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More "Flutter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... western breeze A row of golden tulips is nodding. They flutter their golden wings In a sudden ecstasy and say: Something comes to us from beyond, Out of the sky, beyond the hill We give ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... her moodily from under his dark brows, and noticed the color flutter over her cheek and throat in an adorable way. She had drawn her hand from him, and it rested on the window—a slim brown hand, with a curious ring on one finger—two tiny snakes whose jeweled heads formed the central point ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... his courage and his confidence as he approached the roaring crash, perpetual and always mounting, which showed him where the cube-army was busiest. The sound vibrated the very air, causing the bodies of Sarka to tingle with it, causing them to flutter and shake in their flight with its awesome power. But they did not hold back, flew onward through the gloom, leaving behind them the brightly lighted areas where Gens of Earth battled with the fireballs of the Martians, moving into the area of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... flesh, Or sometimes only wear a week or two;— Love's the first net which spreads its deadly mesh; Ambition, Avarice, Vengeance, Glory, glue The glittering lime-twigs of our latter days, Where still we flutter on ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... whispering softly from the South, and all the earth was glad, the husband of this child-wife was in his grave, and she was alone. Alone? No; she carried in her tired arms the hungry babe, and beneath her heart she felt the faint flutter of another life. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the shanty and looked at the wind and water, his pulses all a-flutter between the strong brandy and the wonderful gold in his pocket; and as he watched the veering of the pine-boughs to see which way they moved, their moaning seemed to be the voice of his widowed mother by her kitchen fire that day, saying, "He is ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... it, and made the walk home as long as he could, in the hope that something might cool down a bit; however, he had to go in, so, shrinking into the smallest possible dimensions, he glided silently into the house, hung up his hat, and sat down. Sally was in a flutter, she was full, it must come:—"What hast ta been trying to do this mornin'?" she began, looking ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... in actual earth-life, so there is for the Ego in Devachan the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force passing into semi-consciousness and lethargy, total oblivion, and—not death but birth, birth into another personality, and the resumption of action which daily begets new ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... found in as few readers; though, I believe, the observation of this forms a very principal pleasure in those who are capable of the discovery; every person, for instance, can distinguish between Sir Epicure Mammon and Sir Fopling Flutter; but to note the difference between Sir Fopling Flutter and Sir Courtly Nice requires a more exquisite judgment: for want of which, vulgar spectators of plays very often do great injustice in the theatre; where I have sometimes known a poet in danger ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... in sprigs of rhyme Until her life's full blossom-time, Flutter (like tremulous little birds) Her small and sweet ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... the outer air; I rushed through, and stared in the growing twilight down the black furrow of the flume. Far in the distance, and going like a streak, I spied the glittering glass windows of the little craft. Once I made out the flutter of a saucy hand. ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... Brineweald announced the usual morning visit of young Stephen Fearwell, and sure enough, up the main drive, at top speed, there appeared the familiar silhouette of the youth on his motor-cycle. This time, however, he did not seem to be alone, fair arms seemed to be clinging to him, and the flutter of a dress and a sun-bonnet ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... she said severely: "his legal mind takes such cut-and-dried views. Granted that it is a speculation, it seems a promising one; and nothing venture, nothing have. I don't know how you feel, Die, but I am quite willing to do my share." Then Dinah, who was in quite a flutter of excitement and pleasure, looked at her adviser in ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a crowd of small boats flutter O'er the intervening space, Bearing hearts too full to utter Thoughts that flush the eager face! See young Eric foremost gaining— (For a father's love athirst!) Every nerve and muscle straining, But to touch the dear ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the clanger from them is practically reduced to nothing by the crossings dipping under them at the street corners. The centre of the capital is approached by colonnades, which at night bear groups of great bulbous lamps, and by day flutter with the Altrurian and Regionic flags. Around this centre are the stores and restaurants and theatres, and galleries and libraries, with arcades over the sidewalks, like those in Bologna; sometimes the arcades are in two ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... affairs occasioned some flutter also in Manchester Square. It could not make much difference personally to old Mr. Wharton. He was, in fact, as old as the baronet, and did not pay much regard to his own chance of succession. But the ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... too great sensation. The air-bath was so sudden, you know. Think of all his beautiful machinery starting off at once in full motion; all his thousand outside feelers answering to the touch of the cool air; the flutter and crash at the ear; and that curious contrivance the eye, looking out wonderingly and bewildered upon the great world, so glorious and dazzling to his unworn perceptions; his net-work of nerves, his wheels and pulleys, his air-pumps ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... there had come a change upon the three, and silently divined whose unconscious influence had wrought the miracle. The embargo was off his tongue, and he was in a fever to ask that question which brings a flutter to the stoutest heart; but though the "man" had come, the "hour" had not. So, by way of steadying his nerves, he paced the room, pausing often to take notes of his companions, and each pause seemed to increase his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and at last the walls, without touching the bird at all. In the end, however, they caught her: and the wife said, 'Shall I kill her at once?' 'No,' cried he, 'that is letting her off too easily: she shall die a much more cruel death; I will eat her.' But the sparrow began to flutter about, and stretch out her neck and cried, 'Carter! it shall cost thee thy life yet!' With that he could wait no longer: so he gave his wife the hatchet, and cried, 'Wife, strike at the bird and kill her in my hand.' And the wife struck; but she missed her aim, and hit ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... we've got our new way of feeling things. Rosamund tells us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set by a young Athenian who's over here studying English. He catches the butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go. He doesn't jab a pin into it as our composers would. Oh, there's Cynthia! I hope ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Beloved Constance,—What shall I say to you? Here I sit, in a strange room, in a strange land,—and my life lies behind me. It is close upon midnight, and very dark. I can see nothing out of window. The air is hot and heavy, the moths flutter round my candle; I cannot save them all. I am trying to write you a letter—do you understand? Oh, but I have no thoughts, only visions! Three there are that rise before me, sometimes ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... at every turn. One indecent (there is no other word for it) chromatic oriental phrase is so strange that none of us can ever recall it or forget it! And the frantically nervous Luisita Puchol, whose eyelids spring open like the cover of a Jack-in-the-box, and whose hands flutter like saucy butterflies, sings suggestive popular ditties just a shade better than any one ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Mrs. Redmain's card, inviting her with her husband to an evening party, it raised in her a bewildered flutter—of pleasure, of fear, of pride, of shyness, of dismay: how dared she show her face in such a grand assembly? She would not know a bit how to behave herself! But it was impossible, for she had no dress fit to go anywhere! What would Tom say if she looked ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... There was a flutter and a whirr, and then came a number of shrill cries from the birds which were wounded. These the boys at once proceeded to put out of ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill
... had not failed to observe the flutter of alarm that shadowed her eyes so swiftly, and that so swiftly was gone as she clapped her hands ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... if all the hills about there were pure chink, and all belonged to me, I would give them if I could just talk to her as I wanted to. But I was afraid to begin; for when I would think of saying anything to her, my heart would begin to flutter like a duck in a puddle. And if I tried to outdo it and speak, it would get right smack up in my throat, and choke me like a cold potato. It bore on my mind in this way, till at last I concluded I must die if ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... the North not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes. Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting, and, turning it over, says bravely, "I think it will dry." Mathematical and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... that the Advertiser aroused interest enough to cause any one to assemble round the Office. Ezra's heart gave a quick flutter at the sight, and he gathered himself together like a runner who sees his goal in view. Throwing away his cigar, he hurried on ad joined ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... men stand in groups laughing and talking in voices pitched shrill with crates excitement. In the brown light of the wharf, full of rows of yellow and barrels and sacks, full of racket of cranes, among which winds in and out the trivial lilt of the Hawaiian tune, there is a flutter of gay dresses and coloured hats of women, and ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... to the door with me," said the girl hesitatingly, but with a certain pleased flutter. "Still I never heard anything extra good about Wall Street brokers, or sports who go to prize fights, either. Ain't you got any ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... friend, the Lord foresaw your case, when, with reference to such distractions which flutter about the soul like this, He replied to the Venerable Jeanne de Matel, who complained of such annoyances, that she should imitate the hunter, who, when he misses the big game he is seeking, seizes the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... midst of an ordinary Continental nobleman; but the announcement that the Baron Rudolph von Blitzenberg had been appointed attache to the German embassy at the Court of St. James was unquestionably received with a certain flutter of excitement. That his estates were as vast as an average English county, and his ancestry among the noblest in Europe, would not alone perhaps have arrested the attention of the paragraphists, since acres and forefathers of foreign extraction ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... one darts its long bayonet-like beak into the water, invariably drawing it out with a fish between the mandibles; this, after a short convulsive struggle, and a flutter or two of its tail fins, disappearing down the crane's ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... Volsces; men and lads, Stain all your edges on me.—Boy! False hound! If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there, That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli: Alone ...
— The Tragedy of Coriolanus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Mr Lupus, though delicately put, and in a nervous flutter, ought by rights to have hit the mayor and Mr Garraway hard; the pair of them being trustees of the charity under which the Free Grammar School was administered. But in those days few public men gave a thought to education, and Mr Lupus taught school, year in and year out, obedient ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... chosen a fitter costume to visit us in," said Merton at length. "I can hardly believe that you come to us from some other part of this same foul, hot, dusty London. To my fever-parched fancy you seem rather to have come from some distant unpolluted place, where green leaves flutter in the wind and cast shadows on the ground; where crystal showers fall, and the vision of the ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... leaps a stricken antelope, and holding the spear poised rushed right into the thickest of the fray. The warriors saw her, and raised such a shout that it echoed like thunder against the mountains. They massed together, and following the flutter of her white robe crashed into the dense heart of the foe. Down went the Matuku before them like trees before a whirlwind. Nothing could stand in the face of such a rush as that. It was as the ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... and shall not stop either. Bonn is in a flutter since I arrived and I shall easily put an end to the paltry, under-hand opposition which had been formed against me. By the time you arrive I shall have well and ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... of the second act of Faust.[22] The effect was great, and gave me a high satisfaction. We are once more transported into Faust's study, where Mephistopheles finds all just as he had left it. He takes from the hook Faust's old study-gown, and a thousand moths and insects flutter out from it. By the directions of Mephistopheles as to where these are to settle down, the locality is brought very clearly before our eyes. He puts on the gown, while Faust lies behind a curtain in a state of paralysis, intending to play the doctor's part once more. He pulls the bell, which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... good taste which will surprise no one after the list of guests, literature had scarcely been mentioned. However, the butterfly flittings of this French tilting match were certain to come to it, were it only to flutter over this essentially French subject. But before coming to the turn in the conversation which led the Consul-General to speak, it will not be out of place to give some account of him ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... Village with its big elms and shaded roads, its wide meadows and encircling green hills. It was all new and delightful after the bare, primeval grandeur of the mountains. Besides, and Wade laughed softly to himself, when all was said and done, he really wanted to meet her. The prospect brought a flutter to his heart and a pleasant excitement to his mind. He would probably fall in love with her again, but there was no harm in that since he would be off before the disease could ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... rising fogs, and the sun is not admitted below them. The black embers fly, and rolling into one body, they thicken, and take a form, and assume heat and life from the flames. Their own lightness gives them wings; and first, like birds, {and} then real birds, they flutter with their wings. At once innumerable sisters are fluttering, whose natal origin is the same. And thrice do they go around the pile, and thrice does their clamour rise in concert into the air. In the fourth ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... great solitude is quick with life. Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds, And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man, Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground, Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee, A more ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... and he had scarcely reached his station there when a boat, pulling furiously over from Gibraltar, reported that Admiral Linois' squadron had made its appearance off the Rock, beating up westward. The sails of the Caesar were instantly swung round, a many-coloured flutter of bunting summoned the rest of the squadron to follow, and Saumarez began his eager chase of the French, bearing away for the Gut under a light north-west wind. But the breeze died down, and the current swept the ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... place I'd go to, after I'd got my title, and was rigged out in Tight-fit's tip-top, should be—our cursed shop! to buy a dozen or two pair of white kid. Ah, ha! What a flutter there would be among the poor pale devils as were standing, just as ever, behind the counters, at Tag-rag and Co.'s when my carriage drew up, and I stepped, a tip-top swell, into the shop. Tag-rag would come and attend to me himself! No, he wouldn't—pride wouldn't ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... speak. At the first mention of Macdonald's name Sheba's eyes dilated. Her smile, her sweet, glad pleasure at Gordon's arrival, were already gone like the flame of a blown candle. Clearly her heart was a-flutter, in fear of she knew not what. When the Indian woman told how she had first crossed the path of Macdonald, the color flamed into the cheeks of the Irish girl, but as the story progressed, the blood ebbed ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... and in the pools—in short, with the poorest sort of gun I could have shot a thousand in one day. One can hear the wild geese calling.... There are lots of them here too. One often comes upon a string of cranes or swans.... Snipe and woodcock flutter about in the birch copses. The hares which are not eaten or shot here, stand on their hindlegs, and, pricking up their ears, watch the passer-by with an inquisitive stare without the slightest misgiving. They are so often running across the road that ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... immediately falls, the catch is released, the switch flies up, and the unlucky bird dangles in the air by the legs. If the trapper is near he can easily release the struggling creature before it is at all injured, otherwise it will flutter itself into a ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... fleeces lay about in the grass, so motionless that they might be the work of a vigorous sculptor. The branches of the trees were so still, so delicate in their outlines against the pale sky, that they made one uneasy; they seemed to have lost the art of waving, as if leaves should never again flutter upon them. A net-work of low stone walls put loosely together, marking off the absurdly small fields, straggled over the face of the landscape, looking in the curious evening light like a great grey web fantastically spun by some humorous spider. The brown figure ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... agreeable flutter I left my room and, descending the stairs, passed the Count's door very much at my leisure. There was just a chance that the beautiful songstress might emerge. I dropped my stick on the lobby, near their ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... we shall be all intellect, and better fitted to receive them."—"'Tis too much!—too much," said I, in broken accents: "how am I oppressed with the pleasure you give me!—O, Sir, bless me more gradually, and more cautiously—for I cannot bear it!" And, indeed, my heart went flutter, flutter, flutter, at his dear breast, as if it wanted to break its too narrow prison, to mingle still ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... youthful and sweet, Scatter the blossom under her feet! Break, happy land, into earlier flowers! Make music, O bird, in the new-budded bowers! Blazon your mottos of blessing and prayer! Welcome her, welcome her, all that is ours! Warble, O bugle, and trumpet, blare! Flags, flutter out upon turrets and towers! Flames, on the windy headland flare! Utter your jubilee, steeple and spire! Clash, ye bells, in the merry March air! Flash, ye cities, in rivers of fire! Rush to the roof, sudden rocket, and ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... dubiously over the threshold of the cottage. Presently, as the air grew chilly, he built a new nest for himself, under the mantelpiece in my friend's study. And every morning, so soon as the fire burned brightly, he would flutter down to perch on the fender and bask in the light and warmth of the coals. But after a few weeks he began to ail; possibly because the study was a small one, and he could not get in it the exercise that he needed; more probably because of the draughts. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Angus Macdonald's Cochin-China hen, having been driven from its own home by the flood, had strayed into Mr Ravenshaw's house and established itself, uninvited, in the cupboard. It received Miss Trim with a croak of indignation and a flutter. Starting back with a slight, "Oh!" the poor lady fell; and who shall adequately describe, or even imagine, the effects of that fall? Many a time had Miss Trim descended that stair and passage on ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... is a little flutter among this brood. A gentleman, at the alley door, wishes to see M. Sorel. M. Sorel leads the gentleman out, through the alley gate, to the front street-door; then, retiring whence he came, he shortly appears from within at the front door, which opens only after a struggle. ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... early morning when the earth grows cold, When river mists creep up, And those asleep are nearest death, She died. The feather would not flutter in her breath; And those who long had watched her slipped away, Too weary then to weep; They could do that next day— They left her lonely on the bed, Under a long, glistening sheet, in feeble tallow-shine, Rigid from muffled feet to ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... maid, brought him his overcoat. Madame desired him to wear it, as he had a cold. "Very well," said Edmund, obliging as usual. Approaching to put the coat on, a little later, he stopped short. Surely the wind didn't cause that singular flutter in the cloth! Then the flap moved. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... to follow, and I am made to go through a little combination of what I have read and of that which she has told me in her direct, compact manner. Thus does she enable me to produce a written paper which never fails to start the "Culture-Seeking Club" into a little flutter of supposed intellectual excitement. For a moment, at least, I am forgotten, or, if remembered at all, they say to one another as they sip that everlasting pale pink foam out of the "dainty art gems from Venice, you know:" "Ah, Sophia Gilder is her more clever mamma's ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... Jean, as they reached the ambulance, "I wish you had made a little memorandum of what I'm expected to do—I'm all in a flutter this morning. You see, without your help my case is hopeless. But I think I'll try for the mule-buyer. I'm getting tired looking at these slab-sided cowmen. Now, just look at those mules—haven't had a harness on in a month. And Tiburcio can't hold four of ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... fellow. Rumour also had it that he was none too happy in his marriage, and that his Mrs. Clephane was something of the same sort. I've seen her several times; she was of the type to make men's hearts flutter." ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... attempt, turned aside, as if not to see Dick's movements—a circumstance which did not escape the notice of the group, and confirmed all their suspicions, Mr. Avenel, with a serious, thoughtful air, and a slow step, approached the group. Nor did the great Roman general more nervously "flutter the dove-cotes in Corioli," than did the advance of the supposed X. Y. agitate the bosoms of Lord Spendquick and his sympathizing friends. Pocket-book in hand, and apparently feeling for something formidable within its mystic recesses, step by step came Dick Avenel towards ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... would be those who had been kind to her, and nobody had been so kind as a certain lady named Mrs. Montacute Jones. Then she spoke of her coming trial. "Don't joke with me about it any more, there's a dear woman. They all flutter me here, talking of it always, though they mean to be kind. But it seems to me so serious. I wish that nobody would speak to me of it except George, and he seems to think ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... such as are qualified to moderate and counterbalance it. It has been an old complaint, that the coxcomb carries it with them before the man of sense. When we see a fellow loud and talkative, full of insipid life and laughter, we may venture to pronounce him a female favourite: Noise and flutter are such accomplishments as they cannot withstand. To be short, the passion of an ordinary woman for a man is nothing else but self-love diverted upon another object: She would have the lover a woman in every thing ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... barred the plateau with long shadows, when Secundra uttered a small cry of satisfaction: and, leaning swiftly forth, I thought I could myself perceive a change upon that icy countenance of the unburied. The next moment I beheld his eyelids flutter; the next they rose entirely, and the week-old corpse looked me for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... later she confidingly took his arm and strolled toward the library, it was evident that all her flutter and hesitancy, her seeming freedom and mimic show of war, were like those of some bright tropical bird fascinated by a remorseless serpent whose intent eyes and deadly purpose are creating a spell ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... With a flutter of skirts the girl followed, her head inclined, as though she was humiliated or greatly embarrassed. She went to the couch and faced him, while an attempt at calmness and a determined fear struggled to control ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... "Now I see what you're at. You want more capital. You want to work the thing on a big scale. I might take a share or two myself, just for the sake of having a flutter." ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... beside me at the instrument; I felt her breath fanning my cheek; and as she placed her arm behind me on the chair-back, a white ribbon, getting disengaged from her beautiful ball-dress, fell across my shoulder, where by my singing and Seraphina's soft sighs it was kept in a continual flutter backwards and forwards, like a true love-messenger. It is a wonder how I kept ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... water; and the rain had put out my fires already, as effectually as if it had been an overturned broth-pot. That I never took off my clothes that night I need not say, though of what was happening in the glen I could only guess. A flutter against my window now and again, when the rain had abated, told me of another bird that had flown there to die; and with Waster Lunny, I kept up communication by waving a light, to which he replied in a similar manner. ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... Scillies; and there were tales of men who, as they listened, had seen the ghosts of drowned mariners rising and falling on the moon-rays, or floating with their white faces thrown back while they drank in the music; yea, even echoing the words of the song in whispers like the flutter of ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... carried downstairs, and in spite of the usual host of apprehension, with some added new ones for to-day, no slightest accident had marred the perilous trip from her front bedroom to the living-room below; still everything and everybody, save old Dr. Bond, was in a flutter. Tension and apprehension marked the faces and actions of all. Not till the last of six propping, easing, supporting pillows had been adjusted; till hot-water bottles were in near contact with two "freezing" ankles; ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... with longing, but they never can fly wing to wing. Through the bars of the cage they look, and vain is their wish to know each other. They flutter their wings in yearning, and sing, "Come closer, my love!" The free bird cries, "It cannot be, I fear the closed doors of the cage." The cage bird whispers, "Alas, my wings are ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... Matabele campaign that Baden-Powell came across a fine wild boar, which, he remarks, caused quite a flutter in his breast. "'If I only had you in the open, my friend,' thought I. 'If only you had a horse that was fit enough to come anywhere near me,' grinned he. And so we parted." A ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... moved her lips, but she was unable even to whisper. Zbyszko guessed that she tried to pronounce his name and that she called him. Immediately afterward, her emaciated hands began to twitch and flutter upon the rug covering her. That lasted only for a moment. No doubt was left now that ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... no terror for King Cotton no longer reigns supreme. The king is dead but the people rejoice as the scepter falls from his nerveless hand and a new monarch ascends the throne. Millions of royal banners flutter in the breeze glistening green with promise for the future and hope is high, and the hearts of the people light as they gather to pay homage to the new monarch, Her Imperial ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... river. The fog holds the bleared eyes of the morning. And I, stiff with watching, suspect some evil. Some foul play is in the mountains, stalking in the shadows of the dawn. Would God the releasing trumpet would blow and the flag flutter on the mountain side, and that I might find all well! General Washington is on a journey. Would God he were returned! [The sound of a bugle is heard.] Blow, blessed bugle! Blow to the rising Sun! Blow to the dayspring of Liberty, to the ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... bear to think of them!' They had never borne reflecting on, those poor outcasts; wounding too deeply the core of true refinement hidden under layers of conformity to the sense of property—wounding too grievously the deepest thing in him—a love of beauty which could give him, even now, a flutter of the heart, thinking of his evening in the society of a pretty woman. And he went downstairs, through the swinging doors, to the back regions. There, in the wine-cellar, was a hock worth at least two pounds a bottle, a Steinberg Cabinet, better than any Johannisberg that ever went down throat; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pavements, seeing vaguely the sacred boats upon the walls, Horus and Thoth, the king before Osiris; as I mounted and descended with the priests to roof and floor, I longed, instead of the clamour of the bats, to hear the light flutter of the soft wings of the Ba of Hathor, flying from Paradise to this sad temple of the desert to bring her comfort in the gloom. I thought of her as a poor woman, suffering as only women ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... in the buttonhole, corrected some of the rumours, but without much success. Finding the throng so thick, he held a long debate between curiosity and dignity. The latter won, and he returned to No. 2, Alma Villas, in a flutter, some ten minutes before ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... characteristically corvine habit. The black-throated jay is an exceedingly restless bird; it is always on the move. Like its English cousin, it is not a bird of very powerful flight. As Gilbert White says: "Magpies and jays flutter with powerless wings, and make no despatch." In the Himalayas there is no necessity for it to make much despatch; it rarely has to cover any distance on the wing. When it does fly a dozen yards or so, its passage is marked by much ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... myself right with him, and consulted his feelings before I asked him for his news. What a blessing a woman's vanity is sometimes! I almost forgot my risks and responsibilities in my anxieties to be charming. For a minute or two I felt a warm little flutter of triumph. And it was a triumph—even with an old man! In a quarter of an hour I had him smirking and smiling, hanging on my lightest words in an ecstasy, and answering all the questions I put to him like a good ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... wholesome, happy place, even for these young heathen who were enjoying their bodies too much to care particularly about their souls. And when the superintendent stood up to rap the school to order for the close of the session, and line out one of Watts's sober hymns, there was a pleasant flutter of getting ready, and the smart young man of the neighborhood took his tuning-fork from his vest pocket to hit against his teeth so he could set the tune. He wore a very short-tailed coat, and had his hair brushed up in a high roach ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... The squire brought his hand down with a thump on the table, near him, which made his wife's heart beat hard for some minutes. 'And as for Roger,' he continued, unconscious of the flutter he had put her into, 'he'll have to make his own way, and earn his own bread; and, I'm afraid, he's not getting on very brilliantly at Cambridge. He must not think of falling in love ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... not, many uses in speculative divinity. But its weightiest practical application is shown, when it is employed to free the souls of the unwary and weak in faith from the nets and snares, the insidious queries and captious objections, of the Infidel by calming the flutter of their spirits. They must be quieted, before we can commence the means necessary for their disentanglement. And in no way can this be better effected than when the frightened captives are made to see in how ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with Boulogne or with Arras. But as the French head of the great historic ferry between England and the Continent, and as the seat of sundry thriving factories, it is both a busy and prosperous town. I found its streets swarming with people and its houses a flutter of flags and banners, when I came to it on June 3, 1889, to see the 'inauguration,' by President Carnot, of the works on which the French Government has been spending millions of francs during the past decade, with an eye to deepening and enlarging the harbour. The weather was magnificent. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the frost, yet still the forest-clad hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful—always. Without colour, or leaf, or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer—the power is ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and will satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the barren wild? The heart from the moment ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... wont, and wished Tabea happiness, but intimated that Daniel was a bold man to undertake to subdue the Hofcavalier. Sister Persida's woman's heart was set all a-flutter, and she quite forgot that she was trying to be a nun, and that she belonged to the solitary and forsaken turtledove in the wilderness. She whispered in Tabea's ear: "You'll look so nice when you're married, dear, and Daniel will be so pleased, and the young ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... interesting of sights is to see one of the schools of minnows that fairly abound in Lake Tahoe. In the clear and pellucid water one can clearly see them swim along. As they pass a rocky place a trout will dart out and catch his prey. A flutter at once passes through the whole school. Yet, strange to say, the trout will sometimes swim around such a body and either stupify them with fear, or hypnotize them into forgetfulness of their presence, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... later the society papers announced the engagement, and the world of gaiety was all in a flutter, over the many functions that were immediately ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... is of no use. Johnny. I Must go to school, The bell is going to stop; That terrible old toad, If only he would hop. Toad. I Must cross the path, I can hear my children croak; I hope that dreadful boy Will not give me a poke. A hop, and a start, a flutter, and a rush, Johnny is at school, and the toad ...
— Baby Chatterbox • Anonymous
... talked together for an hour before he returned. A short time before Edith intended going home, he came in, with his ever cheerful face, and after greeting her cordially, turned to his wife, and spoke in a voice so full of tenderness and affection, that Edith felt her heart flutter and the tears steal unbidden to her eyes. It was so different from the way her husband spoke. The contrast caused her to feel more deeply, if possible, than ever, her own sad, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... occasions that the child was sent for. Nurse was in a flutter at once, putting on his best brown velvet suit, with his little cream-silk shirt, and brushing out his curls ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... open the box the rustles will escape, whether you are wearing a silk dress or not," said the man, seriously. Then he picked up another box. "In this," he continued, "are many assorted flutters. They are invaluable to make flags flutter on a still day, when there is no wind. You, sir," turning to the Wizard, "ought to have this assortment. Once you have tried my goods I am sure you will ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... errours with airy petulance, suitable enough to the levity of the controversy; the other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... far beyond me I respect The virtue, equal to the stiffest crux, Which thus forbids your costume to deflect Into the primrose path of straw and ducks; I praise that fine regard for red-hot tape Which calmly and without an eyelid's flutter Suffers the maddening noon to melt your ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... and flowers; Could talk of powder, patches, paint, With the same zeal as of a saint; 380 Could prove a Sibyl brighter far Than Venus or the Morning Star; Whilst something still so gay, so new, The smile of approbation drew, And females eyed the charming man, Whilst their hearts flutter'd with their fan; Trifle, who would by no means miss An opportunity like this, Proceeding on his usual plan, Smiled, stroked his chin, and thus began: 390 'With shears or scissors, sword or knife, When the Fates cut the thread of life, (For if we to the grave are sent, No matter with ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... stopped rocking and leaned forward in her chair to peer more sharply. What was the child—"She's climbing a tree!" breathed Aunt Olivia in undisguised astonishment. Even as she breathed it, there came to her faintly the snapping of twigs and flutter of leaves. Then all was quite still, but she could discern with her pair of trusty Plummer eyes ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... flutter to the floor. "The perfume of a plum petal," he said softly, in English; "the perfume ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... They never wait for the sound of the bell which the good priest rings every day when it is time for them to be fed, but fly down to the pavement whenever they catch sight of a person with a bit of grain. They flutter down by twos and threes, and beg with their best coos for something ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... handful of pages, no matter how much you have made them your own, are at best but an obscure and questionable spoil. Here they are. "Failure"—"Astonishing": take your choice; or perhaps both, or neither—a mere rustle and flutter of pieces of paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... on the hill, having (as Simpson was to point out several times later) Mentone on its left hand and Monte Carlo on its right. A long winding path led up through its garden of olives to the front door, and through the mimosa trees which flanked this door we could see already a flutter of white aprons. The staff was on the loggia ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... the icy silence, Where the glacier's teeth hang white, And even the sun-god Baldur, Looks down in vague affright, You flutter like startled spectres, With a prayer on your lips for the goal— To stand for one thrilling moment At the awful, ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... was out a flutter of excitement was passing through the village, Milly Lord being the first to discover it. She, poor girl! was sitting at her little window listening to the beat of the rain, and the swish of the grasses that grew in her garden ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... shoulder. "He walked up with me—he wants to see you both. But"—her voice dropped to an intense whisper—"he has asked to see Miss Walton first—wants to speak to her alone! What does he mean?" Anne was in a tremendous flutter, and it was plain that wild ideas were coursing through her. "You are my chaperone, of course, but what can he want to see ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the well-kept grounds, and the windows didn't show so much as the flutter of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around the house—nor, Malone realized, thinking of "Gone With the Wind," were there any horses ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... away in sprigs of rhyme Until her life's full blossom-time, Flutter (like tremulous little birds) Her small and sweet ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... warm pressure of her fingers. Never before had he so poignantly realized that innate splendor of femininity that was uniquely hers, a quality more potent than any mere beauty. Her look met his straight and frankly, but he heard the breath flutter at her lips, and he thought to read in her eyes a question, a hunger, and a delight. His voice was under rigid ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... moodily from under his dark brows, and noticed the color flutter over her cheek and throat in an adorable way. She had drawn her hand from him, and it rested on the window—a slim brown hand, with a curious ring on one finger—two tiny snakes whose jeweled heads formed the central ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... measured pace at which we were walking, we were obliged to stop every minute to recover our breath. Lucien followed us so eagerly that I was obliged to check him several times. He was surprised at not seeing any living creature, not even those beautiful golden flies which, in Mexico, flutter round every bush. But the north wind was blowing, and the sun was hidden behind the clouds, so that both the insects and birds kept in the deepest recesses of their hiding-places. As we advanced, our road became much steeper, and we were obliged to cling to the shrubs ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... up in her arms and bounded into the air. Her tresses began to lift and rise and spread and stream and flow and flutter. And North Wind and Diamond went flying southward. The sea slid away from under them like a great web of shot silk, blue shot with gray, and green shot with purple. The stars appeared to sail away past them, like golden boats ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald
... She entered into the activities of the household with such amazing zest, it seemed as if we were playing kitchen furniture. While it surprised me how one young girl could so disturb regular working hours and get things generally a-flutter, I could easily see that all she needed was a chance to be herself. That was the point that Kishimoto had to ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... conspire to dress dinner and him so punctually together that the one may not be ready before the other. As peacocks and ostriches have the gaudiest and finest feathers, yet cannot fly, so all his bravery is to flutter only. The beggars call him "my lord," and he takes them at their words and pays them for it. If you praise him, he is so true and faithful to the mode that he never fails to make you a present of himself, and will not be refused, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... last flutter of her dress had disappeared around the bend of the road, he walked ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... dressed, is the most unshapely in the woods. It is stiff and abrupt in its manners and sedentary in its habits, sitting around all day, in the dark recesses of the woods, on the dry twigs and branches, uttering now and then its plaintive cry, and "with many a flirt and flutter" snapping up its ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... a state of repentance and flutter that he could not let me take a decent farewell. The sound of the others' horses had long died away down the hill when he began to tell me what he ought ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... the eyes may uncover its pretense. For by this token may be known the real Crotalids from the mock: a small but distinct pit between eye and nostril. Lacking this mark, no ventral crawler in the land of the free need cause a flutter in the most timid breast, with one ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Hundreds of glow-worms were shimmering in the hedge. The grass-hoppers were whirring in the mielles beyond; a flutter of wings went by overhead. The leaves were rustling gently; a fresh wind was coming up from the sea upon the soft, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as they flutter down, softly, one by one, whisper soothingly, "Rest, poor heart, rest!" It is as though our mother smoothed our hair, and ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... fair to exclude all but those which are domesticated with us, or which are willing, sometimes, to come and live in our houses. In the country, and very often in towns, our homes are surrounded, at certain seasons, by beautiful birds, that flutter and twitter about in the trees, and sing most charmingly in the bright hours of the early morning, making the spring-time and the summer tenfold more delightful than they would be without them. These birds ask nothing of us but a few cherries or berries now and then, and they pay well for these ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... turkeys suspected danger; they erected their tall brown and grey necks, and looked about them like alarmed sentinels. "They're off!" cried we — but just as they were preparing to run, which they do with great rapidity, one of them was seen to flutter his wings and tumble over, whilst the crack of the rifle proclaimed the triumph of Migo. We rushed through the brush-wood, elated as schoolboys who have shot their first throstle with a horse-pistol, and found the bustard flapping ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... I press the button, no less than six little, picture maids flutter to my door, each begging for the honor of fastening me up the back. How delighted Jack would be to assign them this particular honor for life. Such whispers over the wonders of a foreign-made dress as they struggle with the curious fastenings! (They should hear my lord's ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... little birds flutter in the sun, and eat my crumbs and the great music swells out while you ask the garcon for another bock. Do you remember, father dear, the day that ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... and fly away from him on first sight; and then he bewitches them nearer, and they are filled with pain seemingly, and flutter and fly about as if in ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... in the maiden Spring? Who heard her footfall, swift and light As fairy-dancing in the night? Who guessed what happy dawn would bring The flutter of her bluebird's wing, The blossom of her mayflower-face To brighten every shady place? One morning, down the village street, "Oh, here am I," we heard her sing,— And none had been awake to greet The coming ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... condition of the blind man quite melted Lucille; never had she been so strongly affected. She felt a strange flutter at the heart, a secret and earnest sympathy, that attracted her at once towards him. She wished that Heaven had suffered ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... With flutter of swift wings and songs Together rose the feathered throngs, And singing scattered far apart; Deep peace ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... scion of New York's aristocracy as one of the most desirable residences in the city; so motioning to the man who had accompanied me to take his stand in a doorway near by and watch for the signal I would give him in case I wanted Mr. Gryce, I turned to the woman, who was now all in a flutter, and asked her how she proposed to get me into the house without the knowledge of ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... we came here, and when the amount of our legacy was first promulgated, we were in a terrible flutter. Andrew became a man of fashion, with all the haste that tailors, and horses, and dinners, could make him. My father, honest man, was equally inspired with lofty ideas, and began a career that promised a liberal benefaction of good things to the poor—and my ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... white puff of smoke beside him indicated that the Archibalds had been watching the combat closely. A second, third and fourth followed in rapid succession until suddenly at the fifteenth burst the Taube began to drop and flutter down, like a leaf falling from a forest tree on a quiet October day. Five minutes later, far out in the salient, we saw a second driven down in a straight nose dive, making the third for that day in the vicinity of Ypres. One might watch for months, as I afterwards ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... that time moved not with its usual swiftness,—that the old year lingered with a sad regret, as if loath to pass away and let the new come in. Even now the midnight clock is striking,—eleven,—twelve;—the last flutter of the old year's robe is out of sight, and the new year glides in with noiseless feet, like one who enters the chamber of the dead. These are but melancholy fancies;—because I am sad myself must I put all the world in mourning? The old year did not linger;—it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... he confessed, "I was very angry. It brings great pain to a man to see the thing he loves droop her wings, flutter down to earth, and walk the common highway. It is not for you, dear one, to mingle with that crowd who scheme and cheat, hide and deceive, for any reward in the world, whether it be money, fame, or the love of country. You were ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... departing in sweet odours—that they quite made up for the absence of the flowers. And the wind—no, there was no wind—there was only a memory of wind that woke now and then in the bosom of the wood, shook down a few leaves, like the thoughts that flutter away in sighs, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... sculptor. The branches of the trees were so still, so delicate in their outlines against the pale sky, that they made one uneasy; they seemed to have lost the art of waving, as if leaves should never again flutter upon them. A net-work of low stone walls put loosely together, marking off the absurdly small fields, straggled over the face of the landscape, looking in the curious evening light like a great grey web fantastically spun by some humorous spider. The brown figure of a shepherd ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... in the market, Brigaut, lying in wait, was able to get near her. Though he saw her tremble and turn pale, like an autumn leaf about to flutter down, he did not lose his head, but quietly bought fruit of the market-woman with whom Sylvie was bargaining. He found his chance of slipping a note to Pierrette, all the while joking the woman with the ease of a man accustomed to such manoeuvres; so cool was he ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... men who, as they listened, had seen the ghosts of drowned mariners rising and falling on the moon-rays, or floating with their white faces thrown back while they drank in the music; yea, even echoing the words of the song in whispers like the flutter of birds' wings. ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... attention. The English sparrow was first, as usual, to inquire into their right to be out of their own tree. He came near them, alighted, and began to hop still closer. Not in the least startled by his threatening manner, the nearest youngster looked at him, and began to flutter his wings, to call, and to move toward him, as if expecting to be fed. This was too much even for a ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... nasty silence. Smith glowered behind his cocked pistol, and the policeman faced the frowning gun, motionless, waiting for the flutter of Piegan's eye that meant action. The gurgling keg was almost empty ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... once this summer, in the 'great world.' His feet are bare, and leave their tiny impress on the sand—a thousand times more expressive than any Parisian boot; his little bronzed hands are crystallized with the salt air; his dark-brown curls are flecked with sea-foam, and flutter in the evening breeze; his face is radiant—a reflection of the sun, a mystery of life and ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... of entreaty sent a queer flutter to the very depths of her calm soul. But the flutter failed to reach or to titillate the steady eyes. Nor did it creep into the level and self-possessed voice, as Dorcas ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... moons hence, to use the language of our story-teller, if she continues as elusive as the wind. I have had glimpses of her, or rather of the flutter of her vanishing raiment. A being with a wonderfully perfect face, clothed in heterogeneous and many-coloured garments, and educated on the amazing fictions with which her foster-father's memory seems to be stored, would ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... the love that must utter While goes a swift omnibus by! (Though sweet is I SCREAM* when the flutter Of fans shows thermometers high)— But if what I bawl, or I mutter, Falls into your ear but to die, Oh, the dew that falls into the gutter Is not more unhappy than I! *[Footnote: Query—Should this be Ice cream, or ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Another flutter of the breath, one slight movement of the mangled hand, and I bent down closer to the poor fellow—closer, because my eyes were so dimmed ...
— "Surly Tim" - A Lancashire Story • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... them. That pictured face on the wall is lovely, but lovelier still may the wife of thy bosom be when she meets thee on the resurrection morn! Those baby cherubs in the old Italian painting—how gracefully they flutter and sport among the soft clouds, full of rich young life and baby joy! Yes, beautiful indeed, but just such a one at this very moment is that once pining, deformed child of thine, over whose death-cradle thou wast weeping a month ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... shall be told, there are imitators. I know it too well; but what lasting influence can be exerted on social life by those who have no real life of their own? They will but flutter in the void, so long as void there be. On the day when the living shall arise to take the place of the dead, they will vanish like ghosts at cock- crow. Shall we never be sufficiently firm in our own faith ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of Fort Sumter's hundred and forty guns echoing over the sea, and saw the Stars and Bars flutter above the walls of the old fort. He saw Generals Bee and Johnson come back from Manassas, folded in the battle flag for which they had given their lives, to lie in state in the City Hall at the marble feet of Calhoun, the great political ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... One can fancy the flutter of pride in Dorothy's heart at the reading of such honors to her lover, and she settled down to await the turn of events with a lighter heart, while Hancock and Adams, with the other delegates, went on toward Philadelphia, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... eyes of the creature flashed fire with anger, and it tried to turn its clumsy body around to find the speaker. Twinkle and Chubbins looked too, but only heard a flutter and a mocking laugh coming from ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... news was of the most astounding character, with just enough air of probability, in minor details, to pass muster with a dull reader. The effect was all he could wish—or rather more—and there was a general flutter in the camp. Of course the Governor-General and one or two others were in the secret, and mightily relished the diversion. But this pleasant and cheering intercourse was drawing to its mournful close. On her way back from Darjeeling, in November, 1861, Lady Canning (not then in Yule's ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... they were useless; but on looking over the side I observed cat's-paws playing on the surface of the ocean. Now they appeared, now they vanished, but as yet we had not felt the slightest breath of wind. Presently, however, I saw the dog-vane rise and flutter slightly; ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... fine revenge on the market that had gone against him. She refused to provide the very modest sum he pleaded for to this end, and as the two old Uncle Bunkers were equally obdurate—they said they had known when he married that flutter-budget just how he would end—his ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... flame-drifts wave and flutter; Silence! though the crowd their curses mutter; Silence! through this fiery purgatory God is leading up a soul ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... twice at a distance, while again and again overhead there was the flutter and swish of wings, probably those of the oil-birds circling about the mouth of ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... most animals of the deer tribe, by their fluttering; and, in want of a sufficient force of men, passes may be closed by this contrivance. The Swedes use "lappar," viz. Pieces of canvas, of half the height of a man, painted in glaring colours and left to flutter ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... Maggie's heart began to flutter with fear. She dared not tell the sad truth at once, but she walked after Tom in trembling silence as he went out, thinking how she could tell him the news so as to soften at once his sorrow and his anger; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Having said which, Nedda felt unhappy; her Dad was not old! "No, miss; but I'll find out. It'll be in the walnut wing!" But with a little flutter at the thought of thus setting people to run about wings, Nedda murmured: "Oh! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... time that she had done just this thing—or if not the first time, it had never seemed to have any particular significance before. Now, however, Julia felt in her heart a little flutter of satisfaction. Somehow Mark did not seem just a commonplace member of the "Rosenthal gang" to-night, nor did she seem "the Page kid." Mark was a man, and—thrilling thought!—was angry at Julia, and Julia, hanging on his arm, with a hundred street lights flashing on ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... his will, and a faintness coming over him he stretched himself out at full length on the bed. All were in a flutter and made haste to relieve him, and during the three days he lived after that on which he made his will he fainted away very often. The house was all in confusion; but still the niece ate and the housekeeper drank and Sancho Panza enjoyed himself; for inheriting ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was Admiral's Row, and had been given to it in 1758, after the capture of Louisbourg and in honour of Admiral Boscawen; but we in Troy preferred to write the apostrophe after the 's'—Miss Sally Tregentil would overpeer her blind and draw back in a flutter lest the Major had ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to her before she heard his step, and turned sharply. She recognized him at once, and he saw the colour slowly rise to her face. She gave no cry of surprise, however, was in no foolish feminine flutter, ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... was to accompany Lady Bray, to one of the families acquainted with the Mowbrays; and where it was expected we should meet Olivia, and her aunt. This expectation, which kept my spirits in a flutter the whole day and increased to alarm and dread in the evening, was disappointed. Whether from any real or a pretended accident on the part of the aunt, who sent an apology, was more than I ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... gaily to his hammock; but lower sinks JOHN'S head, and even the COMTESSE has the grace to take herself off. MAGGIE's arms flutter near her ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... sits down to such a game, the devil will take good care he sha'n't want cunning or strength. It was ten o'clock instead of nine before he left, which he did with a feeling of triumph. Poor Patty remained behind, and shut up the bar, her heart in a flutter, and her hands shaking, while Dick was locking the front door. She hardly knew whether to laugh or cry; she felt the change which had come over him, and was half fascinated and half repelled ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... new way. For we've got our new way of feeling things. Rosamund tells us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set by a young Athenian who's over here studying English. He catches the butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go. He doesn't jab a pin into it as our composers would. Oh, there's Cynthia! I hope she heard ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... scandalized flutter in this quiet room whose oval portraits of ancestral Sawyers might well have tumbled down at the notion of any one being anything but sober, the boy moved closer to the fire as if the ride had ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... humility, too strong in my honesty, too brave, too ignorant; in short, I knew nothing of the matter. We are all of us, more or less, subject to the delusions of vanity, or hope, or love—I—even I!—who thought myself so clear-sighted, did not know how, with one flutter of his wings, Cupid can set the whole atmosphere in motion; change the proportions, size, colour, value, of every object; lead us into a mirage, and leave ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... inconsequential-looking little river. Its contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway against the semi-gelid current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheelbuckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm small lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan, and only ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Th' Brotherhood 'll pay me four dollars a day to sit right here and keep three gages an' a flutter in the stack—go on with yer ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... thoroughly before retiring. Dogs bark at the moon; cats chase rats through openings of the palm-leaf roofs, threatening every moment to fall, pursued and pursuers, down upon the hammocks. Vampires flutter around from room to room, occasionally resting on the tops of the iron partitions, and when they halt, continuing to chirp for a while like hoarse sparrows. Occasionally there will come out of the darkness of the river a disagreeable sound as if some huge animal were gasping ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... Such is the race of Man: And they that creep, and they that fly, Shall end where they began. Alike the busy and the gay But flutter thro' life's little day, In Fortune's varying colours drest: Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance, Or chill'd by Age, their airy dance They leave, in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... what could it be but yes? Yet, while her mind sank, like a feather floating downwards in still air, to final, inevitable acquiescence, while the little clock ticked with a fine, insect-like note, and the flames made a soft flutter like the noise of shaken silk, a blackness of chaotic suffering rose suddenly in her, and her thoughts were whirled far away. In flashes, dear and terrible, she saw it—her ruined youth. It rose in dim symbolic ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... for the look upon his face was not good to see; and he was a coward, for he started at the flutter of a night-bird hurrying late to its home in a rock by the wayside. The mist rising from the valley in wreaths of silver gauze startled him again as he rounded the trail to the cabin, and for an instant he stopped and drew his dagger, thinking the ghost he feared was walking thus early. A ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... flown seventy-six miles inland to a height of two thousand four hundred and fifty feet. I dashed inside for the fishingline; Hurley got out the camera. They were a beautiful sight, hovering with outspread wings just above the snow, tipping it with their feet now and then, to poise without a flutter in a sixty-five-mile gale. Hurley secured a couple of "snaps" at the expense of badly frost-bitten hands. Just as I arrived with the line hooked and baited, the birds flew away to the north-east; our visions ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... 't that pits my puir heart in a flutter? And what gars the tears come sae fast to my e'e? If I wasna ettled to be ony better, Then what gars me wish ony better to be? I 'm just like a lammie that loses its mither; Nae mither or friend the puir lammie can see; I ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe. At times one felt a little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... learn the cause of a knocking at the outward gate, and on his return was so struck with the forlorn and ghastly aspects of his companions of the watch that he exclaimed, "Pity of my heart, my masters, how like owls you look! Methinks, when the sun rises, I shall see you flutter off with your eyes dazzled, to stick yourselves into the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the sacred boats upon the walls, Horus and Thoth, the king before Osiris; as I mounted and descended with the priests to roof and floor, I longed, instead of the clamour of the bats, to hear the light flutter of the soft wings of the Ba of Hathor, flying from Paradise to this sad temple of the desert to bring her comfort in the gloom. I thought of her as a poor woman, suffering as only women can ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a flutter'd bird, came flying from far away: "Spanish ships of war at sea! we have ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... which, in spite of common sense, we dare not throw off. For instance, we have company,—a friend from afar (perhaps wealthy), or a minister, or some other man of note. What do we do? Sit down and receive our visitor with all good will and the freedom of a home? No; we (the lady of the house) flutter about to clear up things, apologizing about this, that, and the other condition of unpreparedness, and, having settled the visitor in the parlor, set about marshaling the elements of a grand dinner or supper, such as no person ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... think that one so exalted as you are, one whose high position is so rife in the eyes of all men, should have taken pleasure in my company. I will confess to a foolish woman's silly vanity in having wished to be known to be the friend of the Duke of Omnium. I am like the other moths that flutter near the light and have their wings burned. But I am wiser than they in this, that having been scorched, I know that I must keep my distance. You will easily believe that a woman, such as I am, does not refuse to ride in a carriage with your Grace's arms on the panels without a regret. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... grown-up butterfly and found it easy of management. He felt with relief that the mother could have threatened none of the things they held dear. And, indeed, in his imagination, her spirit seemed to flutter over them in the solid, solemn room, reassuring through its ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... seat in the shade Of a lime tree. For my passion Wars against the stiff brocade. The daffodils and squills Flutter in the breeze As they please. And I weep; For the lime tree is in blossom And one small flower ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... to the gallant and gay speeches of Bigot, which seemed to flutter like birds round her, but never lit on the ground where she had spread her net like a crafty fowler as she was, until she went almost mad with suppressed anger and passionate excitement. But she kept on replying with badinage light as his own, and with laughter so soft and silvery that ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... him how he did and expressed his gratification at seeing the honored name of Pickles—a power in the commercial world—enrolled among the friends of reform. The appearance of General Divvy put the Mayor in quite a flutter, and when the General told him that he positively must consent to run again, and that he was the only hope of the Reformers, the ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... filled the house after the minister sat down was broken by the sounding of the trombones: then from beneath the trees Leonhard saw the beautiful procession again following the bier; and as he watched the flutter of garments between the dark-green cedar walls, it had been no difficult thing to see in that company not a company of mourners, but the ransomed sons and daughters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... despise it," said the captain, filling his glass, "is that I am going to take an adieu of it. To your health, chevalier; you may boast of having good wine. Hum! And now, n—o, no, that is all. I shall take to water till I see the ribbon flutter from your window. Try to let it be as soon as possible, for water is a liquid that does ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... movement another girl, who had been sitting patiently on a low stool near by, rose and put herself in the way of the sunbeam. But too late: already long lashes were a-flutter upon the delicately modelled cheeks of ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the joyous close of the flower adventure. He felt behind him a flutter as of the lightest wind and saw a white butterfly flitting about in the dimness between the thick trunks. He flew hither and thither in an uneasy quest, as if uncertain of the way. Nor was he alone; butterfly after butterfly glimmered in the darkness, until at last ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... you get so nothing knocks the breath out of you. I'm just coming to looking round here without feeling all of a flutter. The place did used to turn me endwise at first, it was so white and awesome. I actually hated to set foot within its walls. Seems 's if my fingers was always all thumbs every time I come inside the room. Still, I had to come in though; there were things I had to do ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... family of quails, and watch the conduct of the mother. She will not leave you. No, not she. But she will fall at your feet, uttering a noise which none but a distressed mother can make, and she will run, and flutter, and seem to try to be caught, and cheat your outstretched hand, and affect to be wing-broken and wounded, and yet have just strength to tumble along, until she has drawn you, fatigued, a safe distance from her threatened children and the young hopes of her heart; and then will she mount, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... was all in a flutter; the manager was beside himself with joy; bell-boys danced jig steps in the corridors; chambermaids went about with a distracted air—and all because the grand duke, Alexander Melovich, was to arrive on the morrow. It was an epoch-making event. It was better ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... said the second swallow. "First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... and when you have done this you make your way up a very steep path, cut in the cliffside, to the town. When you get there you find yourself in the very dullest town I know on the Coast. I remember when I first landed in Clarence I found its society in a flutter of expectation and alarm not untinged with horror. Clarence, nay, the whole of Fernando Po, was about to become so rackety and dissipated as to put Paris and Monte Carlo to the blush. Clarence was going to have a cafe; and what was going to go on in ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... lofty tower of Ivan, and from its height looked with eyes of pride on the far-extending city. It was grand, that vision of palatial mansions, but it was mournful in its silence and gloom, the tramp of soldiery its only sound, the flutter of multitudes of birds—ravens and crows, which haunted the city in thousands—its only sign of life. Two days before Moscow had been one of the busiest cities in the world. Now it was the most silent. But the conqueror had this satisfaction, that while abandoned ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... be realized. When hooked, he invariably turns golden. The idea of the series of leaps is to rid himself of the hook, and the man who has made the strike must be of iron or decadent if his heart does not beat with an extra flutter when he beholds such gorgeous fish, glittering in golden mail and shaking itself like a stallion in each mid-air leap. 'Ware slack! If you don't, on one of those leaps the hook will be flung out and twenty feet away. No slack, and away he ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... I mentioned your name to her on purpose, and I could see that the heart of the dear little thing began to flutter at the very sound; and when I bantered her, she blushed, and ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... sonorous phrase it ceased. A flutter of applause ran round the tables. Lanyard mastered a sense of daze that he saw reflected in the opening eyes of the woman as she slipped from his arms. In an instant they were themselves once more, two completely ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the lover as inhabiting the same house with his unseen love; and pursuing her in it ceaselessly from room to room, always catching the flutter of her retreating presence, always sure that the next moment he ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... attire; buds appear and the leaves shoot; the flowers bloom sending forth their fragrance, that wafted by the breeze perfume the air far and near. The birds sing their best songs of joy; the insects chirp their shrillest notes; butterflies of gorgeous colors flutter in clouds in every direction in search of the nectar contained in the cups of the newly-opened blossom, and dispute it with the brilliant humming-birds. All creation rejoices because a few tears of mother Nature have brought joy and happiness to all living beings, from the ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough', he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... cowslip wine. Ragingly he spluttered and gulped, and then kicked the bins with all his might. While he was stooping to rub his toe, who should march in but Miss Elaine, dressed and ready for young Geoffrey. But she caught sight of her father in time, and stepped back into the passage in a flutter. Good heavens! This would never do. Geoffrey might be knocking at the cellar-door at any moment. Her papa must be got ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... Wales was with the Grenadiers at Beau Marais when they came in to rest for a time. One day, while having tea at the Sauvage, Mademoiselle Leonie, sister of the proprietor, came up to me in a perfect flutter of excitement to say that that very evening the Prince had ordered the large room to be prepared for a dinner he was giving to his ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... vertical trunks almost as easily as a woodpecker. It continually utters a harsh, creaking note, somewhat intermediate between that of Paradisea apoda, and the more musical cry of Cicinnurus regius. The males at short intervals open and flutter their wings, erect the long shoulder feathers, and spread out ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... doctor and driver now turned their gaze beyond the lion-headed gateway to the winding walk that passed among the trees up to the old mansion house. Far off, through the great columns of the trees, there might indeed this morning now be seen the flutter of a gown of white. The faint sound of voices might be heard. Mary Ellen, conscientious marketer, was discussing joints and salads with her aunt. And then Mary Ellen, deliberately tying the strings of her bonnet under her chin, ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... Neither Mr. Franklin, with his wonderful foreign training, nor I, with my age, experience, and natural mother-wit, had the ghost of an idea of what Rosanna Spearman's unaccountable behaviour really meant. She was out of our thoughts, poor soul, before we had seen the last flutter of her little grey cloak among the sand-hills. And what of that? you will ask, naturally enough. Read on, good friend, as patiently as you can, and perhaps you will be as sorry for Rosanna Spearman as I was, when I ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... "That's nothin' more'n gallantry. It's what's to be looked for whar thar's ladies about, an' is doo to a over-effervescence of sperit, common to the younger males of our species when made gala an' giddy by the alloorin' flutter of a petticoat. Boggs an' Tutt don't honestly mean them bullets none. Also, if you-all is goin' to keep on with your ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... stood up on his hind legs and put his forepaws on the edge of the bowl. As he did this the fish began swimming around swiftly, very much frightened, indeed, just as you may have seen a canary bird flutter in a cage when ...
— The Story of a Candy Rabbit • Laura Lee Hope
... other curiously when at last they met. Jeanne's eyes were sparkling and her cheeks burning, and her whole little person in a flutter of joyful excitement, and yet she couldn't speak. Now that the little cousin was there, actually standing before her, she could not speak. How was it? He was not quite what she had expected; he looked paler and quieter than any boys ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... "Otway's devoted wife to the life!" murmured the company, in a flutter of genuine admiration—forgetting themselves, these Sir Plumes and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... carried neither name nor initials on its lining; and lacked every least hint as to its ownership—or so it seemed until the prying fingers of P. Sybarite turned down the leather and permitted a visiting card concealed therein to flutter ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... the table in such a flutter of excitement that she could hardly eat, but she gazed with intense satisfaction on her guests. Robert sat on her right hand, contrasting Aunt Linda's pleasant situation with the old days in Mrs. Johnson's kitchen, where ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... seeking my favourite labour bureau, I found an unusual flutter among the bench-warmers. A big contractor wanted fifty men immediately. No experience was required, and the wages were to be two dollars a day. With a number of others I pressed forward, was interviewed and accepted. The same day we were marched in a body to the railway ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... flight is present throughout his music. Throughout it, one hears the beating of wings. Sometimes, it is the light flutter of glistening ephemeridae that wheel and skim delightfully through the limpid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of wings preparing themselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping of pinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poemes ailes," flights toward ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... breeze quickening the air upon the uplands beyond old Morlaas, to whip the flags into a steady flutter and now and again flick a dark tress of hair ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... mercy, without manifold mercy and unless mercy abounds towards him. He cannot stand if mercy doth not compass him round about, nor go unless mercy follows him. Yea, if mercy that rejoiceth against judgment doth not continually flutter over him, the very moth will eat him up, and the canker will consume him (Job 4:19). Wherefore it is necessary to the making of Israel live and flourish, that everlasting mercy should be over his head, and everlasting mercy under his feet, with all the afore-mentioned mercies, and more ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... quickly published to that Independent manifesto—not only that by A. S. or Adam Steuart (ante, p. 25), but various others. When it became known, however, that Mr. Edwards also was preparing an Answer, it was expected to beat them all. There was a flutter of anticipation of it among the Presbyterians; but it was rather slow in coming. "There is a piece of 26 sheets, of Mr. Edwards, against the Apologetick Narration, near printed, which will paint that faction [the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... bid—who'll buy, who'll buy? Here's Colley Cibber, Bruce the fibber, Plays of Cherry, ditto Merry, Tickle, Mickle, When I bow and when I wriggle, With a simper and a giggle, Ears regaling, bidders nailing, Ladies utter in a flutter— "Mister Smatter, how you chatter, Dear, how clever! well, I never ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... feathers, breaking up, six or eight feet high, among a wilderness of sensitive plants, scarlet-flowered dwarf Balisiers, {81a} climbing fern, {81b} convolvuluses of every hue, and an endless variety of outlandish leaves, over which flutter troops of butterflies. How the seeds of the plants and the eggs of the insects have been preserved, who can tell? But there their children are, in myriads; and ere a generation has passed, every dead gray stem will have disappeared ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... wild barren country, I can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one. It appears to me that all the world must be barren, like what I see of it. In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise the country. "Beyond Hyde Park," says Sir Fopling Flutter, "all is a desert." All that part of the map that we do not see before us is a blank. The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger than a nutshell. It is not one prospect expanded into another, county joined to county, kingdom to kingdom, lands to seas, making an image ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the minds of those who have given themselves up to the pleasures of the body, paying, as it were, a servile obedience to their lustful impulses, have violated the laws of God and man; and therefore, when they are separated from their bodies, flutter continually round the earth on which they lived, and are not allowed to return to this celestial region till they have been purified by ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the end, however, they caught her: and the wife said, 'Shall I kill her at once?' 'No,' cried he, 'that is letting her off too easily: she shall die a much more cruel death; I will eat her.' But the sparrow began to flutter about, and stretch out her neck and cried, 'Carter! it shall cost thee thy life yet!' With that he could wait no longer: so he gave his wife the hatchet, and cried, 'Wife, strike at the bird and kill her in my hand.' And the wife ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... she crossed over, meaning to nod and smile at least. Trix saw her first, and suddenly became absorbed in the distant horizon. Tom apparently did not see her, for his eyes were fixed on a fine horse just prancing by. Polly thought that he had seen her, and approached with a curious little flutter at her heart, for if Tom cut her she felt that her cup would ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... sitting on the seat, and I write, scores of times, 1848. I write this date criss-cross, in all possible fashions, and wait until a workable idea shall occur to me. A swarm of loose thoughts flutter about in my head. The feeling of declining day makes me downcast, sentimental; autumn is here, and has already begun to hush everything into sleep and torpor. The flies and insects have received their first warning. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... he strode down the path he carried with him the memory of a perfect oval face smiling at him past the tragic figure of the Bajan woman. He went blindly, scarcely aware of the sun-mottled trail his feet were following, for his wits were a-flutter and his heart was leaping to some strange intoxication that grew with ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... a moment and listened at the stillness. The robin, who had flown to his tree-top, was still as all the rest. He did not even flutter his wings; he sat without ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... would surpass their powers of comprehension. In any case it would be a mere allegorical investiture of truth, a parable, or a myth that would be of any good to them. There must be, as Kant has said, a public standard of right and virtue, nay, this must at all times flutter high. It is all the same in the end what kind of heraldic figures are represented on it, if they only indicate what is meant. Such an allegorical truth is at all times and everywhere, for mankind at large, a beneficial substitute for an eternally unattainable truth, and in general, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... if they sought to follow through the park the visions of her youth. Through the open window every now and then came a breath of air laden with the odor of grass and the perfume of flowers. It made her white locks flutter around her wrinkled forehead and old memories float through ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... boys made little water-mills to be run by the force of the stream. We call them 'flutter-wheels.' But I made one so curious that it beat them all," ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... marsh'lling clouds unite, Like thick battalions halting for the fight; The sun sinks back, the tempest spirits sweep Fierce through the air and flutter on the deep. Till from their caverns rush the maniac blasts, Tear the loose sails, and split the creaking masts, And the lash'd billows, rolling in a train, Rear their white heads, and race along ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... old fellow," replied my husband. "That's my wife's little flutter. Dare say the poor fool has had to promise her priest to make ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... silk, old lace, and a white Indian shawl. Miss Prunty had on her starchiest collar and most formal tie. Goneril saw it was necessary that she, likewise, should deck herself in her best. She was too young and impressionable not to be influenced by the flutter of excitement and interest which filled the whole of the little cottage. Goneril, too, was excited and anxious, although Signor Graziano had seemed so old and like a coffee-bean. She made no progress in the piece of embroidery ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... led my horse; and his horrible visage glared into my eyes through the strange, wan light that flows between the departure of the sinking moon and the flutter of the morning when it cannot see its way. I strove to look at him; but my scared eyes fell, and he bound his rank glove across my poor lips. "Let it be so," I thought; "I can ...
