"Threshold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... king's son, the golden ball with which he used to divert himself, and brought it to his mother in great haste; and when he reached the door of his father's house, but not unpursued, and was entering it in a great hurry, his foot stumbled on the threshold, and falling down into the room where his mother was sitting, the two pigmies seized the ball which had dropped from his hand and departed, showing the boy every mark of contempt and derision. On recovering from his fall, confounded with shame, and execrating ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... the door from which he had gone out and in so often in earlier, happier days. They had been keeping watch, he noticed, for lights shifted in the rooms as they came near, and almost as soon as he had crossed the threshold his wife came out from her room to greet him. He marked in that instant that, though she was startled to see him, and had not looked for him so soon, she showed no sign of confusion or of guilt. Against his will he admired the courage ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... Mavor's door. She did not hear us coming, but stood near the window gazing up at the mountains. She was dressed in some rich soft stuff, and wore at her breast a bunch of wild-flowers. I had never seen her so beautiful. I did not wonder that Craig paused with his foot upon the threshold to look at her. She turned and saw us. With a glad cry, 'Oh! my darling; you have come to me,' she came with outstretched arms. I turned and fled, but the cry and the vision ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... Delphi. He now kissed it with devotion, and prayed aloud to the god not to allow him to fall ingloriously by the hands of his fellow-citizens, after leading him safe through so many perils to the threshold of the city. But neither courage nor superstition availed him against the fury of the Samnite onset. For the first time in his life Sulla was beaten, and either retreated into Rome or maintained a desperate struggle close ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... help you," Maurice said, politely; adding to himself, "Damn—damn—!" Stepping backward, he lifted the front wheels, and with Lily's help pulled the perambulator on to the little porch and over the threshold into the house—which always shone with immaculate neatness and ugly comfort. He kept his eyes away from the sleeping face on the pillow. Together they got the carriage into the hall—Lily fumbling all the while with one hand to fasten the front of her dress ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... eyes and an unchecked sigh—as if the very hopelessness of the comparison brought with it a certain pain. As to much of the life of the Quartier about him, he shrank from it as he would from a pestilence. Certain men never crossed his threshold—never dared. ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... upon me as the door closed. There in the threshold stood the manservant whom they called Oliphant, erect as a sentry on guard. The sight reminded me of what I had once seen at Basle when by chance a Rhenish Grand Duke had shared the inn with me. Of a sudden a dozen clues linked together—the crowned notepaper, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Know thou first, I lov'd the maid I married; never man Sighed truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! I tell thee We have a power on foot; and I had purpose Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn, Or lose mine arm for't: thou hast beat me out Twelve several times, and I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters ...
— The Tragedy of Coriolanus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... nothing of it. If Fillmore had taken the trouble to come in a taxi-cab, obviously to call upon her, why had he abandoned the idea at her very threshold? She was still speculating on this mystery when the telephone-bell rang, and her brother's voice spoke huskily in ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... threshold of the century the history of which he so prominently helped to shape, on October 26, 1800, at Parchim in the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. On his father's side he descended from a family of the North German gentry which had come to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... burst open, and David Dodd stood on the threshold, looking terrible. He seemed black and white with anger and anxiety. Making a great effort to control his agitation, he said, "I have changed my mind, sir; I ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... started for a little walk. He was quite happy if some shopkeeper standing on the threshold of his door would stop him and say, "Well, pere Rogron, how goes it with you?" Then he would talk, and ask for news, and gather all the gossip of the town. He usually went as far as the Upper town, sometimes to the ravines, according to the weather. Occasionally ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the country, and ten minutes' walk in the country brings one to real primitive woods. The town has not yet overflowed its limits like the great Northern commercial capitals, and Nature, wild and unkempt, comes up to its very threshold, and even in many places ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... been done, it must not be forgotten that we have scarcely advanced beyond the threshold, and that it is only by numerous and frequently repeated experiments that it is possible to arrive at satisfactory results. Agricultural inquiries are liable to peculiar fallacies due to the perturbing influence ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... reduce to their primitive gases its deadening influences on the memory of that Honourable Member who was once a candidate for the honour of your—and my—independent vote and interest. I will not ask what is that Secretarian figure, full of blandishments, standing on the threshold, with its finger on its lips. I will not ask how it comes that those personal altercations, involving all the removes and definitions of Shakespeare's Touchstone—the retort courteous—the quip modest— the reply churlish—the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... huz pore thortless leds baw a gent on the Dily Chrornicle, lidy. (Rankin returns. Drinkwater immediately withdraws, stopping the missionary for a moment near the threshold to say, touching his forelock) Awll eng abaht within ile, gavner, hin kice aw should be wornted. (He goes into ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... appearance now. Then it had been all ablaze with lights and merry with laughter and music. Now it was lit by but a pair of candles over the hearth and, the glow of a dying fire. Overhead the high roof glimmered into darkness, and the gorgeous furniture was no more than dimness. I stopped short on the threshold, bewildered at the gloom, thinking that the chamber was empty; then I saw that a woman had raised herself from the great couch on which the King had lolled with his little dogs last Sunday night, and was staring at me ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... over the whole city, and passing thirty pastry cook's shops, without daring to enter any one of them. In the first place, it was necessary there should be only one person in the shop, and that person's physiognomy must be so encouraging as to give me confidence to pass the threshold; but when once the dear little cake was procured, and I shut up in my chamber with that and a bottle of wine, taken cautiously from the bottom of a cupboard, how much did I enjoy drinking my wine, and reading ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... postliminium. This term is derived from 'limen' and 'post,' which explains why we say that the person who has been captured by the enemy and has come back into our territories has returned by postliminium: for just as the threshold forms the boundary of a house, so the ancients represented the boundaries of the empire as a threshold; and this is also the origin of the term 'limes, signifying a kind of end and limit. Thus postliminium means that the captive returns by the same threshold at which he was ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... glad. This relation of understanding is partial, but the relation of love is complete. In love the sense of difference is obliterated and the human soul fulfils its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the