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More "Uncanny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boldest and most bloodthirsty of our small mammals; indeed, none of our larger beasts are more so. There is something devilish and uncanny about it. It persists like fate; it eludes, but cannot be eluded. The terror it inspires in the smaller creatures—rats, rabbits, chipmunks—is pitiful to behold. A rat pursued by a weasel has been known to rush into a room, uttering dismal cries, ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... indeed, and Kazmah never once raised his head. Indeed, except for a dignified gesture of greeting and one of dismissal, he never moved. His immobility was rather uncanny." ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... expression lay. It was in those remarkable eyes. Immovable as was her face, the dark eyes were alight with life and a suppressed excitement that made them shine gloriously. The contrast between the shining eyes and the impassive face beneath them struck him as so extraordinary as to be almost uncanny. As a matter of fact, it was doubtless both unusual ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting and uncanny. The metal plate seemed to offer no appreciable resistance to the flying force, and the light was as rich and full as if nothing lay between the paper ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... through the chinks of the green logs. Forest creatures paused to stare at it with steady eyes, from which flashed back a blaze as intense as the fire's own. An owl took his station near and began to call. Overhead the brilliant aurora of the Far North palpitated in a silence that seemed uncanny when coupled with such intensity of movement. Shadows stole here and there like acolytes. Breezes rose and died like the passing of a throng. The woods were peopled with uncanny influences, intangible, unreal, yet potent with the symbolism of the unknown Presence watching these men. The ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... unbearable reality. Under the increasing sunlight the colours of the Doctor's complexion, the pattern of his tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the pose of his head polite; the only uncanny thing ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... household has been very much upset this week by the death of our cook. The funeral took place last night at seven o'clock from the lodge house at the gate. The shadows made on the paper screens as they prepared him for burial, told an uncanny story. The lack of delicacy, the coarseness, the total disregard for the dignity of death were all pictured on the doors. I stood in the chapel and watched with a sick heart. After they had crowded the poor old body into a sitting position in a sort of square tub, they brought it out ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... Newfoundland as the base from which to colonize southwards until an armed New England should meet and beat New Spain. How vast his scheme! How pitiful its execution! And yet how immeasurably beyond his wildest dreams the actual development to-day! Gilbert was not a sea-dog but a soldier with an uncanny reputation for being a regular Jonah who 'had no good hap at sea.' He was also passionately self-willed, and Elizabeth had doubts about the propriety of backing him. But she sent him a gilt anchor by way of good luck and ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... competition, using all those delightful charms with which Nature has endowed her. This is especially true of widows and women whose husbands are at the front. They often rely more upon persuasion than upon any technical or practical knowledge. One reason why they succeed is their almost uncanny knowledge of men. And this often enables them to grasp swiftly the clue ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... kindness and resolve to help him, they felt certain qualms, both of conscience and of fear. The all too conclusive proof that he was a fugitive and that his hands and disordered brain were red with blood were strengthened by this uncanny adventure. ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... mischief to their gentle neighbours as when a "collie" worries the sheep. These evil results may always be minimized by placing a piece of millboard between the culprit and his victim. I have seen lovely bindings sadly marked by such uncanny neighbours. ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... aside, and a figure in uniform, moving with uncanny speed for a man so massive, appeared upon the platform and bounded down the ladder. He was among the struggling men on the floor in a moment, and became a maze of flailing arms and legs. Like ten-pins ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... all, and I wouldn't dare attempt it with any feminine saint in the calendar. Oh, Graydon, what a dear old goose you are!" and she laughed till the tears came into her eyes. He joined her in a half vexed way, protesting that she was still as uncanny as a ghost, although she had lost ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... suppressed sobs now and again showed the anguish of her spirit. She began to realize, during this dreadful night, that her husband was exceedingly ill and might very probably die. The storm which raged outside, and the furious blasts and the uncanny sounds in the air, had terrified her and made ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... originally the same significance; that is, they may have been designed to purge the city from demoniac influence by diverting the attention of the demons from human beings to the puppets and then toppling the whole uncanny crew, neck and crop, into the river, which would soon sweep them far out to sea. In precisely the same way the natives of Old Calabar used periodically to rid their town of the devils which infested ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... He began to mount the rickety, dilapidated stairs; and, where it seemed that the lightest tread must make them creak out in blatant protest, his trained muscles, delicately compensating his body weight, carried him upward with a silence that was almost uncanny. There was need of silence, as there was need of haste. He was not so sure now of the time at his disposal—that he had even reached the Sanctuary FIRST. How long had he loitered in that half-dazed way on the Bowery? He did not know—perhaps ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... not alone in the deserted building? Was there some solitary being who laid claim to its desolation and betrayed jealousy at any intrusion within its mysterious precincts? Or was the dismal place haunted by some uneasy spirit, who with long, uncanny fingers stood ready to clutch the man who presumed to bring living hopes and fears into a spot dedicated entirely to memories? I had scarcely the courage to ask, but when I turned and saw what it was that had alarmed me, I did not know whether to laugh at my fears or feel increased awe of my ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Scrambling out of her bed and wrapping a mantle about her, she sat beside the window and peered into the night. There was not a breeze to break the solemn silence, not a sound to distract her from her reverie. Two black and uncanny pine trees stood like armed guards near by the corner of the house to challenge the interloper from disturbing her meditation. Overhead the stars blinked and glistened through the treetops in their lace of foliage and delicate branches, and resembled for all the world an hundred diamonds set ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... Apart from these uncanny sounds there were other circumstances which gave the Priory a sinister reputation. The very aspect of the building was enough to suggest weird impressions. Its high white walls were blotched with patches of mildew, and in some parts there ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... They were installed, and a young and rapid waiter was attending to them. This time Sally helped to choose the dinner. She could not read the menu, because she knew no French; but the waiter, with an uncanny insight, realised that he would do well to address her and to explain the dishes to Sally instead of to Gaga; and so, to the relief of all three, they were quickly served, and wine was brought, and Sally began to feel creeping upon her all the old pleasure and excitement of noise and wine and ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... is steady and well placed but not decisive. His overhead is reliable and accurate, but lacks "punch." The great factor of Parke's game is his uncanny ability to produce his greatest game under the greatest stress. I consider him one of the finest match players in the world. His tactical knowledge and brainy attack are all the more dangerous, because he has ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... into the sunflecked shade of the grove. A hush like that of primeval day threw its uncanny influence over the world. Jim felt something tugging at his spirit that was unfamiliar, disquieting. He began to whistle just for company, and in a moment, as if at a signal call, Danny came along the path, sedately ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... unhappy ones. There is frequently an attitude towards them combined of wonder, misgiving, fear, aversion—a vague feeling or belief that the deaf are more or less distinct in their thoughts and actions from other people, that they are somehow "unnatural" or "uncanny."[137] ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... "It was an uncanny feeling, Charlie. I felt it myself, and was very grateful that we were hidden from the enemy, who, of course, were blazing away in the direction in which they had last seen us. We only lost three killed and twelve wounded, altogether, and I think those were, for ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... displeased with her, for she creeps about over me every night, and lets fall down upon me drops so hot that I am burning all over from them. My reason for letting you know this is, that I like you somewhat better, though there is something uncanny hovering about you too. However, I could get on with you if I did not feel there was so much more amiss with Gudrun." Then Herdis awoke and told Gudrun her dream. Gudrun thought the apparition was of good omen. Next morning Gudrun ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... slept it never afterward occurred to Miss Arthur to inquire. Something recalled her from the land of visions, and starting up in her chair she saw Celine, standing demurely before her, her face wreathed in smiles, and no signs of any uncanny adventure lingering about her. ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... over to the piano, and, accompanying herself on deadened pedal where she stood, sang in a low voice the "Snow-Tiger," with its uncanny refrain: ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... she punished me once, when I was about seven and persisted in talking about the convent—I suppose I had forgotten it for a time in the new life, and something brought it back to me. But it is the most vivid memory of my childhood. Do you think I could have been one of those uncanny children that live in a dream world? I hope not. I like to think I am quite normal and full to the brim of common sense." He had laughed and told her not to worry. He had lived in a dream world ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... It is an uncanny gift of these folks to come before you when least expected; to be ever-present, emerging, one might almost say, out of the earth. Go to the wildest corner of this thinly populated land, and you may be sure that there is an Arab, brooding among the rocks ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... see now? Was she who sat before him human or divine—one of those who must be placated by strict deeds, by charms or the blood of animals and captives; some spirit of the jungle that had made herself visible, in her marvelous pallor and uncanny costume, amid a retinue of mortals ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... men with pipes and glasses were gathered before it in great easeful chairs, and the wild weather outside and the comfort that was within, and the season of the year—for it was Christmas—and the hour of the night, all called for the weird or uncanny, then out spoke the ex-master of foxhounds ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... one other lodging," answered the headborough, scratching his head. "Only you won't like it, sir. It is uncanny!" ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... Roentgen's rays have rearranged some of the older ideas of matter, while radium has revolutionised them, and is leading science beyond the borderland of ether into the astral world. The boundaries between animate and inanimate matter are broken down. Magnets are found to be possessed of almost uncanny powers, transferring certain forms of disease in a way not yet satisfactorily explained. Telepathy, clairvoyance, movement without contact, though not yet admitted to the scientific table, are approaching the Cinderella-stage. The fact ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... these depressing evenings, while she was boiling an egg in the kitchen, that the ringing of the door-bell reverberated with an uncanny sound through the empty apartment. Spurred by an instinctive fear of a telegram, she ran to open the door, and found Dr. French standing in the dimly lighted hail, with the negro Robert ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... horizons undreamed of by those who know her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time. The world is so far right in regarding beauty with a sort of superstitious dread, as a presence almost uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a daemonic thing,—which is what the world has meant when it has, not unnaturally, confused it with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a supernatural stranger in our midst, a fairy element, and, like the lorelei and the lamia, it does beckon its ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... about him. In A Cry from the Wilderness he more than once clothed his thought in enigmatic garb, but the meaning was always ultimately clear. At this distance, when slavery and the Civil War are alike viewed in the perspective, the words of the oracle are almost uncanny: "In the rest of the Southern states the influence of these Foreigners will be known and felt in its time, and the seeds from the HORY ALLIANCE and the DECAPIGANDI, who have a hand in those grades of Generals, from the Inquisitor to the Vicar General and ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... unreal. There is in them an affectation of psychological purpose which is not very well sustained, and a somewhat clumsy introduction of supernatural machinery. Yet they have a power of engaging the attention in the rapid succession of startling and uncanny incidents and in adventures in which the horrible is sometimes dangerously near the ludicrous. Brown had not a particle of humor. Of literary art there is little, of invention considerable; and while the style is to a certain ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hoped that these interesting animals will not soon be exterminated. A Malay, the only hunter in Sampit, told me that some are so old that they can no longer climb trees. When wounded an orang-utan cries like a child in quite an uncanny manner, as a Dutch friend informed me. According to the Dayaks, it will wrest the spear from its attacker and use it on him. They also maintain, as stated elsewhere, that orang-utans, contrary to the generally accepted belief, are ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... common with excess of snow. This is the Balaitous, craggy, irregular and weird, too far off to be imposing, yet one of the highest of the range. It is not an easily accessible mountain, nor is it often climbed. There is deemed to be something uncanny about it. Its ascent is very dangerous, they say. Accidents have occurred there; a strange ill omen, it is believed, invests those ghostly snows; the death-clutch of the Balaitous holds many a brave mountaineer. As seen ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... weird in the Bat's form, and this is no doubt the reason why, while angels of all kinds are represented with birds' wings, those of Bats have, by universal consent, always been conferred upon demons, dragons, and similar uncanny creatures. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... been here once; sometimes she could fancy she saw dark shadows moving amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed to her to hide voices at times, even as its shadow concealed forms. It was indeed an uncanny place to be alone in even under the broad light of day. All across the Pacific for thousands of miles you find relics of the past, like these scattered ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... that the strange rider was a horse thief, but it struck him at the moment that the terror of the horses might not have been due altogether to wolves. Sometimes these noble animals have an uncanny instinct for detecting danger. He stole silently toward the tent. There was a gun there, loaded with shot for any possible game on the prairie. As he moved in the deep darkness of the valley he stumbled over a root and fell. The same moment ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... as Brayton had thoughtfully been apprised, it was more than a tradition that some of them had at divers times been found in parts of the premises where it would have embarrassed them to explain their presence. Despite the Snakery and its uncanny associations—to which, indeed, he gave little attention—Brayton found life at the Druring mansion very much ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... be surprised," he was saying, "but I didn't think it'd take you like this. After all, there's nothing uncanny ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... out of the gloom a great grey shape came winging towards the window, the heavy pinions moving ponderously with their uncanny sough. It was an owl attracted by the light. Before that bird of evil omen, that harbinger of death, I drew back and crossed myself. I had a sight of its sphinx-like face and round, impassive eyes ere it circled to melt again into the darkness, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... said, with a curious, uncanny laugh. "Old Ma Restless is just raving her fat head off. I was around this morning and heard her. Gee! She was sayin' things. She was cussin' and cussin' like mad. So I jest turned in the yard to see. It was just as ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... where the space (in the well) was only three feet each way, reached at last to the grotesque—the absurd contortions of a man miserable on a pleasure jaunt—and I laughed aloud, but somehow it sounded hollow and uncanny. ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... there fell a dead silence over all the place, and it was uncanny. It seemed impossible that all men should sleep in peace in the palace where such a deed had been wrought at our feet. I had rather the rush and yell of the Welsh over these ramparts they hated than this stillness ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... Now, there was something uncanny about this outbreak on the part of the Sioux, and the general was puzzled. Up to September the Indians had been busy with the annual hunt. They were fat, well-fed, prosperous,—had got from the government pretty much everything that they could ask with any show of reason and, so they ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... Telzey had the uncanny certainty of having had the answer to this situation almost in her grasp. An answer which appeared to involve the world of Jontarou, Tick-Tock, and of all ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... as the apparition came close up to him and he felt, as on the former occasion when he had been visited by her, that he was going to faint, she turned abruptly and moved away in the direction of a small side door. This she opened with her uncanny bunch of keys and without ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... of the general ugliness of the human male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new and uncanny, now that their features,—instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after, boredoms to be avoided, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... if they caught him here? As the woman came close to him and put her hand upon his arm, he was conscious again of the singular thrill that shot through him whenever she touched him. She affected him as no other woman had ever done—nor did he know whether it was like or dislike. There was an uncanny fascination about her that attracted him, even though he endeavoured to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... tree (Ficus Urostigima—Sp.) corresponds to our witch elm, and certainly at night has a most uncanny appearance. Each of these great trees has its guardian spirit, or Ticbalan" (Sawyer, Inhabitants of Philippines, pp. 214, 343). See also Blanco's Flora, art. "Ficus." Chirino speaks of this tree as having no fruit; he must have observed specimens ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... few moments of silent thought, "there's something hugely mysterious and uncanny back of all these doings of less than twenty-four hours. I wonder what that big ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... dwelling on them. Of course this includes everything which makes you feel at all hot, with a sense of something not quite nice;—everything in books which it would make you hot to read out loud (an excellent test);—and I include all uncanny things such as ghosts and palmistry and fortune-telling:—these are not safe things to talk about, and I ask you as my particular wish not to do it, though you are quite welcome to unburden your mind to me if you wish to do so! I think your common sense will bear ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... chair between the knob and the floor, in such a manner that it could not be opened from within. He then threw himself upon the bed, wondering what would be the outcome of his unlawful enterprise, and while inhaling the tonic air of hill and forest, half wished he were well away from this uncanny house and its eccentric inmates. And yet, despite the mystery which enshrouded it, there was a charm, a fascination, he could not deny. It was the dream-like unreality of his surroundings—unreal, because different from all that he had ever known. Should ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... of that human voice, lifted in the midst of this solitude, darkness and desolation, had something so uncanny, so lugubrious about it, that it would have caused even the speaker to shudder, had not Roland, as he himself said, been inaccessible to fear. He looked about for a place from which he could command the entire hall. An isolated table, placed on a sort of stage at one end of the refectory, which ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... thoughtfully, "their chances are small, but you can never tell what these very resourceful people may do. They are buoyed up by a hopefulness that is almost uncanny and they ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... uncanny sense of direction and locality had helped him mightily. The speed at which he had driven his car had not at all confused him. He had known exactly what he was doing, and just where he was going, at all times. A few miles had ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... supposed near ancestors of our present species farther and yet farther back into the dim past, and ends with an analogical inference which "makes the whole world kin." As we said at the beginning, this upshot discomposes us. Several features of the theory have an uncanny look. They may prove to be innocent: but their first aspect is suspicious, and high authorities pronounce the whole thing to be positively mischievous. In this dilemma we are going to take advice. Following the bent of our prejudices, and hoping to fortify these by new and strong arguments, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... saw the door in the wall open. One of the men slipped out and looked up and down. He apparently signaled that the coast was clear, and soon the others followed him. They came down the lane, walking very slowly—a weird and uncanny little procession. Arnold caught a glimpse of them as they passed. The two larger men were supporting their fallen companion between them, each with an arm under his armpits, so that the fact that he was really being carried was barely noticeable. Isaac came behind, his hands thrust deep into his ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... anything then he would have shivered with horror at that moment, for it was surely gruesome and uncanny enough. ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... gigantic, while others bear a ludicrous resemblance to misshapen dwarfs, suggesting, as they stand like pygmies round their mightier brethren, a group of mediaeval jesters in a court of kings. In the faint dusk of evening, as one flits by them in the moving train, their weird, uncanny forms appear to writhe in pain, and he is tempted to regard them as the material shapes ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... disgusting and repellent of all created things. Tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and some lizards are repulsive to the eye and unpleasantly suggestive to the imagination; but the ugliest of them all is not half so uncanny, hideous, and loathsome to me as the Cuban land-crab. It resembles the common marine crab in form, and varies in size from the diameter of a small saucer to that of a large dinner-plate. Instead of being gray or brown, however, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... very awe-inspiring though in the journey in the dark; and in spite of himself Mark could not help feeling that it was rather uncanny to be riding over the black water with what seemed to be golden serpents rushing away in undulating fashion on either side. Then, too, there was a curious quivering glow, something like an aurora, playing about the top of the mountain on their left; ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... his head at an unnatural angle. Without seeming to notice the others of his kind, the Throg came on at a shambling run, straight at Shann as if he could actually see through the dark and had marked down the Terran for personal vengeance. There was something so uncanny about that forward dash that Shann retreated. As his hand groped for the knife at his belt his boot heel caught in a tangle of weed and he struggled for balance. The wounded Throg, still pulling at the spear shaft protruding above the swelling ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... that sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artist from a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien to his nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial "faugh," and dismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usually impelled the black savages to dismiss the white man on an ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... have to marry me without loving me," Beatrice declared thickly. "I won't be left alone in this beastly city! I want some one to take care of me. I am getting frightened. It's uncanny—horrible! I—oh! I am ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drew his bowstring, released it with a loud twang, and the arrow, flying straight and true, pierced the creature's heart, so that it fell dead in its tracks, and they had their first deer. And now again Stukely gave fresh evidence of his uncanny knowledge, for although he had never before killed a deer, and might be supposed to know nothing of the verderer's art, he at once set to work to skin and "break up" the animal with all the skill of an adept. ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Grizzly ranged the Sierra Nevada from Lassen county to Mono, invulnerable, invincible and mysterious, and every old hunter in the mountains had an awesome story to tell of the ferocity and uncanny craft of the beast and of his own miraculous escape from the jaws of the bear after shooting enough lead at him to start a smelter. Old Brin was a never-failing recourse of the country editor when the foreman was insistent for copy, and those who undertook to preserve the fame of his ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... members of a fraternal society are summoned to a meeting by telephone or letter. In the Congo they are haled by the tom-tom, which is the wireless of the woods. These huge drums have an uncanny carrying power. The beats are like the dots and dashes of telegraphy. All the native news of Central Africa is transmitted from village to village ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... had been near him all the time he did not know. It was in the same wave-valley with himself and seemed to be looking at him. Even before there was any sign of human life upon it, it seemed to be standing off there just looking at him, and there was something uncanny about it. It looked like the little flat cupola of the town hall at home, only it was darker, and on top of it two long things stood up like flagpoles. And it bobbed and moved and just ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... that there was something uncanny about it—the idea of a machine making boots was enough to haunt him. He kept ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... absurdum of the attempt of man to create God. God rises not from man to the firmament, but falls from the firmament to man. God does not ascend as the vapor, but descends as the light. This is the wide meaning of this uncanny poem. It is the sanity of the leading poet of the nineteenth century, and the greatest poet since Shakespeare, who saw clearly the inanity of so-called scientific conclusions and godless theories of the evolution of mankind. Mankind can not create God. God creates mankind. All ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... is the upshot?" questioned Helwyse with sullen impatience. The emotion now apparent in the voice, uncanny though it was, counteracted the spell wrought by its purely intellectual depravity. Helwyse was perhaps beginning to understand that he had ventured his stock of virgin gold for a handful ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... consequently the skin could not serve as a scarecrow in any case. Hence, whatever its purpose may be, it surely is not that. It looks like a mere fancy or whim of the bird. There is that in its voice and ways that suggests something a little uncanny. Its call is more like the call of the toad than that of a bird. If the toad did not always swallow its own cast-off skin, the bird would probably use ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... away from the foolish chatter. Matters of a deep and sinister nature occupied his mind. He felt within him wars and rumors of wars. He wished that the curtains would stop swinging out from the wall in that silly fashion. It was deuced uncanny to see them hang at an angle of twenty-five degrees, then slowly and mysteriously fall back into their places. He tried not to watch them, but it was even more dangerous to look at the man next him breaking soft-boiled eggs into a glass tumbler. ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she would keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with the brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness when they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or the rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach. She knew always when they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... striking phenomenon I should by no means fail to mention, and this uncanny fact may be illustrated thus: If an object is blue or if it is yellow it will be recognised by all men as being blue or yellow, as the case may be. One will not say of it, "See that lurid yellow object," to have another reply, "What! that object directly before ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... caught a look in his eyes, when he's been down on his hands and knees, staring into some infernal vent-hole—a look that is—well, uncanny, as if he were peering into the bowels of the earth for something quite outside the conceptions of science. You might think that volcano had worked some spell over him, turned his mind. He prattles to it or storms at it as if it were a living creature. Queer, yes; and he's impressive, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... get over it. But she doesn't. She's worse, if anything; and sometimes her insight, or intuition, or whatever you may call it, is positively uncanny. I never know what she's going to remark next, when I take her anywhere; but it's safe to say, whatever it is, it'll be unexpected and usually embarrassing to somebody. And—is that the baby?" broke off Mrs. Hartwell, as a cooing ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... her from under the stove, languidly stretching himself, and yawning until all the red cavern of his mouth and throat was revealed. At the moment he had an uncanny resemblance to Elder Joseph Blewett of White Sands—Roaring Joe, the irreverent boys called him—when he grew excited and shouted. Mrs. Bell saw it—and then reproached herself ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I've kent me drap that spoon on the fender, and be beat to find it in an hour. And yet, a' the time I was sure it was there. This is a gey mysterious world, and women's the uncanniest things in't. It's hardly mous to think how uncanny they are." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... too, had disappeared to begin that process from which he had always emerged incredibly sleek, and dapper and perfumed. His progress with shaving brush, shirt, collar and tie was marked by disjointed bars of the newest syncopation whistled with an uncanny precision and fidelity to detail. He caught the broken time, and tossed it lightly up again, and dropped it, and caught it deftly like a juggler playing with frail crystal globes that seem forever on the point of ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... among my father's correspondence. In no case was there anything to show that he was afflicted with blindness and this in spite of the fact that he exercised undue economy in the spacing of lines. Towards the close of his life the old man was credited with powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny: it has been said that he could tell at once the color of a ribbon placed between his fingers. My father would neither confirm nor deny ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... Jill could not have said whether she was relieved or more frightened than ever. True, that numbing sense of the uncanny had ceased to grip her, for Reason told her that spectres do not sing rag-time songs. On the other hand, owners of apartments do, and she would almost as readily have faced a spectre as the owner of this apartment. Dizzily, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... not furiously popular, and the crowds congregated where he was not. His tyranny was based upon his uncanny faculty of anticipating the other man's draw. The citizens were not unaccustomed to seeing swift death result to the slower man from misplaced confidence in his speed of hand—that was in the game—an even break; ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... relish this extraordinary yet traditional treatment of his remains after death, and fervently believing in the resurrection of the body in the flesh, thought it distinctly uncanny that his heart and his entrails should each have to go hunting through the city for his body on the Day of Judgment. Accordingly, he was laid to rest just as he died, instead of being entombed, like all the other members of the House ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... his calling, as inscribed upon the wire blinds of the ground floor front. We were ushered at once into the professor's presence by a woman who, I presume, was his wife—a quiet respectable body with nothing uncanny about her. The front parlour was comfortably furnished and scrupulously clean, and the celebrated Professor himself, a pleasant elderly gentleman, was sitting over a manuscript which he read by the light of a Queen's reading lamp. There was not, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... miserable rooms (divided from each other by canvas partitions) was wholly subordinated to the business of the bar. Before long, Barker's had acquired a worse reputation than even other towns of its type, the abnormal and uncanny aggregations of squalor and vice which dotted the plains in those days; and it was at its worst when Sinclair returned thither and took up his quarters in the engineers' building. The passion for gambling was raging, and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... the half-sunken Doraine was scraping ominously on the bed of the channel. She shivered and swerved from frequent contact with submerged rocks, but held her course with uncanny steadiness, while every soul on board gazed with stark, despairing eyes at the land which mocked them as they passed. Far on ahead loomed the lofty hills, and beyond them lay—What? ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... glades and forest borders for it. At last, concealed on a bank in a wood, between Glion and Les Avants, it revealed itself in quantity, many specimens standing over three feet in height. Martagon is an Arabic word, signifying a Turkish cap. A very strange and uncanny-looking lily, which I had never seen before, turned up near Kandersteg at the Blue Lake, beloved of Mr. H. G. Wells. This is "the Herb Paris." It has four narrow outstretched green sepals, and four still narrower green petals, eight large stamens, and a purple seed capsule. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... of," exclaimed Ethel Blue, who was so imaginative and sympathetic that she sometimes had an almost uncanny way of reading peoples' thoughts. "You wanted to bring some of those poor women out into the country so that the children could get well, and you told your grandfather about it and he offered ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... large circle of acquaintances as "the Mhor," which, as Jean would have explained to you, is Gaelic for "the great one." Thus had greatness been thrust upon him. He was seven, and he had lived at The Rigs since he was two. He was a handsome child with an almost uncanny charm of manner, and a gift of make-believe that made his ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... him, sir," said Scrape, "but have heard it said that the strange mysterious person that attended you, him that the maist part of folks countit uncanny, had gane awa wi' a Mr. Ringan o' Glasko last ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... "That steer is coming! There he is now!" And he pointed to the lower end of the ravine, where the animal had just bobbed up among the bushes, shaking his head from side to side in a queer, uncanny way. ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... Carlotta's eyes—the younger girl's radiance, her confusion, even her operating room uniform and what it signified. How she hated her, with her youth and freshness, her wide eyes, her soft red lips! And this engagement—she had the uncanny divination of fury. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... itself, left the neighbouring houses in an impenetrable gloom. Whole battalions of Boxers could have lurked there unmarked by us; perhaps they were only waiting until they could safely cut us off. It was very uncanny. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... we seemed to come to Golden Gate Park. It seemed as if we had started for there. By this time the darkness was settling. But it was a weird twilight. The glare from the burning city threw a kind of red flame and shadow about us. It seemed uncanny; the figures about us ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... of toad-stool (Baeran) in order to counteract the power of the Trolls and other evil spirits, who are believed to be abroad that night; for at that mystic season the mountains open and from their cavernous depths the uncanny crew pours forth to dance and disport themselves for a time. The peasants believe that should any of the Trolls be in the vicinity they will shew themselves; and if an animal, for example a he or she goat, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... everyone knew secretly that it was not the same old Henry Knight. Everyone, including Henry, felt—and could not dismiss the feeling—that Henry was conferring a favour on the office by working as usual. There seemed to be something provisional, something unreal, something uncanny, in the continuance of his position there. And Sir George, when he demanded his services to take down letters in shorthand, had the air of saying apologetically: 'Of course, I know you're only here for fun; but, since you are here, we may as well carry out the joke ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... side. He talked swiftly. Only Alan understood. There was something unearthly and spectral in his appearance; his hair and beard were wet; his eyes shot here and there in little points of fire; he was like a gnome, weirdly uncanny as he gestured and talked in his monotone while he watched the nigger-head bottom. When he had finished, he did not wait for an answer, but turned and led the way swiftly toward ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... most like father," he said once, which, perhaps, explained the preference; but then Allan had so much tact and gentleness. Fred did not understand him at all; he called him odd and uncanny, which ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... cut a large disc of metal nearly free; seemingly on the verge of dropping into the safe. Now the flame left the safe, again retracting itself in that uncanny manner, no force seeming either to supply it with fuel or to support it thus, though it burned steadily, and worked rapidly and efficiently. Now, in mid-air, it hung for ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... Nurse wouldn't let Pat and me stop to talk to him when we passed the cottage going a walk, he was such a queer, black-looking little creature. Old Nancy went away once for ever so long, and when she came back she brought this rum little chap with her, and the people about said he was as uncanny as she. Nobody's very kind to them, ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... must be confessed that Chief Lentsue's defensive activities were wholly illegal, inasmuch as the Boers, although they had declared war against Lentsue's sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria, were not at war with him. It was defined, by an uncanny white man's mode of reasoning, that the war was a white man's business in which the blacks should take no part beyond merely suffering its effects. The Natives' retort to this declaration was in the words of a Sechuana proverb, viz., "You cannot sever the jawbones ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the trees, was impressed, as she had often been before, by a strange sense of the supernatural,—as if some being wholly unconnected with ordinary mortal happenings were visiting the world by a mere chance. She was a little ashamed of this "uncanny" feeling,—and after a few minutes' hesitation she decided to retire within the house and to her own apartments, rightly judging that Morgana would be better pleased to find her so gone than waiting for her return like a sentinel on guard. She ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... startling imitation of the panther's cry, outside, and, rising, presently, when careful listening revealed the fact that the less obtrusive sound of human voices followed what had seemed to