— Slain By The Doones • R. D. Blackmore
... out and the acceptances came in. The English were flattered. Count Malagaski was buoyed by new hopes and the daughters were in a day-and-night flutter, for neither of them had ever come within speaking distance of the real young man ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... George William Curtis, then a youth of eighteen, and his brother Burrill, two years his senior, was a noteworthy event in the annals of Brook Farm, at least in the estimation of the younger members. I shall never forget the flutter of excitement caused by Mr. Ripley's announcing their expected coming in these words: 'Now we're going to have two young Greek gods among us.' ... On a bright morning in May, 1842, soon after Mr. Ripley's announcement, as I was coming down from the Eyrie to the Hive, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... things of the field and wood seemed unafraid of her. At times, returning to where he had left her hidden, he would pause, wondering to whom she was talking, and then as he drew nearer would hear the stealing away of little feet, the startled flutter of wings. She had elfish ways, of which it seemed impossible to cure her. Often the good man, returning from some late visit of mercy with his lantern and his stout oak cudgel, would pause and listen to a wandering ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... Shakespeare's text; of whom one ridicules his errors with airy petulance, suitable enough to the levity of the controversy; the other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that girls with spits, and boys with stones, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... me truly, if it must be said, Parnassian butterfly, and like the bees Wherein old Plato found our similes. Light rover I, forever on the wing, Flutter from flower to flower, from thing to thing, With much of pleasure mix ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... excitement. I have seen women with nothing important to do come down to breakfast in excitement, give their orders for the day as if they were about running for a fire; and the standard of all those about them is so low that no one notices what a human dust is stirred up by all this flutter ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch 'im by de behime legs en slung 'im right in de middle er de brier-patch. Dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox sorter hang 'roun' fer ter see w'at wuz gwineter happen. Bimeby he hear somebody call 'im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin' crosslegged on a chinkapin log koamin' de ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... province through which we were passing, and, after pipes and coffee, and the usual ceremonies, I mounted my horse, and, at the head of my escort, rode out of the mudir's courtyard, when my eye was caught by the flutter of the robes of a woman in a garden across the road. Around the garden ran a high hedge of cactus, and as I leaned forward in my saddle to look through one of the openings, a girl's face presented ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... the race for the hand of the beautiful Miss Effingham; but the prize was not for them. She cared not a jot for either their persons or their purses and would not consent to be caught, and like a bird in a golden cage, flutter without the means ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... meet—it may be we shall meet And count our days up-gathered, one by one, Like poppies plucked among the burnished wheat, Beneath the red gaze of the August sun; And all our scattered dreams shall flutter home At last. Oh! silent, age-long wandering What since your setting forth have ye become? What gift from those far waters do ye bring?— A splash of rain, salt taste of frozen foam, Green sea-weed trailing ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... steam-engines—and to endure it all. But for him, who could fly over a hundred tree-tops before a man could climb to one, it was hard to swing outside a ship, and to watch other birds use their wings, when his, which quivered to fly homewards, could only flutter against the bars. As he thought, a roll of the ship threw him forward, the wind shook the wires of the cage, and loosened the fastening; and, when the vessel righted, ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... which in the night Flutter towards a light, Drawn to their fiery doom, flying and dying, So to their death still throng, Blind, dazzled, borne along Ceaselessly, ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... heads, the leaves of the old lindens rustled with a murmur which recalled that of the sea; and now and then a blossom of a yellowish white would flutter down, which the girls disputed, holding up their ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... elfin playhouses. Perplexity as to Terry's whereabouts gave way to deep anxiety. Then his eyes caught the flicker of something white in the shadowy grove that fronted Ohto's house. Looking closely, he watched it flutter away among the trees, then a darker figure ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... more line—that's false eyes and teeth. But it ain't a profitable line. I want to drop it. And besides I'm thinking of leaving all this business. I understand, it's all right for a young man, in the bloom of his powers, to flutter around like a moth, but once you have a wife, and may be a whole family even ..." he playfully patted the woman on the knee, from which she became scarlet and looked uncommonly better. "For the Lord has blessed us Jews ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... relations, and agreements or disagreements, one with another, has been, I suppose, the ill use of words. It is impossible that men should ever truly seek or certainly discover the agreement or disagreement of ideas themselves, whilst their thoughts flutter about, or stick only in sounds of doubtful and uncertain significations. Mathematicians abstracting their thoughts from names, and accustoming themselves to set before their minds the ideas themselves that they would consider, and not sounds instead of ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... farther. They become so excited that they flutter about on the sand, with dragging wings and limping legs, as if badly wounded. Sometimes they perform somersaults in their intense excitement. The nearer the intruder approaches their eggs the more vigorous do their ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... the direct descendants of many a failing line, which the policy of England has seen fit to sustain by collateral supporters, are now discharging the simple duties of citizens in the bosom of this republic. The hive has remained stationary, and they who flutter around the venerable straw are wont to claim the empty distinction of antiquity, regardless alike of the frailty of their tenement and of the enjoyments of the numerous and vigorous swarms that are culling the fresher sweets ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... had was to accompany Lady Bray, to one of the families acquainted with the Mowbrays; and where it was expected we should meet Olivia, and her aunt. This expectation, which kept my spirits in a flutter the whole day and increased to alarm and dread in the evening, was disappointed. Whether from any real or a pretended accident on the part of the aunt, who sent an apology, was more than I ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... soul bore her away from the tabernacle of flesh, the welcoming Savior said: "Come, thou blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world." And heaven swung wide its gate for her; and excited fancy conceives that, as she passed in, there was a gratulatory flutter of wings and waving of palms through ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... tell. For, between the hands and before the faces of his sorrowing parents, lo! above Iuelus' head there seemed to stream a light luminous cone, and a flame whose touch hurt not to flicker in his soft hair and play round his brows. We in a flutter of affright shook out the blazing hair and quenched the holy fires with spring water. But lord Anchises joyfully upraised his eyes; and stretching his hands to heaven: "Jupiter omnipotent," he cries, "if thou dost relent at any prayers, look on us this ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... manner as in the last century, when all Italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song (and with it also the art of melody) reached its elevation. In Germany, however (until quite recently when a kind of platform eloquence began shyly and awkwardly enough to flutter its young wings), there was properly speaking only one kind of public and APPROXIMATELY artistical discourse—that delivered from the pulpit. The preacher was the only one in Germany who knew the weight of a syllable or a word, in what manner a sentence strikes, springs, rushes, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and flutter, high expectation and renewed hopes, were occasioned at Puddingdale, by the receipt of those episcopal dispatches. Mrs Quiverful, whose careful ear caught the sound of the pony's feet as he trotted up to the vicarage kitchen door, brought ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... all was quiet; only the flutter and whisper of the leaves broke the silence, but broke it only to cause it to appear yet ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... since the early autumn. Undoubtedly the war was the cause. Not that we were among the earlier victims of the fever. I took disgracefully little interest in the Negotiations, while the Ultimatum appealed to Raffles as a sporting flutter. Then we gave the whole thing till Christmas. We still missed the cricket in the papers. But one russet afternoon we were in Richmond, and a terrible type was shouting himself hoarse with "'Eavy British lorsses—orful slorter o' the Bo-wers! Orful slorter! Orful slorter! ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... with all truth, that when I asked your grandmother's hand I did not demean myself as if I were chief mourner at a funeral. She will bear me out that I walked up to her with a smile upon my face, though mayhap there was a little flutter at my heart, and I took her hand and I said—but, lack-a-day, whither have I wandered? What has all this to do with Taunton town and ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Windsor Castle was hove-to, the courses of the enemy were seen to flutter a few moments in the breeze, and then the canvas was expanded. When the vessel had gathered sufficient way, she hove in stays, and crossed the Windsor Castle on the ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sharp pair of scissors, and without otherwise touching the butterflies, I cut off their antennae near the base. The victims barely noticed the operation. None moved; there was scarcely a flutter of the wings. Their condition was excellent; the wound did not seem to be in the least serious. They were not perturbed by physical suffering, and would therefore be all the better adapted to my designs. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... of dreams,[1] and at that time dreamed profusely, but recently I have been dreaming very rarely, and when I do dream the experiences are not at all vivid. I use the term "nightmare" in a somewhat popular sense to mean a painful or frightful dream accompanied by physical disturbances, such as heart flutter and disturbances of breathing, and followed on awakening by a certain amount of the painful emotion which was a part of the dream. Accepting this definition, the experience which I have to relate was a typical nightmare. A few words of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... myself in my own chamber in the tower of the palace. I was so weak that I scarce could lift my hand, and life seemed but to flutter in my breast as flutters a dying dove. I could not turn my head; I could not stir; yet in my heart there was a sense of rest and of dark trouble done. The light from the lamp hurt my eyes: I shut them, and, as I shut them, heard the sweep of ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... well-fashioned eagles, letters, figures and animals hung up in conspicuous places over a beautiful frame-work of gothic structure, astonishing and eliciting remark from passers by. Besides these, there were all kinds of machinery fluttering and struggling in the air on long poles. Flutter mills and gunboats could be seen making their hasty rounds; men wrestling and turning many kinds of machinery could be taken in at the same glance of the eye. Each regiment had a meeting house and bowers, weather-boarded and ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... broken in the sky, And thro' the mountain-walls A rolling organ-harmony 75 Swells up, and shakes and falls. Then move the trees, the copses nod, Wings flutter, voices hover clear: "O just and faithful knight of God! Ride on! the prize is near." 80 So pass I hostel, hall, and grange; By bridge and ford, by park and pale, All-arm'd I ride, whate'er betide, Until ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... wings being folded over its back, too much absorbed to have been startled by my first approach. Occasionally, without any cause which I could detect from my present position—certainly in no way connected with my presence—a small swarm of the butterflies would rise in a flutter above the bush, as though actuated by a common whim—a brief winged tangle in which a beautiful sprite of velvety black hovering in a globular halo, shot through with two white semicircular arcs, was ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... squirrel. Here, too, are a myriad of pigeons as green as the leaf and with eyes and feet of a brilliant red. They are so like the foliage in color that they can be seen only by the practiced eye of the hunter, and even he would fail to detect them were it not for their restless movements. As they flutter about from branch to branch they are apt to fall victims to his ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... flowers; Could talk of powder, patches, paint, With the same zeal as of a saint; 380 Could prove a Sibyl brighter far Than Venus or the Morning Star; Whilst something still so gay, so new, The smile of approbation drew, And females eyed the charming man, Whilst their hearts flutter'd with their fan; Trifle, who would by no means miss An opportunity like this, Proceeding on his usual plan, Smiled, stroked his chin, and thus began: 390 'With shears or scissors, sword or knife, When the Fates cut the thread of life, (For if we to the grave are sent, No matter with what ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... a ship's yards so that the wind strikes on the edges or leaches of the sails, making them flutter in the wind. The same effect may be intentionally produced by ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... to be a very quiet talk, for Miss Podsnap replied in a flutter, 'Oh! Indeed, it's very kind of you, but I am afraid ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the second act of Faust.[22] The effect was great, and gave me a high satisfaction. We are once more transported into Faust's study, where Mephistopheles finds all just as he had left it. He takes from the hook Faust's old study-gown, and a thousand moths and insects flutter out from it. By the directions of Mephistopheles as to where these are to settle down, the locality is brought very clearly before our eyes. He puts on the gown, while Faust lies behind a curtain in a state of paralysis, intending to play the doctor's part once more. He pulls the bell, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... raised to mine as I spoke. There came now a flutter of the eyelids, a curious smile about the lips. Then her head drooped again and was laid against my breast; a sigh escaped her, and ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Prince's Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town flutter in the breeze at its ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... just eighteen, going to be married, and married to a man that Alix or Anne would have been only too glad to win! A real man, from the outside world, a man of twenty-eight, ten years older than she was. And how the letters and presents and gowns and plans would begin to flutter through the bungalow—she would be married in cafe-au-lait rajah cloth, as Miss Pinckney in San Francisco was; she would be Mrs. Lloyd! She could chaperone Alix ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... flew very low,—not more than five feet above our heads. When they were least expecting it, I threw up the net, and three of them flew bang into it. They were so much stunned by the blow, that only one of them could flutter out before I had drawn in the net; and the Dean was quick enough to seize the remaining two before they could escape. This, being the first experiment, gave us great encouragement, as it was more successful than we had ventured to hope. We went on with ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... is, I was conscious of a flutter of skirts, but I am not sure it was Miss Van Allen. I didn't see her clearly enough even to notice the color of her gown. It was merely a glimpse of some one flying round the newel post and up the stairs. It might ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... looked out through the narrow window and saw, rising high above the house-tops, like a finger pointing heavenward, the old gray tower and the gleaming cross. The city's din was far below, and through the summer air the faint coo of the doves and the flutter of their wings came down, like ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... the child Clara, whose marvelous musical powers were the talk of Leipzig, was a sweet consolation to him in his troubles and his toil, though ten years his junior. The love, which became a part of his life, had already begun to flutter into unconscious being in his feeling for a shy and ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with ...
— Stray Birds • Rabindranath Tagore
... favoured flower, delicate of scent and chaste in beauty. Yet the night of the tropics has many drawbacks: noxious, unsightly creatures then forsake their lair, lithe snakes uncoil their glossy rings, bats flutter in the moonbeams, and croaking frogs disturb ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... shoes, the silken rustle of the trains, the jingling of rich bracelets pushed up the arm while gloves are being buttoned. All these people seem excited, nervous, pale beneath their paint, and under the skilfully prepared satin-like surface of the shoulders, tremors flutter like shadows. Dry-mouthed, they speak little. The least nervous, while affecting to smile, have in their eyes and voice the hesitation that marks an absent mind—that apprehension of the battle behind the foot-lights which is ever one of the most powerful attractions of the comedian's ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... friends who will drop off, if let alone,—who must be kept awake to be kept at all,—who will talk and laugh with you as long as it suits your respective humors and you are prosperous and happy,—the blessed butterfly-race who flutter about your June mornings, and when the clouds lower, and the drops patter, and the rains descend, and the winds blow, will spread their gay wings and float gracefully away to sunny southern lands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... a flutter of excitement at the English table, the only other party, except two old men in a corner, who had dined so late, and they were half-way through their repast before she began hers. Paul was annoyed to see how they ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... Neco's funeral Mysa and her mother were thrown into a flutter of excitement by a message which arrived from Bubastes. Some months before the sacred cat of the great temple there—a cat held in as high honor in Lower Egypt as the bull Apis in the Thebaid—had fallen sick, and, in spite of the care and attendance lavished upon it, had died. ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... which was the cause after each service of much divided opinion. Opinion was divided because the choir was divided—separated, in fact, into several small, select cliques, each engaged in deadly and bitter feud with the rest. When the moon-eyed soprano arose, with a gentle flutter, and opened her charming mouth in solo, her friends settled themselves in their pews with a general rustle of satisfaction, while the friends of the contralto exchanged civilly significant glances; and on the way home the solo in question was disposed of in a manner ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and underneath the quiet voice sounded a savage note and his teeth bit through his cigar, which he threw out into the dew-carpeted grass. Just then there came from up under the eaves a soft disturbed flutter of wings and a gentle dove note was answered ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to another room, where stood a table, covered with the whitest of linen damask. Each child, in a flutter of pleasure, laid a shoe upon it, and each shoe held a little hay for the good saint's horse. The door was then carefully locked, and its key hidden in the mother's bedroom. Next followed good-night kisses, a grand family procession to the upper floor, merry farewells at bedroom ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... Milly pushed from her the mass of newspapers and lay with upturned face, hands crossed beneath her head, staring out of her blue eyes at the dusty ceiling, dreaming of triumphs to be, social heights to surmount, a flutter of engagement cards winging their way like a flight of geese to the little Acacia Street house; dreaming of men and women—and somewhere at the end of the long vista she saw a very gorgeous procession, ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... a drug clerk in Austin, being filled with literary aspiration, bought the press and the name of The Iconoclast for $250; but O. Henry's Iconoclast after two issues also ceased to flutter. Later, when Brann again accumulated the necessary funds to permit him to throw off the hireling's yoke, he asked for and received back from O. Henry the legal right to the title ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... up almost before she could catch her breath, and landed her on the fifth floor. The man pointed along a hallway, and she followed this until a name in big gilt letters arrested her attention and caused her heart to flutter spasmodically. "Cornelius McVeigh—Investments," it read. And this was really her son's Eldorado! A mist crept over her eyes as she turned the brass knob and entered. A score of young men and women were ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... know it," I replied. Mac was bending over his plate, rubbing the ink in with deft fingers, and I saw his lowered glance flutter in my direction for ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... daily grind was the immense disparity, the difference and contrast, from class to class, of every instant and every motion. There were times when all the wires in the country seemed to start from the little hole-and-corner where she plied for a livelihood, and where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter of "forms," the straying of stamps and the ring of change over the counter, the people she had fallen into the habit of remembering and fitting together with others, and of having her theories and interpretations of, ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... the children, ready dressed for their parts, were in a tremendous flutter. Even the little wee ones were to do something. They were stationed at the parlor door with baskets, and charged not to let a soul come in, unless the pair of mittens were paid into one of the baskets. I warrant you they ...
— The Two Story Mittens and the Little Play Mittens - Being the Fourth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... Peck had received that very morning a letter from Mrs. Fordyce of Bellairs Crescent—a letter which had put her all in a flutter. It was a letter of warning, counsel, and reproof concerning Miss Peck's duty towards her young charge, and laying a strong injunction upon her to be exceedingly judicious in her treatment of the eccentric ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... in a serious manner, there were few of us whose hearts did not flutter responsively to this surmise, for the danger became every minute more imminent, and we knew what a terrific surf there must be then running on the shingle beach. But we now rapidly approached the shore; we were near to the floating light, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... thousand a Year, and resolve to live single, and enjoy it; I have made the Tour of Italy and France, have given my self the Accomplishment of both Sexes, and design to Visit, Game, Revel, dust the Park, haunt the Theatres, and out-flutter e'er a Fop i'the Nation; and I know not why a Lady that has the best Estate i'the County shou'd n't ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... was, as she could dimly see, a game that might prove exceedingly dangerous to play, and the Count had spoiled it all, anyway. And a curious flutter in her heart, as she watched the Boy take his punishment with as good grace as possible, pled for his pardon until she finally desisted and bade ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... clouds unite, Like thick battalions halting for the fight; The sun sinks back, the tempest spirits sweep Fierce through the air and flutter on the deep. Till from their caverns rush the maniac blasts, Tear the loose sails, and split the creaking masts, And the lash'd billows, rolling in a train, Rear their white heads, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... eye Such is the race of Man: And they that creep, and they that fly, Shall end where they began. Alike the busy and the gay But flutter thro' life's little day, In Fortune's varying colours drest: Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance, Or chill'd by Age, their airy dance They ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... I will tell you, said she. Your father received a letter to-day from your aunt, which put him in a terrible flutter:—he immediately ordered his carriage and directed us to attend him. He met your aunt at a tavern somewhere away back, and she told him that the gentleman who used to come to our house so much once, had contrived to carry you off from the place where you lived with ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... Why, in some respects, a bite is better than a fish. Only very occasionally does a fish look as well on the bank or in the boat as it appeared to the excited imagination of the angler when he first felt the flutter on the line. I have caught thousands of fish in my time; but most of them I have dismissed from memory as soon as they went flapping into the basket. But some of the bites that I have had! I catch myself wondering now what beauteous ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... alcohol in 1885 for the Michigan State Medical Society in which he cited experiments showing that the opinion that alcohol stimulates the heart by an increase of real force, is an error. It creates a flutter, but decreases power. ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... white doves, to baby and me; Softly whirr in the silent air, Flutter about his golden hair: Hark, child, the doves are ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... man. Take heed lest his beams fall on you, For the rays he darts around him Are the power of his enchantment, Are the arrows that he uses.' "Many years, in peace and quiet, On the peaceful Star of Evening Dwelt Osseo with his father; Many years, in song and flutter, At the doorway of the wigwam, Hung the cage with rods of silver, And fair Oweenee, the faithful, Bore a son unto Osseo, With the beauty of his mother, With the courage of his father. "And the boy grew up and prospered, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... that the coronation as King of Bohemia of a man of such decided purposes—a country numbering ten Protestants to one Catholic—should cause a thrill and a flutter. Could it be doubted that the great elemental conflict so steadily prophesied by Barneveld and instinctively dreaded by all capable of feeling the signs of the time would now begin? It had begun. Of what avail would be ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... special compliments to the favourites," she calls, as we set out for Whitehall; and she must run to the door in a flutter and ask if Pierre Radisson has any love-verse ready writ, in case of an amour with ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... are dead; Dead, and neither prose nor rhyme Tells the praises of their prime. Thou didst know them old and grey, Know them in their sad decay. Thou hast seen Atossa sage Sit for hours beside thy cage; Thou wouldst chirp, thou foolish bird, Flutter, chirp—she never stirr'd! What were now these toys to her? Down she sank amid her fur; Eyed thee with a soul resign'd— And thou deemedst cats were kind! —Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... too stiff. Neither Dundas nor Wilberforce moved in the highest circles. Portland, Spencer, and Windham held somewhat aloof, and Leeds, Sydney, and others had been alienated. Accordingly, the news that Pitt was paying marked attentions to Auckland's eldest daughter caused a flutter of excitement. Her charm and tact warranted the belief that in the near future the Prime Minister would dominate the social sphere hardly ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... exclaimed Mrs. Whitney, which had the satisfactory result of bringing her father out of his irritation, into a flutter over the concealment of the ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... investigation, Mr. Ruby, as usual, varying its monotony, or mitigating its wearisomeness, by occasionally, or suddenly, exhibiting some splendid or startling production of his art. The parure of an empress, the bracelets of grand-duchesses, a wonderful fan that was to flutter in the hands of majesty, had all in due course appeared, as well as the black pearls and yellow diamonds that figure and flash on such occasions, before eyes so ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... in the year gone by, St. Jude's Church was in a flutter of expectation. It expected to see a whole paraphernalia of bridal finery, and again it was doomed to disappointment, for Isabel had not put off the mourning for her father. She was in black—a thin gauze dress—and her white bonnet ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... black Snake get outside the cave, than she saw the Kookooburra fall like a stone from its branch, right on top of the Snake. For a second, Dot thought the bird must have tumbled down dead, it was such a sudden fall; but a moment later she saw it flutter on the ground, in battle with the poisonous reptile, whilst the Snake wriggled, and coiled its body into hoops and rings. The Kookooburra's strong wings, beating the air just above the writhing Snake, made a great noise, and the serpent hissed in its ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... was a little flutter, a rustling of silken robes, more kissing and hand-shaking, and "good bye, loves," and ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... sparrow was first, as usual, to inquire into their right to be out of their own tree. He came near them, alighted, and began to hop still closer. Not in the least startled by his threatening manner, the nearest youngster looked at him, and began to flutter his wings, to call, and to move toward him, as if expecting to be fed. This was too much even for a ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... of the windows to a servant passing below, caused her to look towards the house, just in time to see something white flutter from an open bedroom window on the breeze. The bedroom regions ran all around the third story of Danton Hall—six in each range. Mr. Stanford's chamber was in the front of the house, and it was from Mr. Stanford's room the white object had fluttered. Rose ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... and unless mercy abounds towards him. He cannot stand if mercy doth not compass him round about, nor go unless mercy follows him. Yea, if mercy that rejoiceth against judgment doth not continually flutter over him, the very moth will eat him up, and the canker will consume him (Job 4:19). Wherefore it is necessary to the making of Israel live and flourish, that everlasting mercy should be over his head, and everlasting mercy under his feet, with all the afore-mentioned mercies, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... arrived, but the frost had been keen, and the air on the uplands was biting. We speed first across a famous battlefield, where French and English bones lie mingled below the quiet grass, and then turn south-east. Nobody on the roads. The lines of poplar-trees fly past, the magpies flutter from the woods, and one might almost forget the war. Suddenly, a railway line, a steep descent and we are full in its midst again. On our left an encampment of Nissen huts—so called from their ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which would, with some ramification of the supporting ribs, become a bat's or moth's; that is to say, an extension of membrane between the ribs (as in an umbrella), which will catch the wind, and flutter upon it, like a leaf; but cannot strike it to any purpose. The flying squirrel drifts like a falling leaf; the bat flits like a black rag torn at the edge. To give power, we must have plumes that can strike, as with the flat of a sword-blade; and to ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... Some are like the pallid shades of the past, altogether unlike the living and with an unmistakable spectral form—or lack of it. They sweep like mist through the air, or flutter like dead leaves in the gale—a gale always accompanying them as part of the stock furnishings. On the other hand, some revenants are so successfully made up that one doesn't believe them when they pridefully announce that ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... Let it brim with dew; Try if you can cry, We will do so, too. When you're summoned, start Like a frightened roe; Flutter, little heart, Colour, come and go! Modesty at marriage tide ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... the moralities of Ulrici. Fresh follies spring up in new paths of criticism, and fresh labourers in a fruitless field are at hand to gather them and to garner. A discovery of some importance has recently been proclaimed as with blare of vociferous trumpets and flutter of triumphal flags; no less a discovery than this—that a singer must be tested by his song. Well, it is something that criticism should at length be awake to that wholly indisputable fact; that learned and laborious men who can hear only with their fingers should open their eyes to admit ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... since then. I believe he is dead myself; and it sometimes fidgets me that we have never put on mourning for him. And then again, when I sit by myself, and all the house is still, I think I hear his step coming up the street, and my heart begins to flutter and beat; but the sound always goes ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... silent, musing, at the girl's side. He was fond of vistas. There was rest in them, a peace not to be found even in the twilight caverns of cathedrals; wind blowing over waters, the flutter of leaves, the bend in the grasses. To dwell in a haven like this. No care, no worry, no bother of grubbing about in one's pockets for overlooked coins, no flush of excitement! It is, after all, the homeless man who answers quickest the beckon of ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter—and the Bird ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... little time I observed the noise and flutter of wings to increase very fast, and my box was tossed up and down like a sign in a windy day. I heard several bangs or buffets, as I thought, given to the eagle (for such I am certain it must have been, that held the ring of my box in his ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... other two were only a little behind. As they sprang over the rocks one after the other, it took Anerley back to the school sports when he held the tape for the hurdle-race. It was magnificent, the wild spirit and abandon of it, the flutter of the chequered galabeeahs, the gleam of steel, the wave of black arms, the frenzied faces, the quick pitter-patter of the rushing feet. The law-abiding Briton is so imbued with the idea of the sanctity of human life that it was hard for the young pressman to realise ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him should have a boy around and having a boy around where there is a girl around, and spring around and lilacs around and a moon and music and joy around,—what is more natural in all this world than that in the fire struck by the simple joy of youth there should be the flutter of unseen wings around, and when the two had finished singing, with something passing between their hearts not in the words, what is more natural than that the girl, half frightened at the thrill in ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... sprang lightly to her feet; there came a whirring flutter, a twittering shower of sweet notes, soft wings beating almost in their very faces, a distant shadow against the sky, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... up to the water-front of Orlog before they remembered their situation. It was the Very Young Man who first became aware of the danger. Without explanation he suddenly pulled Aura into the bottom of the boat, leaving it to flutter ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... reluctantly, by short and difficult stages, awakened. A rumbling, grating, strident noise first confuses, then startles me. Is it robbers? Is it an earthquake? Is it the coming of fate? I lie rigid, bathed in a cold perspiration. I hear the tread of banditti on the moaning stairs. I see the flutter of ghostly robes by the uncurtained windows. A chill, uncanny air rushes in and grips at my damp hair. I am nerved by the extremity of my terror. I will die of anything but fright. I jerk off the bedclothes, convulse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit subject for a hospital. The night proved a feverish one. During the greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made a record of that night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it would have anticipated several of the chief incidents of this narrative, including ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... infection, I suppose, and all the people present wore the red badge, like Mr. Warren, only he wore one on each arm. This somewhat amazed me, but as I had never spoken in public before I was rather in a flutter. However, I conquered my girlish shyness, and if the audience was not large it was enthusiastic. When I came to the peroration about wishing them all happy endings and real beginnings of true life, don't you know, the audience actually ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... sighingly; "indeed I am sure that she does not. She is dazzled by his showiness and his fluency, his horsemanship and his dancing; but love him she does not It is fascination, such a fascination as leads a moth to flutter round a candle, or a bird to drop into the rattlesnake's mouth,—and never was flame more dangerous, or serpent more deadly. He is unworthy of her, Lucy,—thoroughly unworthy. This man, who calls himself devoted to a creature as innocent as she is lovely,—who ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... after her father had broken the news to her. He had not asked her consent; he had told her, in a flutter of pride, that this thing must be, and for her country's sake. She came to me, in the short dusk, upon the terrace overlooking the Taravo. She was of heart too heroic to linger out our agony. In the dusk she stretched out both hands—ah, God, the child she ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... are they so when one awakens to them, for the first time, in a novel and romantic situation, with the soft sweet air of a tropical climate mingling with the fresh smell of the sea, and stirring the strange leaves that flutter overhead and around one, or ruffling the plumage of the stranger birds that fly inquiringly around, as if to demand what business we have to intrude uninvited on their domains. When I awoke on the morning after the shipwreck, I found myself in this most delightful condition; and as I ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... fragrance, which seemed to come from her old brocades and silks. It was very sweet, but unlike any thing I had ever known before; and it was by reason of this that afterward I often knew, with a little flutter at my heart, she had been in some other rooms of the great house beside her own. This perfume seemed to linger for a little while wherever she had been, and yet it was so faint! I used to go into the darkened chambers often, or even stay for a while by myself in the unoccupied lower ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... The patient's eyelids flutter—as one waves a handkerchief from the deck of a departing steamer—then, breathing in the ether steadily, he falls into ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... a sudden Tom stood up on his hind legs and put his forepaws on the edge of the bowl. As he did this the fish began swimming around swiftly, very much frightened, indeed, just as you may have seen a canary bird flutter in a cage when some cat came ...
