to do except to chat away the time till morning. As they talked, the first faint flush of dawn appeared in the east, giving promise of a fine day despite the fact that the moonless night had ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... hearth-fires shone as brightly as on a moonless evening in autumn.... Fowls retired to their roosts and went to sleep, cattle gathered at the pasture-bars and lowed, frogs peeped, birds sang their evening songs, and bats flew about. But the human knew that night had ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... that, alone and on foot, in strange country, a good five miles from the wagon, with the darkness of a moonless and misty night already gathering about me, was just a trifle awkward, perhaps, for I was both hungry and tired, and a five-mile walk through the long grass would be something beyond a joke. But with the river to guide me on ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... star was of fifth magnitude; by two it was of the first. As the faint flush of dawn began to come toward the close of that frosty, moonless November night, the new star was a great white-hot object more brilliant than any other star in the heavens. Phobar knew that when its light finally reached Earth so that ordinary eyes could see, it would be the most beautiful object in the night sky. What was the reason for these unparalleled ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... It is a moonless night, and the wind, which has risen to a gale, fills the air with noises—the rattling of loosely-fastened shutters, the sough of the pine trees behind the house, the thousand-and-one eerie sounds that a high wind and night bring ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... tale, but he bade me forthright to bear him away; So I took him up behind me, and we rode till late in the day, Toward the cover of the wild-wood, and as swiftly as we might. But when yet aloof was the thicket and it now was moonless night, We stayed perforce for a little, and he told me all the tale: How the aliens came against them, and they fought without avail Till the Roof o'er their heads was burning and they burst forth on the foe, And were hewn down there together; nor yet was the slaughter ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... the twilight passed away, the night was clear and starlight, but moonless, when Luis and his companion left the venta and resumed their progress northwards. After following the highway for a short league, they took a cross-road, on either side of which the richly cultivated plain was sprinkled with farmhouses, and with a few ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... and good wishes. The stars were shining in a moonless sky. On the pavement in the avenue they heard the aide-de-camp changing his step to fit his general's. The door ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... of the neighborhood. But the owner had not occupied his country-home a whole summer before he determined to make a still more attractive home of it by lighting it with a new-fashioned gas of domestic manufacture. He succeeded in lighting not only his house but the whole country-side, for one moonless night his mansion was burned to the ground. Nothing was left of the house but the foundations, and on these the owner felt no desire to build again. He departed from the Lethbury ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... moonless night has passed away, A sudden dawn dispels the shadows grey, The glad sea moves and hails the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... appalled And astonished, the vast fleet veers; And the skies are shrouded and palled, But the moonless midnight hears And sees how swift on them drive and drift strange ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... stone. But there were some who said It moved its lips; And when they went away, the earth stirred And they heard it moan. Now it comes leaping down the tunnel roads Where the moss hangs like stalactites, Screaming out curses, snapping at the toads; Negroes who pass there on the moonless nights Behind them hear a sound that stops their breath. The keen wind whistles through its teeth, And the white skull goes ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... this woman says, "My days were sunless and my nights were moonless, Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak tuneless, If you loved me not!" And I who—(ah, for words of flame!) adore her, Who am mad to lay my ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... for thee and Sparta, when a star shot suddenly from the heavens. Pausanias, this is the eighth year, the year in which on moonless nights ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... when the midnight Is heavy upon the land, And the black waves lying dumbly Along the sand; When the moonless night draws close, And the lights are out in the house; When the fires burn low and red, And the watch is ticking loudly Beside the bed: Though you sleep, tired out, on your couch, Still your heart must wake and watch In the dark room, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... moonless night; the dark blue canopy spangled with myriad stars—grandeur, peace, and purity above; squalor, worry, and profanity below. Fit basis for many an ancient system of Theology— unscientific, if you will, but ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... I quitted Fort Garry, at ten o'clock at night, and, turning out into the level prairie, commenced a long journey towards the West. The night was cold and moonless, but a brilliant aurora flashed and trembled in many-coloured shafts across the starry sky. Behind me lay friends and news of friends, civilization, tidings of a terrible war, firesides, and houses; before me lay unknown savage tribes, long days of saddle-travel, long nights of chilling bivouac, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... that lie like outworks of the enormous wall. Seen from this great height they were in themselves comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now to be perceived through frosted glass. The velvet blackness ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... should be put under the bridge; and Gensuke sought to pass over not having a machi in his hakama, so they sacrificed him Wherefore the midmost pillar of the bridge was for three hundred years called by his name—Gensuke-bashira. It is averred that upon moonless nights a ghostly fire flitted about that pillar—always in the dead watch hour between two and three; and the colour of the light was red, though I am assured that in Japan, as in other lands, the fires of the dead ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... when he had sent Nanny to bed, that she might have a good night's rest before the fatigues of the morrow, he stole softly out to pay a last visit to Milly's grave. It was a moonless night, but the sky was thick with stars, and their light was enough to show that the grass had grown long on the grave, and that there was a tombstone telling in bright letters, on a dark ground, that beneath were deposited the ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... sent alone "To drift upon the moonless sea, "A lute, whose leading chord is gone, "A wounded bird that hath but one "Imperfect wing to soar upon, "Are like what I ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... wandering young family of fugitives from the Natives' Land Act. A sharp pang went through us, and caused our heart to bleed as we recalled the scene of their night funeral, forced on them by the necessity of having to steal a grave on the moonless night, when detection would be less easy. Every man in this country, we thought, be he a Russian, Jew, Peruvian, or of any other nationality, has a claim to at least six feet of South African soil as a resting place after death, but those native outcasts, who in the country of their ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... at about the centre of Hydra and is on the meridian, April 26th. Owing to its many faint stars it is best seen on a clear moonless night. ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... its summit at night finds himself, as it were, lost in the midst of the sky. But for the black flanks of the great cone on which he stands he might fancy himself to be in a balloon. On the occasion to which I refer the world beneath was virtually invisible in the moonless night. The blaze of the constellations overhead was astonishingly brilliant, yet amid all their magnificence my attention was immediately drawn to a great tapering light that sprang from the place ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss |
