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More "Fitful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sands, had run down to the shore as far as the tide would let them, to watch for the return of the boats. Estelle began telling Julien of her visit to the Mermaid's Cave, and of the wonderful echoes which the sailor's voice had called forth. It had started to rain slightly, and the light fitful wind was capping the waves with froth, but the tide was coming in. Julien, therefore, proposed that they should go to the cave, and he would see if he could rouse the echoes as Jack had done. It would be better than standing in the rain and watching for Jack. No thought ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... likely to be at home? Bozzle was never likely to be at home. According to her showing, Bozzle was of all husbands the most erratic. He might perhaps come in for an hour or two in the middle of the day on a Wednesday, or perhaps would take a cup of tea at home on Friday evening. But anything so fitful and uncertain as were Bozzle's appearances in the bosom of his family was not to be conceived in the mind of woman. Sir Marmaduke then called in the middle of the day on Wednesday, but Bozzle was reported to be away in the provinces. His wife had no idea in which of the provinces ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... about him and, save where the lantern cast a fitful light on the fakir and the sentry and the native servant, and threw into faint relief the shadowy, snake-like tendrils of the baobab, his eyes failed to pierce the gloom. The sunset was a memory. In that heavy, death-darkness silence it seemed almost as though ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... the officer on picket duty at Winchester came to my room, I being yet in bed, and reported artillery firing from the direction of Cedar Creek. I asked him if the firing was continuous or only desultory, to which he replied that it was not a sustained fire, but rather irregular and fitful. I remarked: "It's all right; Grover has gone out this morning to make a reconnoissance, and he is merely feeling the enemy." I tried to go to sleep again, but grew so restless that I could not, and soon got up and dressed myself. A little later the picket ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... perhaps of developing the people at large, the nation itself, if that is not too modern an ambition. The reign of Law, broken and disturbed by a hundred storms, but still henceforward with a statute-book to fall back upon and some fitful authority at its command, began in Scotland ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... sees,—whether it be the stripes made by the rain on the gray background of the atmosphere (a species of chasing not unlike the capricious threads of spun glass), or the whirl of white water which the wind is driving like a luminous dust along the roofs, or the fitful disgorgements of the gutter-pipes, sparkling and foaming; in short, the thousand nothings to be admired and studied with delight by loungers, in spite of the porter's broom which pretends to be sweeping out the gateway. Then there's the talkative refugee, who ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... that a taste for versification is, to a press-man, as a rule, what poverty is to most people—a very inconvenient and by no means a profitable companion. In my own case, however, the inconvenience has been a pleasure, and I have no reason to find fault as to profit. From the fitful excitement of journalistic duties I have turned to "making poetry," as Spenser defines the art, as a jaded spirit looks for rest, and have always felt refreshed after it. My only hope in connection with the poetry I have thus made is, that those who may incline to read ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... and collision and confusion of struggling multitudes, and the hoarse bellowing of the guns; and then the hiding of it all under a rolling firmament of smoke—a firmament through which veiled vacancies appeared for a moment now and then, giving fitful dim glimpses of the wild tragedy enacting beyond; and always at these times one caught sight of that slight figure in white mail which was the center and soul of our hope and trust, and whenever we saw that, with its back to us and its face to the fight, we knew that all was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fire,—the light of which, that came and went in flashes, brought distinctly out the settled gravity of the features, and the rugged but grand proportions of the head. There is no better light in which to see an old man's face than the fitful firelight; and no better background than that ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... winding paths of alternate light and shade, sheltered by the latticework of crossed and twisted green boughs where only the amorous chant of charming birds now and then broke the silence with fitful and tender sweetness. All the air about them was fragrant and delicate,—tiny rainbow-winged midges whirled round and danced in the warm sunset-glow like flecks of gold in amber wine,—while here and there the distant glimmer of tossing fountains, or the soft emerald sheen ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... one—yes, I will admit it—a selfish one." There was a struggle going on worthy the soul of this noble-minded youth. He was trying to solve a problem which vacillated between right and wrong. It was no common task, for when duty pointed the way, the form of self overshadowed the path, and showed only fitful ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... the southward and cast a crimson glow far over the sea. This appearance was accompanied by a low growling sound, as of distant thunder, and at the same time the sky above us became black, while a hot, stifling wind blew around us in fitful gusts. ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... at sea the wave was high, While veered the wind and flapped the sail; We saw a snow-white butterfly Dancing before the fitful gale, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to the gods; around it divine worship is conducted, of which music is a subservient ornament; by means of it pictures are given to lovers of their beloved; by it the beauties are preserved which time, and nature the mother, render fitful; by it we retain the images of famous men. And if thou wert to say that by committing music to writing you render it eternal, we ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... literature, if not in other forms of art. Their initiative vanished; they ceased to create and began to comment. Patriotism, with rare exceptions, became an empty name, for few had the high spirit and energy to translate into action man's duty to the State. Vacillation, indecision, fitful outbursts of unhealthy activity followed by cowardly depression, selfish cruelty, and criminal weakness are characteristic of the public life of Greece from the struggle with Macedonia to the final conquest by the arms ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... during the night that Sir Roger was most anxious to talk, and most capable of talking. He would lie through the day in a state half-comatose; but towards evening he would rouse himself, and by midnight he would be full of fitful energy. One night, as he lay wakeful and full of thought, he thus poured forth his whole heart ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... fitful sleep and vivid dreams, Stephen at dawn crept out alone, and hastened to the shore of the sea, where he feasted his hungry eyes on its surging depths, crying, "How long, oh, Lord, how long, before ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... sufficient breathing-place among the other branches, or knotting and gathering itself up to get strength for any load which its fruitful blossoms may lay upon it, and for any stress of its storm-tossed luxuriance of leaves; or playing hither and thither as the fitful sunshine may tempt its young shoots, in their undecided states of mind about their ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... that much from the past generation. We know what to do with leisure in the evening. But we're still awkward and embarrassed when we meet it by daylight. Since we have built our Country Club, a few of us have learned to enjoy ourselves in a fitful and guilty fashion late in the afternoon. But as a rule, even to-day, when you give a Homeburg man a bright golden daylight hour of leisure, he has no more use for it than he would have for a five-ton white elephant with an appetite for ice-cream. And that, Jim, is why I can't speed ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... commotion outside—but in vain. Nothing disturbed the serenity of the night, and when the rosy glow of dawn broke in the eastern sky and gradually spread its glory over the hushed and expectant earth, Hansie fell into a fitful slumber. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom we all loved, before any candle was lighted would often strain her eye to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings; and they suited also the divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man—man and yet not man, real above all things and yet shadowy above ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... his chair, and stretching his little queer legs out before him, began to breathe thicker and thicker, till at last he got the melody up to a grunt. It was not the fine generous snore of a sleep that he usually enjoyed, but short, fitful, broken naps, that generally terminated in spasmodic jerks of the arms or legs. These grew worse, till at last all four went at once, like the limbs of a Peter Waggey, when, throwing himself forward with a violent effort, he awoke; ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... tress of the lustrous brown hair,—but that face! Had not King Hephaestos wrought every line of clear Phoenician glass, then touched them with snow and rose, and shot through all the ichor of life? Perhaps there was a fitful fire in the dark eyes that awaited the husband's coming, or a slight twitching of the impatient lips. But nothing disturbed the high-born repose of face and figure. Hermione was indeed the worthy daughter of a noble house, and happy the man who was ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... girl stood looking out over the lawn, where fading sunshine and deepening shadow made fitful chiaroscuro along the primrose-paved aisles that stretched under the elm arches,—then, raising her fingers as if tracing lines on the soft, gold-dusted atmosphere that surrounded her, she ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... sitting by her tomb In torpor one dark night; When fitful tremours shook the doom Of cold lethargic settled gloom, That ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... of light; the pine-clad hills ceased to have form; the water in the lake was lost to all sense but that of hearing; and upon nearer objects the thinly sprinkled snow bestowed no distinctness of outline, but only a weird show of whitish shapes. The water gave forth fitful sobs. At intervals there were sounds round the house, as of stealthy feet, or of quick pattering feet, or of trailing garments—this was the wind busy among ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... back against the wall, struggled and contrived to get her foot on Will's bent knee. Another struggle sent her breast-high above the sea of sweating faces. There was fitful light enough to see her by, because the man who held a pine torch was privileged. If there had not been hot sparks scattering from the thing doubtless they would have closed in on him and crushed it down, and out, but he had elbow-room, ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... spring day. The afternoon sun glistened with fitful, feeble rays on the windows of the old house of Kirklands, and unpleasant little gusts of east wind came eddying round its ancient gables, and sweeping along its broad walks and shrubberies, sending a chill to ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... Comte, roused from fitful slumbers and trying to gather his wandering wits, put his head out of the window: "What is it, Pierre?" he called out loudly. "What ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... tomb: his will had directed that he should sleep not in the vaults of his haughty line; and his last dwelling is surrounded by a green and pleasant spot. The trees shadow it like a temple; and a silver though fitful brook wails with a constant yet not ungrateful dirge at the foot of the hill on which the tomb is placed. I have stood there in those ardent years when our wishes know no boundary and our ambition no curb; yet, even then, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lifted to one side, and disclosed to view the entrance to a natural cave, into the wall of which was stuck a naming, pitch-pine knot. Entering, the blanket was dropped, and preceded by a man, whose features the fitful glare of the torch failed to reveal, the two adventurers were ushered into the main portion ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... sweet girls Grow up to womanhood, but none like her! Hut that bright vision that just flitted by Seemed so like her it made me cringe and start. O dear Asita, little worth is life, With all its tears and partings, woes and pains, If when its short and fitful fever ends There is no after-life, where death and pain, And sundered ties, and crushed and bleeding hearts, And sad and last farewells ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... darkness of the void up to the barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a grey shadow more unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began to sing, the mail-train thundered past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting crow cawed drowsily. Then there was a belt-loosening silence ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... example which remotely concerns us, a noble structure on Riverside Drive, facing the lordly Hudson and the majestic Palisades that form its farther wall. And, for the horde of Goths and Visigoths, Huns and Vandals, drunkenly reeling in the fitful light of camp-fires, chanting weird battle-runes, fighting for captive vestals, and bickering in uncouth tongues over the golden spoils, what have we now to make the parallel convince? Why, the same Barbarians, actually; the same hairy rudeness, the same unrefined, all-conquering, animal ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... lamp's wan fitful light, Glide,—gliding round the golden rim! Restored to life, now glancing bright, Now just expiring, faint and dim! Like a spirit loath to die, Contending with its destiny. All dark! a momentary veil Is o'er the sleeper! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... its doings, but they are not the stream. They were brought down when it was turbid; it may now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances as of the action of the stream: their history is fitful: they give us no sure intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of its waters; and may scarcely shew more than that it has not been always as it is. The actions of men are often but little better indications ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... Edward Stanley held the bishopric. This later period does not come into our story, as by that time Borrow had all but left Norwich. But of the earlier period, the period of Borrow's more or less fitful residence in Norwich—1814 to 1833—we are tempted to write at some length. There were three separate literary and social forces in Norwich in the first decades of the nineteenth century—the Gurneys of Earlham, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... they had arrived, in darkness, leaving Berkley on his cot in the storehouse to stretch his limbs, and yawn and stretch again, and draw the warm folds of the blanket closer, and lie blinking at the dark, through which, now, a bird had begun to twitter a sweet, fitful salute to the ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Mulford and Jack Tier on their sail, while Biddy had played the wheel a "trick," indeed, by lying down on deck, and sleeping, too, as soundly as if she were in the county Down itself. But there was to be an end of this tranquillity. Suddenly the wind began to blow. At first, the breeze came in fitful puffs, which were neither very strong nor very lasting. This induced Mrs. Budd to awaken Biddy. Luckily, a schooner without a topsail could not very well be taken aback, especially as the head-sheets worked on travellers, and Mrs. ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a Lapland song, which "is haunting his memory still," which "murmurs and whispers still," which "is singing and saying still," which "is mournful" and "sweet" and "fitful" and "fatal" and "strange" and "beautiful." Yet he seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks he himself knows, that they express a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth and age, and rightfully attribute to the young a steadfastness and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... in these first half-dozen days out. People grow intimate in two days at sea, as they would not in two years on land. Was it all gentlemanly courtesy and politeness on the baronet's side? the girl sometimes wondered. She could analyze her own feelings pretty well. Of that fitful, feverish passion called love, described by the country swain as feeling—"hot and dry like—with a pain in the side like," she felt no particle. There was one, Mr. Charles Stuart, lying about in places, looking serene ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... the parlor of the Rondic mansion save that which comes from the fitful gleam of the dying fire in the chimney. A woman sat there, and at her feet knelt a man in ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... blankets strapped to our backs and rations in our pockets for two days, set out along an ancient and in places an obliterated bark road that followed and crossed and recrossed the stream. The morning was bright and warm, but the wind was fitful and petulant, and I predicted rain. What a forest solitude our obstructed and dilapidated wood-road led us through! five miles of primitive woods before we came to the forks, three miles before we came to the "burnt shanty," ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... at the floor of which Symon pressed a button and a door opened on a dark room, or, rather, a room which had an instant before been dark. For almost as the heavy iron door swung open an almost blinding blaze of electric lights filled the whole interior. The fitful enthusiasm of Stinks at once caught fire, and he eagerly asked if the lights and the ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... could hug to my breast when I was startled by a heavy breathing; and, turning sharply, for a moment or two I was certain that one of the fierce beasts had crept up. There, only a few feet away, were a pair of glistening eyes reflecting the fitful flames, and I began to back so as to get the fire between me ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... the trees, torches of lightwood threw a wild and fitful light over the little cluster of graves, and revealed the long, straight boxes of rough pine that held the remains of the two negroes, and lit up the score of russet mounds beneath which slept the dusky kinsmen who had ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Ruth dear," I said gently and actually pushed her a little toward New York, which even now was beginning to appall me. She kissed me good-by. I looked up and saw her floating away in a cloud of fitful steam. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... thing, even for those accustomed to underground labor, to search an unfamiliar spot by torch-light; the fitful gleam makes the objects on which it falls difficult of identification. It is doubtful whether one has seen this or that before or not—whether we are not retracing old ground. Even to practiced eyes these objects, too, are not so salient as the tree or the stone which marks a locality above-ground; ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... He had adventured in blossoms before to the torment of his heart and head. In Spain. He had forgotten the girl's name but it began with an "I." Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and glimmering boughs of fleece. The wind, fitful and chill since the sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground. Stillness and blossoms and the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering campfire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by Piney—story-telling. Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his female companions caring to relate ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... that blew up the gorge came in gusts, not any steady current, but fitful rushes of air, and on one of these brief blasts it seemed to Mary that she caught the sound of a voice blown to whistling murmur. It was a vague thing of which she could not be sure, as faint as a thought. Yet the head of the white horse disappeared, and the glimmer of ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... towns progress was far slower and more fitful. It would seem indeed that the conquest of the Norman bore harder on the rural population than on any other class of Englishmen. Under the later kings of the house of AElfred the number of absolute slaves and the number of freemen had alike diminished. ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... noise and rude humour, has a word to say for itself on the point of decency. It is, however, but child's play after all, and abounds with toys and games, from a half-penny whistle to an electric machine. Leipsic is now in its waking hours; but a short time hence her fitful three weeks' fever will have passed away, and, weary with excitement, or as some say, plethoric with her gorge of profits, she will sink into a soulless lethargy. Her streets will become deserted, and echo to solitary footsteps; and whole rows of houses, with their lately teeming shops, ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... pervasive enough to account for the steady continuing charm of lengthy compositions?... The symbolizations ... mostly resemble patches; they form no system, no plot or plan accompanying a work from beginning to end; they only guarantee a fitful enjoyment—a fragment here, a gleam there, but no growing organic exaltation like that actually ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... Trusia and Calvert in a silence broken only when the monotony grew unbearable. Stovik, lost in wonderment at his future regal state, and a trifle awed at the high-bred girl beside him, added but little to the conversation. The Countess Muhlen-Sarkey awoke only when there was a fitful attempt to break the embarrassment which held all the others. The quondam Parisian openly welcomed each stopping-place as an excuse to escape from such uncongenial companionship. In the throngs on the platforms he found both transient excitement and opportunities of stretching his cramped and ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... together again as on the evening before, but Madge was carelessly languid and fitful in her mirthful sallies, and complained of over-fatigue. "I won't come down again to-night," she said to Graydon as they passed out of ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... a passion for dress. But as in everything else, so in this, his fancy was a fitful one. At one time he would excite our admiration by the splendor of his outfit, and perhaps the next week he would seem to take equal pleasure in ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... long blue solemn hours serenely flowing, Whence earth, we feel, gets steady help and good— Thy fitful sunshine-minutes, coming, going, As if earth turned from work in gamesome mood— All shall be mine! But thou must treat me not 25 As prosperous ones are treated, those who live At hand here, and enjoy the higher lot, In readiness to take what thou wilt give, And ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... days, the fitful mirage played its strange antics with distant landscapes, and at times brought within near vision places many miles away. Sometimes circle within circle appeared around the sun, until as many as four were distinctly ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... would confess, Sylvia fell asleep at once, despite the novelty of her situation and the noises that fill a summer night with fitful rustlings and tones. How long she slept she did not know, but woke suddenly and sat erect with that curious thrill which sometimes startles one out of deepest slumber, and is often the forerunner of some dread or danger. She ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... stirred up the embers of a fire near the doorway of the hut, and the flame leaping out cast a wild and fitful glare over the scene, in the midst of which Hobomok, climbing the stout pole in the centre of the cabin, thrust his head through the smoke-hole at the top, and after emitting a hideous war-whoop shouted the names of Tisquantum and Tockamahamon at the top of his voice, for one of the women ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... "at daggers drawn." I am sorry to say that John Broom's fitful industry was still kept for his own fancies. To climb trees, to run races with the sheep dog, to cut grotesque sticks, gather hedge fruits, explore a bog, or make new friends among beasts and birds—at such matters he would labor with feverish zeal. But so far from ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... showed that the morning was not far away. A few stars shone down through the sky-light. The house was still as the grave, and the only sound to break the silence was the rushing of the wind round the walls and over the roof. But this was a fitful sound, suddenly rising and as suddenly falling away again, and it only served ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... strange and solemn lights in which we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... lonely by the mournful forest streams, The loveliness and melody of childhood's happy dreams; Pale flowers, the vermeil-tinted, lightly fanned