— The Story of a Candy Rabbit • Laura Lee Hope
... close, warm pressure of her fingers. Never before had he so poignantly realized that innate splendor of femininity that was uniquely hers, a quality more potent than any mere beauty. Her look met his straight and frankly, but he heard the breath flutter at her lips, and he thought to read in her eyes a question, a hunger, and a delight. His voice was under rigid control ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the hill they are crowding together, In the stand they are crushing for room, Like midge-flies they swarm on the heather, They gather like bees on the broom; They flutter like moths round a candle— Stale similes, granted, what then? I've got a stale subject to handle, A very stale ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... subtle intricacies of fascination," and asks if these "incalculable frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices" are, to us, an essential part of their charm? And she watches them with amusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a nice child, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to herself sorrowfully: "How utterly empty their lives must be of all spiritual beauty IF they are nothing more than they ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... 'Can't bear to think of them!' They had never borne reflecting on, those poor outcasts; wounding too deeply the core of true refinement hidden under layers of conformity to the sense of property—wounding too grievously the deepest thing in him—a love of beauty which could give him, even now, a flutter of the heart, thinking of his evening in the society of a pretty woman. And he went downstairs, through the swinging doors, to the back regions. There, in the wine-cellar, was a hock worth at least two pounds a bottle, a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the first time a suspicion flashed across her mind, which, while it made her heart flutter like a frightened bird, seemed to her the one drop hitherto lacking in the cup of her unhappiness. Had, then, after all, that gentle indifference of her friend masked an immense hunger, a deeply-felt need of personal tenderness, which she might have supplied—ah, how ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... sermon, and in this sermon he said to the people: "Listen, now, dearly beloved brethren. This morning, when I came into the church here, there comes up to me one of my flock, and she says to me, all in a flutter: 'Oh, Father, what a fright I have had this night! I was asleep in my bed, and the ghosts came and twitched away my coverlet!' But I answered her: 'Dear daughter, that is not possible; because where the dead are, there they stay.'" ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... immediately and the weights will be light," he thought. "She likes a bit of a flutter and I'll see that she gets it. There is plenty of corn in the old man's manger, and if it comes to bursting the bag, I will carry home the pieces. There's where I drive the car. She shall play and I will be her pet lamb. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... during the Matabele campaign that Baden-Powell came across a fine wild boar, which, he remarks, caused quite a flutter in his breast. "'If I only had you in the open, my friend,' thought I. 'If only you had a horse that was fit enough to come anywhere near me,' grinned he. And so we parted." A ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... gratified my pride, and increased my importance in my own eyes. I was nearly fifteen, and my term of apprenticeship had almost expired, when one bright day in March, I saw one of the lay sisters of the asylum enter the work-room. She was in a flutter of excitement; her face was crimson, and she was so breathless from her hurried ascent of the stairs that she gasped rather than said to me: 'Quick! come—follow me! Some one is waiting for you!' 'Who?—where?'—'Make ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... method of training is interesting. From the nest upwards the bird was taught that the only possible place to obtain food was from between a pair of antlers. At first fed sitting between them, as she learnt to flutter she was encouraged to bridge a short gap to her dinner. Then, as she grew stronger, she flew short distances to get her food as before. The next step was the use of a stuffed deer on wheels, which, when the hawk was loosed, was run along, and thus accustomed her to ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... memory of the teachings of their Druid bards and the firm belief in reincarnation which sent the Celtic warrior laughing to his death; but in the traditions of the peasantry, abounding with nature myths, sorcerers still haunt their mountain caves, fairies and May maidens still flutter ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... for the absence of the flowers. And the wind—no, there was no wind—there was only a memory of wind that woke now and then in the bosom of the wood, shook down a few leaves, like the thoughts that flutter away in sighs, and then ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... as the breeze through the cryptomerias, And pause like long flags flapping, And dart and flutter aloft, ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... upon her bluntness and practicability. As she spoke she took her cheque-book out of her reticule, and, opening it, dipped her pen into the ink. I am inclined to think that the flutter of that cheque-book was her ladyship's mistake. The girl had common sense, and must have seen the difficulties in the way of a marriage between the heir to an earldom and a linen-draper's daughter; and had the old lady been a person of discernment, ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... clouds. Then I recovered my wits, and when I began to come down again I tried to fly. I knew the Valley of Mo must be somewhere to the west; so I flew in that direction until I found myself just over the Valley, when I allowed myself to flutter to ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the public—as if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage which he deems more ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of those butterfly beings who seem to have been created that they may flutter about from flower to flower in the summer hours of such gala times as those now going on at Chiswick, just as other butterflies do. What the butterflies were last winter, or what will become of them next winter, no one but ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... party set out for the nearest street-car, and a flutter of mingled gratification and embarrassment stirred Ann Eliza's bosom when it was found that Mr. Ramy intended to pay their fares. Nor did he fail to live up to this opening liberality; for after guiding them through the Mall and the Ramble he led the way to a rustic restaurant where, also at his ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... it was so warm that the bees were all around among the blossoms, and two thrushes, who had built in a yew-tree that watched over the Scotch garden, were in a violent flutter because one of their chicks had fallen out of the nest. The mother bird, at the edge of the long orchard grass, was silent, trying by example to still the tiny creature's cheeping, lest it might attract some large ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... blossoms white and red— Look up, look up! I flutter now On this fresh pomegranate bough. See me! 'tis this silvery bill Ever cures the good man's ill. Shed no tear! oh, shed no tear! The flower will bloom another year. Adieu, adieu—I fly—adieu! I vanish in the heaven's blue,— Adieu, adieu! ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... it made his heart flutter tremendously. When at length he and Miss Clampett were admitted to the theater and walked down the aisle Kedzie came from the background of the screen forward as if to meet him. She came on and on, and finally as he reached his seat, a close-up ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... sat and talked together for an hour before he returned. A short time before Edith intended going home, he came in, with his ever cheerful face, and after greeting her cordially, turned to his wife, and spoke in a voice so full of tenderness and affection, that Edith felt her heart flutter and the tears steal unbidden to her eyes. It was so different from the way her husband spoke. The contrast caused her to feel more deeply, if possible, than ever, her own sad, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... delicious breakfast of tender chickens, light biscuit, excellent bread, fresh eggs, and that rarest of comforts at a hotel, delicious coffee, with a brimming pitcher of cream. We wondered at all these domestic comforts, for we have not heard the flutter of a petticoat in the house till we saw our respectable landlady in spectacles gliding out of the room. We learned from her that she was the only womankind on the 'diggings.' Every thing is neatly done, so we bless our October star for exempting us from the tardy and careless service of chambermaids. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sense, I feel that in my bones. Then there's another thing. Scott never knew the Highlands; he was always a Borderer. He has missed that whole, long, strange, pathetic story of our savages, and, besides, his style is not very perspicuous to childhood. Gad, I think I'll have a flutter. Buridan's Ass! Whether to go, what to attack. Must go to other letters; shall add to this, if ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... frankly of the earth earthly, and I needed to approach my quarry with no tributes pilfered from the armory of heaven. I could praise her beauty with the tongue of men, and leave the tongue of angels out of the question; and if my muse were pleased here and there to take a wanton flutter, I knew I could give decorum the go-by with a ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... way down, too? A little flutter. . . It seems to me you haven't been seen in your usual Paris haunts of late. Where have ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Fernando—Majesty?" Yet a third time she repeated it, as by rote; and, very slowly, understanding grew into the words, and with understanding, terror. The dark innocent eyes went appealingly from one to the other, and the lids began to flutter wildly in a kind of spasm. "Majesty? Majesty?" Then, suddenly, she flung both hands to her face, and a piteous shivering ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... repeated after him. "That is scarcely our affair, is it? Promoters should not bother themselves with long views, Alan. These may be left to the investing public, the speculative parson and the maiden lady who likes a flutter—those props of modern enterprise. But what do you mean? You originated this idea and always said that the profits ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... had evidently been in quest. This she unfolded and waved vigorously with both hands. Until we had passed quite from sight she stood there signalling her farewell. Long after we were beyond distinguishing her figure we could catch the flutter of white. Thus that ship's company, embarking each on his Great Adventure, far from home and friends, received their farewell, a very genuine farewell, from one poor old woman. B. ventured the opinion that it was the best thing we had ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... with them to principles, but we shall find them unable to get established in those along with us. Or if we may get so established along with them, we shall find them unable to weigh occurring events along with us.' CHAP. XXX. 1. How the flowers of the aspen-plum flutter and turn! Do I not think of you? But your house is distant. 2. The Master said, 'It is the want of thought about it. How ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... had put society in a flutter; for Elizabeth Arnold Poe was a favorite with the public not only for her graces of person and personality, her charming acting, singing and dancing, but she had that incalculable advantage for an actress—an appealing ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... whose human figures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kept a sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept the angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make a flock of birds flutter up. ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... than a girl's coming out in the fashionable world? Which, in other words, is to bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one public place to another, richly caparisoned. Yet, mixing in the giddy circle under restraint, these butterflies long to flutter at large, for the first affection of their souls is their own persons, to which their attention has been called with the most sedulous care, whilst they were preparing for the period that decides their fate for life. Instead of pursuing this idle routine, sighing for tasteless show, and heartless ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... down, And while thy struggling pulses flutter, Bid the grey monk his soul mass mutter, And the deep bell its death tone utter— Thy life ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the wing of the stray spirit of youth. He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of wings. They were folded now over the breasts of buried generations; but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his appreciation, of racial differences, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... Goldsmith, says Boswell, was silent during the narrative, because (so his kind friend supposed) he was jealous of the honour paid to the dictator. But his natural simplicity prevailed. He ran to Johnson, and exclaimed in 'a kind of flutter,' "Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should have done, for I should have bowed and stammered through the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... said one boy, whom the child, even in his flutter and misery, recognised as the boy who had accosted them at the door of Westover's that morning, "can't you answer without blubbering like that? Nobody's going ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... thinking of it, plainly meant the thinking of engaging Kit, he immediately partook of his mother's anxiety and fell into a great flutter; for the little old couple were very methodical and cautious, and asked so many questions that he began to be afraid there was ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... what he had intended to do from the very first, but now his plan had apparently fructified, he felt a vague horror at the result of his handiwork. He opened Cumshaw's shirt and put his hand over the man's heart. He could not detect even the faintest flutter. ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... a rip of torn cloth, a flutter in the air—the flutter as of a bird on the wing—an upturned point was caught in a tangle of white linen, and through the tangle Blaise rammed his sword-blade almost to the hilt ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... lifeless in the final scene, she played "at him." He repaid this tribute by distorting his face in agony when Camille was light-hearted, and by breaking into noiseless merriment as her woes were causing handkerchiefs to flutter throughout the audience. When we went to visit her next day, as we often did, she scarcely ever failed to reproach him in some such fashion as: "Ah, Meester Fielt, why will you seet in the box and talk with your overcoat on the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... ladies, the Augers," and, in addition, Pere Roque, and, sitting opposite to Madame Moreau at a card-table, Mademoiselle Louise. She was now a woman. She sprang to her feet with a cry of delight. They were all in a flutter of excitement. She remained standing motionless, and the paleness of her face was intensified by the light ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... time I observed the noise and flutter of wings to increase very fast, and my box was tossed up and down like a sign in a windy day. I heard several bangs or buffets, as I thought, given to the eagle (for such I am certain it must have been, that held the ring of my box in his beak), and then all on a sudden felt myself falling ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... Amid a flutter of flags and the cheers of onlookers, the 'ocean policeman,' H.M.S. Speedy, first took to the water on May 18th, 1893. Its birthplace was the banks of the Thames at Chiswick, but hardly had it settled itself on the smooth surface of the river when orders ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... if it must be said, Parnassian butterfly, and like the bees Wherein old Plato found our similes. Light rover I, forever on the wing, Flutter from flower to flower, from thing to thing, With much of pleasure ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... part, I call a greater triumph than if he were performing the heroics we are more accustomed to. He has steady eyes, can gaze at the right level into the eyes of others, and commands a tongue which is neither struck dumb nor set in a flutter by any startling question. The best instances to be given that he does not lack merit are that the Jocelyns, whom he has offended by his birth, cannot change their treatment of him, and that the hostile women, whatever they may say, do not think Rose utterly insane. At any ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... looked upon it sinking, rising through the sea of smoke, Lo! it shook, and bending downwards, as a tree beneath a stroke, Hung one moment o'er the river, then precipitously fell Like proud Lucifer descending from high heaven into hell. As we saw it flutter downwards, till it reached the eager wave, Not Cape Diamond's loudest echo could have matched the cheer we gave; Yet the English, still undaunted, sent an answering echo back: Though their flag had fallen conquered, ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... remarkable. The elegant interesting figure of the woman, the fop with his hat in the air, the bully with the big sword, the man with the blunderbuss, and the bewildered rustic, to say nothing of the muffled figures on the coach, make up a perfect play. There seems a flutter over all; it is like, as it was intended to be, a scene in ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... so unusual for one of this sober household to go out to a party, that a flutter arose, when Mrs Rookwood had departed, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... had seemed so odd to her the night before, was already gathered round the table, still under the influence of sleep, and therefore uncommunicative, but her entrance sent a little flutter like a breath of ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... was no ways hurt—but that, I know, can't be—and, indeed, they are thinking so much about the carriage, that they can't give one any rational account of any thing; and, as for myself, I'm sure I'm in such a flutter. Lord knows, I advised my lady not to go with the young horses, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... gross adjectives, from the "beastly" and the "filthy" which modern manners too often condone, and still more from the abomination of swearing. So Mr Sharnall's obloquy wounded him to the quick. He went to bed in a flutter of agitation, and lay awake half the night mourning over a friendship so irreparably broken, bitter with the resentment of an unjustified attack, yet reproaching himself lest through his unwittingness he might have brought it all ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... safe and warm, but there doesn't seem to be much breath to rock me," said Do, who lay nearest the little bosom that very slowly rose and fell with the feeble flutter ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... the market, Brigaut, lying in wait, was able to get near her. Though he saw her tremble and turn pale, like an autumn leaf about to flutter down, he did not lose his head, but quietly bought fruit of the market-woman with whom Sylvie was bargaining. He found his chance of slipping a note to Pierrette, all the while joking the woman with the ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... for things with wings. When boy I sought for forest fowl, And caged them in rude rushes' mesh, And fed them with my breakfast roll; So that, though fragile were the door, They rarely fled, and even then Would flutter ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... with the preacher's drowsy tones, and sometimes the congregation is startled from repose by the shrill squeal of some unlucky brute, complaining of the torture inflicted by the sharp teeth of its ill-natured mate or vicious neighbor; or, perhaps, the flutter of fans is suspended at the obstreperous neigh by which some anxious dam recalls the silly foal that has strayed from her side; or the dissonant creaking of a cramped wheel makes doleful interludes between the verses of the hymn. Here naughty boys, escaped from the confinement of the sanctuary, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... larklets in flannel before the fire when their proper parents would not attend to their infantile needs—mother tenderly feeding them with the point of a camel's-hair brush dipped in egg paste and weak wine and water before they were old enough even to 'peep' or flutter their nascent ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... interview was a little era in Mary's young life. Walter had fixed his eyes on her with delight, had held her hand some seconds, and admired her to her face. She began to wonder a little, and flutter a little, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... should be too tired to mount to his dressing- room; but he obeyed, not ungratefully, and his chair was ready, his plate heaped with partridge and his tumbler filled with ale almost before his eyes had recovered the glare of light. The eagerness and flutter of Rosamond's manner began to make him anxious, and he began for the third time the inquiries she had always cut ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nickel-plated, with cast chasings. Was burning for an opening in the diplomatic go-betweening line; wanted to dabble in War Correspondence, and so on. But Van Busch gathered that the biggest egg in the little lady's nest of ambitions was the desire to do a flutter ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... grow," remarked Sister Reparata. Another of Dionea's amusements is playing with pigeons. The number of pigeons she collects about her is quite amazing; you would never have thought that San Massimo or the neighboring hills contained as many. They flutter down like snowflakes, and strut and swell themselves out, and furl and unfurl their tails, and peck with little sharp movements of their silly, sensual heads and a little throb and gurgle in their throats, while Dionea lies stretched out full length in the ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... for tastes. Sidney Kirkwood, spending his Sunday evening in a garden away there in the chaw-bacon regions of Essex, where it was so deadly quiet that you could hear the flutter of a bird's wing or the rustle of a leaf, not once only congratulated himself on his good fortune; yet at that hour he might have stood, as so often, listening to the eloquence, the wit, the wisdom, that give proud distinction ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... roomy harbour of Hong Kong, well sheltered on all sides from wind and waves. A flotilla of steam launches comes out to meet us as we glide slowly among innumerable vessels to our anchorage and buoys. Here flutter in the wind the flags of all commercial nations; the English, Chinese, Japanese, American, and German colours fly side by side. The water in the harbour basin is so shallow that the turn of the propeller stirs up the greyish-brown ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... invitation to lunch or dinner or both. New books made their appearance from below, newspapers and magazines; and if ever the day came when Imogen felt hopelessly faint-hearted, lonely, and over-worked, she was sure to see the flutter of skirts, and her pretty, cordial neighbors would come riding up the trail to cheer her, and to propose something pleasant or helpful. Sometimes Elsie would have her baby on her knee, trusting to "Summer Savory's" sure-footed steadiness; sometimes little Geoff would be riding beside ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... the eyes of the animal again, in the light of the fire. I will shoot, come what will of it;" and before the Knight could interfere, he had discharged his piece in the direction of the object. The dark woods echoed to the report, and some birds disturbed from their perches began to flutter blindly round, but no other sounds were heard, and presently silence, as profound as before, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... string confines me near the ground. I'd brave the eagle's towering wing, Might I but fly without a string." It tugg'd and pull'd, while thus it spoke, To break the string—at last it broke! Deprived at once of all its stay, In vain it tried to soar away: Unable