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Forties   Listen
noun
Forties  n. pl.  See Forty.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Forties" Quotes from Famous Books



... early forties, with twenty years of South-Seas trading, a tall, strong, well-featured, but hard-faced, European, with thin lips over nearly perfect teeth, and cold, small, pale-blue eyes. He talked little to men, but isolated young ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... influence of the Sovereign is obvious and was illustrated by Queen Victoria in such historic incidents as the personal relations with King Louis Philippe which probably averted a war with France in the early forties; in the later friendship with Louis Napoleon which helped to make the Crimean War alliance possible; in the refusal by the Queen to assent to a certain casus belli despatch during the American War which saved Great Britain from being drawn into the struggle; in her influence ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... she had caused him. Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her—not this Rosalind, harder, older—nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties—Amory had wanted her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now once and for all. So far as he was concerned, young ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... a word of explanation along the lines which he had suggested. Prescott, surrounded by his retorts, crucibles, burettes, and condensers, received us much more graciously than I had had any reason to anticipate. He was a man in the late forties, his face covered with a thick beard, and his eyes, which seemed a little weak, were helped out with glasses almost as ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... in one of the Forties which flow like tributaries into the heady waters of Broadway, one may dine from soup to nuts, raisins and regrest for one hour and sixty cents. In Ramy's, courses may come and courses may go, but the initiated one holds on to his fork forever. Here red wine flows ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... led banks, corporations and individuals all over the world to invest surplus funds in bonds, those of the Government being most popular of all. The various issues authorized by act of Congress were known as "seven-thirties," "ten-forties," "five-twenties," etc., these terms denoting either the rate of interest or the period of years, dating from the first issue, wherein it was optional with the Government to redeem them. Everywhere, at home, in the theatres and public resorts not less than on the Exchange, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... rustic population, as such, he was not concerned—but in his basic purpose of holding up nature, pure and holy, as an ideal, Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), an Austrian, must be assigned a place of honor in this group. A more incisive contrast to the general turbulence of the forties could hardly be imagined than is found in the nature descriptions and idyls of this quietist, who "from the madding crowd's ignoble strife" sought refuge in the stillness of the country and among people to whom such outward peace is a physical necessity. His feeling for nature, especially ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... George Stephenson, ran from Liverpool to Manchester at a rate of nearly forty miles an hour, and the possibilities of the new method of transportation became manifest. But the jealousy of the landed interest, eager to maintain the beauty and the privacy of the countryside, retarded till the forties the growth of English railways. Meanwhile, by the use of railways the United States altered her whole economic life and outlook. In 1830 she had twenty-three miles of railway, five years later over a thousand, and by 1840 twenty-eight hundred ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... was a "sport," in every meaning of the term. Though a man well along in his forties, he was as lithe and active as one ten years younger. He motored, fished, played golf, hunted, and of late had added yachting to his amusements. He was wealthy, as his father had been before him, and owned a fine home in New York, but he spent a large part of every year at Lakeside, where ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele

... saw in his eyes. It was beating into hers with the power of an overwhelming masculine passion and a maturity of intellect as his egoism admitted a comrade to its throne. Such is ever the way of the man in the forties when the clock strikes for him. But who could know better the craft of courtship than one of Westerling's experience? He was fighting for victory; to gratify ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... a year or so ago in the "Revue de Paris" told us more. But, to my mind, the most fascinating chapter in this part of her history is the Chopin chapter, covering the next decade, or, roughly speaking, the 'forties. She has revealed something of this time—naturally from her own point of view—in "Lucrezia Floriana" (1847). For it is, of course, one of the most notorious characteristics of George Sand that she invariably turned her loves into "copy." The mixture of passion and printer's ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... industries. The iron and steel industry was scarcely in existence at Confederation. The Marmora plant at Long Point, Ontario, and a smaller plant at Three Rivers, Quebec, had been in existence since the forties; but the iron and steel industry, as it exists to-day in Canada, is largely the creation of the national policy of protective tariffs and bounties. The bounty system was instituted in 1883, chiefly for the benefit of a blast furnace of 100 tons capacity at ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... example, have we ever seen her like this before? So young with those who are young, so happy with those who are happy? And our honoured friend here—nobody could imagine that he had climbed to the middle of the forties—he is as full of energy, of plans and enterprise as a man of twenty. And at the same time he has the beautiful calm, the comfortable appearance of the happy father who has had his desires gratified. And this fortunate boy is the cause of it all. Therefore thanks be to the hour that ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig

... wondered. I took it up myself, four weeks ago. Four forties I've got, strung out in a line that runs from here to yonder. You've got over on my land—by mistake, of course. I just thought I'd tell yuh," he added casually, straightening up, "because I didn't think you ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... peasant-cult—in the Latin countries. But, thank God, he will not have his way. One hears of a Modernist freemasonry among the Italian clergy—of a secret press—an enthusiasm, like that of the Carboneria in the forties. So the spirit of the Most High blows among the dead clods of the world—and, in a moment the harvest ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... that we are very proud of our Wellingsford Hospital. It is the largest and the wealthiest in the county. We owe it to the uneasy conscience of a Wellingsford man, a railway speculator in the forties, who, having robbed widows and orphans and, after trial at the Old Bailey, having escaped penal servitude by the skin of his teeth, died in the odour of sanctity, and the possessor of a colossal fortune in the year eighteen sixty-three. This worthy gentleman ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... In the forties there was a sleepy clerk at Hampstead, a very portly man, who did ample justice to his bright red waistcoat and brass buttons. The church had a model old-time three-decker. The lower deck was occupied by the clerk, the upper deck by the ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... his accounts of the horrors, the time of the suffering is still uncertain. Was it before his first escape from London, as he says in "Lavengro"? Was it during his second long stay in London or after his second escape? Or was it really not long before the actual narrative was written in the 'forties? There is some reason for thinking so. The most vivid description of "the horrors," and the account of the touching gentleman and of Peter Williams, together with a second reference to "the horrors" or the "evil one," all occur in a section of "Lavengro" equal to hardly more than ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... this purpose was money; and he had, by steady and constant plod, managed to enlarge and expand all his business concerns into various, important companies, which he set afloat in all quarters of the world,—with the satisfactory result that by the time his years had run well into the forties, he was one of the wealthiest men in the country. He had from the first taken every opportunity to insinuate himself into politics; and in exact proportion to the money he made, so was his success in acquiring such coveted positions in life as brought with them the masterful control ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... this voyage across practically all of the oceans, proved herself to be extremely seaworthy. Thus we traversed without a single mishap the regions of the northeast and of the southeast trades, the stormy seas of the "roaring forties," the fogs of the fifties, the ice-filled sixties, and reached our field of work at the Ice Barrier on January 14, 1911. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... be hoped is soon to appear in a new edition, grown as it must be to formidable dimensions by the additions of so long a period. The "British and Foreign Medical Review," edited by the late Sir John Forties, contributed to by Huxley, Carpenter, Laycock, and others of the most distinguished scientific men of Great Britain, has an index to its twenty-four volumes, and by its aid I find this valuable series as manageable as a lexicon. The last edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" had a complete ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... stooping figure; on the whole rather good-looking. He was slow of speech, with a nasal twang that reminded me of Dr. Horace Bushnell. His face always wore a sad expression. He had been a student at Yale in the forties a few years before me. Once a prisoner himself in our hands and fairly treated, he sympathized with us. He had been wounded, shot through the right shoulder. When I visited on parole the other Danville prisons in February, a Yankee soldier was pointed out to me as wearing Colonel Smith's blood-stained ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague

... fell largely into their hands, and some small merchants arose here and there. Above all, Frederick Douglass made his first speech in 1841 and thereafter became one of the most prominent figures in the abolition crusade. A new series of national conventions began to assemble late in the forties, and the delegates were drawn from the artisans and higher servants, showing a great increase of efficiency in the rank and file of the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... the Labrador, crossing to Tilt Cove, Newfoundland, direct from Swansea in an empty copper ore tanker, the Kilmorack. On this I was rated as purser at twenty-five cents for the trip. Most tramps can roll, but an empty tanker going west against prevailing winds in the "roaring forties" can certainly give points to the others. Her slippery iron decks and the involuntary sideways excursions into the scuppers still spring into my mind when a certain Psalm comes round in the Church calendar, with its "that thy footsteps slip not." We were ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... place a Mr. Pearkes had opened an oyster shop nearly twenty years before, and his little rooms were frequented by the most talented of the denizens of Bohemia—literary, theatrical, and artistic. One day, in the early 'Forties, the proprietor, to his amazement, heard one of his oysters whistling—a continuous shrill little whistle, doubtless through a hole in its shell. The fact was at once noised abroad, and crowds visited his shop to listen to the sibilant mollusc, which not only whistled, but, it was said with ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... the Negro in California did not especially interest any one until the beginning of the immigration of the forties. The subject of slavery in California was officially called to the attention of the inhabitants through the issuance of a proclamation by the Commander in Chief of the District in regard to the unlawful enslaving of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... middle forties men did not in the least grasp the commercial situation which now confronted the Northwest nor could they foresee that the land behind the Great Lakes was about to deluge the country with an output of produce and manufactures ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert

... his departure for England, until the most favorable season arrived, for his fragile wife and infant children to cross the "rolling forties." At length, on July 6, two days after his forty-ninth birthday, he sailed from Boston in the "Niagara," and with placida onda prospero il vento, in about twelve days they all arrived safely ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... JOHN!— Sir JOHN to-day, good knight, fine painter! Our eyes dwelt lingeringly upon His work, by which all else showed fainter. His dashing pencil "go" could give To simplest scene; a wondrous gift 'tis! How his bold line could make things live In those far Forties and old Fifties! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various

... not much patience. In 1785 Colonel Harmar, commanding at Fort Pitt, sent a deputation down the river to drive the intruders back. But his agents returned with the report that the Virginians and Kentuckians were moving into the forbidden country "by the forties and fifties," and that they gave every evidence of proposing to remain there. Surveyors were forthwith set to work in the "Seven Ranges," as the tract just to the west of the Pennsylvania boundary was called; and Fort Harmar was built at the mouth of ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg

... coming of the emigrant bands in the early 'forties of the last century, the only white men the Indians ever saw were occasional trappers who wandered into the new and strange land. Then, the beautiful Indian name, soft and limpid as an Indian maiden's eyes, was Wasiu—not the harsh, Anglicized, Washoe. Their ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... completely disappeared, while the signalman, near at hand, slept peacefully, undisturbed by her crashing timbers, or the shouts of the drowning seamen. Ratcliff was not a seer, and had no mystical lore. He was a runaway sailor, who had, in the forties, travelled daily over the Egerton run, unconscious of the tons of ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... was a big rangy fellow in the early forties. Bob heard the boss call him "Jake," and later "Houck." As soon as the boy had a moment to spare he took a good look at the man. He did not like what he saw. Was it the cold, close-set eyes, the crook of the large nose, or the tight-lipped ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... out" in the frantic forties and foolish fifties complicate the picture for their younger observers. What they are trying to find is not so much a new thrill as the reliving of an old glow—the hopefulness of their lost youth. Not content ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... entered Mr. Wicker's shop to inquire about a job for his friend, something about old Mr. Wicker forced him to take the job himself. Chris found himself the pupil of Mr. Wicker, not the old man he first saw, but a powerful man in his forties—a magician. Chris learned how to turn himself into a fish, a bird, a fly, and with a magic rope he learned to make a ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... us. They grinned triumphantly at the Frenchmen and the Britishers, but the sight of a Turco in his short jacket and his dirty white skirts invariably set them off in derisive cat-calling and whooping. One beefy cavalryman in his forties, who looked the Bavarian peasant all over, boarded our car to see what might be seen. He had been drinking. He came nearer being drunk outright than any German soldier I had seen to date. Because he heard us talking English he insisted on regarding ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... novel I purposed writing, you said: "It will be a good story. I'm sold on it already!" To you the hacienda of a Rancho Palomar will always bring delightful recollections of the gracious hospitality of Senor Cave Coutts, sitting at the head of that table hewed in the forties. Little did Senor Coutts realize that he, the last of the dons in San Diego County, was to furnish copy for my novel; that his pride of ancestry, both American and Castilian, his love for his ancestral ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... but there's no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea is in the seventeenth century! Let's to the museum. Cannon-balls; arrow- heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev. Jaspar Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Roman camp on Dods Hill—see the little ticket with the faded ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... Victorian Derby day immortal; a less well-known hand has written of what Frith painted. The author who signed himself "Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing scenes in the forties, has set down in his Bye-lanes and Downs of England a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... work. It is difficult to realize that within the memory of men now living, typhus fever was one of the great scourges of our large cities, and broke out in terrible epidemics—the most fatal of all to the medical profession. In the severe epidemic in Ireland in the forties of the last century, one fifth of all the doctors in the island died of typhus. A better idea of the new crusade, made possible by new knowledge, is to be had from a consideration of certain diseases against which the fight ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... pause for a moment, even with the hair brushes in his hands, to wonder if she will be there to-night, and if by any fortunate chance he will be able to take her in to dinner. And if the reign of the forties has commenced, it is just possible that a little mild speculation as to the entrees may be admitted. But, as a rule, a man's thoughts do not on such an occasion strike deep beneath the surface, and there is no record of an author having laid the plan of his next work, or a soldier having marked ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... "Paganini in Prison," was the son of a carpenter, and was born in Bavaria in the early forties. For some time he worked as a wood carver, and then began to paint, and studied at the Munich Academy, under Piloty. Probably his best known picture is "Choosing the Casket," in which he has depicted the familiar scene ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands

... any editor imagine these pages are my professional obituary,—my autobiography. If by mistake he does, then let him place me immediately in their births column. I am in my forties, and there is quite time for me to prepare and publish two more volumes of my "Confessions" from my first to my second birth, and many other ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... the interesting old house where, in the forties and fifties lived Baron Bodisco, Minister from Russia to the United States. He had a very romantic marriage of which I shall tell later. Just before the marriage he purchased this house from Sally Van Devanter, who had inherited it in 1840 from her husband, Christopher ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... struggle, and these martyred lives for nothing—all to end like a choked river in death and corruption? Well, if so, whose fault was it, but the priests'?—of that black, intriguing, traitorous Italy, headed by the Papacy, which except for one brief moment in the forties, had upheld every tyranny, and drenched every liberty in blood, had been the supporter of the Austrian and the Bourbon, and was now again tearing to pieces the Italy that so many brave men had died ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... in, yellow and wild through flying showers, and great north-eastern waves raced past us, their heads torn off in spray, their broad backs laced with ripples, and each, as it passed, gave us a friendly onward lift away into the 'roaring forties,' as the sailors call the stormy seas between 50 and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... change is in the matter of duels. The duels in Pickwick come about quite as a matter of course, and as a common social incident. In the "forties" I recall a military uncle of my own—a gentleman, like uncle Toby—handing his card to some one in a billiard room, with a view to "a meeting." Dickens' friend Forster was at one time "going out" with another gentleman. Mr. Lang ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald

... to any of the rest of the family. Three of my brothers, at least, were not successful from a business point of view, and while I myself have failed in every business venture I ever undertook—beginning with that first speculative stroke sometime in the 'forties when, one March morning, I purchased the prospective sap of Curtis's two maple trees for four cents; yet a certain success from a bread-and-butter point of view has been mine. Father took less stock in me than ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... fully taken up, and only on special occasions had time to accompany her mother. She had been beguiled on this occasion by the family history which was concerned, and which, fin de siecle as Dolly was, excited her curiosity almost as much as if she had been born in the "forties." Dolly was never unkind, sometimes indeed was quite the reverse, to her mother. When Mr. Tatham, with a man's brutal unconsciousness of what is desirable, placed a chair for Lady Mariamne in front of the fire, Dolly twisted ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant

... material troubles for a while longer without having to fly from them, because he was full of stratagems. But on the sentimental side he fell into an affair of much sadness for a comely lady who, at her mid-age, should have known better, though, indeed, the forties have their storms, like the sea latitudes sailors call the "roaring forties." Delectable as detail might be, and desirable to illumine what all befell, I must, for I am no scandal-monger, be content to give you the romance and the tragedy in three snatches ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne

... was a considerable relief to me. It was now manifest that we were bound up into the Indian Ocean, although of course I knew nothing of the position of the districts where whales were to be looked for. Gradually we crept northward, the weather improving every day as we left the "roaring forties" astern. While thus making northing we had several fine catches of porpoises, and saw many rorquals, but sperm whales appeared to have left the locality. However, the "old man" evidently knew what he was about, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... was still in many respects the Philip of the "Bothie," influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by Emerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that Liberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to become the foremost representatives. But all the while, under the surface, an extraordinary transformation was going on. He was never able to explain it afterward, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... through the rooms in my dreams; yet now that I am here, I find that I was mixing the past impossibly with the present, in a way common to those over fifty. Yes, you see I no longer pretend, wear unsuitable headgear, and blink obliviously at my age as I did in those trying later forties. I not only face it squarely, but exaggerate it, for it is so much more comfortable to have people say 'Fifty-five! ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... man's. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half through my forties, was still "You young dog" to him. It was a bright and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished apparently to do ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... of earshot and almost immediately Bloeckman appeared—Bloeckman, a dark suave gentleman, gracefully engaged in the middle forties, who greeted her with courteous warmth and told her she had not changed a bit in three years. He led the way into a great hall, as large as an armory and broken intermittently with busy sets and blinding rows of unfamiliar light. Each piece of scenery was marked in large white letters ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... sought new inspiration in America. On his return he wrote a number of poems on America, which were published under the title of "Atlantica." In later years Lenau's verses, like those of Leopardi in Italy, became ever more melancholy, owing partly to inherited tendencies. In the early forties the poet's pessimism ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... novels, in treatises, in art, in sermons, in conversation. The man who was not acquainted with Hegal had no right to speak. Any one who desired to understand the truth studied Hegel. Every thing rested on him. And all at once the forties passed, and there was nothing left of him. There was not even a hint of him, any more than if he had never existed. And the most amazing thing of all was, that Hegelianism did not fall because some one overthrew it or destroyed it. No! It was the same then as now, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi

... which she is talking about how they first moved into the house at Cheyne Row. They spent their early years in Scotland, you know, and he was a man going on to the forties when he came to London. The success of Sartor Resartus encouraged them to the step. Her letter describes all the incoming. Here is his comment, written after her death: "In about a week all was swept and garnished, fairly habitable; and continued incessantly to get itself polished, civilised, ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... allusion to the ejection from their benefices which befel most of the loyal clergy at the same time as Herrick. It is perhaps worth noting that in the second volume of this edition, and in the last hundred poems printed in the first, wherever a date can be fixed it is always in the forties. Equally late poems occur, though much less frequently, among the first five hundred, but there the dated poems belong, for the most part, to the years 1623-1640. Now, in April 29, 1640, as stated in the brief "Life" prefixed to vol. i., there ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... pretend to say, but I won for my client three forties of the quarter section in dispute. We returned home the way we went down,—on foot,—with the exception that at Stockton we constructed a small sleigh, sufficient to carry our baggage, which much relieved the animals. My client offered ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... Mr Isaac Goble, sniffing the gentle air from the window of his breakfast-room, returned to his meal and his Morning Telegraph with a resolve to walk to the theatre for rehearsal: a resolve which had also come to Jill and Nelly Bryant, eating stewed prunes in their boarding-house in the Forties. On the summit of his sky-scraper, Wally Mason, performing Swedish exercises to the delectation of various clerks and stenographers in the upper windows of neighboring buildings, felt young and vigorous and optimistic; ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... "forties" of last century, English and American explorers were occupied in searching for a north-west passage, or a navigable channel for vessels making by the shortest route from the North Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Let us look at the story of ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... to house was made throughout the island, granite to any extent was on the spot, meetings were held, and I had the pleasure to see Durham's grand work inaugurated there, and to find him welcomed by all the "Sixties"—ay, and the "Forties" too—with the hospitality for which Sarnia ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... sleek, well-groomed fellow, tall and slim, and, in the matter of years, somewhere in his forties. Duff always dressed well—with a foundation of the late styles of the east, with something of the swagger of the plains ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock

... a thickset, balding man in his late forties. Even the blazing suns of Naraka hadn't succeeded in burning the sickly yellow color off his face. In the vision screen he looked like a man on his last legs. Whatever was wrong with him didn't help his temper, Terrence thought as he lowered himself gently into a seat ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith

... of the sexes, Mr. Punch, already in the last year which completes his fourth score, may be allowed to indulge in an old man's privilege of retrospect and incidentally to congratulate the ladies on the wonderful and triumphant progress they have made in instrumental art since the roaring 'forties. For in the 'forties women, though still supreme on the lyric stage, had hardly begun to assert themselves as executants, save on the pianoforte. Punch well remembers LISZT—with the spelling of whose name he had considerable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various

... to the labouring people, and once enfranchised they could work out by legislation their own social salvation. So it seemed in the 'Forties—when one in every eleven of the industrial population was ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... forties a professor of the Universidad Central, Sanz del Rio, was sent to Germany to study philosophy on a government scholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual coma that had followed the failure of the Cortes of Cadiz and the restoration ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... moment, and must be satisfied or appeased in some way, or it will unquestionably destroy them. From the abolition of the franchise until now, an incessant struggle of opposing interests has been going on in the country. The "forties" and their attendants must be fed; but the soul on which they live in its present state is not capable of at the same time supporting them and affording his claims to the landlord; for the food must go to England to pay the ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... name itself, so singularly appropriate; not at all consistent, Mr. Thane tells me, with the usual haphazard nomenclature of this region. However, this is the old Oregon emigrant trail, and in the early forties men of education and Christian sentiment were pioneers on this road. But now that I see the place and the country round it, I find the Middle Ages are not old enough to borrow from. We must go back, away back of ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... we reached the roarin' forties. The skipper knew how to handle sailors, you bet he did. When they came aft to kick about the grub he knocked 'em down before they said ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard

... He lived for many years afterwards abroad, but was at that time quite a young man, and distinguished among the Miuesovs as a man of enlightened ideas and of European culture, who had been in the capitals and abroad. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had come into contact with many of the most Liberal men of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad. He had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in his declining years was very fond of describing the three days ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... imagine, "penetrated" to Haworth; yet the last verse of Emily Bronte's poem might have come straight out of his [Greek: ta pros halaetheiaen]. Truly, an astonishing poem to have come from a girl in a country parsonage in the 'forties. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... essential goodness of human nature, if only it could be freed from the unnatural chains with which society had bound it. Nor could anyone who participated in the commercial life of those times, who had lived, for example, through the depression of the forties, have preserved untarnished the precepts of Ricardo—published only a few years before 1819, and accepted as ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... loomed momentous, unforgivable, incalculable. It assumed to her the proportions of a murder. Bigamy, perjury, deceit—what hadn't she done! Richard, in her estimation, was not what he thought himself, a somewhat ordinary man in the forties whose life had already held poverty and disillusionment and wholesome disappointment, whose nature had been tempered to humour and generosity and philosophy; to Harriet, he was the richest, the finest, the most deserving of men, and she the adventuress who had brought ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris

... said Jane, stiffly, "to discuss thirties or forties or fifties either, which are no business of ours. There's one gentleman, and him a marquis, as chose her over the heads of two beauties in ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the close of the 'forties of the nineteenth century, and the place the city of Ranjitgarh, capital of the great native state of Granthistan, which was not yet a British possession, but well on the way to becoming one. This ultimate destiny was entirely undesired by the powers that were, who had just appointed Colonel Edmund ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... fashion of the barbs called "Drinkers of the Wind." Once I drove, in single harness, a trotter whose time was close on two minutes forty-five seconds; but this is not considered anything extraordinary, and the outside price of such an animal would be under one thousand dollars: once "inside the forties" the fancy prices begin, and go up rapidly to four thousand dollars, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... of eighteen he was free—as only rich young Russians in the 'forties who had lost their parents at an early age could be. Neither physical nor moral fetters of any kind existed for him; he could do as he liked, lacking nothing and bound by nothing. Neither relatives, nor fatherland, nor religion, nor wants, existed for him. He believed in ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy

... Hesiod, reckoned their life to be 9720 years; that sum consisting of four special numbers orderly arising from one, the same added together and multiplied by four every way amounts to forty; these forties, being reduced into triangles by five times, make up the total of the aforesaid number. See Plutarch, in his book ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... doctrines that sunny, joyful Green Valley had refused to listen to. He spoke earnestly of the world's terrible need of salvation, the fearful necessity for haste and wholesale repentance and the awful menace of God's wrath. And the fact that he was a man entering his forties instead of his thirties ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... cards, Anthony and I thought, that there might be another "demonstration" at Esneh, that unruly town where Mohammed Ali banished the superfluous dancing girls of Cairo in the eighteen forties. If Rechid Bey had not discovered the truth about that hurried departure from Luxor for Asiut (as a matter of fact, Mabel and her guardians were almost thrown on board as the train began to move) he might have ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... played "hookey"; nor, as he grew older, would he tell stories of doubtful flavor, or allow others to relate such in his presence. His influence was for good, and Cardinal Manning has said that there was less wine drunk at Oxford during the Forties than would have been the case if Gladstone had not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... shearing, sheds, tracks, and a little unionism—the Lachlan speaking in a quiet voice and with a lot of sound, common sense, it seemed to me. He was tall and gaunt, and might have been thirty, or even well on in the forties. His eyes were dark brown and deep set, and had something of the dead-earnest sad expression you saw in the eyes of union leaders and secretaries—the straight men of the strikes of '90 and '91. I fancied once or twice I saw in his ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson

... along in the forties, I should say. It's a good deal in temperament. I don't suppose that either of them realises yet that they're old, and they must be ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... moved the whole civilized world. About this time (May and June, 1848), far more importance was attached to quicksilver. One mine, the New Almaden, twelve miles south of San Jose, was well known, and was in possession of the agent of a Scotch gentleman named Forties, who at the time was British consul at Tepic, Mexico. Mr. Forties came up from San Blas in a small brig, which proved to be a Mexican vessel; the vessel was seized, condemned, and actually sold, but Forties was wealthy, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... of 1848 and the New Constitutions.*—The turning point came with the great year of revolution, 1848. During the thirties and forties, by public agitation, by the organization of Mazzini's "Young Italy," by the circulation of patriotic literature, and in a variety of other ways, the ground was prepared systematically for the risorgimento upon which the patriots and the prophets had set their hearts. In 1846 a liberal-minded ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... four periods of this happiness. It is necessary to show that the theory of marriage in the thirteenth arrondissement affects in like manner all who come within its rule.[*] Marquis in the forties, sexagenary retired shopkeeper, quadruple millionnaire or moderate-income man, great seigneur or bourgeois, the strategy of passion (except for the differences inherent in social zones) never varies. The heart and the money-box are ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... patients simply fixate his hands and by ordering them to sleep. Thus he is the first who understood these changes as results of mental suggestion. The next great step was due to the English surgeon, Braid, who in the forties studied the magnetic phenomena and like Faria insisted on the merely mental origin of the abnormal state. He proved that a person can bring himself into such an artificial state and that it is therefore entirely independent of energies ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... which may be found inconvenient. More than that, Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old Testament, "numbers must be expected to be used Orientally," and that "all these seventies and forties, as, for example, when Absalom is said to have rebelled against David for forty years, can not possibly be meant numerically"; and, what must have given a fearful shock to some Protestant believers in plenary ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... been scared, the way you run that horse," Parker, range foreman of the Quarter Circle KT, a heavy-built, sandy-complexioned man in the forties, remarked witheringly to Skinny as the cow-puncher climbed from the saddle and slid ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman

... faith played in the lives of the country folk. When, however, I pondered the way in which the rural districts had been increasingly invaded by factories run under the commercial sanctions of our eighteen-forties, I asked myself whether there might not be superstitions of the economic world as well as of ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... cases ain't the same. When youth mates with youth, there's hopes of them learning their lessons together and not making such hard work of it, either. But what can you expect when a man along in the forties decides it's time for him to settle down, and ties himself up to some giddy young thing, so brimful of life that it's all she can do to keep her toes on the ground. It's like hitching up a colt with some slow-going old plug from a livery stable. YOU drive 'em that way, and either the ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... Phi Beta Kappa key is a different color from your watch-chain. It's the old metal, antedating the California gold. Did your father graduate some time in the latter forties or ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... JOHN MOORE and officers. MOORE appears on the pale evening light as a handsome man, far on in the forties, the orbits of his dark eyes showing marks of deep anxiety. He is talking to some of his staff with vehement emphasis and gesture. They cross the scene and go on out of sight, and the squashing of their horses' hoofs in the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... of the buffalo is given in A. C. Laut's The Story of the Trapper, pp. 65-80. Herds of a hundred thousand were common. As many as a million buffalo robes were sent east each year in the thirties and forties. ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... students scoffed at the idea of preparing for work in Liberia their education for service in the United States was not encouraged. No Negro had graduated from a college before 1828, when John B. Russworm, a classmate of Hon. John P. Hale, received his degree from Bowdoin.[1] During the thirties and forties, colored persons, however well prepared, were generally debarred from colleges despite the protests of prominent men. We have no record that as many as fifteen Negroes were admitted to higher institutions in this country before 1840. It was only after much debate that Union College ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... well-dressed, husky-looking man in his middle forties, said: "O.K., Morgan. How did ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett

... his life grows disagreeable —woman is to blame; the dawn of a new life begins to glow, ideals turn up—and again look for the woman. . . . He only derives enjoyment from books and pictures in which there is woman. Our age is, to his thinking, poor and inferior to the forties and the sixties only because we do not know how to abandon ourselves obviously to the passion and ecstasy of love. These voluptuaries must have in their brains a special growth of the nature of sarcoma, which stifles the brain and directs ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... alienating the one class or by sailing under false colours before the other. They cannot advantageously masquerade in Radical clothes. There was a profound truth in Lord Goschen's view upon the conduct of Disraeli when, in strict accordance with the principles he enunciated in the 'forties, he forced his reluctant followers to pass a Reform Bill far more Radical than that proposed by the Whigs. "That measure," Lord Goschen said,[75] "might have increased the number of Conservatives, but it had, nevertheless, in his belief, weakened real ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... forties the Negroes were a real issue in Cincinnati. During the late twenties they not only had to suffer from the legal disabilities provided in the "Black Laws," but had to withstand the humiliation of a ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... was decided upon, and rooms engaged. An old friend of Mrs. Merriam, a cosmopolitan American woman, had once praised the Hotel Valmont, Angela had remembered; and driving from Twenty-third Street up into the Forties, New York was almost as strange to her as if she had never seen it before. Indeed, she had seen little of it, for the Merriams had lived in Boston, and Angela was only eleven when she bade her father and America good-bye. How vividly that ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... saw Forbes, but had a talk with him. He was a man well on in the forties, carelessly dressed, a Bohemian, and not particularly elated at his success apparently. He smiled at the prices which were being offered ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... Teaford, who for a dozen years had gone with Winona Penniman faithfully if not spectacularly; Lyman Teaford, dignified and genteel, who belonged to Newbern's better set, had one night appeared at an affair of the Friday Night Social Club. Perhaps because he had reached the perilous forties he had suddenly determined to abandon the safe highway and seek adventure in miry bypaths. Perhaps he felt that he had austerely played the flute too long. At any rate, he came and danced with the lower element of Newbern, ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... provided for tournaments weekly from May to September. Miss Ballin, together with Mrs. Wightman, organised junior tournaments for girls under 18, along the lines used for the boys' events. The response was immediate. Entry lists, which in the old days were in "the teens," jumped to the thirties or forties, in the regular events. Young girls who, up to now, had not played tournaments, fearing they lacked the necessary class, rushed to play in the Junior girls' events. From this latter class came such a promising young star of today as Miss Martha ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D

... not yet begun with us. The old console themselves with saying that, if there is nothing now, there was something in the forties and the sixties; that is all right for the old ones, but we are young and our brains are not yet touched with senile decay. We cannot console ourselves with such illusions. The beginning of Russia was in 862, and civilised Russia, as I understand ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... reconsidered and Mr. Daniels obtained his desire. It was hard to refuse a personage like Mr. Daniels anything. He was not an elderly man; neither was he, strictly speaking, a young one. His age was, perhaps, somewhere in the late thirties or early forties and he was East Wellmouth's leading lawyer, in fact its ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln

... Arnaud in his campaign against the Arabs. The mingled interest and horror inspired in him by this extra-ordinary man finds expression in his "Invasion of the Crimea" (ii. 157). A few, a very few survivors, still remember his appearance and manners in the forties. The eminent husband of a lady, now passed away, who in her lifetime gave Sunday dinners at which Kinglake was always present, speaks of him as SENSITIVE, quiet in the presence of noisy people, of Brookfield and the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... United States. Conkling had gained from the senatorship and the leadership of his party a great reputation, to which subsequent service in the Senate could add little or nothing. He was in his early forties, in the prime of his powers, and he would have had before him, as chief justice of this great court, a long life of usefulness ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... de race course lak' oiseau Tail over datch boar', nice you please, Can't tell for sure de quick he go, S'pose somew'ere 'bout two, t'ree forties. ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond

... pretty to see me bow to right and left although in mortal fear lest something give way, I being grown heavier of late and the quality of cloth suffering from the New York Custom House. The applause being over did continue my speech and say that in my forties had had little time to think of aught but my own personal affairs, but that now being come to my fifties was well disposed to share them and they did all drink to that and smash their glasses with right ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various

... old colonial mansion opposite was thrown open, and clumsy and cautious motion was evident. Presently a tall, slender woman came down the path between the box borders, pushing a baby-carriage. It was undoubtedly a very old carriage. It must have dated back to the fifties, if not the forties. It was made of wood, with a leather buggy-top, ...
— The Yates Pride • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... yourself.'" This work of art, a Louis XVI. gilt-bronze time piece, with its two candelabra, once also in Balzac's possession, was part payment of the balance due to the de Berny family, and was surrendered only in the forties. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... snapped on Park Avenue the other A.M., lying among a bunch of pigeons, with a broken leg. But evidently that hadn't been the case because his legs were okay now. It couldn't even have been a sprain, judging by the way he was standing there. He was a fairly tall, good-looking guy in his middle forties maybe—brown hair, blue eyes with a kind of vacant look ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman

... fretted screen of red lacquer, and within this open cage stood Mrs. John, surveying winsomely the expanse of little tables, little chairs, big chairs, huge chairs, sofas, rugs, flower-vases, and knick-knacks. She had an advantage over most blondes nearing the forties in that she had not stoutened. She was in fact thin as well as short; but her face was too thin. Still, it dimpled, and she held her head knowingly on one side, and her bright hair was wonderfully done up. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle. But in China we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another day. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... o'clock, that hour before dawn cracks, even the West Forties, where night is too often cacophonous with the sound of revelry, drop into long narrow aisles of gloom. Thin, high-stooped houses with drawn shades recede into the mouse-colored mist of morning, and, as through quagmire, this mist hovering close to ground, figures skulk—that ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... questions that faced President Cleveland when he entered upon the Presidency in 1893 for the second time, the status of the Hawaiian Islands was important. Since the development of the Pacific Coast of the United States in the forties and fifties, there had been a growing trade between the islands and this country. Reciprocity and even annexation had been projected. In 1875 a reciprocity arrangement was consummated, a part of which ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... missives from her relatives, the Lees and Wards of New York City and Boston, and her enjoyable visits to their gay homes, broke the strain of mental grind, and kept her in touch with the fashionable world. Her communications in the forties disclose a relation to men and women of culture, whose letters are colorful of people, places, and events, and through them we reach an intimate inside of her own self. Those faded, musty-smelling epistles, with pressed flowers, from an old attic, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... pathos that the genius of Preston chiefly consists. In poems like "Owd Moxy," "T' Lancashire Famine," and "I niver can call her my wife," he gives us pictures of the struggle that went on in the cottage-homes of the West Riding during the "hungry forties." In "Owd Moxy" his subject is the old waller who has to face the pitiless winter wind and rain as he plies his dreary task on the moors; but in most of his poems it is the life of the handloom-weaver that he interprets. The kindliness of his nature ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... of the late forties, Peter Polite says, in the live-oak trees Were weird, macabre macaws And ash-colored cockatoos, blown overseas From Nassau and the West Indies. These hopped about like dead men's thoughts Among the draggled Spanish moss, Preening themselves, all at a loss, ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... Cambodunum Telling the Bees The Two Lamplighters Our Beck Lord George Jenny Storm The New Englishman The Bells of Kirkby Overblow The gardener and the Robin Lile Doad His last Sail One Year Older The Hungry Forties The Flowers of Knaresborough Forest The Miller by the Shore The Bride's Homecoming The Artist Marra to Bonney Mary Mecca The Local Preacher The Courting Gate Fieldfares A Song of the Yorkshire Dales The Flower ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman

... arrived at the Bay of Whales on January 9, having been delayed in the "Roaring Forties " by ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen



Words linked to "Forties" :   1940s, mid-forties, decennium, adulthood



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