by vernal breeze, Whose fitful breath went sighingly among the solemn trees; Sunny streamlets, gushing clearly in their fresh and tameless glee, Sparkling onward, ever onward, toward a golden summer sea. Fairy isles of green were sleeping on its softly-heaving breast, Where the chime ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... no small intelligence and influence among the people—who was to perform the burial service. The coffin was laid on trestles in front of the cooper's cottage, and a large assemblage of the people had gathered round, many of the men carrying pine-wood torches, the fitful glare of which glanced over the strange assembly, where every pair of large white-rimmed eyes turned upon —— and myself; we two poor creatures on this more solemn occasion, as well as on every other when these ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... was not to be disregarded. The wind, which had so long varied, began to be heard in the rigging of the silent brigantine; and the two elements exhibited unequivocal evidence, in their menacing and fitful colors of the near approach of the gust. The young sailor, with an absorbing interest, turned his eyes on his ship. The yards were on the caps, the bellying canvas was fluttering far to leeward, and ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... to order the work stopped, as did Bryant. For some time the wind blew only in those fitful puffs Lee had noted or died down entirely for short periods; and of this fact the night shift took advantage to assemble the fresnos and plows beside the canal and to drive their horses to shelter. The crews of the north camp, being fewer, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... With fitful gusts tearing around the bungalows, no one felt much like going to bed. About ten o'clock came a hard downpour, lasting for half an hour. Then the wind died away, and gradually the ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... the winter went by, short and fitful, and the spring unfolded slowly. With the milder weather the mud dried in the roads, and the Major and the Governor went daily into Leicesterburg. The younger man had carried his oratory and his influence into the larger cities of the state, and he had ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... are confined here; but beauty alone beams on the prison-yard from the windows of its cell. At this moment of writing, I hear voices from a room immediately below me; fair, the speakers possibly may be, but—judging from the fitful scraps of conversation that rise hither—they are assuredly ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... sat beside fat Uncle Joseph during their long, long drive, relatives of hers were indeed going into fits; at least, so Florence would have described their gestures and incoherences of comment. Moreover, after the movies, straight into such a fitful scene did the luckless Herbert walk when urged homeward by thoughts of food, at about six that evening. Henry Rooter had strongly advised him against entering ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... surface of the water, as if the engulfed orb cast a sigh of satisfaction across the world. The twilight was short, night fell with its myriad stars. Pere Lastique took the oars, and they saw that the sea was phosphorescent. Jeanne and the vicomte, side by side, watched the fitful gleams in the wake of the boat. They were hardly thinking, but simply gazing vaguely, breathing in the beauty of the evening in a state of delicious contentment; Jeanne had one hand on the seat and her neighbor's finger touched it as if ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Part had been five years in print when Spohr composed his "Faust," but it is based not on the great German poet's version of the legend, but on the old sources. This opera has still life, though it is fitful and feeble, in Germany, and was produced in London by a German company in 1840 and by an Italian in 1852, when the composer conducted it; but I have never heard of a representation in America. Between Spohr's "Faust," written in 1813 and performed in 1818, and Boito's "Mefistofele," ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... already an obsolete arm. Invading hosts could never be victualled for more than three months, or stand a winter campaign; English troops were ploughmen by profession and soldiers only by chance; Henry VII.'s treasure was exhausted, and efforts to raise money for fitful and futile inroads nearly produced a revolt. Henry VIII. himself was writing that to provide for these inroads would prevent him keeping an army in Ireland; and Wolsey was declaring that for the same reason English interests in Scotland must take ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... under strong emotion turns to purple, and when she chose could melt and appeal like a dumb creature's, whose only means of communicating their wants is through their eyes. The lashes were long and curved; her complexion delicate as a rose leaf, with a fitful color vanishing and re-appearing in the peachy cheek apparently as she willed it. Her hair, a rare tint of golden auburn was wreathed around her head in heavy coils that reminded me of the aureoles the ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... pulled a piece of the blind to one side, and a fitful gleam of sunlight, that dances in a heartless manner, flickers in and out of the room, nay, even strays in its ghastly mirth across the bed where the ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... farce. Men are not all either knaves or heroes. Women are neither angels nor furies. And yet if you depended upon much of the literature of the day, you would get the idea that life, instead of being something earnest, something practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing. How poorly prepared are that young man and woman for the duties of to-day who spent last night wading through brilliant passages descriptive of magnificent knavery and wickedness! The man will be looking all day long for ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... of visitors, and when walking with them on the terraces, his thoughts ran on Mount Rorke Castle, his own success, and Frank's failure; and when he awoke in the sweet, luxurious rooms, in the houses where he was staying, his brain filled with febrile sensations of triumph, and fitful belief that he was ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... blast. We had a cheerful fireside, however, and should have had a pleasant evening, only that the wind on the sea made us excessively drowsy. This morning we awoke to hear the wind still blustering, and blowing up clouds, with fitful little showers, and soon blowing them away again, and letting the brightest of sunshine fall over the plashy waste of sand. We have already walked forth on the shore with J——- and R——-, who pick up shells, and dig wells in the sand with their little wooden spades; but soon ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... estimated to be not much more than two hundred yards from the mouth of the creek, and in the direction toward which the latter seemed to be trending, while at the same moment the blare of horns and the dub-a-dub- dub of tom-toms was borne faintly to our ears by the fitful breeze. ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... mountains, seek one of these sequestered camps, take our place in the magic circle, and listen to wondrous tales as they are passed around. There is nothing to disturb the magnificent silence save an occasional soughing of the fitful breeze in the tops of the towering pines, or the gentle babbling of some tiny rivulet as its water soothingly flows over the rounded pebbles in its bed. There is a charm in the environment of such a spot that will photograph its picture on the memory as the gem ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the day there were light variable winds, such as, according to Fuzl Khan, might be expected at that season of the year. The northeast monsoon was already overdue. Its coming was usually heralded by fitful and uncertain winds, varied by such squalls or storms as ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... not, however, until an hour had gone that the flakes began to swirl in fitful flurries. By then the travellers were making better time, and Jim was convinced the blotted sun would soon again assert its mastery over clouds so abruptly accumulated in the sky. The wind, however, had veered about. It came directly in ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... a moon, but for the greater part of the time it was hidden by fitful, hurrying clouds, and, as David stumbled forward, at one moment he would see the rails like streaks of silver, and the next would be encompassed in a complete and bewildering darkness. He made his way from tie to tie only by ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... and tempestuous; the thunder growled around; the lightning flashed at short intervals: and the wind swept furiously along in sudden and fitful gusts. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... misunderstanding of the character of my friend. As for Madonna Beatrice, she that was such a flower in a guarded garden, why, you would have said it was little less than incredible that the clear course of her simple life could be crossed by the summer lightning of Madonna Vittoria's brilliant, fitful existence. Yet, nevertheless, from first to last, Madonna Vittoria was of the utmost moment in the lives of this golden lass and lad, and this much must be admitted in all honesty: that she never did, or at least ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the seven Crusades (1096-1272), during which the Christians of Europe endeavoured, with tremendous yet fitful energy, to wrest the birthplace of Christianity from the equally fanatic Moslems, the Knights Templars fought bravely among the foremost. Whether by the side of Godfrey of Bouillon, Louis VII., Philip V., Richard Coeur de Lion, Louis IX., ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... began to smile over the first volumes of Tristram Shandy. From internal evidence in these early volumes it is possible to note with some assurance the progress of their composition and the approximate time of their completion. In his wayward, fitful way, and possibly for his own amusement more than with dreams of fame and fortune,[3] Sterne probably began the composition of Shandy in January, 1759, and the completion of the first installment is assigned to the summer or early autumn of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... of Benjamin, indeed, a few Israelites still maintained a fitful independence, and Samuel, the representative of the traditions of Shiloh, was allowed to judge his own people, and preside over a Naioth or "monastery" of dervish-like prophets under the eye of a Philistine ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... down the gently sloping tunnel, and presently the eager watchers who could catch only glimpses of shadowy roof and walls in the fitful light of the lanterns, saw the three stop. In her excitement, Fran forgot her fear of the distance stretching before her and ran to them. The next second came ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... now, and more and more henceforth, he began to look on Literature as his real employment, after all; and was prosecuting it with his accustomed loyalty and ardor. And he continued ever afterwards, in spite of such fitful circumstances and uncertain outward fluctuations as his were sure of being, to prosecute it steadily with all the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... solemn midnight; a dense cloud had obscured the sky, and hid the refulgent light of the moon; the wind howled in fitful murmurs, the thunder rolled in the distance, lightnings glared, and nature wrapped herself in the sable shroud of midnight, and seemed shrieking a death-wail in her ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... these covered days of fitful sunshine, of light, unsteady winds, with a swell from the westward, and hazy in general, but with the land about the Cape at times distinctly visible. It has been my lot to look with reverence upon the very spot more than once, and for many hours together. All but thirty ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... simplest ideas. Every sight in the apartment that attracts the eye, every sound that gains the ear, expresses a luxurious repose. No brilliant light mars the pervading softness of the atmosphere; no violent colour materialises the light, ethereal hues of the dresses; no sudden noises interrupt the fitful and plaintive notes of the lute, jar with the soft twittering of the birds in the aviaries, or drown the still, regular melody of the ladies' voices. All objects, animate and inanimate, are in harmony with each other. It is a scene of ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... 1902 the French consular authorities in Tientsin filed a request to have their Concession extended on the ground that they were becoming cramped. The Chinese authorities, although not wishing to grant the request and indeed ignoring it for a long time, were finally induced to begin fitful negotiations; and in October, 1916, after having passed through various processes of alteration, reduction, and re-statement during the interval of fourteen years, the issue had been so fined down that a virtual agreement regarding the administration of the new area had been reached—an agreement ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... girl's high spirit into subservience to his own was in itself a peculiarly alluring prospect, and he proved how little he appreciated her character by whiling away part of the night over "Taming of the Shrew." A creature of fitful impulse, nurtured into an arrogant sense of superiority, he banished all compunctions, persuading himself easily into the belief that as soldier, officer, and lover he was taking the manly course in going straight forward. "The idea of consulting ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... days went by, Irving Stanley, quiet, pleasant, gentlemanly, and winning all hearts by his extreme suavity of manner; Hugh, silent, fitful, moody; Alice, artificially gay, and even merry, trying so hard to make up Hugh's deficiencies, that she led poor Irving astray, and made him honestly believe she might be won. It was on the morning of the third day that he resolved to end ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... starts, when he could bring his mind to it, excelled in the business. Nobody could train a dog like Dandie; nobody, through the peril of great storms in the winter time, could do more gallantly. But if his dexterity were exquisite, his diligence was but fitful; and he served his brother for bed and board, and a trifle of pocket-money when he asked for it. He loved money well enough, knew very well how to spend it, and could make a shrewd bargain when he liked. But he preferred a vague knowledge ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was great, down where they were, and it made the passageway muggy and odorous. Fitful shadows were flung by widely separated oil lamps as they pressed forward—grotesque splotches of black that half a dozen times tightened the American's grasp on his sword, sure that a guard had come upon them. He knew that their margin of time in which to effect escape was small, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. The very first words I heard them interchange as I became conscious, were ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... seen through the open door, had there been any to see, was almost as motionless as a tableau, and it was a starkly grim one, with murky shadows against a fitful light. A ray of the setting sun forced its inquisitive way inward upon the semi-darkness of the interior. A red wavering from the open hearth, where supper preparations had been going forward, threw unsteady ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... been free from the unnatural and unneeded stimulus? Take Burns, for example. Alcohol did not make his genius, or even brighten it.... Genius may have its poetical and imaginative powers stored up into fitful paroxysms by alcohol, no doubt: the control of will being gone or going, the mind is left to take ideas as they come, and they may come brilliantly for a time. But, at best, the man is but a revolving light. At one time a flash will dazzle ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... with her wondrous hair And eyes that are stormy with fitful light, The delicate hues of brow and cheek Are unmarred all, rose-clear and bright; That matchless frame yet holds at bay The crouching ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... man, who had visited him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with whom the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer evidently so impressionable to the lethal nature of his topic, to take ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... bandannas of silk, some seeking a poker game on a neighboring rancho, some bent on courting. Pedro and Joe lay, faces down, under the shade of the trees about the tenaya, the stone cistern into which water was pumped by the windmills that worked in the fitful breezes. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... maple-leaves made a little island of sombre green, around which more vivid grasses rippled and dimpled under the fitful spring breezes. And everywhere leaves lisped to one another, and birds shrilled insistently. It was ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... earth a thousand discords ring, Man's fitful uproar mingling with his toil, Still do ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... o'clock, on the morning of the 19th, it was reported to him that artillery firing could be heard in the direction of Cedar Creek, but as the sound was stated to be irregular and fitful, he thought it only a skirmish. He, nevertheless, arose at once, and had just finished dressing when another officer came in, and reported that the firing was still going on in the same direction, but ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... long time first,—she heard the quick prompt sounds, which told of her father's arrival. In he came—to the room as yet only lighted by the fitful ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... swarms with factory operatives; and, after our chat with blind John, the chairmaker, and his ancient crony the grinder from Nile Street, we set off again to see something more of them. Fitful showers came down through the day, and we had to shelter now and then. In one cottage, where we stopped a few minutes, the old woman told us that, in addition to their own family, they had three young women living with them—the orphan daughters of her ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... quite near at hand came the boom of artillery, a sound which for the moment drowned all others, even the hoarse, harshly uttered words of command, as large bodies of men swung past the doorway of the hut, and the fitful bugle-calls which a minute before had fallen on ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... deprive myself,—is not the most natural and the most efficacious. What would the 'Black Dwarf' be if every one knew from the beginning that he was a rich man and a baronet?—or 'The Pirate,' if all the truth about Norna of the Fitful-head had been told in the first chapter? Therefore, put the book down if the revelation of some future secret be necessary for your enjoyment. Our mystery is going to be revealed in the next paragraph,—in the next half-dozen words. Mr. and ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... of rain is slackening into fitful pauses, renewed gusts of wind startle it from a ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... as if she longed to hurt something, to revenge her loss even upon an object without power of feeling. Julian sprang up and went over to the window. He looked out onto the road and watched the people moving by in the fitful sunshine beyond the dirty railings. That day, he, too, was in a tumult. He felt like a monk who had suddenly thrown off his habit, broken his vows, and come forth into the world. The cell and the cloister were left behind, were things to be forgotten, with the ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... a winter's day. The gale had freshened since noon, stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew with the strength of a hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns firing over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided, and between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling tide, the small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore, the motionless ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... back into bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Mary explained in muffled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simply gotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest of the night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her face began to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used it to wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had been absorbed, however, and the skin was broken out ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... brows, at Dominic Le Mierre, who swaggered in and out amongst the girls, tapping one on the cheek, chucking another under the chin, and pulling the long curls of a young creature in her teens. In the fitful and flickering light, the master of Orvilliere looked like a sea-king, so stalwart, so wicked, so magnetic. It was quite plain to Perrin Corbet that he was more than a little the worse for drink; and he watched ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... all the pines, and through the tall, dry grass, The fitful breezes with a shiver pass, While o'er the autumn's lately flowering weeds The snow-birds flit and peck ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... eastern heaven Bursts, and then,—as clouds of even Fleck'd with fire and azure, lie In the unfathomable sky,— So their plumes of purple grain Starr'd with drops of golden rain Gleam above the sunlight woods, As in silent multitudes On the morning's fitful gale Through the broken mist they sail; And the vapours cloven and gleaming Follow down the dark steep streaming, Till all is bright, and clear, and still ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... dexterous his dives into porches and the patches of shadow which the eaves cast, the priest's trained eye followed his every turn, numbered, as it were, the very steps he took. And the smile upon Fra Giovanni's face was fitful no more. He walked as a man who has a great jest ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering campfire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by Piney—story-telling. Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... there as a student but his old champion of the Truro Grammar School? Their friendship was renewed; and the elder student from that time forward acted as the Mentor, of the younger one. Martyn was fitful in his studies, excitable and petulant, and occasionally subject to fits of almost uncontrollable rage. His big friend, on the other hand, was a steady, patient, hardworking fellow; and he never ceased to watch over, to guide, and to advise for good his irritable fellow-student. He kept ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... robes, in their relation to thickness of fur and lustre, were those taken during the winter months, particularly February, at which period the maximum of density and beauty had been reached. Then, notwithstanding the sudden and fitful variations of temperature incident to our mid-continent climate, the old hunters were especially active, and accepted unusual risks to procure as many of the coveted skins as possible. A temporary camp would be established under the ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... minutes later the wind, which had become fitful, suddenly grew warm. All around him now the mist was dissolving into a thin golden rain; the land-breeze freshened, blowing through distant jasmine thickets and orange groves, and a soft fragrance stole out ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... complete in itself. The narrative, as already stated, will be based largely upon the great Stories or Tales known as the Orkneyinga, St. Magnus', and Hakonar Sagas, and also upon Scottish and English chronicles and records so far as they throw their fitful light upon the northern counties of Scotland, and especially upon Caithness and Sutherland, during the dark periods ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... remaining whole hours at some favourite spot, lying flat on the ground, with his face toward the sky. The flickering shadows of the sun; the rustling of the leaves on the trees; the sailing of the fitful clouds over the horizon, and the golden blaze of the sky at morn and eventide, were to him spectacles of which his eye never tired, with which his heart never got satiated. And as he grew more and more the constant worshipper of nature, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... shifts for existence, he had found no leisure for close and brooding reflection upon that spoliation of just rights—that calumny upon his mother's name, which had first brought the Night into his Morning. His resentment towards the Beauforts, it is true, had ever been an intense but a fitful and irregular passion. It was exactly in proportion as, by those rare and romantic incidents which Fiction cannot invent, and which Narrative takes with diffidence from the great Store-house of Real Life, his steps had ascended in the social ladder—that all which his childhood had ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fell into a fitful, feverish slumber accompanied by a nightmare in which the lashing of the wind and rain outside were conjured into the clangor and hoof beats of cavalry and he was hopelessly enmeshed ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... on the twelfth of June, the day the fitful firing ceased around Cold Harbor. There was danger in the Valley, where Hunter had won success at Staunton, and where Crook's and Averell's Union troops were expected to arrive from