its own weight to bear, It flutter'd downward through the air; Unable its own course to guide, The winds soon plunged it in the tide. Oh! foolish kite, thou hadst no wing, How could'st thou fly without a string? My heart replied, "Oh, Lord, I see How much the kite resembles me! Forgetful ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... answer. She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs. Marven went on in a rising flutter: "Why, you can't have my rooms! I don't understand you. I've taken my rooms for the whole of August, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Stale, (a living Fowle of the same kind you would take) and cross pricking your Rods, one into, and another against the Wind sloping, a foot distant one from the other, pin down your Stale, some distance from them, tying some small string to him, to pull and make him flutter to allure the Fowle down. If any be caught, do not run presently upon them, their fluttering will encrease your Game. A well taught Spaniel is not amiss to retake those that are entangled, and yet flutter away. Thus likewise for the Water, consult the Rivers depth, and let your Rods ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... plodded toward the Club, "we should have disguised Mile End in bunting and blue fire. But perhaps it's a compliment. He knows his London, and it's no use trying to hide the facts from him. They must have queer notions of cities, those monarchs. They must fancy everybody lives in a flutter of flags and walks about under triumphal arches, like as if I were to stitch shoes in my Sunday clothes." By a defiance of chronology Crowl had them on to-day, and they seemed ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it will be the "last call" in dead earnest—the last call for the joy of life and the glory of the world. The grass is already withering, the flower already fading; and that bird of time, with so short a way to flutter, is relentlessly ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Since in the flutter of her spirit caused by the words of Mrs. Hughs, Cecilia felt she must do something, she decided to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Revels is nowhere visible. The crowds press from point to point, peering into the depths of the woods and watching stealthily where the torrent breaks from its dungeon in the hills, and leaps, mad with joy, in the new-found liberty of light and motion; but not a flutter of her garment betrays to the keenest eye the Presence which is the soul of ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... their immense delight in bursting the old Bethune bomb as shrapnel over the German trenches. It was only when the last bomb was thrown that Sergt. G. F. Foster, the stoutest Bomber that ever lived and fell, ended a demonstration which can hardly have caused a flutter in the dove-cotes ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... him to Long Oliver, who leant against the staircase wall with his arms crossed and a veiled amusement in his face. With a slightly heightened colour, but no flutter of the voice, she repeated her blasphemy; and then, pulling a shilling from her worn purse, tendered it to Geake. This, of course, meant "Mind your own business"; but he ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I will take it. But look! There burns the candle. I keep about me a moth for the express purpose of extinguishing candles. I will let him enter the flame. This is his place and hour. May this moth which I here release, depart to flutter above the flame in varying circles. The breeze from the insect's wings has translated the flame into accursed darkness. Or shall I not rather curse the darkness brought by me upon my Brahmanic family? For my father was a man who knew the four Vedas, who would ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... old man. Take heed lest his beams fall on you, For the rays he darts around him Are the power of his enchantment, Are the arrows that he uses.' "Many years, in peace and quiet, On the peaceful Star of Evening Dwelt Osseo with his father; Many years, in song and flutter, At the doorway of the wigwam, Hung the cage with rods of silver, And fair Oweenee, the faithful, Bore a son unto Osseo, With the beauty of his mother, With the courage of his father. "And the boy grew ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... missionaries for meddlers and the treaty officials for crazy fools. When the flag was at last in place, Fetuao and he drew away to get a better view of it from the beach. Standing there, in silence they watched the vivid colors flaunt and flutter against the wooded hills behind, while Jack, with a seaman's instinctive reverence for the flag, bared his head, and Fetuao clapped ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... aside, he allowed the moths to flutter more closely round the candle, and the brilliant throng of the JEUNESSE DOREE, eagerly attentive to Lady Blakeney's every movement, hid the keen, fox-like ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... is a short flutter of joys and pains, a bright glimmer of smiles and tears, and we are gone. But whence did we come? And whither do we go? Can human thought divine ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... he said, earnestly, "my heart sings as it has never sung since its earliest love-flutter. I feel like a stainless god in a sacred garden, listening for the first time to the dear madness of the nightingale. No subtle Neapolitan ever stirred me as this wood-nymph does with her flaming hair and her frank eyes. No wonder the ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... foot of the mountains, than to the Alpine heights where he had generally found a more robust amusement. And wherever he went he bent his attention on the fairer portion of the creation, the girls who fill all the hotels with the flutter of their fresh toilettes and the babble of their pleasant voices. It was very mean and poor of him, seeing he was a mountaineer himself—but still it must be recorded that the only young ladies he systematically neglected were those in very short petticoats, with very sunburnt ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... never a spark of energy on lamenting the delay; this is a natural process and takes time, and once more you make up your mind. Presently you will think of it oftener and oftener, daily perhaps; the idea of control will flutter nearer and nearer to the moment of expression, but always too soon—when you are not about to say anything, or too late—after you ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... fenced. Laura sighed. But she looked at the stout red-faced woman with a peculiar flutter of pleasure. The air of the wild upland—all the primitive, homely facts of the farm, seemed to come about her again. She had left Bannisdale, choked with feeling, tired with thought. Polly's broad speech and bouncing ways were welcome as a ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... (She sits gingerly in the hammock, and then, with a sudden flutter of white, does what BETTY suggests.) Yes. (Regretfully.) I'm afraid that was rather wasted on you, Betty. We must have some ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... the tension of her mind yielded to a flutter of hope as she saw the water no longer gained ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... tinkling, and the copper snakes began to move around each of them in undulating motion. Then the Malay advanced a pace, and elevating his eyebrows very high and opening his eyes until they were of huge size, he nodded his head at Muzio ... and the eyelids of the corpse began to flutter, parted unevenly, and from beneath them the pupils, dull as lead, revealed themselves. With proud triumph and joy—a joy that was almost malicious—beamed the face of the Malay; he opened his lips widely, and from the very depths of his throat ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... never before—asking awkward, burning questions, which put its seniors in a flutter. The seniors, under question, discover that they have no body of doctrine, and have never till now dreamt of the need of any. If they are wise, they will put away the taboo on politics and sit down with their juniors to hammer these things out, ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... you may be sure, ready dressed; and a very sweet, old-world picture she makes, standing beneath the great overhanging gables of the wooden chalet. She, too, favours the national green; but, as relief, there is no lack of bonny red ribbons, to flutter in the wind, and, underneath the ornamented skirt, peeps out a bright-hued petticoat. Around her ample breast she wears a dark tight-fitting bodice, laced down the front. (I think this garment is called a stomacher, ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... the steps of the temple; spring toilettes already glitter in the sun; trains sweep the dust with their long flowing folds; feathers and ribbons flutter; the bell chimes solemnly, while carriages keep arriving at a trot, depositing upon the pavement all that is most pious and most noble in the Faubourg, then draw up in line at the farther end ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... own name being called, I felt a flutter about the heart which I did not feel in action, or in the hurricane, or when, in a case more desperate than either, I jumped overboard at Spithead, to swim to my dear Eugenia. "Powers of Impudence, as well as Algebra," said I, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... in the corner by that pillar, where she seems buried in the gloom, in spite of the candles blazing above her head? Between her and us there is such a sparkle of diamonds and glances, so many floating plumes, such a flutter of lace, of flowers and curls, that it would be a real miracle if any dancer could detect her among those stars. Why, Martial, how is it that you have not understood her to be the wife of some sous-prefet from Lippe or Dyle, who has come to try ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... the place was very pleasing. The cook's assistants were few, some of the regulars were absent, Andy guessed from what he heard the cook say. The latter was rushed to death, and jumping from stove to stove and utensil to utensil in a great flutter of excitement and haste for he was behind in ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... first a firebrand flings; It strikes the sides, takes hold, and clings; The freshening breezes spread the blaze, And soon on plank and beam it preys. The inmates flutter in dismay And vainly wish to fly; There as they huddle and retire Back to the part which 'scapes the fire, Sudden the o'erweighted mass gives way, And falling, shakes the sky. CONINGTON, ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... rapidly. Again I waved my handkerchief, and held it between my two hands, so that it might flutter in the breeze. The stranger approached. She was a fine large square topsail schooner, with a black hull and taunt raking masts. She rounded to close to us, so that she could drop down to ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... time they cease dancing they haunt the holes in the paper through which the newly born moths emerge. When a female appears a male instantly rushes towards her, or rather the two creatures rush towards one another, and they are at once locked in a fast embrace. Immediately their wings cease to flutter, the only commotion on the newspaper being made by the unmated males. In a hatching-room these males on the stacks of trays are so numerous that the place is filled with the sound of the whirring of their wings. The down flies from their wings to such an extent that one continually sneezes. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... of the new day—I was up and climbed the whale for the lantern. In its place I left attached to the upright oar a shirt to flutter in the wind for a signal. I hoped that any vessel passing near enough to see my signal would stop for me. But of one thing I was sure: If it chanced that a whaling ship came within sight of the dead leviathan my peril would soon be over. This huge beast had not been long dead and ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... ordinarily handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing. You grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the cei—, pardon me, as I THOUGHT you did, when I fell down in a fit in your chambers"; and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble; I did not care to offend the man—I did not DARE to offend the man. I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking refuge in Day and Martin's Blacking Warehouse; of speaking to a policeman, but not one would come. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... a boy, and I own I am glad you were not—a man wants a daughter—I should have been quite willing to allow you your flutter on Wall Street, or your try at anything you felt you would like to handle. It would have interested me to look on and see what you were made of, what you wanted, and how you set about trying to get it. It's a new kind of deal ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... house, the man seemed dilapidated also: a slovenly, ill-dressed, demoralised figure he looked, even with his face covered. He seemed in a deep sleep. Wild ducks settled on the lake not far from him with a swish and flutter; a coyote ran past, veering as it saw the recumbent figure; a prairie hen rustled by with a shrill cluck, but he seemed oblivious to all. If asleep, he was evidently dreaming, for now and then he started, or his body twitched, and a muttering came ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... plainly visible from the passage. It is almost noon. Dim light, reflected from the snow outside, comes in through the middle window of the back wall, a view of which is afforded through the opening in the centre. The snowflakes flutter down drearily as on the previous day. The fire now and then casts a red light upon the oleanders, which separate the space surrounding the fireplace from the background. AUNT CLARA, in mourning as before, and LENE, also dressed in black, are busy at the table, which has been set. They move ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... great flutter of excitement over the Queen's Fancy Dress Ball, which took place in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace on 12th May. Its leading feature was the assembling and meeting of the two Courts of Anne of Bretagne (the Duchess of Cambridge) and Edward III. and Queen ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... moment of but one thing—the woman who had compromised her name to help me to attain freedom. I would have died a thousand deaths if it might only be with my hands at his throat, her story unknown. Yet even as I braced my body for the leap, gazing straight into that deadly barrel, there came a quick flutter of drapery at my side, and she, pressing me firmly backward, faced ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... the drawing-room; and FREDA stands restlessly tapping her foot against the bottom stair. With a flutter of skirts CHRISTINE KEITH comes rapidly down. She is a nice-looking, fresh-coloured young woman in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... That sacred Peace may in assurance rayne, And tymely Sleep, when it is tyme to sleepe, May poure his limbs forth on your pleasant playne; The whiles an hundred little winged loves, Like divers-fethered doves, Shall fly and flutter round about your bed, And in the secret darke, that none reproves, Their prety stealthes shal worke, and snares shal spread To filch away sweet snatches of delight, Conceald through covert night. Ye sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will! For greedy pleasure, carelesse of your toyes, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... at the round table, when sport and other topics of our limited world are discussed, and when one generally manages to give or to receive an invitation to pot-luck, with a rubber or a gentle poker flutter to follow. ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... a quiet read At Booty Shelley's poetry; [12] I thinks that Swinburne at a screed Is really almost too-too fly; At Signor Vagna's harmony [13] I likes a merry little flutter; I've had at Pater many a shy; In fact, my form's the ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... certain December, and through the village there was a pleasant little flutter of Christmas preparations. Captain Eli had been up to the store, and he had stayed there a good while, warming himself by the stove, and watching the women coming in to buy things for Christmas. It was strange how many things they bought for presents or ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... in a vast garden with trees, flowers, statues, and fountains. About this garden of Armida, thus radiant upon the waves, were a multitude of boats, under sail or propelled by oars, moving about, and their lights resembled the swarms of fireflies that in summer flutter above the fields of Lombardy. The mild temperature favored this joyous festival. The whole city, all the buildings, every vessel, were ablaze with a thousand lights, and the glassy sea reflected numberless flames. The darkness of night gave the signal for ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Quintard has to say about that," interrupted the woman as that lady entered in a flutter of emotion springing from more than ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Low," say one and all; and straightway all was flutter and commotion, as in a duck pond when a hawk pitches and ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... himself up in an attitude of bold assurance. Wherever a group of scarlet cloaks made a bright patch upon the human arras, there was a flutter of approval. Even the braver of the English nobles, who for race-pride alone might have supported Sebert in a valid claim, saw nothing to do now but to draw away, with a silent interchange of shrugs and headshakes, and leave him to ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... hull. By observing this precaution we at length succeeded in shooting away his fore-topmast, and thus rendering him helpless to continue his flight. Whereupon, like a sensible fellow, he ran the Spanish flag up to his gaff, allowed it to flutter there for a moment, and then hauled it down again ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... shoulder waits thy husband, On thy right side, Ilmarinen, Constant friend and life-protector, He will guard thee from all evil; Husband ready, steed in waiting, Gold-and-silver-mounted harness, Hazel-birds that sing and flutter On the courser's yoke and cross-bar; Thrushes also sing and twitter Merrily on hame and collar, Seven bluebirds, seven cuckoos, Sing thy wedding-march in concord. "Be no longer full of sorrow, Dry thy tears, thou bride of beauty, Thou hast found a noble husband, Better wilt ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... his blue coat tightly and trudged up to where the committee was busy with the sheets of brown paper, weighting them with stones so that the July breeze could not flutter them away. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... said in a serious manner, there were few of us whose hearts did not flutter responsively to this surmise, for the danger became every minute more imminent, and we knew what a terrific surf there must be then running on the shingle beach. But we now rapidly approached the shore; we were near to the floating light, and in the roadstead not ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... found out the loss of the paper?" he thought. "He must have discovered it, and that's why he is in such a flutter. If it's spoilt his chances, so much the better. I owe him a grudge, and, if I've put a spoke in his wheel, I ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... back again, ma'am, I'm sure," the man said. "There's lots of boys and young men who stay around the monument, hoping for a chance to earn a stray dime or so by showing visitors around or carrying something. One of them probably saw the hat flutter out of the window, and somebody will ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... there the sides were glowing with patches of the deep golden, yellow globe-flower; a little farther on, there was a deeper spot with a patch of the great glistening leaves of the water-lily, not yet in bloom; and as he stepped down into the water, there was a flutter from a bird seated on a dead twig, and a flash of azure light gleamed over the river, as the disturbed kingfisher darted upstream, to be watched till ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... bade him leave her, herself buttoning about him the soldier coat which her own hands had cleaned and mended and made respectable. She was glad afterward that she had done so; glad, too, that she had kissed him and waited by the tree, where, looking backward, he could see the flutter of her white dress until a turn in the forest path hid her from ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... which was a ford, and crossed the stream, stopping to let the horses drink. The water was only a foot deep. As we came up on the higher ground beyond the river we met the south wind squarely, and it came in at the front of the cover with a rush. We heard a sharp flutter behind, and then the wagon gave a shiver and a lurch, and the horses stopped; then there was another shock and lurch, and it rolled ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... I should call for objections, I saw Mrs. Chapman take up her Bible in a flutter and nervously turn over its leaves. When I sat down all eyes were turned on her, and there was a death-like stillness in the house. Then she rose up, and in a moment was out of the house. She left the town the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... opportunity to renew the conversation. I have seen this fancy gradually coming on, and, fool that I was, was afraid to speak for fear of making things worse. I thought it might be only a passing whim, like those which flutter twenty times through girls' silly heads before they are married, and was unwilling to treat it as of any consequence. But does Anne mean to deceive me? It is not at all like her. She never did so before. No, she has courage enough for anything, and is incapable of deception. But these foolish feelings ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... to find myself in my own chamber in the tower of the palace. I was so weak that I scarce could lift my hand, and life seemed but to flutter in my breast as flutters a dying dove. I could not turn my head; I could not stir; yet in my heart there was a sense of rest and of dark trouble done. The light from the lamp hurt my eyes: I shut them, and, as I shut them, heard the sweep of a woman's robes ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... flowers became aware of a stranger having come among them, and a flutter (as much as such well-bred creatures deigned to evince) ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... reported in The World. This puffing and Oscar's own uncommon power as a talker; but chiefly perhaps a whispered reputation for strange sins, had thus early begun to form a sort of myth around him. He was already on the way to becoming a personage; there was a certain curiosity about him, a flutter of interest in whatever he did. He had published poems in the Trinity College magazine, Kottabos, and elsewhere. People were beginning to take him at his own valuation as a poet and a wit; and the ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... come at a certain early spring date before the leaves are fully expanded, and flutter upward, while they take something from beneath the budding leaf or twig. It is a peculiar motion, which with their restless ways, olive-green color, and small size, readily distinguishes them. It is rare that one is still. "But the ruby-crowned sometimes favors me with a song, and as it is ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... no words would be quite so cheerful and stimulating to hear as those matter-of-fact words of Sue's. She soon reached the attic. She opened the door softly, and yet with a flutter at ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... King's right, and he passed along the platform of the throne with an easy, unhesitating step, and an almost boyish smile of pleasure at the sounds he heard, and at the flutter of excitement that was in the air, rather to be felt than otherwise perceived. Coming up the steps of the throne, he bent one knee before his brother, who held out his ungloved hand for him to kiss—and when that was done, he knelt again before the Queen, who did ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... and ran to put flags on its gateposts and porch pillars and loop bunting around its windows. And when the morning broke like a great pink rose and shed its rosy light over the dimpling hills and lacy, misty woodlands the old town was a-flutter with banners, everybody was about through with breakfast and certain childless and highly efficient ladies were already taking their front and side hair ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
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