be the weird, uncanny call of the wild-beast, he went to the door and opened it, so ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... could describe, of fettered victims writhing under the knife; of massed forms straining forward out of the gloom, with ferocious faces lit up by the sacrificial fires; of the background of ghostly trees; of the dark pyramid of Diamond Head standing sentinel over the uncanny scene, and the peaceful moon looking down upon it through rifts in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in a dwining way. But for it, I think she might have wrestled through the winter. However, it was ordered otherwise, and she was removed from mine to Abraham's bosom on Christmas Day, and buried on Hogmanay, for it was thought uncanny to have a dead corpse in the house on the New ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... tree was whipping about like an alive creature in agony. She could hardly keep her breath, and the salt spray flew over the roof and touched her lips. The elements roared and shrieked and whistled in a colossal orchestra, and above them she could hear that most uncanny of all sounds in a West Indian storm, the rattling of the hard seeds of the giant tree ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... woman is seen to enter a locked bath-room, where she is not found on inquiry. A woman had been murdered there some years before. The percipient, General Sir Arthur Becher, had seen other uncanny visions. A little boy, wakened out of sleep, said he saw an ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... of the party were rather pleased with the spectacle, though they had had enough of it; while the ladies, whose flesh had been "crawling" at the uncanny sight, were glad to escape. They all reached the hotel, and were hungry enough after the long jaunt of the forenoon ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... "Oh, I had an uncanny feeling when you first mentioned the Jeanne D'Arc!" she cried. "But could you not find out more? What became of the man that ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... The evil works from a bad center both ways. It demoralizes those who practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by it in the efficiency of the law as a safe protector. The man in whose breast that faith has been darkened is naturally the subject of dangerous and uncanny suggestions. Those who use unlawful methods, if moved by no higher motive than the selfishness that prompted them, may well stop and inquire what is to be the end ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... the old Paris coachman crossed himself and, as he entered the uncanny neighborhood, felt around for the sacred amulet that every good Frenchman wears ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... Dick. "It's uncanny, George. A place like this must have had a thousand slaves, and I don't see any of them rushing ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... did not comprehend, and with a few hurried apologies he managed to escape his fair but uncanny tormentor. Besides, this unlooked-for incident had driven from his mind the more important object of his visit,—the discovery of the assailants of ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... to Stevenson's human soul. I find Mr Symons says, at p. 243, that Stevenson "had something a trifle elfish and uncanny about him, as of a bewitched being who was not actually human—had not actually a human soul"—in which there may be a glimmer of truth viewed from his revelation of artistic curiosities in some aspects, but is hardly true of him otherwise; and this ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... writer and many more, lived as a kind of squatter, in his sod-built hut, close to “The Tower.” A sort of living fossil was this individual, short in stature, dark in complexion, and with a piercing, almost uncanny, eye; roughly clad, and looking as though he were something of a stranger to soap and water. “What’s in a name?” said love-sick Juliet. Yet the name which clung to this eccentric person probably had its significance. In one of the “Magic Songs” of the Finns (given in “Folklore,” ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... certain; there was not anybody or anything in the world, apparently, that one could count on. She had a feeling of nausea along with a curious calm that was like the calm of desperation. Yet her mind was alert, active, and she understood Mrs. Toomey with an uncanny clearness. She believed her when she had said that she liked her, just as she knew that she had lied when she had said that she was glad to see her. She understood now that Mrs. Toomey had accepted the loan ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... lost her third husband—by divorce—had received from Mr. Yahi-Bahi a glimpse into the future that was almost uncanny in its exactness. She had asked for a divination, and Mr. Yahi-Bahi had effected one by causing her to lay six ten-dollar pieces on the table arranged in the form of a mystic serpent. Over these he had bent and peered deeply, as if seeking to unravel their meaning, ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... people from the most distant places to close proximity; Pittsburg and even Salamanca meet Fort Benton and St. Paul at the Forks of the Ohio. On the other hand, with uncanny certainty, those most eager to meet are kept apart and thrown to the ends ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... puzzling that I sat down to reflect upon the young man's peculiarities. He had always seemed somewhat uncanny, and had I proved more sympathetic he doubtless would have gone farther and told me of certain problems which he professed to have solved concerning the life beyond this. One thing that he had said came back vividly: "If I could only overcome that purely ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... a steamer crossing the bay. The water seemed populous in the night-time, with dark, uncanny comings and goings. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... her Scottish blood could understand the weakness, while, as for this polygamy, she had long ago secretly concluded that the practice was one which suited them very well, as it had suited David and Solomon, and even Abraham. But for all this, although she was sure in her uncanny fashion that her baby's death would come of her staying, she refused to leave her husband as she ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... and certainly, if gravity of demeanour goes for anything, all the owls of all the ages in collaboration could not have produced an expression of time-honoured wisdom so convincing. Sometimes his old lantern-jaws would emit an uncanny cackle of a laugh, and a ghastly flicker of humour play across his parchment features; but these only deepened the general sense of solemnity, as the hoot of a night-bird deepens the loneliness of some desolate ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... comber and the picaroon acquire nasty tricks with knives, and have an uncanny skill ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... somewhere out of the air came a humming sound. It grew louder and louder, and the boys felt a strange suction of wind which made them hold tightly to the rail for fear of being pulled overboard by some uncanny force. There followed a loud snap and a crash, and the mast began ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... of beard and his mustache. With them—thanks to the recent FBI rule that agents could wear "facial hair, at the discretion of the director or such board as he may appoint"—the resemblance to the Tudor monarch was uncanny. ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... shadow, and there it was, a shapeless blotch the girth of his body, (the sun was overhead), moving along the ground. I remembered his threat, and felt sure that all the long years of rivalry were about to culminate in uncanny battle. ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... continued to peer out with strangely shining eyes through the holes of his mask. The effect of that human intelligence, sheltered in there behind that expressionless celluloid, whose frail thinness they all knew covered unspeakable frightfulness, became uncanny. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... six years Mr. Wilson had manipulated the Government of the United States with a skill that was almost uncanny. He had turned himself from a minority President into a majority President. He had so deftly outmanoeuvred all his opponents in Congress and out of Congress that they had nothing with which to console themselves except their intensive ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... the mood is on me, I don't care to think of those times. I never feel really myself when it happens. I seem to be listening to somebody else playing, and trying to remember something I have hopelessly forgotten. It gives me a strained, uncanny feeling, Helen." ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... bedroom that morning which had stuck just as Costanza was sticking; only one, but it might have been a myriad it was so tiresome from daylight on. It was determined to settle on her face, and she was determined it should not. Its persistence was uncanny. It woke her, and would not let her go to sleep again. She hit at it, and it eluded her without fuss or effort and with an almost visible blandness, and she had only hit herself. It came back again instantly, and with a loud buzz alighted on her cheek. She hit at it again and hurt herself, ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... break the uncanny bonds that held him paralyzed, but it was of no avail. His body retained ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... utter loneliness, she was forced again and again to the only companion at hand. She read The Explorer, fascinated in a shivery, uncanny way by the first line, as though a ghostly voice were whispering to her from the black corners of the cave: "There's no sense in going further—it's the edge of cultivation." And later: "I faced the sheer ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... still for Clery, waiting, waiting, sick and weary Of the strange and silly rumours we have often heard before. And we now begin to fancy there's a touch of necromancy, Something almost too uncanny, in the unregenerate Boer— ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... naturally came to pass than can be looked for in these days of the tyranny of commerce and the dominion of "villanous saltpetre." This was the more so from the fact that enchanters, magicians, demons, dragons, and all that uncanny brood, the creation of ignorance and fancy, made knighthood often no sinecure, and men's haunting belief in the supernatural were frequently more troublesome to them than their armed enemies. But with this misbegotten crew we have nothing to do. They belong to legend and fiction, not to history, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... its mane, and snorted fiercely, as if it understood, and without more ado it flew on its way, its uncanny black-cloaked rider seated ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... are on the wing, some suffer lingering deaths in consequence of a singular characteristic of one of the trees of the jungle. Tall and graceful, with luxuriant glossy leaves, there is nothing uncanny about the tree. In style and appearance it is the very antithesis of "the upas-tree," upon which legendary lore cast unmerited responsibility. Yet in certain respects it would be vain to enter upon its defence. It is ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... her now with an almost uncanny intelligence. She laughed a little and standing on tiptoe laid her cheek against the cool glass. "When I am married," was her wordless question, "will you sound your trumpet high up near ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... harbour of determination to pay the price of her love and make the best of things. And I should not be altogether surprised if even our romantic library-subscriber finds the next live-happily-ever-after story a little flat by comparison. For there is no doubt that Mr. BENNETT has some uncanny power of realising the conflict of human souls, and that there is an astonishingly adroit method in his mania for unimportant and unromantic detail. I refuse altogether to accept as adequate (or appropriate) his explanations of the adventures of the banknotes on the night of their disappearance, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... having encountered the gray, keen eyes of the spinster. She knew they would read unfailingly the whole extent of the revelation that had dawned upon her. That the spinster herself knew the truth, and had long known it, she was sure; and she recalled with a shudder the look of those uncanny eyes upon the evening of their little frolic at the Elderkins. She dreaded the thought of ever meeting them again, and still more the thought of listening to the stiff, cold words of consolation which she knew she would count it her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... instantly, eagerly, indeed, so that there was something almost uncanny in the unusualness of the situation. To every demand, every suggestion came the unfailing, "Yes, darlings! Certainly, darlings!" Even the audacity of the double programme aroused no more notice than the remark that it was an admirable idea. ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... at his side caused him to start and stop short in his walk. A moment before he had fancied himself alone; he had heard no footsteps; and the place from where the words came was a mere vague blur in the shadows. There was something uncanny in the muffled approach, and the sensation it produced on his nerves was like the shock he used to feel as a child when his hand was unexpectedly touched in ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... it necessary to tell the girl what she had done before he aroused her. This knowledge, with the dream, was to him an uncanny thing. The girl's experience he felt was in some weird way a call from a misty and long-forgotten past. The dream but emphasized comparisons he himself had made. He had even told his mother the girl reminded him of a humming bird. This conception, ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... Mr. Home enjoined this as better than the silent sobriety I looked for—suddenly the table shuddered, and a cold wind swept over our hands laid upon it. "They are coming now," said Mr. Home, which everybody seemed glad of, though that cold wind felt to me not a little "uncanny," but I said nothing in disparagement, for fear of stopping a "manifestation." Soon loud knocks were heard, apparently from the middle of the table, and on sundry spirits being alleged to be present, Mr. Home proceeded to question them through the ordinary clumsy fashion, of ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... by the yellow-breasted chat. This bird also has something of the manners and build of the catbird, yet he is truly an original. The catbird is mild and feminine compared with this rollicking polyglot. His voice is very loud and strong and quite uncanny. No sooner have you penetrated his retreat, which is usually a thick undergrowth in low, wet localities, near the woods or in old fields, than he begins his serenade, which for the variety, grotesqueness, and uncouthness ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... half-open drawer, and nearly went down the dumb-waiter." And, as if in judgment on me, at that instant came two rather terrific thumps from somewhere below, and inarticulate words, shouted rather than spoken. It was uncanny, of course, coming as it did through the register at our feet. Mr. ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... expect an answer. He was quite calm again, and even his eyes had lost their intensity. The mere telling of his uncanny experience had a soothing effect. He nonchalantly readjusted his watch and chain, and ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... the riot and tumult of the night. A thousand lamps and coloured lanterns flashed like fireflies along the way, and under them the crowd had gathered, and was flowing back and forth. It was a weird and fantastic sight—this one strange and almost uncanny street that was there largely for the play and ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... huge mass of oak, slashed and scored all over. Attached to it were several appliances, an injecting pump, a forcing-machine, and a mechanical mincer, which, with their wheels and cranks, imparted to the place an uncanny and mysterious aspect, suggesting some ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... frighten me! I can't bear it tonight!" She hid her face against his shoulder like a child. He put his arm round her and she pressed her face deep into his coat. This ghost of Bob Tryst holding him away from her! This enemy! This uncanny presence! She pressed closer, closer, and put her face up to his. It was wonderfully lonely, silent, whispering, with the moongleams slipping through the willow boughs into the shadow where they stood. And from his arms warmth stole through her! Closer ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... young was she when intuitively she sensed the inner call that was always so deeply to sway her. Through the years from eight to fourteen Priscilla worshipped more or less frequently before her secret shrine. The uncanny ceremony eased many an overstrained hour and did for the girl what should have been done in a more normal way. The place on the red rock became her sanctuary. To it she carried her daily task of sewing and dreamed ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... Kells, passionately, as if his manhood had been affronted. "It's because he's Gulden. There's something uncanny ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... colder. It should be summer,—but as they crept southward they encountered cold and wind beyond that of the North Sea in January. The nights grew long; the battering of the gales never ceased; the ships lost sight of one another. It was whispered that not only had the uncanny brothers foretold the evil weather, but Thomas Doughty had boasted of having brought it about. "We'll ha' no luck till we get rid of our prophet," said blunt Tom Moone, "and the Lord don't provide no whales ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... gane far awa', Whare guns and cannons rattle, yet Unless my Johnnie chance to fa' In some uncanny battle, yet Till he return my breast will burn Wi' love that weel may cheer me yet, For I hope to see, before I dee, His bairns to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and inspected the skin curiously. Unborn reindeer skin! He rubbed the glossy substance between his fingers. It felt uncanny to his touch, this relic of a long-past tragedy, this message from the world's end. And the message seemed to be no more than a faded jumble of figures. He read them carefully, searching in vain for ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... also the experience of Haskett Smith among the Druses, already referred to (A. Q. C., iv, 11). Kipling has a rollicking story with the Masonic sign-code for a theme, entitled The Man Who Would be King, and his imagination is positively uncanny. If not a little of the old sign-language of the race lives to this day in Masonic Lodges, it is due not only to the exigencies of the craft, but also to the instinct of the order for the old, the universal, the human; its genius for making ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... round and began again: "Do you know, Schumann, I shall be glad when Wolf is off our hands. The man strikes me as almost uncanny. And then that Sergeant Keyser; he's a revengeful, resentful kind of fellow. He'll never forgive Wolf the six weeks he had on his account. Just see to it that the two have as little to do with one another as possible. Of course he'd never really do anything to a fellow like that; but it's ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... In no case was there anything to show that he was afflicted with blindness and this in spite of the fact that he exercised undue economy in the spacing of lines. Towards the close of his life the old man was credited with powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny: it has been said that he could tell at once the color of a ribbon placed between his fingers. My father would neither confirm nor deny ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... a thorough inspection of No. 4, Vivian found that the uncanny light was, after all, very easy of explanation. It was nothing but the reflection from a lamp outside, and the swaying of the blind had been responsible for the movement. Having shown Evelyn the unromantic origin of her spectre, the monitress left her, apparently pacified, ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... slowly, savouring its sweetness and warmth; its uncanny power to soothe and bless. But as he set down the glass revulsion took hold of him; and on the heels of revulsion came self-scorn. This last roused him like the prick of a spur: for to men of Eldred Lenox's calibre, self-respect is the oxygen of the soul. The spirit of his grandfather had "scored ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... his skin. His big milky eyes made him seem uncanny, standing there shivering in the shade. He hobbled down the pebbly bank on his tender feet, his bashful grin breaking into a dozen contortions of pain as he went. The boys stood watching him like tigers awaiting a ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... said Gardley, uneasily, "but something strange I cannot understand. I don't suppose it can possibly have anything to do with your daughter, and yet it seems almost uncanny. This morning I stopped at the Tanners' to let Miss Earle know I had returned, and was told she had gone yesterday with a couple of Indians as guide to meet the Brownleighs at Keams or somewhere near there, and take a trip with them to Walpi ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... those uncanny, guardian powers that had formerly rendered him immune from the dangers of surprise? Could this dull sleeper be the alert, sensitive ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at various times, trying to discover the "origin of evil." Vast stores of uncanny legends, and tales of wonders have been handed down to us in explanation of this ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... eyes of lovers when they embrace. Ah, Brothers of the Sword, these things cannot be told! Yet, of a surety, there is a heady delight in the fray itself. And so I found. For I struck and warded not, that being scarce necessary. Because an axe is an uncanny weapon to wield, but still harder to stand against when well used. And I drove the rabble before me—the men of them, I mean. I felt my terrible weapon stopped now and then—now softly, now suddenly, according to that which I struck against. And all the while the kitchen of the inn ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... yellow-breasted chat. This bird also has something of the manners and build of the catbird, yet he is truly an original. The catbird is mild and feminine compared with this rollicking polyglot. His voice is very loud and strong and quite uncanny. No sooner have you penetrated his retreat, which is usually a thick undergrowth in low, wet localities, near the woods or in old fields, than he begins his serenade, which for the variety, grotesqueness, and uncouthness of the notes is not unlike a country ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... and demands delivered in a shrill clarion as from some summit of childish wisdom, and they said she was a queer child. She yielded always to command from utter helplessness, but the why of obedience was strongly alert within her. The child might have been in some subtle and uncanny fashion the offspring of her age and generation instead of her natural parents, she was so unlike either of them, and so much a product of the times, with her meekness and slavishness of weakness and futility, and her unquenchable and ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... obsession, a mirage. I could smell the moss-like smell of bock beer; I even remembered conversations we had had. You fellows were as real to me as you are real to-night. It's strange, and then, when you come to, uncanny; you feel the sweat ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... be seated?" she said, with a politeness and a softness of tone that sounded almost uncanny coming ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... had an uncanny knack of issuing an odd number of articles to go among an even number of men, and vice versa. There would be eleven loaves of bread to go to a platoon of fifty men divided into four sections. Some of the sections would have ten men and some ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... endeavoured to obtain possession of a lame dog, but failed. A one-eyed dealer in Seven Dials, to whom, as a last resource, I applied, offered to lame one for me for an extra five shillings, but this suggestion I declined. I came across an uncanny-looking mongrel late one night. He was not lame, but he seemed pretty sick; and, feeling I was not robbing anybody of anything very valuable, I lured him home and nursed him. I fancy I must have over-nursed him. He got so healthy in ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... into the inner shrine of this awe-inspiring organism, he naturally preferred to think of the secret autocratic powers, and of the almost uncanny insight of those to whom he was about to make appeal. Surely they would soon probe the mystery ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... and terror, and who possess an instinctive, speechless, and poetic knowledge of her moods, is one of the earliest and most interesting of his long novels. He excels in the short story. Some of his finest work in this field is in The Sin Eater (1895), which contains uncanny tales of quaint, strongly-marked highland characters with ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... seemed to flash in upon us all of a sudden, and to disappear almost as quickly! I'm afraid there's something a little bit uncanny about him," said Frances, who was very imaginative. "But if he helps to put all the money troubles right, he will certainly be like a good fairy ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... were gathered at the waist, now shouting and cheering as we laboured painfully into the circle of vivid light. Among them a big man (huge he looked in that uncanny glare) roared ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Bob felt afraid to speak; the silence of the room, save for the ticking of the little clock, and the occasional rustle of papers, together with the experiences through which he had been passing, almost unnerved him; besides, there was something uncanny, almost ghostly, about ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... night-blooming cercus—that uncanny white witch of a creature, with its petals moulded in wax or ivory, its golden-brown leaf-sheathings, and its unequalled emerald (is it a tint, or is it but a shadow?) far down within the lovely cup, with that overpowering voluptuous ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... her pallor. "It was not an infliction. Your writing's wonderful. Quite uncanny—the way you get inside people and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... a foot upon the neck of the quiet figure at his feet and, throwing back his head, give vent to the wild, uncanny challenge of the bull-ape that has made a kill. Then they knew that ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to shoot your head off, was quite another matter. As a guard, we watched over our friends; as a picket, we watched for our foe. For a long time, being no nearer the enemy than the hearing of their drums, the soldiers had grown somewhat careless. But there was an uncanny feeling in standing alone in the still hours of the night, in a strange country, watching, waiting for an enemy to crawl up and shoot you unawares. This feeling was heightened, especially in my company, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... retire to their tent the dead silence of the wilderness was startled by the uncanny cry of a loon. Bob stood for a moment and listened. Then, turning ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... was in, just preparing for a smoke in company with the local blacksmith, when Gerald entered with the news of the uncanny discovery in the churchyard. Eleven young Bolans, grouped around the turf fire, drank in the intelligence and instantly scattered to spread the report in eleven different directions. A tale confided to the Bolan household ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... and made a circuit of the room. Behind the curtain that had moved the door was securely closed. The windows were shut and locked, and everywhere the silence was absolute. The cat followed me majestically. I stooped and stroked its head, but it persisted in its uncanny watching of the corners of ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Pray and I came in sight of her cottage, at this now uncanny hour of the night, we saw that the house was all alight, and Belle O'Neill stood in the doorway, loudly and gleefully ringing ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... prettiest, cheeriest, and most graceful girls I have ever met—a dusky blonde, brown-eyed, brown-haired, with a creamy, waxen whiteness of skin that was yet warm and peach-downy. And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain fact that there was nothing uncanny about her. In spite of her singular faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... incomparably valuable, and to account for it as self-hypnosis would end it for us as a piece of folly. Can life's highest values be so dealt with? Moreover, we cannot settle down comfortably in unbelief; just when we feel most sure that there is no God, something unsettles us, and gives us an uncanny feeling that after all He is, and is seeking us. We find ourselves responding, and once more we are strengthened, encouraged, uplifted. Can a mere imagination ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... louder yet through the frosty air. But he never met the Circassian beauty, and he would have found "l'Africaine," for example, both tedious and unreasonable. To him each of these publics was new, and no less new than alien. Besides, it would have seemed an uncanny thing to be abroad and stirring ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... hybrid that the invaders sent to recapture Ruth and me. It was a fit specimen of the grisly magic which those devils from outer space work with their uncanny surgery and growth-stimulating radioactive rays. The basic element of that monster was an ordinary tarantula spider, with its growth incredibly increased in a few short hours of intensive ray treatment in the Centaurian's camp. The half-head grafted to it was that of a human being. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... was a curiosity. It bore the Englishman's signature, and hinted at cats—at a Sending of Cats. The mere words on paper were creepy and uncanny to behold. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... his playground ever since he was first able to steal away from Granny and toddle off to "the bush" to gather blue flags and poke up the goggle-eyed frogs from their fragrant musk-pools. But here was something unfamiliar; a strange uncanny place the swamp seemed to-day; and, being Nature's intimate, he fell into sudden sympathy with ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... bush, found ourselves face to face with a sight that froze all movement out of us for a moment—the living, moving head of a horse, standing upright from the turf on a few inches of neck: a grey, uncanny, bodyless head, nickering piteously at us as it stood on the turf at our feet. I have never seen a ghost, but I know exactly how I will feel if ever ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the clubfooted Grizzly ranged the Sierra Nevada from Lassen county to Mono, invulnerable, invincible and mysterious, and every old hunter in the mountains had an awesome story to tell of the ferocity and uncanny craft of the beast and of his own miraculous escape from the jaws of the bear after shooting enough lead at him to start a smelter. Old Brin was a never-failing recourse of the country editor when the ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... accustomed to her gaze, which glittered and shone, and never wavered, and was by some people thought uncanny. He finished his supper slowly and methodically, and until he had eaten the last mouthful, and drained off the last drop of beer in the pewter mug, ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... spite of all these stories, the boy was not afraid; and if he had been informed that any of the uncanny people were, even now, haunting his footsteps, he would not have ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... that the Misticot walks," said Edie; "it's an awesome nicht and an uncanny to be meeting the like of him here. Besides he might not be best pleased to come upon us when we were trying to lift ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... woman, thus called upon to be a silent witness for or against the living. Joan drew a sigh of relief and let fall the blind. There could be no misreading the evidence. Death had smoothed away the lines, given back youth. It was almost uncanny, the likeness between them. It might have been her drowned sister lying there. And they had never known one another. Had this also been temperament again, keeping them apart? Why did it imprison us each one as in ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... down to smoke and rest beside a beautiful lake at the foot of a green knoll that rose from its shore. The knoll was covered with green grass and somehow as they looked at it they had a feeling that there was something about it that was mysterious or uncanny. ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... skill of even Snake Purdee had to take a back seat in the face of the performance of Rolling Stone. Not only were his cakes better in taste, and more delicately browned, but he showed almost uncanny skill in tossing them high in the air, and catching them in the pan as they came down. Not once did a cake "slop over"—that is descend half within and half without the pan. Each one fell true and in the middle of the skillet, there to be held over the coals again ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... seemed to have risen like a vision, and the most hopeful of those who endured that cruel gale the year before could hardly believe that they were not deceived by some uneasy, uncanny dream. ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... very comfortable when the door slammed behind me, and I found myself standing alone in a cold, dark passage out of which rose a gloomy staircase, suggestive of all sorts of uncanny possibilities. However, overcoming these nervous apprehensions as best I could, I began a thorough search of the premises, to make sure that no ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... a rainy day. She bowed now to Dosia with a patronizing dignity, pointed by the plaintive warmth of the greeting to Lois, who had come hurrying down-stairs out of those passion-depths of darkness, so that Mrs. Snow wouldn't suspect anything. She had an uncanny faculty of divining just what you didn't ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... note quickened. Something uncanny and impure had crept into it. It raised its head and hissed a little and was gone, gliding away among the low notes and losing itself in a rustling wave of sound.... The music trembled a moment and was ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting and uncanny. The metal plate seemed to offer no appreciable resistance to the flying force, and the light was as rich and full as if nothing lay between the paper and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... continued, so solemnly that a hush fell on the audience—"I don't think the spirits ought to tell these things, but I am forced to say that one Christmas day a member of your family will die." A startled look passed over his face, and a shiver ran through the audience at the uncanny message. The man's name could not be learned, but on the succeeding Sunday your correspondent heard two women get up in the audience and admit that the young Spiritualist ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... at the bolt with a sort of uncanny feeling stirring within him. The engine at the head of its long string of box cars approached. It passed him, and he heard its driver hurl some uncomplimentary remark at him as the rattling old kettle ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the alphabet and told her the names of several letters and had her try to make them with a lead pencil, which she did with such uncanny seriousness and quickness that the pity of it, that in his own State such intelligence should be going to such broadcast waste for the want of such elemental opportunities, struck him deeply. The general movement ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... extraordinary, and almost uncanny, to see the same old stars we knew in England, still above us, so ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... in appearance than the individual here described, but the seventh sub-race developed a superior type, though very unlike any living men of the present time. While retaining the projecting lower jaw, the thick heavy lips, the flattened face, and the uncanny looking eyes, they had by this time developed something which might be called a forehead, while the curious projection of the heel had been considerably reduced. In one branch of this seventh sub-race, the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... the fine August morning that starts the tale. Katharine the Fair, men called her, with considerable show of reason. She was very tall, and slim as a rush. Her eyes were large and black, having an extreme lustre, like the gleam of undried ink,—a lustre at some times uncanny. Her abundant hair, too, was black, and to-day seemed doubly sombre by contrast with the gold netting which confined it. Her mouth was scarlet, all curves, and her complexion was famous for its brilliancy; only ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... in his hiding, there was something uncanny in her failure to respond. But he could picture her—Truth, calm in the presence ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... trophies of the storm high in those dizzy recesses above, where eagles, undisturbed by any human presence, made their homes upon the crags. The rending and crashing up there was conjured by the distance into a hundred weird and uncanny voices which now and again seemed like the wailing ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... with his chairman he could hardly make his way in at the doors. A great treat was expected, but there was among the officers of police some who thought that a portion of the audience would not bear quietly the hard things that would be said, and that there was an uncanny gathering of roughs about the street, who were not prepared to be on their best behaviour when they should be told that old England was ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... up to the pen, and the last wrestle began. The crowd, silent and motionless, craned forward to watch the uncanny, white-haired little man and the huge dog, working so close below them. M'Adam's face was white; his eyes staring, unnaturally bright; his bent body projected forward; and he tapped with his stick on the ground like a blind man, coaxing the ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... Bonham-Carter, having sent away his boats, was reduced to a Carley float, an apparatus like an exaggerated lifebuoy with a floor of grating. Upon contact with the water it ignited a calcium flare, and he was adrift in the uncanny illumination with a German machine-gun a few hundred yards away giving him its ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... the boldest and most bloodthirsty of our small mammals; indeed, none of our larger beasts are more so. There is something devilish and uncanny about it. It persists like fate; it eludes, but cannot be eluded. The terror it inspires in the smaller creatures—rats, rabbits, chipmunks—is pitiful to behold. A rat pursued by a weasel has been known to rush into a room, uttering dismal ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... Gaza I believe they were never used. One could easily understand their striking terror into anybody, however, especially if their appearance on the scene were the least bit unexpected, for they were uncanny objects. ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... places already filled with the riot and tumult of the night. A thousand lamps and coloured lanterns flashed like fireflies along the way, and under them the crowd had gathered, and was flowing back and forth. It was a weird and fantastic sight—this one strange and almost uncanny street that was there largely for the play and ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... Wallie. He'll know," had become a sort of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his knowledge of the theatre was infallible (this does not include plays unproduced; in this no one is infallible) and his feeling for it amounted to a sixth sense. There was something uncanny about the way he could talk about Lottie, for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs. Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske when she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It was as though he had the power to cast himself back ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... dismounted from my mare, and called one of the Kaffir boys to take her to the stable. Nobody answered.... I called again. Still silence.... I tied her up to the post, and strode over to the door, astonished at the solitude. I began to feel there was something weird and uncanny about this home-coming. Never before had I known ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... the primary forces that had moved them both. And why had he sung that Bedouin Love Song just as she was thinking it as something that explained him and identified him? It was mysterious as the desert itself lying there so quiet under the moon. It was weird as the cry of the coyote. It was uncanny as spirit rappings. But she could not feel any resentment; only a thrill that was part pleasure and part pain. She wondered if he had felt the same; if he knew. But she could not bring herself to face even the thought of ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... to the fringe of willows along the river she came, until, at their very edge, there broke upon her already taut nerves the hideous and uncanny scream of a wildcat. The girl stopped short in her tracks. She felt the chill of fear creep through her skin, and a twitching at the roots of her hair evidenced to her the extremity of her terror. Should she turn back? The horses might be between her and the river, but judgment told her that they ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of surprise had worn away somewhat, the weirdness of the uncanny voyage came upon the crew with tenfold force. They stood gripping the rail, staring ahead with the feeling of condemned prisoners on their way ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... make a dash, and get between him and his hole; and so he stands, crouching on guard, staring at me, and I at him. He is some sort of crab, but he stands on two legs like a caricature of a man; he has two big weapons upraised for battle, and staring black eyes stuck out on long tubes. He is an uncanny thing to look at; but then suddenly the idea comes, How do I seem to him? I realize that he is alive; a tiny mite