infinite. Therefore love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... never set foot in Mr Bickers's house before, and experienced a curious sensation as he crossed the threshold of his enemy's citadel. Suppose Mr Bickers should return and find ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... paced the room several times, one of the fishermen arose and extinguished the light, and when all was still, I went to the door that had been fastened after the master fisherman, drew the bolt without disturbing any one, and went out. At the threshold of the door I found an axe which I took in my hand, walked around the hut several times, but could not discover the object of my search. I at length found his blanket tucked up among the thatch under the eaves of the hut, and immediately re-entered the room to tell my companions I was ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... measure, he having "changed his opinion on the subject," on the motion of Mr. S. O'Brien, the debate was adjourned. The debate continued by adjournment up to February 28th, before any division or amendment took place: the opposition wishing to stop it on the very threshold. On the last night of the debate the house was addressed by Mr. Cobden, who complained that extraneous matter had been introduced into the discussion to a greater extent than had ever been introduced previously into any corn-law debate. The two main topics, he said, on which it ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... in mad impatience, and was over the threshold before the doctor's peremptory call ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... the room-door, which I opened, and peered into the passage, nearly faint with horror lest some leering, shapeless thing should greet me upon the threshold. ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... man, though not quite in the secret of the universe. He vaulted over the counter, and opened the door with such a ringing of its appended bell as made heavy-hearted Clare turn before he heard his voice. The long spare white figure appeared on the threshold, framed ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... Bouille: an electric thunder-chain; which the invisible Bouille, like a Father Jove, holds in his hand—for wise purposes! Brave Bouille has done what man could; has spread out his electric thunder-chain of Military Escorts, onwards to the threshold of Chalons: it waits but for the new Korff Berline; to receive it, escort it, and, if need be, bear it off in whirlwind of military fire. They lie and lounge there, we say, these fierce Troopers; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Marion Sanford went slowly up the stairs and to her room. Mrs. Stannard listened until she heard her close the door, then hastened down the row in pursuit of Mr. Blake. Ray waved his hand to her as he stepped inside the threshold, and Blake, fuming with fury, came back ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... that, as Eve and her mother loitered over luncheon, the door again softly opened, and they saw Luigi standing erect on the threshold, and holding with both hands above the brightly bronzed face a tall, slender, white jar of ancient and exquisite shape, carefully painted, and having a glass suspended within, lest any water it might receive should penetrate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative debt relief in 2005. Kigali's high defense expenditures have caused tension between the government and international donors and lending agencies. Rwanda obtained debt relief from the IMF and World Bank in 2006. Rwanda also received Millennium Challenge Account Threshold status in 2006. Energy shortages, instability in neighboring states, and lack of adequate transportation linkages to other countries continue ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... this sketch of the "Threshold of India," a mere glance at the military history of the country will suffice. In fact, only so far as it may have a bearing upon the present, has reference to the past any place in ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... heard of them often, but only once did I ever see any of them before. That was when some of us one night paid a visit to a man who sat much alone, and was said to think a great deal. We saw two of those sitting in the room with him, and he was as pale as they were. We could not cross the threshold, but shivered and shook, and felt ready to melt away. Is not your ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... venerated mansion close behind us forever. Even thus did they close ages ago upon him, the light and honor of that ancient house, who, leaving it in the glow of health, in the pride of manly beauty, in the aspirations of a high but not a haughty spirit, was destined never to cross that paternal threshold more. The blessings that went with him have mouldered on the lips that pronounced them; the tears that mourned his fall have dried upon the lids from which they streamed; all who knew and loved, all who watched and wept for Sir Philip Sydney are silent in the dust to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... against"—began Alvarez, but at that moment the door was opened and Lieutenant Diego Bernal appeared upon the threshold. ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in full swing when the deputy entered; scores of lithe dark men and their black-eyed partners were whirling in the fervid Spanish waltz; but as he crossed the threshold a discordant note arose: disturbance broke out in a corner of the hall; a woman screamed; a knife-blade flashed. Clark shoved his way through the crowd and reached the fight in time to disarm a ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... that she should be shaken by a doubt of her own identity; and having reached her room she paused upon the threshold and looked around as if to satisfy herself by all those silent witnesses which made it truth. There was the chair in which she had so often sat plying her needle with such tardy grace while her impatient thoughts did battle with the humdrum, narrow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... tempest-tossed earth-pilgrim blesses himself or herself, turning inward from the crowded ways of the world. This thought blesses the man of business, as he turns from his day's care, and crosses the sacred threshold. It is as restful to him as the slippers and gown and easy-chair by the fireside. Everybody understands him here. Everybody is well content that he should take his ease in his own way. Such is the case in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... men of faith to seek the grounds of reassurance in a science of their own; in a method of experiment, of observation, of hypothesis checked by known facts. It is impossible for me to do more than glance across the threshold of this subject. But it is necessary to say that the method is in an elementary stage of revival. The imposing success that belongs to natural science is absent: we fall short of the unchallengeable unanimity of the Biologists ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... within his soul. Then the actual comparative darkness of the carriage obscured it and he found himself again conscious of the scent of roses, the sheen of satin and soft velvet, and his heart was beating madly. He had stumbled over the unsuspected threshold, surprised the hidden temple of his own heart, and this, inopportunely, prematurely, and, to his everlasting confusion, in the presence ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Coupled with a sturdy uprightness of carriage, this raised him at a bound above the pallid habitues of ballroom and pavement. It was, perhaps, only natural that Millicent Chyne should have noted this man as soon as he crossed the threshold. He was as remarkable as some free and dignified denizen of the forest in the midst of domestic animals. She mentally put him down for a waltz, and before five minutes had elapsed he was bowing before her while a mutual friend murmured his name. One does not know how young ladies manage ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... more knocking, and more, but none of it reached Mona's brain. She was flying with the heroine, and enjoying hairbreadth escapes, while running away from her wicked guardian, when her bedroom door was flung open, and Millie Higgins—not the wicked guardian—appeared on the threshold. ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... you all right?" queried Doctor Hilary stepping across the threshold. He appeared totally oblivious of the fact that Antony's presence made the success of George's search ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... such a being as Buddha, the son of Suddhodana, king of Kapilavastu, has been doubted. But what can never be doubted is this, that Buddhism, such as we find it in Russia[67] and Sweden[68] on the very threshold of European civilisation, in the north of Asia, in Mongolia, Tatary, China, Tibet, Nepal, Siam, Burmah, and Ceylon, had its origin in India. Doctrines similar to those of Buddha existed in that country long before his time. We can trace them like meandering roots below the surface long before ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... quarrels? You may be served-I know you don't love an invasion-nay, that even passes my taste; it will make too much party. In short, the lady dowager Prudence begins to step a little over the threshold of that discretion which she has always hitherto so sanctimoniously observed. She is suspected of strange whims; so strange, as neither to like more German subsidies or more German matches. A strong ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... reached the studio door just as a shower of knocks descended upon it from outside. He opened it, and on the threshold there stood two persons; a stout lady in white, surmounted by a huge black hat with a hearse-like array of plumes; and, behind her, a tall and willowy youth, with—so far as could be seen through the chinks of the hat—a large nose, fair hair, pale blue eyes, and a singular deficiency of chin. He ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... disarray and slovenly administration of home affairs. Only one of these houses had a door opening on the road, and that was the meanest in the hamlet. A flight of narrow stone stairs ascended from the threshold to the second story. All these houses were specimens of a rude antiquity, built of brick and stone, with the marks of arched doors and windows where a subsequent generation had shut up the lights, or the accesses which the original builders had opened. Humble as these ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gold—they are in the air, and only waiting to be precipitated. I stand ready to be amused, and that same afternoon the Evening Post aims a blow at the Tammany 'Tiger' over the shoulder of Mr. Edward M. Shepard; I am in the mood adventurous, and instantly the shadow of a prodigy falls across my threshold; yea, though I live on upper West End Avenue. Do you remember this?" and he held ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... milk-pail. She ran off as fast as she could to her master, the parson, and said, "Sir, sir, the cow is talking!" But the parson said, "Woman, thou art surely mad!" However, he went with her into the cow-house to see what was the matter. Scarcely had they set their feet on the threshold when Thumbling called out, "Don't bring me any more hay!" Then the parson himself was frightened; and thinking the cow was surely bewitched, ordered that she should be killed directly. So the cow was killed, and the part in which ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... they sleep out of doors. Mothers of families sit about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while their raven- haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the covert insects that haunt the tangles of the children's locks. Within doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... since then many have been swallowed up by the sea. St. Mael evangelized sixty of them. Then in his granite trough he ascended the river Auray. And after sailing for three hours he landed before a Roman house. A thin column of smoke went up from the roof. The holy man crossed the threshold on which there was a mosaic representing a dog with its hind legs outstretched and its lips drawn back. He was welcomed by an old couple, Marcus Combabus and Valeria Moerens, who lived there on the products ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... tube now honoured by kissing the lips of your highness shall have poured out in ecstasy the incense of another bowl of the fragrant weed, the slippers of the kessehgou will be left at the threshold of the palace. Be chesm, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... On the threshold of summer, Nature proffers us this her virgin fruit; more rich and sumptuous are to follow, but the wild delicacy and fillip of the strawberry are never repeated,—that keen feathered edge greets the tongue in ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... furnishes the best illustration of this law. Every literature has to go through these four stages, but nowhere have they been passed with such regularity as in Russia. Accordingly we have in due order of time Pushkin the singer, Gogol the protester, Turgenef the warrior, who on the very threshold of his literary career vows the oath of a Hannibal not to rest until serfdom and autocracy are abolished, and lastly we have ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... anything yet conceived by the human mind;—something combining in fearful and unnatural amalgamation hitherto supposed incompatible elements. The calling of the voices in Brockden Brown's novel of Wieland is awful; so is the picture of the Dweller of the Threshold, in Bulwer's Zanoni; but," he added, shaking his head gloomily, "there is something more horrible still ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... weather-beaten pile it looked no more inviting in sunshine than it had looked in shadow; and true to its traditions, not a living being was anywhere to be seen. The door of the office stood ajar. De Spain, pushing it all the way open, walked in. No one greeted him as he crossed the threshold, and the unsightly room was still bare of furnishings except for the great mahogany bar, with its two very large broken mirrors and the battered pilasters ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... places the heroine of his tale in a petit reduit pres le Strand, "with a green and fresh jalousie, and a large blind, let down all day; you fancied you were entering a bath of Asia, as soon as you had passed the perfumed threshold of this charming ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the fair-haired Southern woman looked, and if her eye dimmed and her pale lip quivered there was nobody to see. And after a little while she went into the house, slowly, head held high, black skirt lifted, just clearing the threshold of her ancestors. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... the habit of frequently going to look down in the wheel chamber or pit, and one day, as I stepped on to the threshold, my feet glided from under me, and, but for my activity in catching at and hanging by the iron bar that crossed the way I ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... west of the bema. To the east of these compartments stands what was the original eastern wall of the church, and in it, in the north aisle, a large doorway retaining its architrave and cornice, is still found. Of the corresponding doorway in the south aisle only the threshold is left. These doorways must have communicated with the outer world to the east of the church, like the doorways which occupy a similar position in the Studion (p. 53). The northern compartment had an opening, which is still surmounted by architrave and cornice, also in its north ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... opportunity to escape. I sent the papers by one of the waiters. Madame was a little too anxious to cross-examine me. I began checking some counterfoils at the desk, but before I had been there five minutes the door of the inner room was opened, and Mr. Hirsch appeared upon the threshold. He caught my eye and beckoned to me solemnly. I crossed the room, ascended the steps, and found myself in what the waiters called the club-room. Mr. Hirsch carefully closed the door ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... forgetting how tenderness is almost ever a part of such peculiar manliness of character; "yes, sit we here under this spacious elm, and think that our youth has come back to us once more. For verily, m'amie, nothing in life has ever been so fair to me as those days when we stood hand in hand on its threshold, and talked, boy-bridegroom and child-bride as we were, of the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." Not