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More "Unready" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wouldn't marry Sally, but he didn't want another man to have her. And he wouldn't give up his soft berth in the house of Sally's brother. He knew Quade would never suspect him of having the nerve to fight. So he takes Quade unready and plugs him, while Quade ain't ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... desperate need. They are between the nether and upper millstones of sin and death. On the one hand they meet the pressure of terrible temptations, and on the other they have to face the awful fact of death, unready and unprepared. But although the men are open to a religious message and to the Christian challenge presented by one who has a real message, it could hardly be maintained by anyone that there is a revival of religion at the front today. Rather ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words. In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed. Yet he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style. This he had acquired by conversation with the world, for his education was merely reading, writing, and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at a later day. His time was employed ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Richelieu, one's old friend in a sense: "Is Trajan pleased?" whispered Voltaire to his Richelieu; overheard by Trajan,—who answered in words nothing, but in a visible glance of the eyes did answer, "Impertinent Lackey!"—Trajan being a man unready with speech; and disliking trouble with the people whom he paid for keeping his boots in polish. O my winged Voltaire, to what dunghill Bubbly-Jocks (COQS D'INDE) you do stoop with homage, constrained by their ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... that had worked so successfully the year before at Port Hudson. But against a weight, a volume, and a velocity of water such as had to be encountered here, it was now plainly seen that something else would have to be tried. No emergency, however great or sudden, ever finds a man of his stamp unready. As soon therefore as the collapse showed him the defect in his first plan, he instantly set about remedying it by dividing the weight of water to be contended with. At the upper fall three wing-dams were constructed. ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... postboy and gave him some money, and patted the neck of his horse. Whether he made some movement that scared it or not, there was very nearly a nasty accident, for the beast started violently, and the postilion being unready was thrown and lost his fee, as he found afterwards, and the chaise lost some paint on the gateposts, and the wheel went over the man's foot who was taking out the baggage. When Lord Saul came up the steps into the light of the lamp in the porch to be greeted by ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... dramatic work. It is affluent in beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness, but imbued with a tone of license which may be held either to justify the theory that it was a precocious product of the author's youth, or to show that Shakespeare was not unready in mature years to write with a view to gratifying a patron's somewhat lascivious tastes. The title-page bears a beautiful Latin motto from ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... moment in which to note the significance of her attitude, for Lesley changed it as soon as she heard his name. He gave her Ethel's message at once and Ethel's parcel, and then stood, a little confused and unready for she had risen and was looking as if, when his errand was accomplished, he ought to go. Fortunately, Doctor Sophy came in and invited him cordially to sit down; rang for tea and scolded him roundly for not coming oftener; ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... a green bank-side, Skirting the smooth edge of a gentle river, Whose waters seemed unwillingly to glide, Like parting friends who linger while they sever; Enforced to go, yet seeming still unready, Backward they wind their way in many a ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... like the driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred,[11] on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... because Ringfield was unready on these occasions nor because of any fear lest his special kind of intercessory gastronomic prayer might fail to carry conviction with it, but on account of the intrusion of two belated arrivals down by the door. He could not distinguish ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... grew so indolent, and unready of taking pains, that misfortunes came heavier upon them, which also proceeded in part from their contempt of the Divine worship; for when they had once fallen off from the regularity of their political government, they indulged themselves further in living according to their ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... immediate readiness for war of all European Armies is due, and since the organisation of these forces is uniform this "more or less" of readiness exists in precise proportion to the sense of duty which animates the several Armies. Where the spirit of duty and self-sacrifice is low the troops are unready and inefficient; where, as in Prussia, these qualities, by the training of a whole century, have become instinctive, troops really are ready to the last button, and might be poured down upon any one of her neighbours with such rapidity that the very first collision must suffice to ensure ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... crescent of prosaic trenches, themselves manned by paladins of an almost incredible stolidity, Ypres still points her broken fingers to the sky—shattered, silent, but inviolate still; and all owing to the obstinacy of a dull and unready nation which merely keeps faith and stands by its friends. Such an attitude of mind is incomprehensible to the Boche, and we are well content that it ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... dismasted and the other was laboring in grave peril. The Revenge loomed as a spectral shape while Blackbeard was endeavoring to get her running free in pursuit of the Plymouth Adventure. But slovenly, reckless seamanship had caught him unready. His sails were blowing to ribbons, ropes flying at loose ends, and it was with great difficulty that the vessel could be made ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... be your watchword, so that the blow, if it is coming, may not come upon you as a thief in the night, and may not find you unready and taken by surprise." Such had been Lord Randolph's warning. It was now learnt, with feelings in which disgust and indignation were equally mingled, that Lord Randolph's son was bent on coming ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... what was given, and not think; content that another should think for him, and tell him what was the mind of his Father in heaven. Again I say, let the person who can be so satisfied be so satisfied; I have not to trouble myself with him. That he can be content with it, argues him unready to receive better. So long as he can believe false things concerning God, he is such as is capable of believing them—with how much or how little of blame, God knows. Opinion, right or wrong, will do nothing to save him. I would that he thought ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... sacred island the last great Prince of the Saxon race, Edward, son of Ethelred the Unready, found Dunstan's little brotherhood of Benedictine monks, who were living in mud huts round a small stone chapel. Out of this insignificant beginning grew a mighty monastery, the West Minster, dowered with royal gifts and ruled over by mitred Abbots, who owned ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... spontaneous, ad lib, ad libitem [Lat.]. fallow; unsown, untilled; natural, in a state of nature; undressed; in dishabille, en deshabille [Fr.]. unqualified, disqualified; unfitted; ill-digested; unbegun, unready, unarranged^, unorganized, unfurnished, unprovided, unequipped, untrimmed; out of gear, out of order; dismantled &c v.. shiftless, improvident, unthrifty, thriftless, thoughtless, unguarded; happy-go- lucky; caught napping &c (inexpectant) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... as white as the snow which hung on the rocks above her, and she looked at the water and then at me, and she cried, "Oh dear! oh dear!" And then she began to sob aloud, being so young and unready. But I drew her behind the withy-bushes, and close down to the water, where it was quiet and shelving deep, ere it came to the lip of the chasm. Here they could not see either of us from the upper valley, and might have sought a long time for us, even when they came quite near, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... done? [Cheers.] Russia, knowing her deficiency, knowing how unprepared she was, said, "I must pull myself together. I am not going to be trampled upon, unready as I am. I will use all my resources." What is the first thing she does? She stops the drink. [Cheers.] I was talking to M. Bark, the Russian Minister of Finance, a singularly able man, and I asked, "What has been the result?" He said, "The productivity ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... you did not experience sensible joys after your communion; this simply proves that you were not careful enough, or that, tired by the excess of the evening before, your imagination showed itself unready to play the infatuating fairy story you expected from yourself after ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... the "Unready" or "redeless" from his indifference to the "rede" or council of his advisers, the city would again have fallen into the hands of the Danes, but for the personal courage displayed by its inhabitants and the protection which, ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... Admiral Gravina's Spanish fleet and a French battleship, the "Aigle." Again the Spaniards were mostly unready for sea, but six of them and the "Aigle" joined Villeneuve when he sailed out into the Atlantic steering for the West Indies, now at the head of eighteen battleships and ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... seized (after suicide) Fears some will stand for the tolerating of Papists Greater number of Counsellors is, the more confused the issue He that will not stoop for a pin, will never be worth a pound In my nature am mighty unready to answer no to anything It may be, be able to pay for it, or have health Lady Castlemayne do rule all at this time as much as ever No man was ever known to lose the first time She loves to be taken dressing herself, as I always find her ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger
... expect to change mankind at once, or even "in three generations," by arrangement of groups and series, or flourish of trumpets for attractive industry. If these attempts are made by unready ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... concluded, his father said: "Truly, Edgar, you have been fortunate indeed, which is another way of saying that you have skilfully grasped the opportunities that presented themselves. The man who bemoans ill-fortune is the man too apathetic, too unready, or too cowardly to grasp opportunity. The man who is called fortunate is, on the other hand, he who never lets a chance slip by, who is cool, resolute, and determined. During the time that you have been away you have made friends of two wealthy merchants, and have rendered ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... engage, to the no small alarm of all spectators.[521] Unfortunately, however, the intellectual and moral development of the young prince had by no means kept pace with the growth of his physical powers. The sluggishness of his dull and unready comprehension had, at an earlier date, been noticed by the Venetian Marino Cavalli, while, with a courtier's flattery, he likened him to those autumnal fruits that are more tardy in ripening, but are of better quality and last longer than the fruits of summer.