of hunger for life, of fear and resolution. I think, How lonely he must be! And I want to tell him that I love him, and would not hurt him ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... sense of the silent loneliness and desertion of the old garden grew upon me, and I felt shivery. One could imagine things lurking among the tangled bushes; while, in the very air of the place, there seemed something uncanny. I think Tonnison was conscious of this also, though he ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... suit is, with perhaps the exception of a diver's costume, the most absurd-looking dress a man can get into. The stranger's suit was of black rubber, tightly strapped at the wrists and ankles, but it was his head-gear which gave the man his weird and uncanny effect. It was a combination of mask, goggles, hood, earflaps, and neckshield which was so arranged with hinges that the noseguard and mouthpiece worked ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... for something to worship points to an almost uncanny recrudescence of the spirit of Asia in a fine European intelligence. For my own part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's case to be typical; but in that I may be mistaken. It is possible that an epidemic of Asiatic religiosity may be one of the sequels of the War. If that be so—if ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... came off, and who was sent with the despatch," demanded the general of the new-comer, upon whom the Hualpai looked in recognition, but with neither light nor welcome in his piercing eyes. Question and answer in halting, uncanny speech progressed fitfully a moment. Then ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... his eyes with a shiver. It was uncanny. All that had been five years ago, five years filled to the brim with work and struggle and final attainment, all making for forgetfulness. The thing was utterly absurd and impossible! His senses had tricked him! The light had blinded his eyes and imagination ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... deaf ears. Miss Brewster deigned no reply, so Sary sat down heavily upon a strong kitchen chair and took thought for herself. How did Miss Brewster guess her half-formed idea? Had she discovered in some uncanny manner, that Sary had slyly removed Bill's post-card photograph from her Bible and cremated it that she might feel freer to accept a second ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... believing himself the victim of some hallucination and expecting to see her still sitting in her seat, only to find that she really had gone. For a moment, a cold chill ran down his back. How could she have vanished without his knowing it? It seemed incredible. What an uncanny way she had of coming and going! He glanced up at the box again where he fancied he had seen her; but the lady in cerise was now seated, talking to two ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... almost uncanny the way in which villages would completely disappear. For instance, at the time when these hamlets first came within our vision, on our reaching the crest of the hill, they appeared almost intact, but a few days rendered them unrecognisable—they had ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... of the spinster. She knew they would read unfailingly the whole extent of the revelation that had dawned upon her. That the spinster herself knew the truth, and had long known it, she was sure; and she recalled with a shudder the look of those uncanny eyes upon the evening of their little frolic at the Elderkins. She dreaded the thought of ever meeting them again, and still more the thought of listening to the stiff, cold words of consolation which she knew she would count ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... refuge than no refuge at all, since the limbs began to trickle forth steady streams of water, which, by some accursed miracle of choice, seemed to consider the back of my neck their inevitable destination, I started in to explore as best I could in the uncanny light of the night for some more sheltered nook. Feeling, too, that, having robbed me, Hippopopolis would become an extremely unpleasant person to encounter in my unarmed and exhausted state, I made ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... timid as a rabbit; if you are panic-stricken, he knows exactly what to do; if you are fearful, he has no fear; if you are inquisitive, he is instantly shy; and, like all other wild creatures, he has an almost uncanny way of understanding your thought. It is as if, in that intent, penetrating gaze of his, he saw your soul turned inside out for his inspection. The only exception is when you meet him without fear or curiosity, with the desire simply to attend to your own affairs, as if he were a stranger and ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... be near them somewhere," said Mary, to whom the whole affair appeared uncanny. "They wouldn't drive sheep ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... hard to convince him that objects had once looked as distinct, and leaves as green, and the sky as blue, and red paint as red, to his natural sight, as they now did through those magical glasses. The distinctness and brightness seemed artificial and uncanny. But in the end he was convinced, and then he wanted to keep the spectacles, and pulled out his money to pay for them there and then, and was very much put out when their owner insisted on having them back. However, shortly afterwards a pair was got for him; and with these on his nose he galloped ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... he's now gane far awa', Whare guns and cannons rattle, yet Unless my Johnnie chance to fa' In some uncanny battle, yet Till he return my breast will burn Wi' love that weel may cheer me yet, For I hope to see, before I dee, His bairns to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... he was, the old Paris coachman crossed himself and, as he entered the uncanny neighborhood, felt around for the sacred amulet that every good Frenchman ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... softly as I could, although it seemed as if water never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it caused that undefinable shudder which ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... difficulty was my bull-terrier "Bill," a spotted dog of doubtful ancestry. He had been given to me as a bull-terrier when he was only a little white rat of a thing, and I had raised him at Bunji on tinned milk. He was a most uncanny dog (the joke is unintentional), and it was commonly believed in the force that his father was a tom cat. Poor Bill! Before he got to Laspur he was so snow blind that until we got to Mastuj I had to open his eyes for him every morning and bathe them with hot water before he could see, and ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... there was no Peggy Saville to occupy their thoughts, and life without the interest of her presence would have seemed unspeakably flat and uninteresting. She was a bundle of mystery. Even her looks seemed to exercise an uncanny fascination. On the evening of her arrival the unanimous opinion had been that she was decidedly plain, but there was something about the pale little face which always seemed to invite a second glance, and the more closely you gazed, the more complete ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... these uncanny dogs had puzzled me, a score of vicious, hungry brutes that drew the sledges in winter and that picked up a vagabond living in the idle summer by hunting rabbits and raiding the fishermen's flakes and pig-pens and by catching flounders in the sea as the tide ebbed. ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... Dunning's portfolio of papers was gathering dust on the writing-table. In it were the quires of small-sized scribbling paper which he used for his transcripts: and from one of these, as he took it up, there slipped and fluttered out into the room with uncanny quickness, a strip of thin light paper. The window was open, but Harrington slammed it to, just in time to intercept the paper, which he caught. 'I thought so,' he said; 'it might be the identical thing that was given to my brother. You'll have to look out, Dunning; ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... The uncanny, misbehaved, and outrageous harridans advanced then to meet the son of Morna, and when he saw these three Goll whipped the sword from his thigh, swung his buckler round, and got to them ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... to come to Golden Gate Park. It seemed as if we had started for there. By this time the darkness was settling. But it was a weird twilight. The glare from the burning city threw a kind of red flame and shadow about us. It seemed uncanny; the figures about us moved ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... "their chances are small, but you can never tell what these very resourceful people may do. They are buoyed up by a hopefulness that is almost uncanny and they can't all ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... had put on him a scarlet robe in mockery; they had hung him between two robbers on the hill of Golgotha; a brutal soldier now at Scopus had won by lot his seamless robe, and was jauntily displaying it as a trophy; an uncanny darkness had covered the Judaean sky; the soldier Longinus had pierced the sufferer's side; they had buried the dead Christ in the garden tomb of the Arimathaean Joseph. Monumental events were these—all new to Quintus, but destined ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... east and west, with a slight divergence toward the north. The road to Tanis ran due north. It was not long until Kenkenes' flying steed brought him in sight of the un-Israelite Goshen. Illuminated windows starred the plain and the wind shrilling in Kenkenes' ears bore uncanny sounds. A turf-thatched hovel at the roadside showed a light as they swept by and a long scream clove the air, but the Arab ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... possessed powers denied to the great majority of their fellow-men. Moreover, it must be remembered by the sceptical that all who have ever been intimately associated with the African savage are fully agreed that he is gifted with certain strange, uncanny powers quite incomprehensible to the white man, as was indubitably demonstrated during the last Zulu war, when the natives exhibited an intimate knowledge of certain events—notably the disaster to the British troops at Isandhlwana—within an hour or two of their occurrence, and several days ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... was subjected to many weird and uncanny effects. Phantasmagoric visions made their visitations throughout the night, for a time with such regularity that I used to await their coming with a certain restrained curiosity. I was not entirely unaware that something was ailing with my mind. Yet these ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... and houses of worship. Then, insatiate still, with a blast like the chaos of worlds dissolved, it rushes out to new desolation, until Nature herself, awe stricken at the sight of such ineffable woe, blinds her eyes to the uncanny scene of death, and drops the pall of night upon ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... down on her with a smile that no longer seemed uncanny. Indeed, there was something almost sweet in the rugged face as he repeated, "Mr. Pat's little girl, well, well," as if it ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... and stood staring like a nonny. Her footstep fell so light, she was so agile and quick, the superstitious dwarf swore she was but a creature of the night and held surreptitious meetings with all the familiar spirits of demonology. As she never denied the uncanny imputation, but only displayed her small white teeth maliciously, by way of answer, Triboulet felt assured he was right and crossed himself religiously whenever she gazed too ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... village-snakes. Of the local ghosts some are beneficent. Sometimes they are only mischievous, like Robin Goodfellow, and will milk the cows, and sour the milk, or pull your hair, if you wander about at night in certain well-known uncanny places. A more dangerous demon is heard in the crackling of the dry leaves of the date-tree in the night wind; and some trees are haunted by a vampire, who will drag you up and devour you, if you venture near them in the darkness.' ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... later, however, he forgot his aches. Appearing with uncanny and inexplicable suddenness, there was the big pioneer again, sitting up by the edge of the canal. As before, he sat absolutely motionless for a minute or two, sniffing and listening. Then, satisfied once more that all was well, he moved lazily up the slope to examine the tree; and in half ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... from under the stove, languidly stretching himself, and yawning until all the red cavern of his mouth and throat was revealed. At the moment he had an uncanny resemblance to Elder Joseph Blewett of White Sands—Roaring Joe, the irreverent boys called him—when he grew excited and shouted. Mrs. Bell saw it—and then ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down road; nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather—Ramilly Savage; height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077 W; nose, delicate aquiline; temperament, uncanny—" ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... upon his arm, he was conscious again of the singular thrill that shot through him whenever she touched him. She affected him as no other woman had ever done—nor did he know whether it was like or dislike. There was an uncanny fascination about her that attracted him, even though he endeavoured ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... comfortably where the space (in the well) was only three feet each way, reached at last to the grotesque—the absurd contortions of a man miserable on a pleasure jaunt—and I laughed aloud, but somehow it sounded hollow and uncanny. ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... set look of terror, or some unearthly expression which they could not absolutely define, on his face, the blood streaming down from under the bandage across his forehead, making his appearance ghastly and uncanny, as the Scotch say, in the extreme. He resembled, more a ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... the Doctor's complexion, the pattern of his tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the pose of his head polite; the only uncanny thing was his silence. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... awesomely think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later, lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with all that weird, uncanny lite seething ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... me cold; the proverbial funeral bell at the marriage feast was nothing to them. I suppose it was because in a flash of intuition I knew that they would come true and that he was an appointed Cassandra. Perhaps this uncanny knowledge overcame my natural indignation at such super-gaucherie of which no one but Bastin could have been capable, and even prevented me from replying at all, so that I merely sat still and looked ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... The white highways that ran like threads among the fields, and the tiny openings in the towns and villages which he guessed were streets, seemed to belong to a dead world, for nowhere was there trace of living person. The strange stillness that brooded over the earth was made more uncanny by cries that occasionally seemed to float in the air around them, behind, before, to the right or to the left, but never exactly beneath the car. They could hear people calling, and the captain said that they were running ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... set limits to the future conquests of the latter, which is probably destined to perform miracles un-dreamt of to-day, perhaps coupled in some unthought-of way, with radium, the youngest sprite of the weird, uncanny tribe of mysterious agents. Uranium, the supposed basis of the latest discovery, Radium, has only one-millionth part of the heat of the latter. The slow-moving earth takes twenty-four hours to ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... room as he turned to go out was uncanny. As it was a back room, there was no street below from which could arise sounds of passing vehicles, and the thickness of the fog muffled such sound as might have floated from the front. He stopped half-way to the door, not knowing why, and listened. To what—for what? ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... minutes, striving to conquer his laboring heart and throbbing brain, exerting manfully all his splendid resources of mind and body. Then he turned to the trembling Frenchwoman and said with almost uncanny gentleness: ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... kangaroo tail, for we wanted meat and they a smoke. They had just killed the animal, and were roasting it whole, HOLUS-BOLUS, unskinned and undressed. We saw several mobs of grey kangaroos feeding in the timber—queer, uncanny beasts, pretty enough when they jump along, but very quaint when feeding, as they tuck their great hind legs up to try and ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... there was a sudden swish of skirts and scurry of feet, and then Mr. Truman's voice was heard. Then there was some kind of sharp talk from the lieutenant to Downs, and then, in a sort of a lull, there came that uncanny cry out on the mesa, and, stopping only long enough to see that the lieutenant was not roused or disturbed, Todd hastened forth. One or two dim figures, dark and shadowy, were just visible on the ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... This was uncanny. Probably this girl had been to the movies and seen the same picture that Ryan had told him about. But he smiled gravely and answered, watching her quizzically ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... the said John Brughe being confronted with hir at the tyme."[7] We can claim this renowned empiric not only for the Glendevon district, but in a sense for the Presbytery, since it was alleged against him that he had got his uncanny knowledge "from a wedow woman, named Neane Nikclerith, of threescoir years of age, quha wis sister dochter to Nik Neveding, that notorious infamous witche in Monzie, quha for her sorcerie and witchecraft was brunt fourscoir of yeir since or thereby." Spite ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... he touch another article therein or thereon, nor hesitate an instant in the selection of the drawer to be rifled. His knowledge of the apartment of the daughter of the house of Prim was little short of uncanny. Doubtless the fellow was some plumber's apprentice who had made good use of an opportunity to study the lay of the land against a contemplated invasion of ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... put in for form and substance." This wisdom had always been in one's ears; but it had at the same time been equally in one's eyes that really constructive dialogue, dialogue organic and dramatic, speaking for itself, representing and embodying substance and form, is among us an uncanny and abhorrent thing, not to be dealt with on any terms. A comedy or a tragedy may run for a thousand nights without prompting twenty persons in London or in New York to desire that view of its text which is so desired in Paris, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... often has a deficient sense of time. He is less conscious of the passage of the hours than any other type. The Muscular and the Osseous often have an almost uncanny time-sense, but the extreme Cerebral man often lacks it. Forgetting to wind his watch or to consult it for hours when he does, is a familiar habit of ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... lay under a forgotten piece of rock—had made all of their share of history. They had begotten "Pukka" Cunningham, who had hacked the name deeper yet in the crisscrossed annals of a land of war. It was strange—it was queer—uncanny—for the third of the Cunninghams to be sitting on the stone. It was unexpected, yet it seemed to have a place in the scheme of things, for he caught himself ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... wheat-starch (lapsi) for smoothing the fibre, and that their name is somehow derived from this fact. But the explanation does not seem satisfactory. Many of the country people appear to think that there is something uncanny about the plant because it grows so quickly, and they say that on one occasion a cultivator went out to sow hemp in the morning, and his wife was very late in bringing his dinner to the field. He grew hungry and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... with elbows resting on the table; and involuntarily also the small twinkling eyes of her husband followed in the same direction. There is a type that reaches its prime in middle age. Mrs. Camelford, nee Jessica Dearwood, at twenty had been an uncanny-looking creature, the only thing about her appealing to general masculine taste having been her magnificent eyes, and even these had frightened more than they had allured. At forty, Mrs. Camelford might have posed ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... storekeeper. Naturally, Pete did not appreciate the value of this until later—when his familiarity with the language helped him out of many a tight place. But what Pete did appreciate was the old herder's skill with the six-gun—his uncanny ability to shoot from any position on the instant and to use the gun with either hand with equal facility. In one of the desert towns Pete had traded a mountain-lion skin for a belt and holster and several boxes of cartridges to boot, for Pete ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... while Jane was absent in search of the man. She held her basket on her knee, her hand resting on it. Her kindly, slow-working mind was wakening to strange thoughts. To her they seemed inhuman and uncanny. Was it because good, faithful, ignorant Jane had been rather nervous about Ameerah that she herself had of late got into a habit of feeling as if the Ayah was watching and following her. She had been startled ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... there but one year. One of his earliest compositions was a fantasia for four hands, having about thirteen movements of different character, occupying about thirty-two pages of fine writing. His brother remarks that not one ends in the key in which it began. He seems to have had a passion for uncanny subjects, for the next work of his is a "Lament of Hagar," of thirteen movements in different keys, unconnected. After this again, a "Corpse Fantasia" to words of Schiller. This has seventeen movements, and is ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... "It's uncanny," another clerk was quoted. "I sat at the third desk from Mr. Whitmore's door all morning and I'm ready to swear no one entered or left that office. He could not have committed suicide, for I would have heard the shot. He came down this morning, after an absence of six weeks, pleasant ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... to him, clutched at his arm, but he hurled her off and struck again.... It was enough. Bonbright stood wavering a moment, struggling to remain upright, but sagging slowly. Then he slumped to the ground in a sort of uncanny sitting posture, his head sunk ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... old Applehead had never before attempted to browbeat a woman, and her unsubmissive silence seemed to his bachelor mind uncanny. ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... The sort of feeling that he had long since forgotten, for there was nothing for such feelings to feed upon, here in his prison. Yet the sensation, vague as it was, seemed to have been recognised, shared for an instant by the young creature beside him. It was rather uncanny. He had heard that idiots or half-witted people were like that. She rose uneasily, placing upon her long, sprawling curls an old sun hat, very dirty, the brim misshapen by frequent wettings of pipe-clay. A servant appeared from behind the far corner of the ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... around me was tremendous energy, marvelous feats of achievement, super-human instincts, the ceaseless movement of tens of thousands of legionaries; yet no tramp of feet, no shouts, no curses, no welcomes, no chanties. It was uncanny to think of a race of creatures such as these, dreaded by every living being, wholly dominant in their continent-wide sphere of action, yet born, living out their lives, and dying, dumb and blind, with no possibility of comment on life and its fullness, of censure ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... getting unbearable. He hated making a scene, nevertheless—He woke with a start. The sound of wheels grinding through the gravel of the driveway brought him to his feet. It was a strange sound, eerie, uncanny. The darkness had gone, and the moon. The world was all gray; objects showed dim and ghostly; the ocean was shrouded in mist, and the wind from the face of it was clammy, heavy with salt. Moisture was dripping from the leaves, the trees, and shrubbery. The sound of laughter ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... face and hands, and then sat quietly down beside him. So many strange, uncanny things had happened within the last twenty-four hours that the little dog was rapidly outgrowing his irresponsible puppyhood. After a long time Auld Jock opened his eyes and sat up. Bobby put his paws on his master's knees in anxious sympathy. Before the man had ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... all their kindness and resolve to help him, they felt certain qualms, both of conscience and of fear. The all too conclusive proof that he was a fugitive and that his hands and disordered brain were red with blood were strengthened by this uncanny adventure. ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... laid beside the pole with its roots turned towards the grave (this is called SELIKANG); and on the other side of the pole is put another vertical pole with a cross-piece tied at its upper end. Fire is left burning beside these structures. In this way the Kayans symbolically prevent any of the uncanny influences of the graveyard following the party back to the house; though they do not seem to be clear as to whether it is the ghosts of the dead, or the TOH of the neighbourhood, or those which may have ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... up the hill on the other side, and, to the right, passed a row of cottages with long gardens at the back running down to the brow of the bank that overhung the Beck. In most of these cottages she was an object of suspicion because of her uncanny words and ways, and she knew it, and the thought of it was a grief to her. She wanted the people to like her as she would have liked them had they let her. The wish to win them fired her imagination. She ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... hand and from the stone belfry near-by came the solemn tone of the chime, pealing out a full round of melody, and then tolling solemnly twelve slow strokes. There was something almost uncanny about it that held the stranger still, as if an unseen presence with a convincing voice had been invoked. The young man sat under the spell till the full complement of the ringing was finished, the workman with his hand up holding ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... "I feel like Balkis when she came to sip wisdom from Solomon's goblet. If I question you further I may find that, like my Lord Verulam, you have taken all knowledge for your province. This is something uncanny in ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... thin and Roger, who had taken a great fancy to him, brought him a pail of water, and scratched his head and talked to him before going on into the tent. Here he was shortly absorbed in sorting his blue prints. He was studying the ground plan of the absorber, when an uncanny sense of being watched made him look over his shoulder. Von Minden, a sawed-off shot-gun aimed at Roger's back, ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... flippant sub-title, the elderly gentleman came, with intense amazement, to understand that the date of this singular performance was 1993. Other persons at a similar juncture would have pinched themselves to see if they were awake, or have tossed the book into the street as an uncanny thing. But our elderly gentleman being of an inquisitive and acquisitive turn of mind, despite his quaintness, recognised the fact that if he was not of the twentieth century the volume obviously was; ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... from superstitions, but the phenomenon which interested him was so mysterious that all sorts of uncanny devilry intruded into his mind against his will. All the evening he was imagining that the incognito Fedyukov was the spirit of some long-dead clerk, who had been discharged from the service by Navagin's ancestors and ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
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