merely—not dwell in it for ever, but not even enter it, not even get through the very gate, and cross the very threshold, of it. The merely assenting, merely respectable, even the so-called religious and orthodox life will not let you into the kingdom of heaven, either in this life or the life to come. No. That requires the noble life, the pure life, the just life, the gentle life, the ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... she open'd straight, All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was iron'd within and without, Where an army in battle array had march'd out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main Lifted her up, a weary weight, Over the threshold of the gate: Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... length she appeared on the threshold of the apartment, bringing with her the traveling bag and looking wonderfully the better for her ninety minutes of complete repose and privacy, the relief he experienced was so intense that he remained transfixed ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... woman hitherto as maiden and wife. She now approaches the sacred threshold of maternity. She is with child. In no period of her life is she the subject of an interest so profound and general. The young virgin and the new wife have pleased by their grace, spirit, and beauty. The pregnant wife ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... assured her that the Ehrichs were old friends and not the kind of people who say one thing and mean another. "They will never permit us to go to the hotel—I know them." With that she consented, and fifteen minutes later Louis and Henriette met us at their threshold and took Zulime to their hearts, as though they had ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... in rare exalted or peculiar moments, but these are in costume and bathed in color. Shutting and opening many doors, balked at one vestibule and traversing another, suddenly you surprise the lord or mistress of the mansion, or from some threshold you silently observe their secret passion, which is unconscious of the daylight, and is caught in all its frankness. You come upon people, and not upon pictures ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... The gate gave readily to Lanyard's pull. The knob of the small door turned silently. He stepped across the threshold, and shut himself into an unlighted hall, thoughtfully apeing the negligence of the servant and leaving the door barely on the latch by way of provision ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... submissive to what might occur. He felt himself the victim of circumstances over which he himself had no control. Gazing at the partly opened door, he waited for whatever adventure might next befall him. Once again the footsteps paused, this time at the very threshold, and then the door was slowly pushed ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... corner of the sign; and indeed the night was such as might well have caused that suicidal fowl to abandon all thoughts of self-incremation, and submit to an unprecedented death by drowning), there was no idle officer, or lounging waiter upon the threshold. Military and civilians were all snug in their quarters that night; and the inn, except for the 'Aldermen' in the back parlour, was doing no business. The door was nearly closed, and only let out a tall, narrow slice ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... life as naturally as they went into a university or into the hunting field. In the case of the younger Fox and of the younger Pitt the political direction was conspicuously inevitable from the beginning. The paths of both lay plain from the threshold of the nursery to the threshold of St. Stephen's. The lad who was the chosen companion of his father at an age when his contemporaries had only abandoned a horn-book to grapple with Corderius, the boy who learned the principles of elocution and the essence of debate from the lips of the Great Commoner, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... fought on the threshold of Greenfield senior's study, in which many were wounded on both sides, and in the midst of which Oliver arrived on the scene, kicking right and left, ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... the church, in fact, was the devil's own; That its architect (Being long "suspect") Had confessed to the Bishop that he had wrecked Not only his OWN soul, but had lost The VERY FIRST CHRISTIAN SOUL that crossed The sacred threshold: and all, in fine, For that very beautiful design Of the wonderful choir They were pleased to admire. And really, he must be allowed to say— To speak in a purely business way— That, taking the ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... Colonel," and then ushered him to the door. For a moment Colonel Culpepper stood at the bottom of the stairs, partly hesitating to go into the windy street, and partly trying to think of some way in which he could get the subject on his mind before his daughter in the right way. Then as he stood on the threshold with his nose in the storm, he recalled General Ward's discourse about the different worlds, and he thought of Molly's world of lovers' madness, and that brought up his own youth and its day-dreams, and Molly flew out of his mind and her mother ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... leave England, and turning my face toward America, in the spring of 1847, I was met, on the threshold, with something which painfully reminded me of the kind of life which awaited me in my native land. For the first time in the many months spent abroad, I was met with proscription on account of my color. A few weeks before departing from England, while in London, I was careful to purchase ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... were overwhelming. They fell in heaps, with many of their foes underneath them. The few who remained to the last retreated fighting, step by step, each man towards his own dwelling, where he fell dead on its threshold. Swart himself, with a few of the bravest, had driven back that part of the enemy's line which they attacked. Thus they were separated for a time from their less successful comrades, and it was not till the smoke ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... an hour I had been indolently watching this amphibious scene, when the landlord entering my room said, that the Russian Prince, G——n, wished to speak to me on some business; and the information was scarcely communicated, when I perceived his Highness standing at the threshold of my door. With the attention due to his rank, I instantly begged he would do me the honour to walk in; and, after we had sufficiently bowed to each other, and that I had prevailed on my guest to sit down, I gravely requested him, as I stood before him, to be ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... faded blue eyes were gazing past me, hopelessly sad, supremely mournful. What the deuce ailed him? I wondered angrily. The thing was almost weird. Of a sudden, with irritation, yet with dread, too, I felt myself on the threshold of a house of tragedy. The man might, from the look of him, have been watching some loved ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... said, haughtily, as she stepped lightly out, and ran up the broad marble steps of the mansion, where, heedless of her stainless and delicate gloves, she seized the bell-knob, and rung violently. During the few moments she waited for admission, her foot, clad in white satin, beat the threshold with a light, but restless motion. Her brocade-robe about which costly laces hung in gossamer clouds, rustled down in rich folds to the marble floor of the vestibule, while with every pulsation ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... open for the CHIEF OF STAFF who is about to go out when suddenly in the doorway appears a young man of thirty, pale, dark, timid. He hesitates on the threshold. ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... with closed door, at the press, I feeling very desolate to know that the whole house was empty, and that were I to open the parlour door, there would meet me no merry note of singing from a sweet voice within—while we worked thus, I say, there came a rustling at the threshold, and presently a piece of paper was thrust under the door. By the dim rush light we took and read ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... Gateman said it to a hawker bringing lobsters from the strand, and that got no leave to cross the threshold by reason of the oath given out by the King. The half of the kingdom she will get, they were telling me, and the king living, and the whole of it after he ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... I seed from the first that you was piney-like," she said, standing tray in hand on the threshold of the little parlour, her fresh, highly-coloured face smiling kindly upon the pale girl. "I always do say that I pities ladies when they has anything on their minds; sitting about, same as you do now, with nothing to take them off theirselves. A body like me that has to ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the dread of my incomprehensible tempter. Rather, a hundred times, front and defy those seven Eastern slaves—I, haughty son of the Anglo-Saxon who conquers all races because he fears no odds—than have seen again on the walls of my threshold the luminous, bodiless shadow! Besides: Lilian—Lilian! for one chance of saving her life, however wild and chimerical that chance might be, I would have shrunk not a foot from ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Sunday, however, he dined with the old publisher, who was soon to retire to Brighton, and was commissioned to compile six volumes of "Celebrated Trials," etc., "from the earliest records to the year 1825." What a caprice of Fate that the young aspirant should, on the very threshold of his adult career, be thrown into these coulisses of criminal biography! That a taste already keen to search out the birds of prey that haunt the fringe of decorous society, should be immersed, as it were, in a stream of criminal records! Old songs of Denmark, ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... suddenly, as unexpectedly, disappears. Indeed, had it not been that the person concerned was Chichikov, and not some youth of twenty summers—a hussar or a student or, in general, a man standing on the threshold of life—what thoughts would not have sprung to birth, and stirred and spoken, within him; for what a length of time would he not have stood entranced as he stared into the distance and forgot alike his ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... that, as we came into the hall presently, they thought us the most goodly company that had ever crossed its threshold; and that is likely, for at our head were Havelok and Goldberga. Raven was a mighty warrior to look on as he came next, grave and silent, with far-seeing grey eyes that were full of watching, as it were, from his long seafaring, ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... counterfeit, was shocked at seeing himself lauded in three-inch black characters on a flaring red ground, and driven in desperation to explain that while his gratitude was unbounded, he did not want an admiring crowd collected on his threshold. So, much to the disappointment of his servants, who in China feel that their master's glory reflects upon themselves, the announcement ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... sole, or sandal, of this form, continued in Palestine to be the universal out-of-doors protection for the feet, up to the Christian-era; and it served for both sexes alike. It was not, however, worn within doors. At the threshold of the inner apartments the sandals were laid aside; and visitors from a distance were presented with a vessel of water to cleanse the feet from the soiling of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... he deserves for his eminent qualities of loyalty, virtue, and good faith. I am longing to see you, and beg you to hasten your return, resolved not to allow me to be without the benefit of your advice. I am on the threshold, as it were, of a second life. Already certain persons who defended me in my absence begin to nurse a secret grudge at me now that I am here, and to make no secret of their jealousy. ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... restrained from access to the temple, by reason of the pollution of murder; yea, as Philo the Jew witnesseth (in his book of the Offerers of Sacrifices), whosoever were found unworthy and wicked, were by edict forbidden to approach the holy threshold. ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... sixpence-halfpenny tins of salmon, red, shiny tins with pink halved salmons depicted, and another yellow pyramid of four-pence-halfpenny tins of pineapple. Bacon dangled in pale rolls almost over James' doorway, whilst straw and paper, redolent of cheese, lard, and stale eggs filtered through the threshold. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... enacted here, how many deadly shots had sped from out the holes, what crowds of excited townsfolk had gathered in the church, what grave words of exhortation and of blessing had been spoken from the altar or the threshold by anxious prelate, robed and mitred for the Mass of Supplication to a God of Battles, an humble funeral appeared,—a priest, a peasant bearing a black wooden Cross with the name of the deceased painted on it, a rope-bound coffin carried by hot and sorrowing women, and ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... in one window and in another, and vanished, and soon the door opened and there appeared two people on the threshold, clearly visible in the light of a strong incandescent ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... physical passions and contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The message flies by ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... But once on the threshold of the pavilion itself, it was for him to show the coward. Turning, he made me a gesture; one I did not understand; and seeing that I did not understand it, he said, after a fearful ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... leaden feet, he moved toward the door. Gropingly his hand reached for the knob. Thus he stood for another long minute, and then with a sudden gesture he straightened his giant frame, threw back his mighty shoulders and, with fearless head held high, swung back the door and stepped across the threshold into the room which held for him the dearest memories and associations of his life. No change of expression crossed his grim and stern-set features as he strode across the room and stood beside the little couch and the inanimate form which lay face downward upon it; the ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... personal graces are most valued, when a good presence is a blank check on the Bank of Fortune, with Nature's signature at the bottom, he found himself made hideous by this fearful-looking counterfeit of a limb. It announced him at the threshold he reached with beating heart by a thump more energetic than the palpitation in his breast. It identified him as far as the eye of jealousy could see his moving figure. The "peg" became intolerable, and he unstrapped it and threw himself on the tender mercies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... had grown quiet, each waiting for the other to move, and, hearing a step in the hall, I looked toward the door, which was partly open, then went forward, thinking a belated guest might be coming in. The door opened wider and Selwyn stood on its threshold. ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. "There's Duplain," he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with them, but a small boy who said breathlessly: "Mr. Truscomb wants you to ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... kiss is not recorded, there being no account extant of the ceremonial and etiquette of Olympus. Whatever it was, doubtless it was rigidly enforced; for the Thunderer, it would seem, had a Bastile, or lock-up, with iron doors and a brazen threshold specially provided for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... were great shambling parodies of humanity, long-armed, short-legged, twice as heavy as men, with close-set reddish eyes and heavy bone-crushing jaws. They may have been incredibly debased humans, or perhaps beasts on the very threshold of manhood. From what he had seen of conditions on this planet, Kalvar Dard suspected the latter to be the case. In a million or so years, they might evolve into something like humanity. Already, the Hairy ones had learned the use of fire, and of chipped crude stone implements—mostly heavy triangular ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper
... there. "That wicked,"—or rather "THE LAWLESS ONE," (ho anomos, as he is called in 2 Thess. ii. 8,)—must be bound, hand and foot, somewhere in his career of lawlessness; and in these Sermons the threshold of the Bible has been chosen as the place for the conflict. My life for his life. I will slay or be slain on the very portal of Holy Scripture. With the young, you begin at the beginning,—"the Creed, the LORD'S Prayer, the Ten Commandments;" and they must be further ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... step, Godolphin re-entered the threshold of his cottage-home. He passed into a small chamber, which was yet the largest in his house. The poor and scanty furniture scattered around; the old, tuneless, broken harpsichord; the worn and tattered carpet; the tenantless birdcage in the recess by the window; the bookshelves, containing ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little Sally Pendleton, as you used to sign the merry letters you wrote to me?" asked Miss Rogers, stopping short in some remark she was making to Louisa, and gazing hard at the slender, girlish figure that had just appeared on the threshold. ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... the homes which were their own, without a lord. We exchanged the last salutations. The wooden soles of their shoes clattered upon the stone threshold of the door. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... accompanied by numerous princes. And the prince halted in the woods of Kamyaka. And in that secluded place, he found the beautiful Draupadi, the beloved and celebrated wife of the Pandavas, standing at the threshold of the hermitage. And she looked grand in the superb beauty of her form, and seemed to shed a lustre on the woodland around, like lightning illuminating masses of dark clouds. And they who saw her asked themselves, 'Is this an Apsara, or a daughter of the gods, or a celestial phantom?' And with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... On the threshold stood a slim female figure enveloped in a cloak. "The love potion I had here last week," began a timid voice, "seems hardly satisfactory. If you stock a stronger quality, no matter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... Hollingsworth book-bindery were astonished at the door being flung suddenly open and seeing the handsome young man whom they had known as the street-car conductor and Nadine Holt's lover standing on the threshold. ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... several other rooms, at the doors of which, pausing on the outside, we could hear the volubility, and sometimes the wrangling, of the female inhabitants within, but invariably found silence and peace, when we stepped over the threshold. The women were grouped together in their sitting-rooms, sometimes three or four, sometimes a larger number, classified by their spontaneous affinities, I suppose, and all busied, so far as I can remember, with the one occupation of knitting coarse yarn stockings. Hardly ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a cannon-shot was heard, and a cry of general satisfaction followed it. It was the signal that the procession had crossed the threshold of the church. In the same moment a charge of carabineers swept off the people who were obstructing the middle of the street, the regiments of the line opened floodgates for the overflowing crowd, and soon nothing ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... made myself as near smart as possible and flew for the smartest tea-room on Michigan Avenue. If I could stay me with Orange Pekoe and comfort me with toasted crumpets and English marmalade—But just as I was blithely footing it across the threshold the S.F. rose up behind me like a genie from a bottle ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Divine Being as one so jealous for His own rights and honor that He would have the human heart a void, so that he might reign there supremely. So all that terrible night he stood smitten and astonished on a threshold he could ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Brandon stopped at the threshold and stared intently at the captive hexans. Goggling green eyes glaring venomously, they were lying quiet, but tense; mighty muscles ready to burst into berserk activity should the attention of a guard waver for a ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... line at this turn, he had sprung so far to the left as to bring Duke and the "trap" down upon the little phaeton. There was a lock and a crash; a wheel was off the phaeton, the tandem was overturned, Sylvie Argenter, in the act of alighting, was thrown forward over the threshold of the open shop-door, Rod Sherrett was lying in the road, a man had seized the pony, and Duke and Red Squirrel were shattering away through the scared Corner Village, with ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... hall, the august Senators, each in his seat. Let your minds be like that, with reverent thoughts clustering on every side; and when wild passions, and animal desires, and low, mean contemplations dare to cross the threshold, they will be awed into silence and stillness. 'Whatsoever things are august . . . think on ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the threshold of all this, it is again and again to be asked, What of the Idle Aristocracy? Again and again, What shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the Owners of the Soil of England; whose recognised function is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England, shooting the partridges ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... her voice evidently affected the young man also. He came, hurrying, and when he had entered stayed upon the threshold, warm-hued with work and bringing with him the odor of the soil. His brown eyes went from one of them to the ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... from the threshold, graved by skill, With characters and wondrous signs, upturned A virtuous stone, where, underneath the sill, Pots, with perpetual fire and secret, burned. The enchanter breaks them; and at once the hill To an inhospitable rock is turned. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... light came from within and made scant war on the lurking darkness without. Lee's ears were greeted with the crazy whine of an old accordion, and with men's voices lifted in laughter. He shoved the swing door open with his shoulder, Carson pushed the other half back, and the two stood on the threshold, their ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... feet short and four feet narrow, with a heap of straw in the further end. My spirits had been steadily recovering from the banality of their examination; and it was with a genuine and never-to-be-forgotten thrill that I remarked, as I crossed what might have been the threshold: "Mais, on est ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... loaf of bread, and they set out for the great gloomy wood. When they reached it they saw in front of them, in the thickest of the trees, a queer little hut, and when they looked into it, there lay the witch, with her head on the threshold of the door, with one foot in one corner and the other in the other corner, and her knees cocked up, almost touching ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... time and thought you can give to it," the girl said, enthusiastically. "I can't imagine anything grander than to stand at the threshold of the world ready to enter the battle of life, to struggle with the obstacles and to conquer them. Think, Allen—just think of what you have before you, while we girls never get any such ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... before the door of the Davis room. Wesley raised the latch. It was an old-fashioned fastening. Number Two was directed to stand at the threshold while Wesley and Jones ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... opened, the student set foot across the threshold, and uttered a cry of surprise. Instead of the garrote, instead of racks and torturers, he beheld a gorgeous saloon, brilliantly lighted up with a profusion of wax tapers. Five or six men of distinguished ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... After cursing the wiles of the little old hag, I covered my head and commenced to run through the middle of the night-house to the exit opposite, when, lo and behold! whom should I meet on the very threshold but Ascyltos himself, as tired as I was, and almost dead; you would have thought that he had been brought by the self-same little old hag! I smiled at that, greeted