[522] Although he had reached the age ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... unscientific, and such speculations, though interesting, cumber science wofully.' This is sheer nonsense, and comes very ill from an observer whose successes in science have been due entirely to the employment of methods of observation which would have had no existence had others been as unready to think out the meaning of observed facts as he appears ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... amidst flowers, and streams of rippling water, you will forget all the misery that human folly has so recently allotted you. Oh! listen to me, my prince. I do not jest. I have a heart, and mind, and soul, and can read your own,—aye, even to its depths. I will not take you unready for your task, in order to cast you into the crucible of my own desires, of my caprice, or my ambition. Let it be all or nothing. You are chilled and galled, sick at heart, overcome by excess of the emotions which but one hour's liberty has produced in you. For me, that ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... King Ethelred nicknamed The Unready. The name stands not as meaning that he was unprepared, but that he was without counsel, or "redeless". His advisers were few and, for the most part, traitorous and unworthy; they swayed him and directed him just as it ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... unready. All the little opening speeches she had prepared for the interview deserted her suddenly, driven away by her shocked realisation of the transformation which the few days since she had last seen him had wrought in the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... the question,—wished to leave the subject. Perhaps he did not regard the poor old school-master as a practical judge of practical matters. All his life he had called him thriftless and unready. ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... over the walls in their shirts. Enter, several ways, the Bastard of Orleans, Alencon, and Reignier, half ready, and half unready.] ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... equally unfeasible. Sea-robber volunteers so especially abounding in that time, one perceives how easily the Jomsburgers could recruit themselves, build or refit new robber fleets, man them with the pick of crews, and steer for opulent, fruitful England; where, under Ethelred the Unready, was such a field for profitable enterprise as the viking public ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... tolerate, if not demand, a leader strong to exact respect for France and to enforce his commands; would prefer the vigorous mastery of one to the feeble misrule of the many or the few. Still further, the man was as unready as the time; for it was, in all probability, not as a Frenchman but as an ever true Corsican patriot that Buonaparte wished to "show himself, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... gaping watchers in the stockade on the headland beheld the great ship creep forward under the rising cloud of smoke, her mainsail unfurled to increase her steering way, and go about close-hauled to bring her larboard guns to bear upon the unready fort. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... suffer a time of internal trouble owing to the friction of conflicting conceptions of Socialist reconstruction, but I am quite certain that no one has yet said what is to be the last word on the subject, and to split on such a controversy as this is to advertise to the world how unready Socialism is to ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... who cannot remember whether he began his sentence with "people" in the singular or the plural, and who finishes it otherwise than as he began it. Points of grammar that are purely points of logic baffle a child completely. He is as unready in the thought needed for these as he is in the use of ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... then?" she said slowly, as if still unready to believe. "We never half believed our boys when they came home from the war—the ones that did come home—and told about the white horse and the priest riding the field. We thought it was one of the things men see when they're fighting ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... off, the dyspeptic Judge was discussing 'the situation' with his host—a large unwieldy man, so nervous of his own bulk and unready wit that only the discerning few discovered the sensitive, friendly spirit very completely hidden under a bushel. Roy, who had liked him at sight, felt vaguely sorry for him. He seemed a fish out of water in his own home; overwhelmed by the florid, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... springs from the base of the hill El-Safra, oozing out in trickling veins bedded in soft dark mud. It can be greatly increased by opening the fountains, and economized by a roofing of mat: we tried this plan, which only surprised the unready Arab. After swinging to the left bank and running for a few yards, it sinks in the sand; yet on both sides there are signs of labour, showing that, even of late years, the valley has seen better days. Long leats and watercourses have been cut in the clay, and are ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... quite what I expected and I was unready. I stammered in my reply. 'It's because I am a patriot that I want peace. I think that ... I ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... as great a shock as War. Hence the need of Preparedness to meet the inevitable conflict for Universal Trade. We—as a nation—are as unready for this emergency as we are to meet the clash of actual physical combat. Commercial Preparedness is as vital to the national well being as the ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... the ashes to fire, so that I cheered myself thereat. And since now the flame is like to go out again, and the Master's teaching to be choked and concealed beneath that same ash-mountain, I pray God that He inspire my unready quill to set down a true picture of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was there an opportunity to break out of this prison? Yet the chance came, came unexpectedly, came after some weeks of waiting and despondency, came at a moment, in fact, when it found Jules and Henri almost unready, unprepared to seize a ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... of me, all the more, no doubt, that it was denied me. Our aim in the world is beauty and happiness; but we are late in learning that they exist in the will and imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable thing or circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready attention. If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you might stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you "improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot where Adam ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Turks had been pressing their attack on Cyprus and were besieging the city of Nicosia. If the Christians had been moved by any united spirit they could have relieved Nicosia and struck a heavy blow at the Turkish fleet, which lay unready and stripped of its men in the harbor. But Gian Doria, who inherited from his great uncle his great dislike of Venetians, and who probably had secret instructions from his master, Philip II, to ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... drawing rooms, and among buzzing voices, and surrounded by people who were always saying things because such things were proper to be said, Fanny was always dizzy, and puzzled, and unready; and for fear that she would say something that she should not, she concluded to say nothing at all; nevertheless, she made good use of her eyes, and found a very quiet amusement in looking on to see how other ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Purbeck Island. It is a picturesque ruin, and full of interesting associations. It was here that Edward, the dupe of the wily Dunstan, was murdered in the year 979, at the instigation of Elfrida, the widow of Edgar, and Edward's mother-in-law, who wished to have her own son, poor "Ethelred the Unready," upon the throne. A far more interesting event connected with it was the defence made by Lady Bankes, the wife of the owner, in 1643, against the Parliamentary forces. It must have been in those days a very strong place, for Lady Bankes, with her daughter and ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... discovered country with some island or district of the Far East, named on his maps. He was an ignorant man, though he knew Ptolemy and Marco Polo by heart, credulous, uncritical, not consciously dishonest, but unready to correct false impressions caused by his ignorance and gullibility. His notes, as may be seen from a reproduction of a page of his manuscripts (facing p. 38), were in an execrable hand. The forger ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... wall. Be brave and strong, I say, for otherwise we are but dead men." When Hengist ceased heartening his comrades, the knights arrayed them for the battle. They moved against the Britons as speedily as their horses might bear them, for they hoped to find them naked and unready, and to take them unawares. The Britons so misdoubted their adversary that they watched in their armour, both day and night. As soon as the king knew that the heathen advanced to give battle, he ordered his host in a plain that seemed good for his ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... peace of the world. Alas! the whole of the fabric was destroyed, the fair prospects hopelessly clouded over, by the intemperate ambition of the Kaiser, who, just because he believed that the Balance of Power was favourable to himself, that Russia was unready, that France was involved in serious domestic trouble, that England was on the brink of civil war, set fire to the magazine and engineered the ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... Danegelt: a noble was a coin worth 6s. 8d. Danegelt was originally the land-tax raised by Ethelred the Unready to buy off the Danes; the word was afterwards used of any unpopular tax, here of Charles I's imposition of ship-money, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... himself, in a later war, killed his father on the battlefield, while Palnatoke stood by approving, though in after years the two were bitter foes. All we need say further of these personages is that Sweyn invaded England with a powerful force in the time of Ethelred the Unready and drove this weak king from the island, making himself master of great part of the kingdom. He died at Gainsborough, England, in 1014, leaving his son Knud, then a boy of fourteen, to complete the conquest. It is this son, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... reason of the Presbyters. Some were clapped up to-day, and strict watch is kept in the City by the train-bands, and letters of a plot are taken. God preserve us! for all these things bode very ill. So home, and after going to welcome home Sir W. Pen, who was unready, going to bed, I staid with him a little while, and so to my lodging ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... attempt to negotiate directly with the Czar. Success in winning Russia would put Austria again at Napoleon's mercy; Alexander must be kept in warlike humor at all hazards. Nesselrode demanded nothing less than Austria's adherence to the coalition; Francis was still unready to fight; and Metternich, displaying all his adroitness, finally wrung from Nesselrode a basis for mediation comprising six articles: the extinction of Warsaw, the enlargement of Prussia by her Polish provinces and Dantzic, the restoration ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... at the outset of the war had his fleet in two principal divisions: one still somewhat formless and as yet unready, but of very considerable power, was in the ports of the Peninsula; the other—Cervera's—at the Cape Verde Islands, a possession of Portugal. The latter was really exceptional in its qualities, as our Italian author has said. It was exceptional in a general sense, because homogeneous and ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... the early history of St. Paul's might bring a few facts to light, whether directly or by inference; but even after the reign of Alfred we have very little knowledge of the condition of the city and its port. It was never taken by the Danes. During the reign of Ethelred "the Unready," the King seems to have been shut up in London while the marauders ravaged the country round. Either the Londoners had great stores of provisions, or they had access to foreign markets. Edgar first recognised the importance of ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... The nervous, unready wooer both endures and inflicts agonies of mind if he tries to make a verbal offer. He had {48} much better write, for then he will at least be intelligible. The vacillating woman has no right to let a man propose to her and then accept him just because she cannot make up her mind to ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... enterprise. Greece and Africa had not proved distant enough to escape their ravages. The descendants of the Viking Rollo ruled in France as Dukes of Normandy; and Saxon England, misguided by Ethelred the Unready and harassed by Danish pirates, was slipping swiftly and surely under Northern rule. It was the time when the priests of France added to their litany this petition: "From the fury of the Northmen, deliver ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... seven-eight-three first came the Danes 783 Who caused the Saxons aches and pains. They sailed right up our rivers broad, Putting the natives to the sword. "Danegeld" For centuries our sadly fated 991 Towns by them were devastated. Etheldred the 'Unready Toff' By 'Danegeld' tries to ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... and teaches him that He will bring him to Himself if man will but follow. Man never desires anything so earnestly as God desires to bring a man to Himself, that he may know Him. God is always ready, but we are very unready; God is near to us, but we are far from Him; God is within, but we are without; God is at home, but we are strangers. The prophet saith: God guideth the redeemed through a narrow way into the broad road, so that they come into ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... rough chance as he often did, sent ground scouts forward and ordered a charge instantly, to catch the savages unready; and the stiff rods snapped and tangled between the beating hoofs. The horses plunged at the elastic edges of this excellent fortress, sometimes half lifted as a bent willow levered up against their bellies, and the forward-tilting men fended their faces from the whipping twigs. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Protestant party, landed in Pomerania with a small but highly disciplined army. This illustrious monarch, eminent for virtue and piety, no less than for political wisdom and military skill, was now the sole hope of the Reformation in Germany. The princes who professed its tenets were lukewarm and unready,—divided by jealousies among themselves, and careless of all but their own worldly interests. He, on the contrary, was devoted to the cause of his faith, and his solemn disavowal of personal ambition in undertaking its championship ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... began again Bobus was a good deal missed, Jock was in a severe idle fit, and Armine did not come up to the expectations formed of him, and was found, when "up to Mr. Perkins," to be as bewildered and unready as other people. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Jay as before to prepare his breakfast and then join them later. It was already a change in his sentiments to find himself looking forward to that tete-a-tete with the young girl, as a chance of redeeming his character in her eyes. He was beginning to feel he had been stupid, unready, and withal prejudiced. He undressed himself in his seclusion, broken only by the monotonous voices in the adjoining apartment. From time to time he heard fragments and scraps of their conversation, always in reference to affairs ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... but the best from West Point have gone southward long ago, and by the retirement of McClellan the North lost, probably, her one promising strategist. Cool and provident in the formation of his plans, though somewhat unready in their execution, and scarcely equal to sudden emergencies, if he achieved no brilliant success, he was likely to steer clear of grave disaster. The dearth of tacticians is made very manifest, by the list of candidates suggested in the event ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... fellow. 70 And, where red lilies flaunted, Balloons from the thistles Tell summer's disasters, The butterflies yellow, As caught in an eddy Of air's silent ocean, Sink, waver, and steady O'er goats'-beard and asters, Like souls of dead flowers, With aimless emotion 80 Still lingering unready To leave their old bowers; And the fount is no dumber, But still gleams and flashes, And gurgles and plashes, To the measure of summer; The butterflies hear it, And spell-bound are holden, Still balancing near it O'er the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... if his idea was to take her in his arms and stifle her outbreak that way. But something in her eyes, cold, unready, yet aware of ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... Odyssey; and even when the same qualities are attributed to him—his soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence—they are held in very different estimation. The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father's courage, and then ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... that Montgomery would think the compliment to his ready hand an excuse in full for the allusion to his unready tongue, and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... men—two in the wagon and one beside his horse-stared at him as though they had seen him for the first time. They were unready for the passion that possessed him. Not a muscle of his body appeared to move; he was as motionless as the trunk of a tree. But in his eyes and his voice there was, as one of the ranchers said ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lunge that seemed to find the captain unready. But the latter, with a sharp involuntary cry, got his blade up in time to divert the point, by pure accident, with the guard of his hilt. His own point was thus turned straight toward his antagonist; and Tom, throwing his weight after his weapon, impaled himself upon ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... possessed an adroitness in fastening upon minor weaknesses in a case, and postponing to such the consideration of the important point at issue, which, coupled with a peremptoriness of tone often bordering on insolence, effected nothing towards conciliating a people believed to be both unready and unwilling to fight. The American envoys, at their first interview, in April, met him with the proposition of their Government to reopen negotiations on the basis of the treaty of December 31. Learning from them that ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... become the "Danelagh" of their northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about. The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of AEthelred the Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... hereupon our bold Sir Pertinax With indignation red of face did wax. The needful word his tongue was vainly seeking, Since what he felt was quite beyond the speaking. Though quick his hand to ward or give a blow, His tongue all times unready was and slow, Therefore he speechless looked upon the maid, Who viewed him 'neath her lashes' dusky shade, Whence Eros launched a sudden beamy dart That 'spite chain-mail did reach and pierce his heart. And in that instant Pertinax grew wise, And trembled 'neath ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... do think there is no hale man, howsoever desperate and careless of life, but who, faced with sudden, violent death, will not of instinct blench and find himself mighty unready to take the leap into that dark unknown whose dread doth fright us one and all; howbeit thus was it with me, for now as I stared from the pistol muzzle to the merciless eyes behind them, I, that had hitherto esteemed death no hardship, lay there ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Hague Conference, Count Munster, in his frequent diatribes against its whole purpose, and especially against arbitration, was wont to insist that the whole thing was a scheme prepared by Pobedonostzeff to embarrass Germany; that, as Russia was always wretchedly unready with her army, The Hague Conference was simply a trick for gaining time against her rivals who kept up better military preparations. There may have been truth in part of this assertion; but the motive of the great ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... this was one of my faults in the ministry. Nourish babes; comfort downcast believers; counsel those perplexed; perfect that which is lacking in their faith. Prepare them for sore trials. I fear most Christians are quite unready for days of ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... about sixty boys and girls of a club; the president warned me in her invitation that the children were exceptionally undisciplined, but my previous experiences with similar gatherings led me to interpret her words with a moderation which left me totally unready for the reality. When I faced my audience, I saw a squirming jumble of faces, backs of heads, and the various members of many small bodies,—not a person in the room was paying the slightest attention to me; the president's introduction could ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... this stammering, purple-faced gentleman come to prepare her? Her heart gave a cry of anguish, while her eyes rested with apparent calmness on Sir Felix's unhappy face. Of course it was Mustapha. Would he never speak? Why could they not have found a better messenger than this unready inarticulate gentleman? ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... liked Ann Veronica because she was never awkward, had steady eyes, and an almost invariable neatness and dignity in her clothes. She seemed just as stiff and shy as a girl ought to be, Lady Palsworthy thought, neither garrulous nor unready, and free from nearly all the heavy aggressiveness, the overgrown, overblown quality, the egotism and want of consideration of the typical modern girl. But then Lady Palsworthy had never seen Ann Veronica running like ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... arranged our bivouac. When the sun sets in the East, it is like turning off the gas; you are left in darkness suddenly, without any intervening twilight. As a fact one knows this perfectly well; but habit is stronger than reason, and day after day I went on being perplexed, and often unready ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... all. For, if the pleasantness of a present depended solely on the expression of good-will, why not express good-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?—for we have all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or (more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! of making small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirely superfluous to waste our substance and cumber our friends' houses by adding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold from Ophir and apes and peacocks. There are inconveniences ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... so considerably mortgaged, as to render an appeal to his ancient friends, the usurers, a matter of much difficulty, if not totally useless. Manasseh Ben Israel, indeed, he knew had an inexhaustible store, and a not unready hand, as he had upon more than one occasion, experienced; but, villain as he was, he shrank from the idea of applying to him for assistance, at the very moment when he was thrusting the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... enthusiasm as well-remembered spots come into sight. A horseman rides round a bend of the road, and meets them—he stares hard at her—she takes no heed. It is a young farmer, an old acquaintance, anxious for some sign of recognition. After he has passed he lifts his hat, like a true countryman, unready at the moment. As for the brother, his features express gathering and almost irrepressible disgust. He kicks with his heavy boots, he whistles, and once now and then gives a species of yell. Mademoiselle turns up her pretty nose, and ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... expression, dull-eyed, heavy-browed, inactive and sluggish in all his motions, and so slow in resolution, that the soubriquet of one of his ancestors was conferred upon him, and he was very generally called Athelstane the Unready. His friends, and he had many, who, as well as Cedric, were passionately attached to him, contended that this sluggish temper arose not from want of courage, but from mere want of decision; others alleged that his hereditary vice of drunkenness ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the close, let us suppose, of our second month of war. The fleet has been neglected, and has been overwhelmed, unready and unprepared. We have been beaten twice at sea, and our enemies have established no accidental superiority, but a permanent and overwhelming one. The telegraph cables have been severed, one and all; these islands ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the night of August 6 he received telegraphic news of the Battles of Woerth and Forbach, whereupon he exclaimed, "Poor Emperor! I pity him, but I have had a lucky escape." Austria also drew back, and thus left France face to face with the naked truth that she stood alone and unready before a united and triumphant Germany, able to pour treble her own forces through the open portals of Lorraine and ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... pleasantness. It could not be, Flora thought in terror, that Mrs. Herrick intended to leave these two enemies to each other! Mrs. Herrick had risen; and Flora, following, saw both men, also uprisen, hang hesitatingly, as if unready to