West Virginia. Sheridan, too, was off on a twenty-day raid. He cut the Virginia Central ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... condition on leaving my stung and smarting fingers. Besides, the sky has become overcast, a storm is imminent. In the month of May, so variable, so fickle, in my part of the world, we can hardly ever count on a whole day of fine weather. A splendid morning is swiftly followed by a fitful afternoon; and my experiments with Mason-bees have often suffered by these variations. All things considered, I am inclined to think that the homeward journey across the forest and the mountain is effected just as readily as across the corn-fields ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... tree, surveyed a prospect new to me. For miles and miles, away to the white line of the smoking Cordillera, stretched a low rolling plain; one vast thistle-bed, the down of which flew in grey gauzy clouds before a soft fitful breeze; innumerable finches fluttered and pecked above it, and bent the countless flower-heads. Far away, one tall tree rose above the level thistle-ocean. A strange longing seized me to go and tear it down. The forest leaves seemed tasteless; my stomach sickened at them; ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... drooped as he spoke and his thin fine lips betrayed a pain and weariness that even the fitful light of the fire could not conceal. There was a silence for a moment, then a burro screamed, and Mackay got ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... branches of the grove bent over the cliff that overhung the sounding sea. The birds of heaven sang over her head, and before her the sea-birds wheeled in myriads, countless as the sand upon the shore, like burnished clouds over the adjacent isles. Their bright wings flashed in the sun, like the fitful fires that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... uncocked; the burthen was resumed, and the party slowly toiled up the bank. Sam watched them as they went; the light sending back fitful gleams through the dripping bushes, and it was not till they were fairly out of sight that he ventured to draw breath freely. He now thought of getting back to his boat, and making his escape out of the reach of such dangerous neighbors; but curiosity was all-powerful with poor ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... set in. It was a cold night in March; the wind howled in fitful gusts along the streets, but the people could not disperse. They sat shivering together in the market-place; for how was it possible for sleep to visit their eyes, when every moment might hurl destruction upon their heads. The old priest went from one to another, encouraging the ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value, and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child's manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... full-length, recumbent effigy, in the north aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, Westminster Abbey, while in the south aisle he sees the tomb and effigy of her old rival and enemy, Mary Queen of Scots (S397). The sculptured features of both look placid. "After life's fitful fever they ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... dimpling smile, with sweetness fraught, The bosom, 'mid its snow, upheaving; Who, that had seen them, could have thought That things so fair could be deceiving? The moon, the sky, the wave, the wind, In all their fitful moods of changing, Are nought to wavering woman's mind, For ever shifting, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... I could not wish that others should lower my spirits as I was lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same result from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... The fitful rush of the wind was now disturbed by a portentous sound: it was a quick and heavy knocking at the outer door. Pearson's wan countenance grew paler, for many a visit of persecution had taught him what ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all but the face and tress of the lustrous brown hair,—but that face! Had not King Hephaestos wrought every line of clear Phoenician glass, then touched them with snow and rose, and shot through all the ichor of life? Perhaps there was a fitful fire in the dark eyes that awaited the husband's coming, or a slight twitching of the impatient lips. But nothing disturbed the high-born repose of face and figure. Hermione was indeed the worthy daughter of a noble house, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... portmanteau containing Ethel's trousseau was small enough to go on the seat in front of them. You must figure a rather broken-down four-wheeler bearing the yellow-painted box and the experienced trunk and Mr. Lewisham and all his fortunes, a despondent fitful horse, and a threadbare venerable driver, blasphemous sotto voce and flagellant, in an ancient coat with capes. When our two young people found themselves in the cab again a certain stiffness of manner between ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... farm generally began on the Monday after the Fourth of July and lasted from four to six weeks, according to the weather, which is often fitful in Maine. We usually harvested from seventy to seventy-five tons, and in the days of scythes and hand rakes that meant that we had to do a good deal of ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... dull, foggy night. A neighboring church clock slowly struck the hour. The flickering light of the two candles showed fitful phantom shadows in the lofty room. These were the ancestors of Charles, standing back ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... involuntary exclamation from Trysail. The intimation that came from the cloud, was not to be disregarded. The wind, which had so long varied, began to be heard in the rigging of the silent brigantine; and the two elements exhibited unequivocal evidence, in their menacing and fitful colors of the near approach of the gust. The young sailor, with an absorbing interest, turned his eyes on his ship. The yards were on the caps, the bellying canvas was fluttering far to leeward, and twenty or thirty human forms on each spar, showed that the nimble-fingered ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... calm day, with a few light showers, and fitful but unfavourable breezes. Some thirty or forty little birds, which the sailors called Mother Carey's chickens, but which were smaller and more graceful than any I have seen of that name, followed closely in our wake. I was never tired of watching ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... leave their boundaries undefined; a mile nearer or farther, what does it matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic occupation of the land leads to oscillations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within. Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... men—possibly morbidly sensitive, with whom it is always difficult to deal; but it is recorded of him, as it is not recorded of his great compeer, that Giorgione was frank and friendly as an artist, however moody and fitful he might be as ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf, On the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... already shown that he was not proof against Stella's charms. He wondered what Stella thought of the man, well knowing that few women liked him, and one evening, as they sat together in the scented darkness with the roar of their mountain-stream filling the silences, he turned their fitful conversation in Monck's direction to satisfy his lazy curiosity in ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... diversified with outstanding rocks and promontories, about the most picturesque and the most dangerous part of our southern shores. Old George decided that probably the object of our search had been driven in by the fitful wind amongst some of the near rocks and creeks, and might, perhaps, be recovered by a careful search. So, warily steered by our experienced sailor, we set ourselves to the work, having scanned, to the best of our ability, the open sea beyond with a ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... night that sweeps the wires of the electric telegraph with a wild and fitful hand; a night so very stormy, with the added storm of the train-progress through it, that when the Guard comes clambering round to mark the tickets while we are at full speed (a really horrible performance ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... The egg, the seed, the bud, are all alike in many ways, and look to the future. Our earliest spring flower, the skunk-cabbage, may be found with its round green spear-point an inch or two above the mould in December. It is ready to welcome and make the most of the first fitful March warmth. Look at the elms, too, and see how they swarm with buds. In early April they ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... absence of advertised or even of confessed relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!" The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large might or mightn't do for those in contact with it, became thus one's own fitful care, with one's attention for a considerable period doubtless dormant enough, but with the questions always liable to ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the bustling trafficking town, Worn out and weary, climbs his favourite hill And thinks it Heaven to see the calm green fields Mapped out in beautiful sunlight at his feet: Or walks enraptured where the fitful south Comes past the beans in blossom; and no sight Or scent or sound but fills his soul with glee:— So I,—rejoicing once again to stand Where Siloa's brook flows softly, and the meads Are all enamell'd o'er with ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... through the long night he sat with his touch, which compelled quiet, upon her body, for when, after she had fallen at last into a fitful slumber, he arose and lowered the lights, she started up with a scream and called out that she was "alone—fearfully alone!" Then, as he returned to his chair, she reached for him in the darkness and clung desperately to his outstretched arm, drawing it presently ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... preferring life's countless humiliations before any humility. Master's blazing rays, the open penetrating sunshine of his wisdom, were too powerful for their spiritual sickness. They sought some lesser teacher who, shading them with flattery, permitted the fitful sleep ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... meant. He had adventured in blossoms before to the torment of his heart and head. In Spain. He had forgotten the girl's name but it began with an "I." Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and glimmering boughs of fleece. The wind, fitful and chill since the sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground. Stillness and blossoms and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... was sitting there in their cheerless room, planning and planning!—Maurice was out, wandering about in the gray afternoon. It had begun to snow, in a fitful, irritating way—little gritty pellets that blew into his face. He had nowhere to go—four o'clock is a dead time to drop in on people! He had nothing to do, and nothing to think of—except the foolish, middle-aged woman, stating, in their dreary third-floor front, an undeniable ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... a weak, fitful fashion. I first became slightly curious about myself. Why had I slept so profoundly? Why was I so nerveless and stupid after ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... of defalcating debtors could suggest. But the Roman Jews were merely pestilent heretics. Perhaps it was the comparative poverty of the Ghetto that made its tragedy one of steady degradation rather than of fitful massacre. Nevertheless bloodshed was not unknown, and the song died on Rachel's lips, though the sterner ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... propounded the Tasmanian convict village scheme. In '47, he announced total abolition. In '48, another complete revolution took place, and all convicts were to be sent to Van Diemen's Land. This extravagance of upstart theory and fitful experiment without end, all tended to check colonial enterprise and ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... Mumbray's rebukes for levity of speech and indifference to the conventional norm of feminine behaviour. Though her parents had always been prominent in Polterham society, she was ill-educated, and of late years had endeavoured, in a fitful, fretful way, to make amends to herself for this injustice. Disregarding paternal censure, she subscribed to the Literary Institute, and read at hap-hazard with little enough profit. Twenty-three years old, she was now doubly independent, for the will of a maiden aunt (a lady always on the worst ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... crept, and lingered lazily about the lightning rod, before it rose and melted away into the pure evening sky. But by this time the lap-dog had come forwards to meet her, and now ran in