him cordially, and asked him what he was doing ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... answer in father's most genial rumble. Then I heard him call loudly for Dabney, and when Sallie descended with my bundle, that contained a complete telegraphic outfit for Luella May which showed a decided leaning to tennis style, she met Dabney on the front threshold with a rough parcel from which I saw a shirt sleeve and a ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... still again. The new-comer was evidently waiting for a reply. After a pause, the steps drew nearer—now they were already in the hall; and now the tall, slender form of a Prussian officer, with a bandaged head and arm, appeared on the threshold of the room. When he beheld the immovable body on the floor, his pale face expressed surprise ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... present a bird's-eye view of the steps in human advancement towards civilization as the best anthropologists have traced them. Thus, we shall be able to see our historic social order in right relation to that ideal humanity which our own spiritual constitution projects prophetically above the threshold of our consciousness. Then, if ever, we shall be in a state of mind to judge whether the thing which civilization has begotten after its own kind and named ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... there came a terrible storm. In the far end of the cave Gudwall and the other were nearly swept away by a huge wave which rushed in to devour them. No longer content with pausing on the threshold, the sea swept through their whole house, dashing away their little store of books and furniture, a most unneighborly thing to do. It tried to drag the two men from the corner where they clung to the rough rock. Choked and gasping they escaped this time, ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... nothing but exclaim, "Who would have thought it!" "Who, indeed!" was the reply, in various tones of sympathy, envy, and surprise. Poor Mrs. Howard, to the day of her death, never suffered another portionless beauty to enter her doors while even the shadow of an eldest son rested on its threshold. Mrs. Myles was of course in an ecstacy of delight; her prophecy was fulfilled. Helen, her Helen, was the honourable wife of a doubly honourable man. What triumphant glances did she cast over the railings of the communion-table at Mr. Stokes—with what an air she marched down ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... as he reached the threshold of the door, and saw, to his left, a group of Huns about a gun that seemed to have jammed. And not all the Huns were alive, either, showing that the fire of the attacking party had done part of ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... made an awkward bow at nothing in particular before going out. Mr. Van Torp followed them at some distance towards the outer door, judging that as they had forced their way in they could probably find their way out. He did not even go to the outer threshold, for the last of the three shut the ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... formal visit but called repeatedly upon his people, as their spiritual or temporal needs seemed to require. He timed his visits for the most part when the family were assembled for the noonday meal. He would enter the living room or stand at the threshold and chat in a friendly manner with the members of the household. Although invited to partake of of their hospitality he never accepted the least refreshment, not even a drink of water. He talked with them about their every day life, ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... finds faith and hope in the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds of the mother's grief. Thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood and so shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils. In every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains a knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats. In short, she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus catches the spiritual meaning of what she reads. She can feel as well as think and so can emotionalize ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... not even pretty, Isabelle said, but there was a strange fascination about her earnest face, and the wonderful grey eyes possessed a charm that was all their own. She had graduated with honors. Now she stood upon the threshold of the unknown, holding her life in ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... spectacle was sufficiently painful to make it natural for old friends to stay away. Doors and windows stood wide. The sofa and tea-table where the wisest and best from all parts of the world had held converse were turned out to be examined and bid for. Anybody who chose passed the sacred threshold; the auctioneer's hammer was heard on the terrace; and the hospitable parlor and kitchen were crowded with people swallowing tea in the intervals of their business. One farmer rode six-and-thirty miles that morning to carry home something ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... popular man—one that didn't grudge the "bit and sup," and never turned his back upon friend or foe. Loud and hearty were the cheers of the delighted tenantry, as the three sons of their beloved landlord passed the threshold. The appearance of the "stranger" was received with no such demonstrations of welcome; on the contrary, there was a sullen silence, soon after broken by suppressed and angry murmurs. These were somewhat appeased by one of the sons introducing his "cousin," and endeavouring to joke the peasants into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to the threshold of our own religious history, and shall endeavour to answer, in substance at least, the queries with which we commenced the present inquiry. It was certainly an extraordinary period of our national religious history, in which ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous
... Nora. "I am home again. Mother can't expect me to dress." She rushed past her cousin. She was too excited to have any sympathy then with English Molly. She ran up to her own room, and stood with a sense of dismay on the threshold. It had always been a beautiful room, with its noble proportions and its splendid view; and it was now ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... man invited me to go with him to his house; at the gate of which his friends met him with many expressions of joy, shaking hands with him, embracing him, and singing and dancing before him. As soon as he had seated himself upon a mat, by the threshold of his door, a young woman (his intended bride) brought a little water in a calabash, and kneeling down before him, desired him to wash his hands; when he had done this, the girl, with a tear of joy sparkling in her eyes, drank the water; this being considered as the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... the right, facing the window, a glass door surmounted by a frame glazed and painted gray. On raising the latch and crossing the threshold, one experienced precisely the same impression as when one enters at the theatre into a grated baignoire, before the grating is lowered and the chandelier is lighted. One was, in fact, in a sort of theatre-box, narrow, furnished with two old ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and a yet graver, occasion of regret was that we must stop short on the threshold, without crossing it, of the nineteenth-century literature of France. With so many shining names seen just ahead of us, beacon-like, to invite our advance, we felt it as a real self-denial to stay our steps at that point. We hope still to deal with Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... causans, the secondary or apparent physical cause and the primary or spiritual cause, without which the secondary cause could not exist; and so we shall get a new standpoint of clear knowledge and certain power by stepping over the threshold of the mechanical and entering ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... his cabin and fainted upon its threshold; while a third lay weltering in his gore some ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... not until this permission has been given by some one, dares the savage cross the threshold to do ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... screamed out loud like a person as he went, so that the hills echoed with it, and