be deserted; yet with well-filled glasses, and newly ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... bodily presence, as now close beside her, exercised an emotional influence quite unforeseen and unreckoned with. Under it her will wavered. She ceased to see her way clearly, to be sure of herself. She grew timid, bewildered, unready both of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... until He come whose right it is, and I will give it Him.' Let as pray for His coming. And in the mean time have we a care that our loins be girded about, and our lamps burning; that when He cometh and knocketh, we may open unto Him immediately. We shall be unready to open immediately, if our hands be overfull of worldly matters. It were not well to have to say to Him, 'Lord, let me lay down this high post, and that public work, and these velvet robes, and this sweet cup, and this bitter one—and then I will open unto Thee.' I had rather mine hand ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... but without darkness or repose,— A dismal picture of the general doom, Where souls, distracted when the trumpet blows, And half unready, with their ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... care for nothing: take thou care of everything for me, heart and mind and all. I leave all to thee. Wilt thou not at length draw me out of this my frozen wintery state? Let me not shrink from fresh life and thought and duty, or be unready to come out of the shell of my sickness when thou sendest for me. I wait thy will. I wait even the light that I feel now as if I dared not encounter for weariness of ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... to intercept and destroy any orders that were not to his liking. The precaution was unnecessary. Sydney was peremptorily stopped, and ere any letter came to stay Drake, too, the wind had shifted northerly, and, all unready as he was, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... stand had thwarted Germany's murderous plan against an unready world, were a sad little army when they reached the Yser about mid October. It was not what they had endured that contributed most to break their spirit; but what they had been unable ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... art, then, for he hath destroyed my heart's treasure and buried it in the ground; so I go sorrowing all my days for the suffering he caused her on earth, and for her young and unready death." ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... sunrise! An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band of music, health, and physical beauty; all but love - to any worthy practiser. I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am unready for death, because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art. I AM not but in my ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had already touched the trees, and Cartier, having accomplished his exploration, hastened back to Stadacone, where he set about making preparations for spending the winter. A fort was hastily built at the mouth of the St. Croix. But the exiles were unready for the violent season that soon closed in upon them, almost burying their fort in drifting snow and casing the ships in an armour of glistening ice. Pent up by the biting frost, and eking out a wretched existence on salted food, their condition ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the thing I was. But the feeling put me on my guard. And I was not unready for the remark which followed a more exhaustive scrutiny ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... you think we might enact a romance in high life in this very room; it is high enough from the street to entitle it to be called a romance in high life," and the editor grinned uneasily, like an unready man who hopes to relieve a dilemma by ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... us welcome, with a heartiness as though she were only too glad to see us, although it would appear as if her hands were full enough of housework already, without the additional care of looking after a couple of helpless, unready new-chums. But strangers are so rare up here, that much must be made of them when they do come; therefore, the fatted calf is killed, so to speak, and we ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... sun was gay upon the thinly frosted-stones, but in the shadow of the garage the glass and brass of seventy or eighty cars glowed in a veiled bloom of polish. Only the Rochet-Schneider, which had been to Verdun, stood unready for the inspection, coated from wheel to hood with white Meuse mud. There was nothing to be done with her until she had been under ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... two out of the few who got back to the German lines. Most of the Prussians stayed in the ploughed field. Karl Heinz's scream had frozen the blood of the English soldiers, but it had also ruined the major's plans. He and his men, caught all unready, clumsy with the burdens that they carried, were shot to pieces; hardly a score of them returned. The rest of the force were attended to by an English burying party. According to custom the dead men were searched before they were buried, and some singular relies of the campaign were found ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... something, but putting off the hour of action. In 1776 he was suddenly spurred to decide by the circumstance that Barrington had written to propose a joint work on natural history. "If I publish at all," said Gilbert White to his nephew, "I shall come forth by myself." In 1780 he is still unready: "Were it not for want of a good amanuensis, I think I should make more progress." He was now sixty years of age. Eight years later he was preparing the Index, and at last, in the autumn of 1789, the volume positively made ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... a little disconcerted at the unexpectedness of the meeting, and returned the salutation in a confused way. The attempt which he had made to prevent Lord Blandamer from entering the choir was fresh in his memory, and he stammered some unready excuses. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... problem. Two men, a left-hand man and a right-hand man, go out to engage two other men whom they hope and believe to be unready. The left-hand man is particularly confident of being able to drive back his opponent, but he knows that sooner or later upon his right the second enemy, a stronger man, may come in and disturb his action. He says therefore to his right-hand companion: "Stand firm and engage and ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... all save market mornings, is a slug-a-bed town; and even at nine o'clock, when he issued forth after an impatient breakfast, the streets wore an unkempt, unready, unsociable air. Housewives were still beating mats, shopboys washing down windows; ash-buckets stood in the gutter-ways, by door and ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... used on the instant. Yes and no, right and wrong, we must have them labelled and ready to pack to go anywhere, to do anything at any time, or to know why we refuse to do it, if it is something we will not do. Ethelred the Unready died helpless a thousand years ago. The unready are still with us, but the strenuous century will grant them ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... use his eyes to as good purpose at home—" he said involuntarily, then stopped. Few men were more unready and awkward in conversation; yet when roused he was one of the best platform speakers of ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Prussian Ministry of War issued a new set of regulations respecting the maintenance of prisoners of war. They show great thoroughness and forethought, but I am afraid the average Englishman would be as unready to believe that they showed genuine good intentions, as the average German would be to believe that favourable regulations issued by the English authorities were really bona fide. Yet, as it seems to me of general interest, I will here give the second regulation: ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... down," yet few are aware that the words are translated from an old Norse song, and fewer still could say who broke down the bridge. The story goes that this was accomplished by the other Olaf, afterwards known as St. Olaf. He and his Vikings had allied themselves with Etheldred the Unready against the Danes, who held the Thames above London Bridge. The bridge itself, which in those days was a rough wooden structure, was densely packed with armed men, prepared to resist the advance of the combined fleets. But Olaf ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... soldiers one sees in the streets of Berlin are big, husky, strong, healthy creatures, with jowls hanging over their collars. The officers are clean-cut, keen-eyed, and in splendid health and training. Austria seems distraught and unready for emergencies, the people are not as keen for the war as the Germans and appear to be more indifferent as to its results. I am predicting that the end of the war will see Japan, Italy, and Roumania gainers, and Belgium, Turkey, and Austria losers, while Germany and England will be approximately ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... France or Belgium. They would have been held at Liege and in the Ardennes. Five hundred thousand men would have held them indefinitely. But the Allies had never worked trench warfare; they were unready for it, Germans knew of their unreadiness, and their unreadiness it is quite clear they calculated. They did not reckon, it is now clear that they were right in not reckoning, the Allies as contemporary soldiers. They were going to ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... of all perhaps was presented by the orthodox camp. For, in proportion as the Modernist attack developed, was the revival of faith among those hostile to it, or unready for it. For the first time in their lives, religion became interesting—thrilling even—to thousands of persons for whom it had long lost all real savour. Fierce question and answer, the hot cut and thrust of argument, the passion of honest fight on equal terms—without ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Caesar Borgia. His dominion is spreading like a plague upon the face of this Italy, which he has threatened to eat up like an artichoke—leaf by leaf. Already his greedy eyes are turned upon us, and what power have we—all unready as we are—wherewith successfully to oppose the overwhelming might of the Duke of Valentinois? All this his Highness realises, for we have made it more than clear to him, as we have, too, made clear ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... round hearing footsteps behind him, but still was startled and unready. "It does not ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... forecast the new world that will follow the War, we know merely that it will be utterly new. Nevertheless, the great tendencies already at work we can partly discern and recognize something of what they promise. It is well to try to see them, that we may be not too unready to welcome the opportunity and accept the burden of the world that is being born ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... circumstances a little better than those of their friends. They kept the rent of their rooms paid; and, moreover, it was a rare thing for a starving youth to drop in on them and find their samovar cold, or their welcome unready. Sergius was himself, indeed, the heart and soul of his branch of the brotherhood; and from him had emanated none knew how many screeds and pamphlets upon his favorite theme. Irina, relying on him as the last protector of her family, questioned none of his plans, but found in his ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... formation to keep their courage up to the necessary pitch. And still better they had the training that would make them reliable in judgment when sudden and unexpected conditions arose. Perry's policy to have a goodly number of men always in training at headquarters so that unready recruits should not have to go out to face emergencies, was being approved by events as highly statesman-like. But he was right in constantly keeping before the Government the need for increasing the numbers of the Force, because, although the men were wonderfully ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... the whole country to realize that war on a scale never known before had come, and, as the firing upon Fort Sumter awakened America, convinced England that she must fight to the death for her liberties, unready as she was;—but Mr. Balfour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, says that, since the war began, she has added one million to the tonnage of her navy, and has doubled its personnel, and is ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... haven of rest which his retiring from the office was to be. Especially as he had dragged himself from bed to stop the relentless snarl of his alarm-clock, had he hoped for late morning sleeps in his new home, when he could wake up at seven, feel himself still heavy, unrefreshed, unready for the day, and turn on the pillow to take ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... misgivings in their crudity; she started by asking how his change of front would affect people and instanced Dick and herself only as examples of how the thing might strike certain minds. She must feed him with the milk of rectitude, for its strong meat his stomach was hopelessly unready. But he was suspicious, and insisted on hearing what Dick Benyon had said; so she told him pretty accurately. His answer was a long disquisition on the political situation, to which she listened with the same faint smile with which she had heard Dick himself; ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... very quickly. We were taken by surprise, all unready, with our men ashore or mixed among the horses, or carrying tubs in the water. The troops and preventives were over the last dune and galloping down the sand to us almost before Marah had finished speaking; yet even then in all the confusion, as a captain shouted to us to "surrender in the ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... Both carelesse of his health, and of his fame: Till at the last he heard a dreadfull sownd, Which through the wood loud bellowing did rebownd, That all the earth for terrour seemd to shake, 60 And trees did tremble. Th' Elfe therewith astownd, Upstarted lightly from his looser make,[*] And his unready weapons ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... met them all at breakfast, with the same unready eyes and lips that Mr. Linden had seen before. It was odd how Faith seemed to have put off the full realization of Thursday till Thursday came. After breakfast she was making her escape, but was detained before she reached ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... and among his regiments of horse, biting his lip till the blood ran down his chin. Leslie thought to surprise Cromwell; Cromwell surprised Leslie, crossed the Broxburn on the low level, before dawn, and drove into the Scots who were all unready, the matches of their muskets being wet and unlighted. The centre made a good stand, but a flank charge by English cavalry cut up the Scots foot, and Leslie fled with the nobles, gentry, and mounted men. In killed, wounded, and prisoners ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... all, the showing would be by no means a discreditable one. It had been a remarkable task; and Smith, now that he came to look back on it, remembering the black days of the reign of Gunterson the Unready, could himself only wonder mildly at the way all these things had come about. In the midst of the satisfaction which he could not help but feel, there was always a genuine sense of amazement at the facile way in which Fate had played into his hand. If he had any doubts, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... her hair; she had a dainty white apron tied on, "to cook in," she said, and her pink nails were powdered with flour. Her eyes laughed and twinkled at me. I remember thinking how young she looked, and how unready for suffering. I remember that she brought the baby in after a while, and that Tip came all muddy from the garden, dragging his tiny hoe over the carpet; that the window was open, and that, while we all sat there together, ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... He was unready with his apology, however, and tramped on without again looking behind. Madame La Tour glanced at her ship, which would have to wait for wind and tide to ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... in a forty years' drama—and they give military officers a lesson on the necessity of having their minds prepared and stocked, by study of the conditions of war in their own day, if they would not be found unready and perhaps disgraced in the hour of battle.[89] It is not to be supposed that so many English seamen misbehaved through so vulgar and rare a defect as mere cowardice; it was unpreparedness of mind and lack of military efficiency in the captains, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... into Abbott's always unready ear, "That isn't La Gonizetti. Wonder what this means? La Gonizetti is much more of a woman than this one, and she doesn't wear a mask, or much of anything else. La Gonizetti doesn't care who sees her. Why, this is nothing but a mere—I tell you now, if she ain't on to ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... bound I'm back before Etheldred the Unready wants me," he answered, bounding off with an elasticity that caused his mother to say the boy was made of india-rubber; and then putting his head in by the window to say, "By-the-bye, if there's any pudding owing to me, that little chorister fellow of ours, Bill Blake, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Unready, from his accession, after the murder of his innocent brother, until the scene depicted in the nineteenth chapter of the tale, was a tragedy ever deepening. Its details will seem dark enough as read herein, but how utterly dark they were can only be appreciated by ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... sentinel by starlight, lo, descried This mighty Soldan and his host draw near, Who found not as he hoped the Christians' guide Unware, ne yet unready was his gear: The scouts, when this huge army they descried, Ran back, and gan with shouts the 'larum rear; The watch stert up and drew their weapons bright, And busked them bold to battle and ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... which he wound up, staring vacantly about the decks as he did so. "Tell me, boy," he said gently. "Is Lane come over with you?" To tell the truth, it flashed across my mind, when he pulled out his watch, that he was making me unready for a difficult question. I was not a very bright boy; but I had this sudden prompting or instinct, which set me on my guard. No one is more difficult to pump than a boy who is ready for his questioner, so I stared at him. "Lane?" I said, "Lane? ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... freedom of the watering-place Miss, which Avice had plainly acquired during her sojourn at the Sandbourne school, helped Pierston greatly in this role of jeune premier which he was not unready to play. Not a word did he say about being a native of the island; still more carefully did he conceal the fact of his having courted her grandmother, and engaged himself to marry ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... Here were other quartz tubes, but these led down still further, for this floor contained individual sleeping bunks, most of them unoccupied, unready for occupancy, though ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... guessed to be the new rector's family. Celestina looked quite composed; though so very quiet and silent a child, she was neither shy nor awkward. She was too little taken up with herself to have the foolish ideas which make so many children bashful and unready: it never entered her head that other people were either thinking of or looking at her. So she was free to notice what she could do and when she was wanted, and her simple kindly little heart was always pleased to render others a ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... not see this. All he saw, in the blinding rage which suddenly possessed him, was a horse down, unready for duty, and beside her a horse standing, ready for duty, but restrained by the other. Stringing out a volley of oaths, he stepped to the side of the mare and jerked at her head, but she refused stubbornly to get up ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... years, no challenge so formidable as that represented by the new German fleet these three hundred years. It brings with it a crisis in the national life of England as great as has ever been known; yet this crisis finds the British nation divided, unready and uncertain what ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... live, and that reign abhor, And will the nations it should dawn? Will they Who ride upon the perilous edge of war? Will such as delve for gold in this our day? Neither the world will, nor the age will, nor The soul—and what, it cometh now? Nay, nay, The weighty sphere, unready for release, Rolls far in front of ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... last generation. Unfortunately, the king, though an honest and well-intentioned man, was totally unfit to guide a country through a dangerous crisis. His courage was passive, his manners were heavy, dull, and shy, and, though steadily industrious, he was slow of comprehension and unready in action; and reformation was the more difficult because to abolish the useless court offices would have been utter starvation to many of their holders, who had nothing but their pensions to live ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his proper time), those sinful acts come to the foolish man.[597] The objects that are stored with expectation are scarcely enjoyed. Such storing is never applauded by the wise, for death waits for no one (but snatches his prey whether the latter be ready or unready). The wise have said that the righteousness of all creatures is an attribute of the mind. For this reason, one should, in one's mind, do good to all.[598] One should practise virtue singly. In the practice of virtue one has no need for the help of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... tell you, however, that the habit of being ready is going to make for Ferguson a great deal of comfort in this world, and bring him in a great deal of enjoyment. And, on the other hand, Horace the Unready, as they would have called him in French history, will work through a great deal of discomfort and mortification before he rids himself of the habit which I have illustrated for you. It is true that he has a certain rapidity, which somebody calls "shiftiness," of resolution ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... he was always esteemed as a most sympathetic companion; timid, reserved, unready, if taken by surprise, but highly cultivated, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... once to assume his "angry countenance." Certainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to match—the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a light is not rather more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to be unattainable by man. But of course the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Napoleon, he would have made himself sure personally as to "the last gaiter button" and all other details, but with sublime self-satisfaction and inane blindness the Second Napoleon put himself at the head of this unready army, inspired apparently with the "on to Berlin" confidence ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... moreover, with holster-like appendages to it—while he watched her, wholly charmed, curious and shy, carried indeed a little out of himself, waiting for her to make further disclosures, since he felt absurdly slow and unready of speech. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... heavy-lidded, twinkled under their bushy brows with a queer, kind cynicism. As a young man he had sown many a wild oat; but he had also worked and made money in business; he had, in fact, burned the candle at both ends; but he had never been unready to do his fellows a good turn. He had a passion for driving, and his reckless method of pursuing this art had caused him to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as the eyes. I would invariably make pupils talk, during lessons, Latin and Greek, no matter how badly at first; but unfortunately I should have to begin with teaching the pedants who, as a class, are far more unwilling and unready to learn than are those ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... time, the call of God to come forth in beauty! What a difference it would make in the working, and getting, and hustling, and learning, and enjoying if everybody remembered how near the lying-quiet time might be! How unready some might be to lie down and feel that it was all over! How much difference it must make what one had done with the time over there in the city, when the stopping time came! How much better it would be if one could live remembering the Presence, always ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... duke of that county, who ventured, with a small body, to attack them, they spread their devastations over all the neighbouring provinces. In this extremity, Ethelred, to whom historians give the epithet of the UNREADY, instead of rousing his people to defend with courage their honour and their property, hearkened to the advice of Siricius, Archbishop of Canterbury, which was seconded by many of the degenerate nobility; and paying the enemy the sum ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... dusk of a wet night of early June, with the sea in a tumble and the wind blowing fretfully from the west of north, that the mail-boat made our harbour. For three weeks we had kept watch for her, but in the end we were caught unready—the lookouts in from the Watchman, my father's crew gone home, ourselves at evening prayer in the room where my mother lay abed. My father stopped dead in his petition when the first hoarse, muffled blast of the whistle came uncertain from the sea, and my own heart fluttered ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... forget all the misery that human folly has so recently allotted you. Oh! listen to me, my prince. I do not jest. I have a heart, and mind, and soul, and can read your own,—aye, even to its depths. I will not take you unready for your task, in order to cast you into the crucible of my own desires, of my caprice, or my ambition. Let it be all or nothing. You are chilled and galled, sick at heart, overcome by excess of ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... bask in this sun, You can drink wine, and eat: Good-bye. I must gird myself and run, 10 Though with unready feet: I ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... the railway employees came on. It was exceptionally strong in the cities of Illinois—Chicago, Decatur, Springfield, Galesburg, East St. Louis, and every other city of considerable size. The State was ill prepared for such a crisis. The strike ran along for several days with the State unready to bring the matter to a close. Having been in office but a few months, I had not yet secured any arms or other military equipment with which to combat organized violations of the law. The Illinois National Guard was inchoate—in fact, scarcely organized at all, except in companies voluntarily formed, ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... there were no actual and deep piercing of the French lines, the pressure upon the French would lead them to call upon the British for help. British attack, while the British force was still unready, would lead to great losses and would exhaust the reserves in men and munitions of both France and Britain. At the worst this would mean that neither France nor Britain would be ready to take the field in their long-promised general offensive ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... agile, sprightly, deft, lively, swift, brisk, active, spry. Antonyms: slow, sluggish, clumsy, dilatory, unready, dull, heavy. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and gave him some money, and patted the neck of his horse. Whether he made some movement that scared it or not, there was very nearly a nasty accident, for the beast started violently, and the postilion being unready was thrown and lost his fee, as he found afterwards, and the chaise lost some paint on the gateposts, and the wheel went over the man's foot who was taking out the baggage. When Lord Saul came up ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... brought to a Saviour. I feel this was one of my faults in the ministry. Nourish babes; comfort downcast believers; counsel those perplexed; perfect that which is lacking in their faith. Prepare them for sore trials. I fear most Christians are quite unready for days of ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... honor to see his Majesty pass out; Majesty escorted by Richelieu, one's old friend in a sense: "Is Trajan pleased?" whispered Voltaire to his Richelieu; overheard by Trajan,—who answered in words nothing, but in a visible glance of the eyes did answer, "Impertinent Lackey!"—Trajan being a man unready with speech; and disliking trouble with the people whom he paid for keeping his boots in polish. O my winged Voltaire, to what dunghill Bubbly-Jocks (COQS D'INDE) you do stoop with homage, constrained by their appearance ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... dangerous pastimes of mock combat and jousting he delighted to engage, to the no small alarm of all spectators.[521] Unfortunately, however, the intellectual and moral development of the young prince had by no means kept pace with the growth of his physical powers. The sluggishness of his dull and unready comprehension had, at an earlier date, been noticed by the Venetian Marino Cavalli, while, with a courtier's flattery, he likened him to those autumnal fruits that are more tardy in ripening, but are of better quality and last longer ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... strange, dark, desirous things was the look she encountered. Abruptly he rose—he was coming toward her, and she struggled suddenly to her feet, battling against the cold terror which held her dumb and unready. She flung one arm out before her and found it grasped by hands that were hot and burning. The touch shot her with a fierce rage that cleared her brain and unlocked ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... and girls of a club; the president warned me in her invitation that the children were exceptionally undisciplined, but my previous experiences with similar gatherings led me to interpret her words with a moderation which left me totally unready for the reality. When I faced my audience, I saw a squirming jumble of faces, backs of heads, and the various members of many small bodies,—not a person in the room was paying the slightest attention to me; the president's introduction ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... will not pass. Besides, [In a higher tone.] the offence is so exorbitant, To mingle with a misbelieving race, That speedy vengeance would pursue your crime, And holy Mahomet launch himself from heaven, Before the unready thunderbolts were formed. [Emperor, taking him by the throat with one hand, snatches out his sword with the other, and points ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... gladness in the usually patient voice that struck even Rachel, though she was usually too eager to be observant, but she was still unready with talk for the occasion, and Ermine continued: "We had heard so much of the Major before-hand, that we had a sort of Jupiter-like expectation of the coming man. I am not sure that I shall not go on expecting a ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beauty and happiness; but we are late in learning that they exist in the will and imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable thing or circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready attention. If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you might stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you "improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot where Adam first stood erect, and the place ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... And so business continued brisk with this curiously matched pirate firm—a giant and a boy—until, under the cliffs of Kinlimma, in Friesland, hasty word came to the boy viking that the English king, Ethelred the Unready, was calling for the help of all sturdy fighters to win back his heritage and crown from young King Cnut, or Canute the Dane, whose father had seized the throne of England. Quick to respond to an appeal that promised plenty of hard knocks, and the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the hangings which protected his bedroom door. 'Sorry you found me unready,' he said; 'I got in late from the club somehow, but they'll bring us up some dinner presently. Looking at that thing, eh?' he asked, as he saw Mark's eye rest on a small high-heeled satin slipper in a glass case which stood on a bracket near him. 'That was ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... was now far advanced, and again the Miobu rose to take leave. The moon was sailing down westward and the cool breeze was waving the herbage to and fro, in which numerous mushi were plaintively singing.[12] The messenger, being still somehow unready to start, hummed— ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... without darkness or repose,— A dismal picture of the general doom, Where souls, distracted when the trumpet blows, And half unready, with their bodies come. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... is the other. I will tell you, however, that the habit of being ready is going to make for Ferguson a great deal of comfort in this world, and bring him in a great deal of enjoyment. And, on the other hand, Horace the Unready, as they would have called him in French history, will work through a great deal of discomfort and mortification before he rids himself of the habit which I have illustrated for you. It is true that he has a certain rapidity, which somebody ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... walked back and forth over the restricted space, talking genially together as if they were old friends. Nevertheless there was a certain cautious guardedness in the Captain's speech; the wary craft of an unready man who is in the presence of a person more subtle than himself. The bluff Captain remembered he had been caught napping the night before, when, after refusing to tell the Prince the direction of the steamer, he had given himself away by mentioning the Gulf of Finland. Lermontoff ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... the yard the sun was gay upon the thinly frosted-stones, but in the shadow of the garage the glass and brass of seventy or eighty cars glowed in a veiled bloom of polish. Only the Rochet-Schneider, which had been to Verdun, stood unready for the inspection, coated from wheel to hood with white Meuse mud. There was nothing to be done with her until she had been ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... quickly. We were taken by surprise, all unready, with our men ashore or mixed among the horses, or carrying tubs in the water. The troops and preventives were over the last dune and galloping down the sand to us almost before Marah had finished speaking; yet even then in all the confusion, as a captain shouted to us to "surrender ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... we feel that our talents lie elsewhere. To Comrade Jackson the management of the Psmith estates seems the job on which he can get the rapid half-Nelson. For my own part, I feel that my long suit is the Bar. I am a poor, unready speaker, but I intend to acquire a knowledge of the Law which shall outweigh this defect. Before leaving you, I should like to say—I may speak for you as well ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... But here we come to two tombs of Kings. Sebba was buried in the North Aisle in 695. He had been King of the East Saxons, but being afflicted with grievous sickness he became a monk. His tomb remained until the Great Fire, as did that of Ethelred the Unready, next to it. On the arches above were tablets ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... obtain them was a problem. Though he held a British navigator's license, he did not appear to be an Englishman. None of us ever knew, I think, from what country he originally came. His rough, mumbling, unready speech might have been picked up in any of the seaports of the English-speaking world. His manners smacked of the forecastle, and he was altogether so difficult to classify that I used to toy with the theory that he had murdered the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... to the end without consideration of the means and degrees, pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them—like an unready horse, they will neither ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... arranging for industrial relations. They grew to be one of the most powerful nations on earth without preparing their institutions or their minds for the ending of their isolation. They stumbled into the World War morally and physically unready, and they stumbled out again, much ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Ah! how unready, how gauche she had shown herself! From the beginning instead of conciliating she had provoked him. But how to make a plausible story out of their adventure at all? There was the deciding, the fatal difficulty! Her face burnt anew as she tried to think his thoughts, to imagine all ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the invasion of Belgium aroused the whole country to realize that war on a scale never known before had come, and, as the firing upon Fort Sumter awakened America, convinced England that she must fight to the death for her liberties, unready as she was;—but Mr. Balfour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, says that, since the war began, she has added one million to the tonnage of her navy, and has doubled its personnel, and is ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this the harvest time of the church, when the days are closing and the nights lengthening? Have we not been used to hear of special efforts being made for the rescue of perishing souls, and ingathering of those who are in danger of dying unready? ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words. In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed. Yet he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style. This he had acquired by conversation with the world, for his education was merely reading, writing, and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at a later day. His time was employed in action ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... her with a rather bewildered expression, but his large gray eyes were full of gratitude for her supposed kindness, even if his unready tongue was slow ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... not because Ringfield was unready on these occasions nor because of any fear lest his special kind of intercessory gastronomic prayer might fail to carry conviction with it, but on account of the intrusion of two belated arrivals down by the door. He could ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... the Battles of Woerth and Forbach, whereupon he exclaimed, "Poor Emperor! I pity him, but I have had a lucky escape." Austria also drew back, and thus left France face to face with the naked truth that she stood alone and unready before a united and triumphant Germany, able to pour treble her own forces through the open portals of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... set men in wait to intercept and destroy any orders that were not to his liking. The precaution was unnecessary. Sydney was peremptorily stopped, and ere any letter came to stay Drake, too, the wind had shifted northerly, and, all unready as he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... white as the snow which hung on the rocks above her, and she looked at the water and then at me, and she cried, "Oh dear! oh dear!" And then she began to sob aloud, being so young and unready. But I drew her behind the withy-bushes, and close down to the water, where it was quiet and shelving deep, ere it came to the lip of the chasm. Here they could not see either of us from the upper ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Israelites grew so indolent, and unready of taking pains, that misfortunes came heavier upon them, which also proceeded in part from their contempt of the Divine worship; for when they had once fallen off from the regularity of their political government, they indulged themselves further in living according to their own pleasure, and ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... story. Only the events since your arrival here. The rest counts for nothing. We are all on the ground here and I propose to act quickly. I learned some matters in Calcutta which have greatly enlightened me." The facile tongue of the renegade was slow to do the bidding of his unready brain. "Damme! But she's a cool one!" the ex-officer concluded, as he caught his breath. But, conscious of her watchful eye, he related all his adventures, with a judicious reserve as to Justine Delande. The burning eyes of Berthe Louison were steadily fixed upon the relator's ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... require to have mass formation to keep their courage up to the necessary pitch. And still better they had the training that would make them reliable in judgment when sudden and unexpected conditions arose. Perry's policy to have a goodly number of men always in training at headquarters so that unready recruits should not have to go out to face emergencies, was being approved by events as highly statesman-like. But he was right in constantly keeping before the Government the need for increasing the numbers of the Force, because, although the men were wonderfully ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... Germany, quite unprepared—Austria with her fifty millions does not count—was fighting on the defensive against wicked, aggressive enemies who were fully prepared. This explains why she invaded France and took possession of towns like Neuve Chapelle to defend her poor, unready people from the French, who had been plotting and planning "the day" when they would ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to compound employments of ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... on foot a law-suit against him for libel. Cormac's kinsmen backed him up to answer it, and he would let no terms be made, saying that they deserved the shame put upon them, and no honour; he was not unready to meet them, unless they played him false. Thorvard had not come to the holmgang when he had been challenged, and therefore the shame had fallen of itself upon him and his, and they ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... for immediate ills, it may come sweet as a challenge upon reserves of energy. The American frontier subsequent to the civil war was so vast, yet so rapid, in its motive that to the weak or the unready it was merely appalling. The task was that of creating an entire new world. So confronted, some sat down and wept, watching the fabric grow under the hands of others. Some were strong, but knew not how to apply their strength; others were strong but slothful. The man of initiative, ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... would be by no means a discreditable one. It had been a remarkable task; and Smith, now that he came to look back on it, remembering the black days of the reign of Gunterson the Unready, could himself only wonder mildly at the way all these things had come about. In the midst of the satisfaction which he could not help but feel, there was always a genuine sense of amazement at the facile way in which Fate had played into his hand. If he had any doubts, however, no one ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... accomplished his exploration, hastened back to Stadacone, where he set about making preparations for spending the winter. A fort was hastily built at the mouth of the St. Croix. But the exiles were unready for the violent season that soon closed in upon them, almost burying their fort in drifting snow and casing the ships in an armour of glistening ice. Pent up by the biting frost, and eking out a wretched existence on salted food, their condition grew deplorable. A ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... bold Sir Pertinax With indignation red of face did wax. The needful word his tongue was vainly seeking, Since what he felt was quite beyond the speaking. Though quick his hand to ward or give a blow, His tongue all times unready was and slow, Therefore he speechless looked upon the maid, Who viewed him 'neath her lashes' dusky shade, Whence Eros launched a sudden beamy dart That 'spite chain-mail did reach and pierce his heart. And in that instant Pertinax grew ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... fatigue of travelling from one plague-stricken town to another that he caught the pest. Among all the kings of Christendom there was never a better, or nobler, or more luckless, an Alfred with the fortune of "Unready" Ethelred. ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... little unready, cast about at his storied halls; any illusion to the "exposure" of the objects they so solidly sheltered was obviously unpleasant to him. But then it was as if he found at a stroke both his own reassurance and his daughter's. "How can there be a question of it when ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... Ethelred the Unready, from his accession, after the murder of his innocent brother, until the scene depicted in the nineteenth chapter of the tale, was a tragedy ever deepening. Its details will seem dark enough as read herein, but ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Unloving, Unthankful, Ungrateful, Unwilling, Unruly, Unreasonable, Unwomanly, Unworthy, Unmotherly, Undutious, Unmerciful, Untruthful, Unfair, Unjust and Unprincipled. She was Unpunctual, Unthrifty, Unskilful, Unready, Unsafe, Unfit, and totally Unprofitable. She was Unknown, Unnoticed, Unheeded, Unobeyed, Unloved, Unfriended, Unemployed, Unvalued, Unpopular, and actually Unpitied. She was Unsuccessful, Unfortunate, Unlucky, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... Wodehouse had contented herself with loving Lucy—had suffered her to grow up very much as she would, without interference—had never taken a decided part in her life. When anything had to be done, to tell the truth, she was very inexpert—unready—deeply embarrassed with the unusual necessity. Nettie's case, so wonderfully different from anything she could have conceived, lay on her mind and oppressed her as she went home ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... of the Presbyters. Some were clapped up to-day, and strict watch is kept in the City by the train-bands, and letters of a plot are taken. God preserve us! for all these things bode very ill. So home, and after going to welcome home Sir W. Pen, who was unready, going to bed, I staid with him a little while, and so to my lodging ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... sudden mad impulse took her: she would go over to Jersey, and see Rose. It was not so very late, the babies kept Rose and Harry up until almost eleven. She thirsted suddenly for Rose, for Rose's beautiful, pure little face, her puzzled, earnest blue eyes under black eyebrows, her pleasant, unready words that were always ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... and deeper meanings of religion; but he can during this period be led into the doing of right acts and deeds, and thus have his religious habits started. At a time when his brain is yet unripe, and hence unready for the more difficult truths or the more exalted emotions of religion, the child is at his best in the matter of habit-forming. For habits grounded in early childhood are more easily formed and more deeply imbedded than those acquired at any later time, and they exert a stronger ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... laboring in grave peril. The Revenge loomed as a spectral shape while Blackbeard was endeavoring to get her running free in pursuit of the Plymouth Adventure. But slovenly, reckless seamanship had caught him unready. His sails were blowing to ribbons, ropes flying at loose ends, and it was with great difficulty that the vessel could be made to mind ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... some limit to himself, of something unformed in his very being, of some buds which were not ripe in him, some folded centres of darkness which would never develop and unfold whilst he was alive in the body. He was unready for fulfilment. Something undeveloped in him limited him, there was a darkness in him which he could not unfold, which would never unfold ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... 24, 1915, the Prussian Ministry of War issued a new set of regulations respecting the maintenance of prisoners of war. They show great thoroughness and forethought, but I am afraid the average Englishman would be as unready to believe that they showed genuine good intentions, as the average German would be to believe that favourable regulations issued by the English authorities were really bona fide. Yet, as it seems to me of general interest, I will here give the second regulation: "Self-management ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... delighted to engage, to the no small alarm of all spectators.[521] Unfortunately, however, the intellectual and moral development of the young prince had by no means kept pace with the growth of his physical powers. The sluggishness of his dull and unready comprehension had, at an earlier date, been noticed by the Venetian Marino Cavalli, while, with a courtier's flattery, he likened him to those autumnal fruits that are more tardy in ripening, but are of better quality and last longer than the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... your watchword, so that the blow, if it is coming, may not come upon you as a thief in the night, and may not find you unready and taken by surprise." Such had been Lord Randolph's warning. It was now learnt, with feelings in which disgust and indignation were equally mingled, that Lord Randolph's son was bent on coming to Belfast, not indeed ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... and strong, I say, for otherwise we are but dead men." When Hengist ceased heartening his comrades, the knights arrayed them for the battle. They moved against the Britons as speedily as their horses might bear them, for they hoped to find them naked and unready, and to take them unawares. The Britons so misdoubted their adversary that they watched in their armour, both day and night. As soon as the king knew that the heathen advanced to give battle, he ordered his ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... island the last great Prince of the Saxon race, Edward, son of Ethelred the Unready, found Dunstan's little brotherhood of Benedictine monks, who were living in mud huts round a small stone chapel. Out of this insignificant beginning grew a mighty monastery, the West Minster, dowered with royal gifts and ruled over by mitred Abbots, who owned no ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... grateful warmth on her shoulders and, watching the daily miracle of birth, felt vaguely some corresponding process stir her own heart. Nature cherishes no yesterdays; the work of rebuilding and replenishing goes serenely on. Punctual dawn never finds the world unready, April's burgeoning colors bury away forever the memories of winter ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... challenge these hundred years, no challenge so formidable as that represented by the new German fleet these three hundred years. It brings with it a crisis in the national life of England as great as has ever been known; yet this crisis finds the British nation divided, unready and uncertain what leadership ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... is internationalism unless all the nations of the world are of the same mind? How shall it be safe for some nations to guide themselves by these fine sounding principles when others are but lying in wait to attack them when they are unready? I believe in peace. I believe the laddies who fought in France and in the other battlegrounds of this war won peace for humanity. But they began the work; it is for us who are left to ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... justice of recent years, you have seen twelve fools bamboozled by a knave, you have heard a friend of yours grossly insulted, and you ask me what's the matter." The car swung round a corner, and Lady Touchstone, who was unready, heeled over with a cry. "I wish Mason wouldn't do that," she added testily, dabbing at her toque. "So subversive of dignity. What was I saying? Oh yes. A change. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the dusk of a wet night of early June, with the sea in a tumble and the wind blowing fretfully from the west of north, that the mail-boat made our harbour. For three weeks we had kept watch for her, but in the end we were caught unready—the lookouts in from the Watchman, my father's crew gone home, ourselves at evening prayer in the room where my mother lay abed. My father stopped dead in his petition when the first hoarse, muffled ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... even could he have fancied anything to be gained by it, whereas his interest lay in the opposite direction, his object being to use the lad unconsciously to himself. He discovered also concerning him that he had lofty ideas of duty in everything; that he was very trusting, and unready to doubt; and that with him poetry was not, as with Lady Joan, a delight, but an absolute passion. After such discoveries, he judged it would not be hard to make for. himself, as for an idol, a high place in the imagination ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... present and to devise immediate remedies for immediate ills, it may come sweet as a challenge upon reserves of energy. The American frontier subsequent to the civil war was so vast, yet so rapid, in its motive that to the weak or the unready it was merely appalling. The task was that of creating an entire new world. So confronted, some sat down and wept, watching the fabric grow under the hands of others. Some were strong, but knew not how to apply their strength; others were strong but slothful. The man ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... rather bewildered expression, but his large gray eyes were full of gratitude for her supposed kindness, even if his unready tongue was ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... II, surnamed the "Unready" or "redeless" from his indifference to the "rede" or council of his advisers, the city would again have fallen into the hands of the Danes, but for the personal courage displayed by its inhabitants and the protection which, by Alfred's ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... had concluded, his father said: "Truly, Edgar, you have been fortunate indeed, which is another way of saying that you have skilfully grasped the opportunities that presented themselves. The man who bemoans ill-fortune is the man too apathetic, too unready, or too cowardly to grasp opportunity. The man who is called fortunate is, on the other hand, he who never lets a chance slip by, who is cool, resolute, and determined. During the time that you have been away you have made friends of two wealthy merchants, and have rendered ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... principles, which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... sexual centers are not even awake. True, even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall, in its approach from the distance. But these are only an uneasy intrusion from the as-yet-uncreated, unready biological centers. The great sexual centers of the hypogastric plexus, and the immensely powerful sacral ganglion are slowly prepared, developed in a kind of prenatal gestation during childhood before puberty. But ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... Where was there an opportunity to break out of this prison? Yet the chance came, came unexpectedly, came after some weeks of waiting and despondency, came at a moment, in fact, when it found Jules and Henri almost unready, unprepared to seize ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... amiable lady bids us welcome, with a heartiness as though she were only too glad to see us, although it would appear as if her hands were full enough of housework already, without the additional care of looking after a couple of helpless, unready new-chums. But strangers are so rare up here, that much must be made of them when they do come; therefore, the fatted calf is killed, so to speak, and we are regaled ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... an artist of high powers, would lean over each boy and girl, murmuring her praise, soothing in the same breath the unlucky ones who had not found the most gorgeous fruit, warning the men not to trouble the yet unready apples, quieting the maids if they grew too boisterous, an eye and an ear for everyone ...
— In the Border Country • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... heart: A cheat on procreation will not pass. Besides, [In a higher tone.] the offence is so exorbitant, To mingle with a misbelieving race, That speedy vengeance would pursue your crime, And holy Mahomet launch himself from heaven, Before the unready thunderbolts were formed. [Emperor, taking him by the throat with one hand, snatches out his sword with the other, and points ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... stretches straight as an arrow along the whole ridge. Near the fort is the famous White Horse cut in the chalk, which, since its recent cleansing, gleams brilliantly from the hillside. It was cut out to commemorate the magnificent victory of Ethelred the Unready and Alfred over the Danes at Ashdown in 871. Readers of Tom Brown's School Days will recall the story of the Berkshire revels in 1857, when the scouring of the Horse took place. Judge Hughes was born ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... late? One fierce blow at the unsuspecting horseman at his side, one cry to his French troops, one desperate charge upon the unready lines before him, and these rebellious Barons might rue the day they dared to thwart his plans! A bolder hand might have turned the game even at that point. Had it been a Richard there! the cup of liberty might have been dashed from England's lips, and the ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... it was done!" The wondering exclamation forced itself from Thorpe's unready lips. He bent forward a little, and took a new visual hold, as it were, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... so business continued brisk with this curiously matched pirate firm—a giant and a boy—until, under the cliffs of Kinlimma, in Friesland, hasty word came to the boy viking that the English king, Ethelred "The Unready," was calling for the help of all sturdy fighters to win back his heritage and crown from young King Cnut, or Canute the Dane, whose father had seized the throne of England. Quick to respond to an appeal that promised plenty of hard knocks, and the possibility of unlimited booty, Olaf, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... think,—and a white crocus in her hair; she had a dainty white apron tied on, "to cook in," she said, and her pink nails were powdered with flour. Her eyes laughed and twinkled at me. I remember thinking how young she looked, and how unready for suffering. I remember that she brought the baby in after a while, and that Tip came all muddy from the garden, dragging his tiny hoe over the carpet; that the window was open, and that, while we all sat there together, a little brown bird brought some twine and built a nest on an apple-bough ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... investment, it cheapened production by the application of initially expensive but ultimately repaying, apparatus, it effected enormous economies in wholesale production and distribution. Before the new methods of business the old gilds stood as helpless, as unready, as bowmen in the face ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and low in the crown. His grey eyes, heavy-lidded, twinkled under their bushy brows with a queer, kind cynicism. As a young man he had sown many a wild oat; but he had also worked and made money in business; he had, in fact, burned the candle at both ends; but he had never been unready to do his fellows a good turn. He had a passion for driving, and his reckless method of pursuing this art had caused him to be nicknamed: ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... addressed, rose of course from his seat. By nature he was not a coward, but he was unready, and knew not what to do or to say on the spur of the moment. "I did not come here ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... dumb. I did not know how to answer her, and she knew it. Even Dick, with his quick Yankee wit, for once was unready. And indeed, the Duchess had us at a ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his pupil easy to please, but ill to satisfy; ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to discover beauty, slow to say, "Here I ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... war—the first act in a forty years' drama—and they give military officers a lesson on the necessity of having their minds prepared and stocked, by study of the conditions of war in their own day, if they would not be found unready and perhaps disgraced in the hour of battle.[89] It is not to be supposed that so many English seamen misbehaved through so vulgar and rare a defect as mere cowardice; it was unpreparedness of mind and lack of military efficiency in the captains, combined ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... of the early history of St. Paul's might bring a few facts to light, whether directly or by inference; but even after the reign of Alfred we have very little knowledge of the condition of the city and its port. It was never taken by the Danes. During the reign of Ethelred "the Unready," the King seems to have been shut up in London while the marauders ravaged the country round. Either the Londoners had great stores of provisions, or they had access to foreign markets. Edgar first recognised the importance of this trade, and no doubt the ill-advised ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... pressing their attack on Cyprus and were besieging the city of Nicosia. If the Christians had been moved by any united spirit they could have relieved Nicosia and struck a heavy blow at the Turkish fleet, which lay unready and stripped of its men in the harbor. But Gian Doria, who inherited from his great uncle his great dislike of Venetians, and who probably had secret instructions from his master, Philip II, to help as little as possible, succeeded in blocking any vigorous move on the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... singularly unready to meet invasion. The regent Moray had died a few weeks earlier, and his successor, Donald, Earl of Mar, incompetent to carry on his vigorous policy, had perhaps already been intriguing with the adventurers. The only resistance to Balliol's landing, made ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
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