advance, emitting a fitful and joyous bark; and as she ascended the steps the door was opened by a servant, who, having admitted her, closed it again; but not before a stranger might, from without, have witnessed a fair and youthful female figure swiftly descend the stairs into the hall, and, throwing ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... day far advanced in autumn, he set off to visit this being. The howling of the wind as it came in fitful gusts through the openings of the forest, formed no bad accompaniment to his thoughts; while the indistinct twilight received little aid from the moon, which waded through heavy masses of clouds. The Baron, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... the view, crowned by the turquoise cone of Soemboeung, the traditional centre of Java, a green knoll at the base of the volcanic pyramid being regarded as the "spike" which fastens the floating isle to some solid rock in unfathomed depths of ocean. The fitful fancy of a wandering race, ever drifting across the changing seas, reflects itself in the legendary lore of the Malay Archipelago, often represented by weird traditions as though in perpetual motion. The vicissitudes of volcanic action, whereby islands were sometimes submerged ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... companions and I were content to dream in the verandah, and watch the lengthening shadows, and drink cocoa-nut milk, till the abrupt exit of the sun startled us, and we saw the young moon carrying the old one tenderly, and a fitful glare 60 miles away, where the solemn fires of Mauna Loa are burning at a ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... see and hear all that came within the ken of her keen eyes and ears. The growing moon lighted up half the enclosure, the rest, so far as the shadow fell, lay in darkness. But in the middle of a large semi-circle of free servants a fire was blazing, throwing a fitful light on their brown faces; and now and again, as fresh pine-cones were thrown in, it flared up and illuminated even the darker half of the space before her. This added to her trepidation; she had to cross the court-yard, as she hoped, unseen; for innocent and natural as her proceedings were, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... had awakened after a night of fitful slumber under the hay. His first act was to go to a place where he could observe the sanitarium. There was no sign of life about it, and the boy, after watching a few minutes, began to feel faint for lack ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman
... the result of a passing impulse," he thought, "sooner or later she will come to me. Nature, however, tolerates no fitful, half-hearted scholars, and should she prove one, she will be contented with ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... bells in the windows of the campanile began, and I turned and looked up at their beautiful lolling and watched their fitful tumble- aboutiness. They swung open-mouthed like elephants with uplifted trunks, and I wished I could have fed them with buns. They were not like English bells, and yet they rang more all 'Inglese than bells mostly do in Italy—they had ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... trial came, The world no longer was the same. I still had pleasures:—who could live Without the healing aid they give? But, as a plant surcharg'd with rain, When radiant sunshine comes again, Just wakes from a benumbing trance, I caught a feverish, fitful glance. The dove, that for a weary time Had mourn'd the rigour of the clime, And, with its head beneath its wing, Awaited a more genial spring, Went forth again to search around, And some few leaves of olive found, But not a bower which could impart Its interchange of light and shade; Not ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... early, and soon fell into a fitful slumber, which lasted until an hour before midnight. I arose, dressed, and sat down by the smouldering camp-fire, ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... always showed off a compact, well-rounded leg in corduroy inexpressibles, they had learned to distinguish as "Billy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bagpipe, had broken down ere I came up with them; and now, sitting on the grass, he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical music, to which Billy Breeches was dancing; but, just as I passed, Billy also gave way, after wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect; and, falling over the prostrate musician, I could ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of October had been fitful and treacherous. On November 14, 1854, a terrible hurricane burst on the Crimean coast and wrecked nearly the whole of the British transports which lay at anchor in the roadsteads. Several warships and transports belonging to the French were wrecked. The British war vessels suffered severely, ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... At length a fitful slumber came upon me and a confusion of rotting bodies swarming with monstrous lice passed before my closed eyes. I was fully awake long before reveille, sleepy and unrefreshed, and when reveille came we received orders to move within ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... and carried it once more through the ground-floor of the Tower. Save for the dying fires, and the sputtering lamp, everything was dark and still in the spacious house. The storm was dying down in fitful gusts that seemed at intervals to invade the shadowy spaces of the corridor, driving before them the wisps of straw and paper that had been left here and there by the unpacking of the great writing-table. There could be no ghosts in the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fire threw the grotesque figure into high relief, and Tarzan recognized her as Momaya, the mother of Tibo. The fire also threw out a fitful flame which carried to the shadows where Tarzan lurked, picking out his light brown body from the surrounding darkness. Momaya saw him and knew him. With a cry, she leaped forward and Tarzan came to meet her. The other women, turning, saw him, too; but they ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... piece of the blind to one side, and a fitful gleam of sunlight, that dances in a heartless manner, flickers in and out of the room, nay, even strays in its ghastly mirth across the bed where ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... door, opened it, and stepped outside. The sky was thick and heavy, with only a white blur where the moon was smothered. Fifty yards away the gray gloom became opaque. Over the thousand miles of drift to the north there came a faint whistling wind, rising at times in fitful sweeps of flinty snow, and at intervals dying away until it became only a lulling sound. In one of these intervals both ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... places the four boys staggered up the unsteady companionway. As they gained the deck they were assailed by terrific gusts of wind carrying sleet and snow. During their stay below the weather had turned colder, bringing fitful dashes of sleet out of the north. The schooner ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... and other nobles came and pressed her, and Jean whispered to her not to show herself a fule body, and disgrace herself before the English, setting the harp before her and attending to the strings. Eleanor's fingers then played over them in a dreamy, fitful way, that made the old Earl raise his ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... haggard, bestial face—repulsive with every mark of his wicked, licentious years—grinned with an insane determination to take the place that was his by right of his money bags; while his glazed and sunken eyes shone with fitful gleams, as he rallied the last of his vital forces, with a devilish defiance of the end that was so ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... of the Rhine,—where seed was never sown, What harvest lay upon thy sands, by those strong reapers thrown? What saw the winter moon that night, as, struggling through the rain, She pour'd a wan and fitful light on marsh, and stream, and plain? A dreary spot with corpses strewn, and bayonets glistening round; A broken bridge, a stranded boat, a bare and batter'd mound; And one huge watch-fire's kindled pile, that sent its quivering glare To tell the leaders of the host ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... performed this service for Shanty, had got permission for a few hours, to visit his mother over the Border, Mr. Dymock having told him in all kindness that he would blow for him if needs must. But the fitful light—the alternate glow and comparative darkness which accompanied and kept time with the motion of the bellows, made it almost impossible for the old man to satisfy himself concerning his horrible imagination. He saw that the infant who lay so still on the woman's ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... thick scrub. Brambles, wait-a-bit vines, and berry bushes scratched and stung her, and switched across her face, leaving bleeding and livid marks on her tender skin. But she pushed on and on in the fitful moonlight through the dense undergrowth, making a straight line ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... and ship-owners of more than one country—not, if the suspicions of our statesmen were well founded, without some connivance on the part of their governments. Nor were our efforts in the cause the fitful display of impulsive excitement. We have continued them and widened their sphere as occasions have presented themselves, exerting a successful influence even over unchristian and semi-civilized governments, of which an instance has very recently been ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... wood and field, formed the grandest of pyrotechnic displays. Rare spectacle—in one magnificent panorama, gleaming through the dark mantle of night, were the steady lights of peaceful camps, and the fitful flashing ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... was looking into the fire,—the light of which, that came and went in flashes, brought distinctly out the settled gravity of the features, and the rugged but grand proportions of the head. There is no better light in which to see an old man's face than the fitful firelight; and no better background than ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... amiable elegance of the "Valse Triste" and that which produced the hard and naked essentiality of the Fourth Symphony are almost foreign to each other. The creative power itself is extraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physical robustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the major artist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer of indisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all his independence and intensity. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... wins more esteem from the reader of this day, because she was a cheerful woman, of serene temper, brought into advantageous comparison with a husband much older than herself, whom circumstances had rendered moody, fitful, sometimes capricious, and confessedly obstinate in that degree which Pope has taught us to think ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... slopes are arrayed in virgin white of pear and cherry blossom, with here and there a blush from apple-trees and a faint glimmer of delicate green against cool grey of stone walls showing among the purples of trunks and branches warming into new life under the fitful rays of April sunshine. The sunshine draws out colour from soaring spires or copper domes of churches and from the quaint towers and pinnacles of old Prague's former defences against enemies that came like storm clouds from out of the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... to dream of, not describe; to dream of in some faint and breathless eve of early summer, beside the margin of some haunted streamlet, beneath the shade of twilight boughs in which the fitful breeze awakes that whispering melody, believed by the poetic ancients to be the chorus of the wood-nymph; to dream of and adore—even as she was adored by him who sat beside her, and watched each varying expression, that swept across her speaking features; and hung upon each accent ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... gone out for good now, but there was plenty of chance to see even in that grimy, smoke-filled place, by the fitful glare of the flames that were reaching out and licking up the seats and the tawdry decorations now. And he had not very far to go before he found what he was looking for—the body of a little girl who had fallen and been overcome by the smoke. ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... we decided that if it really came, we saw no choice between going down with the house into the cellar and having the house come down on top of us, so we turned in and got a night's rest, which, I am free to confess, was rather fitful. ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... Dutton in this fitful, disjointed talk, and as there was really nothing to be done or to be inquired into, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... the accident a watery sun had come out in fitful gleams. It had been raining and blowing for some hours. There was still no sign of returning consciousness in the sick man. Sir Shawn's face looked heavy and dull on the pillow, where he lay as motionless as though ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... companions. There lies Frank on his cot, with blanched countenance, eyes closed, and pale lips smiling, as if in dreams. Of his two friends, Atwater and the old drummer, only one, as Seth Tucket said, remains. One was carried out last night—in a coffin his cold form is laid—life's fitful fever is ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... that night in a fitful manner and came to a stop about four A. M. The wind went down and the air seemed to have lost its vivacity and life; it was a dead atmosphere; we arose from our blankets ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... his horse and started. The rain and wind were now at his back—a hundred paces, and the road, lonely save for stragglers, the grey troops, the battle in front, was all sheeted and shrouded in the darkly drifting storm. The fitful bursts of musketry were lost beneath the artillery of the clouds. He travelled a mile, found Pelham and gave his order, then stood aside under the tossing pines while the horse artillery went by. It went by in the dusk of the storm, in ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... safeguards. A rank bog surrounded the place on three sides, and thus but few troops were needed to guard the great mass of rebel prisoners lodged in wooden barracks and long lines of tents. Vincent's case seemed to have grown stationary after her coming. He slept a fitful, troubled sleep half the day. At night he grew delirious and restless. Rosa and Linda divided the hours into watches, and administered the draughts prepared by the stewards. Through the humanity of the physician in charge, the invalid had been ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... highest merely in the scale of its creatures but the lord of all." He is not a parasite but the paragon of the globe. He has faith in the unchangeableness of the laws he is mastering while suffering from them. He confidently declares there is nothing fitful, nothing capricious, nothing irregular in their action. The greater the calamity the more earnest his effort to ascertain its causes and learn ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... declared that there was no hope. In one of those fitful bursts of anger, in which Charles from time to time indulged, even in his state of exhaustion and in his dying moments, he had desired to be left by his doctors and attendants, and he slumbered his last slumber in this world, before closing his eyes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... she had during her life but one veritable passion, which she admitted nobody to share with her. Her daughter, Madame de Grignan, the prettiest girl in France, clever, virtuous, business-like, appears in her mother's letters fitful, cross-grained, and sometimes rather cold. Madame de Sevigne is a friend whom we read over and over again, whose emotions we share, to whom we go for an hour's distraction and delightful chat. We have no desire to chat with Madame de Grignan; we gladly leave her to her ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... if not in other forms of art. Their initiative vanished; they ceased to create and began to comment. Patriotism, with rare exceptions, became an empty name, for few had the high spirit and energy to translate into action man's duty to the State. Vacillation, indecision, fitful outbursts of unhealthy activity followed by cowardly depression, selfish cruelty, and criminal weakness are characteristic of the public life of Greece from the struggle with Macedonia to the final conquest ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... picked up the Curlew the fitful wind died suddenly and the air grew heavy with moisture. The white clouds which scurried across the face of the heavens dropped lower and massing themselves together obscured the stars. Piloting the Pelican and her tow safely to the high seas, the girl relinquished the wheel to Johnson ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... seems indeed a subject worthy of the talents of a skilful painter. The fancy of the artist would represent the dreary and frightful appearance of the ice-covered sea, stretching away as far as the eye could reach, a bleak and boundless waste; the dark and broken clouds driving across the fitful sky; the ship motionless amidst the islands and mountains of ice, her shrouds and sails being fringed and stiffened with the frozen spray. On the deck would appear the form of Hudson himself, displaying the chart to his men; his countenance careworn and sad, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... into the other room, and selected a book for perusal; it chanced to be a work on metaphysics, and after poring over its abstruse pages for some time, she became drowsy, and finally fell into a dreamy sleep. In her fitful slumbers, she was visited by a dream or vision of extraordinary vividness, which made an indelible impression upon her mind, because she felt personally interested in the characters that appeared before her, and by alluding to the scenes, she might ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... then I've strayed through many a fitful clime, (Tossed on the wind of fortune like a feather,) And chanced with rare good fellows in my time; But ne'er the time that we ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... own couch, a large, four-posted affair, sleep soon overpowered the stranger; but sleep, broken and fitful! Nor did he dream only of France and of kings running away, of American land barons and of "bolters." More intrusive than these, the faces of the strollers crept in and disturbed his slumbers, not least among which were the features ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... real tragedy pushed small discomforts back into their proper perspective. It still stormed, though not so furiously, and with fitful spells of sunlight breaking through the churning clouds. The men left the cabin at daylight, and Mrs. Singleton Corey found herself practically compelled to wash the dishes and sweep the floor and wait on the distracted Kate who was crushed under the realization of Mrs. Singleton ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... a few minutes would tear me limb from limb. Whenever, by fatigue and weakness, my terror yielded to drowsiness, the least noise roused me to a sense of the hideousness of my condition. Once, in a fitful slumber, I fell forward into the fire, and inflicted a wretched burn on my hand. Oh! with what agony ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... approaching separation, and Sunday afternoon found them all assembled at Mrs. Hapgood's for a farewell dinner together. But it was rather a silent, subdued party that gathered about the table; the conversation was fitful and broken by long pauses, and the jokes were rather forced and feeble; while Molly's red eyes and Florence's white cheeks showed that something was wrong. If it was bad at the table, it was worse when they all sat in the front porch after dinner, with nothing to do but watch the ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... that. They were too much worried about the littlest Bunker to laugh at Laddie's riddle. They went up to the fence and crept through an opening where the tumble-weeds had not piled up in great heaps as they had in many places along its length. The wind was still blowing in fitful gusts, and Laddie and Margy and Vi took hold of hands when they ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... ungracious, they might go back whence they had come without even attempting that bold stroke in the hope of which they had paid this visit. They had dared, however, show no signs of their consuming anxiety. With smiling thanks they bade good-bye to the Governor and went on, in the fitful silence of suspense, to ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... upon it. I visited it but once, and then came away displeased with its magnificence. It seems to me that a cemetery should not be so much a repository of art, as a place of great natural beauty and quiet, where one would long to rest after "life's fitful fever." ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... paying heavily for mail service until the lines were self-supporting, and withdrawing her aid only when competition could be safely defied. Congress steadily refused to enter upon any system of the same kind. Fitful aid was granted to special lines here and there, but no general system was devised, and the aid extended being temporary and accompanied sometimes by scandals in legislation was in the end rather hurtful ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... he skims along, Uttering his sweet and mournful cry; He starts not at my fitful song, Nor flash of fluttering drapery. He has no thought of any wrong, He scans me with a fearless eye; Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong, The little ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... up the embers of a fire near the doorway of the hut, and the flame leaping out cast a wild and fitful glare over the scene, in the midst of which Hobomok, climbing the stout pole in the centre of the cabin, thrust his head through the smoke-hole at the top, and after emitting a hideous war-whoop shouted the names of Tisquantum and Tockamahamon ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... fat Uncle Joseph during their long, long drive, relatives of hers were indeed going into fits; at least, so Florence would have described their gestures and incoherences of comment. Moreover, after the movies, straight into such a fitful scene did the luckless Herbert walk when urged homeward by thoughts of food, at about six that evening. Henry Rooter had strongly advised ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... which the empress had granted to the Countess Margaret had passed away, and the eve of her bridal had dawned. During those eight eventful days the countess had been more fitful than ever, and her uncle's ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... "this is incredible!" and the miserable creature stood for a moment with an appalling vacancy shadowing in his countenance, which was illumed for one fitful moment with a ray of hope as he inserted his hand in his waistcoat pocket to assure himself that the diamond which he had placed in that receptacle the night before at least ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... afternoon, was near them now, and had burst in deep-mouthed battle among the ravines at the other side, and over the broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... like the vexed clucking of a frightened blackbird; after which relief, the Abbe resumed his fitful striding up and down the box-bordered alley. This lasted until the hour of twilight, when Augustine, the servant, as soon as the Angelus had sounded, went to inform her master that they were waiting ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... one of them would in London. Democracy triumphed in the drawing-rooms of Paris before it had erected its first barricade in the streets; and all subsequent efforts in behalf of Monarchy here have produced and can produce only a fitful, spasmodic, unnatural life. If three Revolutions within a life-time, all in the same direction, have not impressed this truth conclusively, another and another lesson will be added. The French have great faults of character which imperil the immediate fortunes of the Republic but ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... voices, in an indistinct, fitful way, reached him where he sat. At first there was nothing peculiar in the tone, but in a few minutes it was evident that Maggie was getting angry. Allan rose then and went slowly toward them. Where the hill touched the beach it terminated in a point of jagged rocks about seven feet high. Maggie and ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... hot during the day, but the night was bitterly cold. There was a heavy frost that night, and under a thick blanket upon the bare ground, I slept by fitful snatches. Let me tell you, friends, that the most terrible place upon earth is a battlefield at night. The groans of the wounded men and horses are awful beyond anything I ever heard. All night I ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... door and descended the steps, and he found himself in a gloomy and lonesome valley. Jagged mountains, black as night, rose on either side, and huge rocks seemed ready to topple down upon him at every step. Through broken clouds a watery moon shed a faint, fitful light, that came and went as the clouds, driven by a moaning wind, ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... heiress of the French throne, that even in the world of spirits she might be cheered by seeing Henry heading the armies of France, the terrible avenger of her wrongs. These hopes invigorated her until the fitful dream of her joyless life was terminated, and her restless spirit sank into the repose of the grave. She lived, however, to see her plans apparently in progress toward their most ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... and the howling ridges of Iceland, obtained a fresh development, with numerous modifications and strange additions, from the new life, climate, scenery, and customs to which they were there exposed. The temptation to predatory habits and strife, the necessity for an intense though fitful activity arising from their geographical situation, the fierce spirit nourished in them by their actual life, the tremendous phenomena of the Arctic world around them, all these influences break out to our view in the poetry, and are reflected by their results ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Lord Andover's house, and her knowledge of the secret between herself and Cuthbert, that the young man had felt half afraid lest she should contrive to betray it to others by her blushes, her bright, fitful glances, and her newborn softness in his presence, which gave a sweeter quality to her childish charms. He himself did not wish Martin Holt to be aware that anything had passed between him and Cherry till he could come boldly forward and ask her at her father's hands, having the wherewithal ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... time wore on, and Bosnia enjoyed a kind of fitful repose. There and in Herzegovina the feudal system had lost much of its primeval vigour, although a barbarous independence still prevailed, more especially in the latter province, where Ali Aga of Stolatz showed symptoms of forsaking the treacherous fidelity ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... leather, the flesh of his cheeks had sunken, his teeth showed in the drawing back of his lips. All these signs spoke of exhaustion and of ultimate collapse. But as the case grew more desperate, he seemed to discover in some unsuspected quality of his spirit, or perhaps merely of his youth, a fitful and wonderful power. He collapsed from weakness, to be sure; but in a moment his iron will, apparently angered to incandescence, got him to his feet and on his way with an excess of energy. He helped the others. He urged the dog. And then slowly the fictitious ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... with smoky old lamps and flaring torches, and the fitful light shows weird pictures to our unaccustomed eyes. Each booth is in charge of one or more women, and here and there is a man resplendent in overshadowing sombrero, with heavy silver braid wound about the crown. ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... till 1891, when the drawing on the huge stones became too much for my old back." Like his life-long friend and contemporary, Hine, he was not of Punch Punchy—at least, in respect to conviviality; and after a record of Staff service extending to 1844, with fitful contributions up to 1848, he deserted the precincts of Whitefriars, and soon after renounced wood-drawing in favour of his more lucrative employment. He had, however, already contributed ten cartoons—striking for their handling, if not at first for their finish. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... apoplectic seizures, or, in case of a too healthy and active digestion, liable, owing to a lack of a correspondingly active condition of the excretory organs, to go off in uraemic coma. This sporadic and fitful feasting has no perceptible effect on the Indian, who either simply works it off in exercise, or sleeps it off in a long and prolonged period of sleep, during which his lungs work with the deep and steady pull and persistence that a tug-boat exhibits when towing in a large ship ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... a book that she wanted in the drawing-room, and, when presently her grandfather fell asleep in his fitful manner, she went down after it. In crossing the hall she came upon Captain Stewart, who was dressed for the street and had his hat and stick in his hands. He did not live in his father's house, for he had a little flat in the rue du Faubourg ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... the course of events were fitful and wayward, so that effects started up without causes, and like causes under like conditions produced unlike effects, and anything might come of anything, there would be no such thing as that which we call nature. When we speak of nature, we imply a regular and definite flow of tendencies, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... me to race downstairs as soon as he was out of ear-shot, he was mistaken, for I hit the sack like the proverbial ton of crushed mortar. It had been literally weeks since I'd had a pleasant, restful sleep that was not broken by fitful dreams and worry-insomnia. Now that we had something solid to work on, I could look forward to some concrete action instead of merely ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... match after match that he struck into it lighted sufficiently to throw a dull glare about his groping face, and to sprinkle his hands with pale little spots of fire, but not sufficiently to light the candle. The stranger, taking advantage of this fitful illumination of his visage, looked intently and wonderingly at him. Jeremiah, when he at last lighted the candle, knew he had been doing this, by seeing the last shade of a lowering watchfulness clear away from his face, as ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... man living whom the country could so ill afford to lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable poet and dreamer, who sneered at the war, and at the great nation that waged it, with the pettishness of ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... gray afternoon was wearing away with keen gusts and fitful snow-falls. Dode looked up wearily: a sharp exclamation, rasped out by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... frosty bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache), there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney. Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of more inspiring ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... first fifteen minutes after Billy's arrival conversation was a fitful thing made up mostly of a merry monologue on the part of Billy herself, interspersed with somewhat dazed replies from one after another of her auditors as she talked to them in turn. No one thought to ask ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... Rothesay's absence passed,—not without anxiety, for it was war-time, and his letters were frequently interrupted. At first, whenever this happened, his wife fretted extremely—fretted is the right word, for it was more a fitful chafing than a positive grief. Sybilla knew not the sense of deep sorrow. Her nature resembled one of those sunny climes where even the rains are dews. So, after a few disappointments, she composed herself to the certainty that nothing would happen amiss to her Angus; and she determined never to ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... habitual contempt of what goes on about him") are much less amusing; and his letters to Joanna Baillie the dullest in the volume, unless it be the answers which Joanna Baillie sent. Best of all, perhaps, is the correspondence (scarcely used by Lockhart) between Scott and Lady Abercorn, with its fitful intervals of warmth and reserve. This alone would justify Mr. Douglas's volumes. But, indeed, while nothing can be found now to alter men's conception of Scott, any book about him is justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the owl that was high in the tree-top outside, according to the countryside superstition, or whether by a singular coincidence, he discovered that he had business elsewhere, he was soon gone, and the night was left to the chorusing katydids and tree-toads and to the weird, fitful illuminations of ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... him. Perhaps these things, by weaning her from all further care about life, might have found their natural effect in making her indifferent to the course of the trial, or even to its issue. And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies, 'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry light—sweet and woful to remember. Then——but why linger? ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... dear," I said gently and actually pushed her a little toward New York, which even now was beginning to appall me. She kissed me good-by. I looked up and saw her floating away in a cloud of fitful steam. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... the trail they rode into a cloud that rested trembling on the mountain-side, passed through it and emerged upon fitful sunlight. Near the top there came a sudden shower which descended with the souse of an overturned bucket. It won small attention from Judith, but Pete and Beck resented it in mule fashion, with a laying back of ears and lashing ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... unstable, unsteadfast, reversible, alterable, revocable, mobile, convertible, transmutable, commutable, kaleidoscopic, transformable, impermanent; volatile, fickle, mercurial, protean, irresolute, capricious, vacillating, fitful, inconstant, erratic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... distant land, seeking to know his destiny. All day he had journeyed thitherward, and the dusk had already fallen ere he reached the sacred spot. Jette sat on the glimmering altar-steps, clad in a flowing white robe, while on the altar itself burned a faint and fitful flame. The tall, slender trees, showing fantastic and ghostly in the fading light, made a fitting background for the gleaming shrine; and the elusive, unearthly beauty of the priestess was quite in keeping with the magic scene. Her ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... reflecting the masts and sails of the ship in extended lines upon the smooth sea. Now all was dark: the water rippled short and broke in foam; the smaller and lofty sails had been taken in, and the vessel was cleaving through the water; and the wind, in fitful gusts and angry moanings, proclaimed too surely that it had been awakened up to wrath, and was gathering its strength for destruction. The men were still busy reducing the sails, but they worked gloomily and discontentedly. What Schriften, the pilot, had said to them, Philip knew ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... visitor's expression. This man, who had visited him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with whom the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer evidently so impressionable to the lethal nature of his topic, to ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... she gave up her spying attitude, closed the telescope, and turned to the decaying embers. From these no appreciable beams now radiated, except when a more than usually smart gust brushed over their faces and raised a fitful glow which came and went like the blush of a girl. She stooped over the silent circle, and selecting from the brands a piece of stick which bore the largest live coal at its end, brought it to where she ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... "Pantheress!—beautiful forest-born!—wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom." "How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked—slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... With her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought, spirit-like—a thing made of an element—the ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... young girl, who scribbled queer little scratches in a tablet. Beside another desk in the opposite corner of the room were two men, both tall and gray and pleasant appearing, but so much absorbed in their conversation that they did not notice the children's entrance. Through a nearby door came the fitful clicking of some machine, and Peace could see a second girl seated at a table pounding a typewriter, while another man hurried to and fro from a row of shelves to a big iron box against the wall. None of them, however, paid any attention ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... April breath of memory might thaw out. This was not merely conjectural, of course. I had the story of his mental collapse from his mother in the early days of my sojourn in Bel-Oiseau; for it came to pass that a fitful caprice induced me to prolong my stay in the swart little village far into ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... if you were a Talleyrand in love matters; and, so completely versed in the pathology of the "fitful fever," as to be able to diagnose it at a glance; besides nursing the patient through all the several stages of the disease—watching every symptom, anticipating each change, bringing the "case," ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... these new, delightful friends went away, it seemed as if everything changed. Dull, foggy days, with fitful gusts, succeeded to the lovely month just gone, and the skies were leaden ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
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