the folks at Cauldstaneslap got to their feet about the table and looked at each other with white faces. The horse fell dead at the yard gate, the laird won the length of the house and fell there on the threshold. To the son that raised him he gave the bag of money. "Hae," said he. All the way up the thieves had seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the hallucination left him - he saw them again in the place of the ambuscade - and the thirst of vengeance seized on his dying ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... commenced in January, 1846, the intellectual power of Mr. Adams, and the extent and accuracy of his acquaintance with the facts connected with that subject, were preeminently manifested. Though conscious, being then in his seventy-eighth year, that he stood on the threshold of human life, he sought no relaxation from duty, no exemption from its performance. To counteract the effect of a nervous tremor, to which he was constitutionally subject, he used for many years an instrument to steady his hand when writing, on the ivory label of which ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... interrupted by the opening of the door. Andy Gilgallon stood on the threshold and looked in with amazement. He had not expected to find the lady and the ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... about her feet. They came to the house, and passed through the sunny porch, where their mother, Metaneira, was [87] sitting against one of the pillars of the roof, having a young child in her bosom. They ran up to her; but Demeter crossed the threshold, and, as she passed through, her head rose and touched the roof, and her presence filled the doorway with a ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... refreshments; were pleasantly accosted by him, and told he belonged to Company G, of Colonel M.'s Michigan volunteers; had been sick and was out on furlough at the house of a friend. One of them, a social kind of fellow, lingered on the threshold, amused at the badinage passing between the soldier and the ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... at the beginning of a new and important era in my life. Although upon the threshold of manhood, I had, until the relation with my master was sundered, only dim perceptions of the responsibilities of a more independent position. I longed to cast off the chains of servitude, because ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... He was rather a splendid figure now that he had sloughed all disguises and was on the threshold of his triumph. Even through the fog in which my brain worked it was forced upon me that here was a man born to play a big part. He had a jowl like a Roman king on a coin, and scornful eyes that were ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... in the morning she showed a bright, almost a happy face. It was long, long since she had enjoyed such a night's rest, so undisturbed with unwelcome thoughts on the threshold of sleep and on awaking. Her life was perhaps wrecked, but the thought of that did not press upon her; for the present she must enjoy her freedom. It was like a recovery of girlhood. There are few married women who would not, sooner or later, accept with joy the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... de Camors, the elder, returned to his home bent on suicide, his son, passing up the Avenue Maillot, was stopped by Lescande on the threshold of his villa. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... threshold of his life; A life all bright with promise,—and he prayed, "Father of Heaven! this beautious world of thine, Is trod in sorrow by my race." The shade Of sin and grief darken the sunshine, Thou Around us with a lavish hand, ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... an antique door and porch, narrow windows with the smallest diamond panes, and has been called since its first stone was laid, the Vicarage. Forget the village, courteous reader, and cross with me the hospitable threshold, for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... buoys and strainers and safes and bibbs and tuckers we are to adopt? If I should consume midnight oil during a full four years' course at a college for plumbers I should still find myself just upon the threshold of ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... and landed, beating down the other's guard. Dreer staggered back, ducking his head, and Penny shot a long arm around in a swinging blow that caught the other under his ear and Dreer's knees doubled up under him and he sprawled on the threshold of ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... if struck by lightning, remained the prince upon the threshold; behind him were seen the astonished faces of his generals, who, on tiptoe, stretched their necks to gaze, over each other's shoulders, upon ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... said Toinette to the first; and he went away with a friendly nod. But to Doggie she said, "Entrez, monsieur." And monsieur carried the two crocks over the threshold and Toinette shut the door behind him. And there, sitting over some needlework in a corner of the kitchen by a lamp, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... was necessary for passing the title into other hands. This theory had an affinity to that of the Common Law, which made the prince the suzerain, and rendered him the heir of all escheated estates. But Mark's humility, not to say his justice, met this doctrine on the threshold. He admitted the sovereignty and its right, but placed it in the body of the colony, instead of in himself. As the party most interested took this view of the case, they who were disposed to regard ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Arthur Wellesley as one of the aide-de-camps to Lord Buckingham, alluded to in a recent letter from Lord Mornington, suffered an interruption on the threshold from a proposal made by Sir George Yonge, then Secretary at War, for reducing the gentlemen holding those appointments to half-pay. Lord Mornington, who was still in England, resented the proposal indignantly, and brought the affair under the notice of the ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... managed to hook my heel over the note and get it out of sight, M'Clare has paused for an answer and I have to dredge my Sub-threshold memories for— ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... [Celebrated as a Scottish lawyer.] Meanwhile, I have written myself out of my melancholy and blue devils, merely by prosing about them; so I will now converse half an hour with Roan Robin in his stall—the rascal knows me already, and snickers whenever I cross the threshold of ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Come near and nearer from below— One effort more—thank Heaven! 'tis past, They've gained the topmost steep at last. And now they touch the temple's walls. Now HAFED sees the Fire divine— When, lo!—his weak, worn comrade falls Dead on the threshold of the shrine. "Alas, brave soul, too quickly fled! "And must I leave thee withering here, "The sport of every ruffian's tread, "The mark for every coward's spear? "No, by yon altar's sacred beams!" He cries and with a strength that seems Not of this world uplifts the frame Of the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... in wars from his cradle, he could tell a true soldier from a traitor at a glance, with the calm confidence of a veteran; but women and their motives are to him an uncharted sea. Suddenly a beautiful young heiress falls in love with him, and leaves home and friends to marry him. He stands on the threshold of a new realm, happy but bewildered. Then comes Iago, his trusted subordinate, —who, as Othello knows, possesses that knowledge of women and of civilian life which he himself lacks,—and whispers in his ear that his bride is false to him; that under this fair veneer lurks the eternal ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... through which all energy percolates. One side of the triangle represents anabolism, or the process of building up, and the other katabolism, the process of breaking down, and at the Apex is the Mystical "Terror of the Threshold," the "Ainsoph" (vide frontispiece), which introduced sacrificial death to the Physical, as an adaptation in the evolution of, and for the good of, the Human race. With the death of the Physical, the rending of the Veil, as we have seen in View ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein |
