"Humorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... howled around the little hut upon the Hills. The season was in one of its humorous moods, for the day was almost summer-like in spite of the wind's noisy insistence. Between the tops of the highest dunes the white crested heads of the waves could be seen at times; and the deep, solemn tones announced that there was ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... the Irish imagination, some are humorous, some grotesque, and some awe-inspiring even to sublimity, and chief among the last class is "the weird-wailing Banshee, that sings by night her mournful cry," giving notice to the family she attends that one of its members is ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... the priest was at the chapel door, walked, with a stride that very much resembled the mock-heroic, towards the place of worship; but, in the opinion of the shrewd spectators, his dignity was sadly tarnished by the humorous contempt implied in the practical jest that had been so adroitly played off at ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... of these concoctions sounded as if they should most certainly appeal to Bakahenzie and his brethren of the craft. He wandered off into a reverie, wondering why it was that superstition is so hard to eradicate from the human mind. In Birnier was a strain of humorous melancholy which appreciated the comedy of human marionettes made to dance to the legion of devils and bugaboos invented by themselves, and as a stimulant to the dominant scientific absorption was the knowledge ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... accented syllables is very useful in humorous verse, helping along the rhythm and binding ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... Jefferson, that humorous and human and instructive book, there is a passage that illustrates admirably the bearing of this same principle of economy of attention upon the actor's art. In speaking of the joint performances of his half-brother, Charles ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... was so called by Sir W. Scott. He was "a quick, active, intrepid little fellow, full of fun and merriment ... all over quaintness and humorous mimicry." ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... not adventuring on the dangerous paths of dramatic criticism. When I write of the "humorous stage," I am using the phrase as Wordsworth used it, to signify a scene where new characters are suddenly assumed, and the ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... beside the fountain's marge will stay 5 And fain would thirst again, again to quaff; Then when the tear, slow travelling on its way, Fills up the wrinkles of a silent laugh— In that sweet mood of sad and humorous thought A form within me rose, within me wrought 10 With such strong magic, that I cried aloud, 'Thou ancient Skiddaw by thy helm of cloud, And by thy many-colour'd chasms deep, And by their shadows that for ever sleep, By yon small flaky ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... being rich in personal attractions, with a form fashioned as light as a fairy's, a complexion of the clearest and finest Italian brown, and a profusion of silken tresses as black as the raven's wing. A humorous savant wrote the following critique on this description of the beauty of Sir ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... for the woman was not a Christian. The woman was very pleased and thanked me in the native fashion by at once asking for a necklace of beads for a wedding present. The demand for tips. becomes sometimes quite humorous. A native girl fell down and cut herself and one of the officials dressed the wound until it healed. The parents then came and asked for a tip and when the astonished individual required to know the reason said that the girl had been every day to have her wound ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... laughter, for Henry Benson's stout figure bid fair to develop still further along lines of considerable girth, and the very thought of Fat flying was highly humorous to his mates. ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... fit his tongue To dialogues of business, love, or strife; But it will not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride The little actor cons another part,— Filling from time to time his "humorous stage" With all the persons, down to palsied age, That Life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Cruikshank,[41] there can at this time of day be little risk of offending or hurting anyone by presenting the passage, which the curious student of the Autobiography can insert at the proper point, and may feel that its presence adds to the completeness of the impression, half-humorous, half-eerie, which De Quincey was fain to produce by that somewhat grim episode. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... books and men, In feeling of thy worth I dedicate. My verse was offered to an older friend; The humbler prose has fallen to thy share: Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, What spoken in thy presence must offend— That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter soul ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the other side of the Kent Ditch. Here lived Sir Harry Trevor, the second holder of a title won in banking enterprises, and lately fallen to low estate. The reason could perhaps be seen on his good-looking face, with its sensual, humorous mouth, roving eyes, and lurking air of unfulfilled, undefeated youth. The taverns of the Three Marshes had combined to give him a sensational past, and further said that his two sons had forced him to settle at Brodnyx with a view to preserving ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... humorous as they were, took on a shrewdness under their sandy brows as if judging the character of the boy before him and his ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... ain't fit fur a lady," said the hotel man. Then he grinned a very human humorous grin that straightway made him much less repulsive. "Anyhow, them two durn boys of mine an' their cousins is asleep in 'em. I'd as lief rout out a nest of hornets. I'll leave you ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... he was essentially mid-Victorian) and in order to keep up to it, I saluted Mr. Cazalette with great respect and expressed myself as feeling highly honoured by meeting one so famous as my fellow-guest. Somewhat to my surprise, Mr. Cazalette's tightly-locked lips relaxed into what was plainly a humorous smile, and he favoured me with a knowing look that was almost ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... see two young miners named Macaulay a few miles away, and was regretfully compelled to decline," and the humorous smile on his face widened, for he knew ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... back of his house, which afforded a view of the long valley of the Tocketuck and the great sea. Here he would sit, enjoying the calm beauty of the landscape, pointing out to me localities interesting from their historical or traditional associations, or connected in some way with humorous or pathetic passages of his own life experience. Some of these autobiographical fragments affected me deeply. In narrating them he invested familiar and commonplace facts with something of the fascination of romance. "Human life," he would say, "is the same everywhere. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... I found her in my ship's biscuit. From the first I recognised that she was no ordinary weevil; her stately bearing, the fine upward curl of her moustachios, but, more than anything else, the intelligent, often humorous gleam in her big black eyes elevated her at once above the mass of her compatriots. She took to me wonderfully: I secured her confidence with a piece of boiled cat-fish, and thenceforth we were scarcely ever apart. Not that she resented the advances of the rest of the crew—she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 26, 1917 • Various
... customs quite the opposite from those described have been in vogue. In Irving's "Knickerbocker's History of New York," a somewhat humorous account is given of a custom which has prevailed in some parts of this country as well as others, even within the memory of persons living at the present day, and is, indeed, said to be not yet altogether obsolete in Finland. The author, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... officers and men throughout the entire command. He started well, so to speak, and his quiet, reticent, observant, but unobtrusive ways favorably impressed his regimental comrades and led to many a commendatory remark from veteran officers. But there was universal comment, half humorous, half commiserating, upon his assignment to Devers's troop, and Devers knew it. He treated the young man with cool civility at first, but became speedily captious and irritating, rebuking him openly ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... white which only the warm damp of the western seaboard can give or preserve. Her eyes he had seen even in the church, but now first he realized what unfathomable gentleness and what a wonder of frank innocence were in them. The Canon looked round the table at his children, and there was a humorous twinkle in his eye when he ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... THE following humorous lines well describe the difficulty that editors find in pleasing the public. They are expected to know everything, and to be able to satisfy all tastes and capacities. No imperfections can be excused in conductors of newspapers; they are ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... long in the station-house when Alderman Morris, accompanied by Mr. Waterbury, entered. The latter looked at Tom with a humorous smile. ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... of the Severed Hand"; "The Story of Little Muck"; "Nosey the Dwarf"; "The Young Englishman"; "The Prophecy of the Silver Florin"; "The Cold Heart," etc. What prospects for winter evenings are here! And while we can assure the adult reader that the promise which these titles give of burlesque or humorous description, and bold, romantic narrative, shall be more than kept, it may be well also to say, for the comfort of those whom we hope to see buy the book for their children's sake, that the stories in it are entirely free from certain objections which may be fairly urged against the "Arabian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... behind the house. Paton, the man from Sydney who remembered them, thought they did a little better towards the end, when they got a store, and Mrs. Beauchamp kept it. Do you hear that, Maria?" cried the Doctor, with a half-humorous, half-indignant emphasis. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... is a fairyland and no real world which Spenser opens to us is the great difference between Chaucer and him. Chaucer gives us real men and women who love and hate, who sin and sorrow. He is humorous, he is coarse, and he is real. Spenser has humor too, but we seldom see him smile. There are, we may be glad, few coarse lines in Spenser, but he is artificial. He took the tone of his time—the tone of pretense. It was the fashion to make-believe, yet, underneath all the make-believe, men were ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... her the story, making it as humorous as he could. But when he had finished, she wasn't laughing. For a moment his impulse was to lay before her the whole story—the bitter climax, the ashen climax, which lately he had thought so beautiful. She had said that nothing in the ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... excess; and it was presumed that a guest had not enjoyed his dinner unless he was at least comfortably the worse for liquor. This view of drunkenness is admirably depicted in Dickens's Pickwick Papers, where intoxication is treated throughout as something merely humorous. ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... in violently rigid and entangled tufts, rendering it a matter of wonder how anything in the shape of a hat could stick on. His brow was a countless mass of ever-varying wrinkles, which gave to his sly visage an aspect of humorous anxiety that was highly diverting—and all the more diverting when you came to know that the man had not a spark of anxiety in his composition, though he often said he had. His dress, like that of most Jack tars, was naturally rugged, and he contrived to ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... that is complimentary can be said of the German aristocracy as a whole. "Serenissimus" is to-day as frequently the subject of bitter, if often humorous, caricature in the comic press as ever he was. A few of the class, like Prince Fuerstenberg, Prince Hohenlohe, Count Henkel-Donnersmarck and some others engage successfully in commerce; many are practical farmers and have done a good deal for agriculture; several are deputies to Parliament; ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... precious, but for the most part base and horrible beyond words. All the disastrous, sensual, covetous meanness, the mere baseness of the modern world, is expressed there with a naivete that is, by some miraculous transfiguration, humorous with all the grim humour of that thief death, who has gathered these poor souls with the rest because someone loved them and they were of no account. The husk of the immortality of the poet and the hero has been thrust upon the mean and disgusting clay of the stockbroker; the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... a luxury to Maltravers; he felt an inexpressible sense of relief to be freed from Ferrers. The hard sense, the unpliant, though humorous imperiousness, the animal sensuality of his companion would have been torture to him in his ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the ships, and perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their boats or by the road on foot, made up the usual company. The traders, all bred to the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business; "South Sea Merchants" is the title they prefer. "We are all sailors here"—"Merchants, if you please"—"South Sea Merchants,"—was a piece of conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed to lose in savour. We found them at all times simple, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... up in surprise, because the tones were familiar. He saw a ruddy face, with keen, twinkling eyes and a massive chin, a face in which shrewdness and a humorous view of the world were combined. He hesitated a moment, then he remembered and held ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... naval officer in the preventive service off the coast of Sussex, on board the Kestrel. Leigh is taken prisoner by the adherents of the Pretender, amongst whom is an early friend and patron who desires to spare the lad's life, but will not release him. The narrative is full of exciting and often humorous incident. ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... With one, it was a business pure and simple, to which he was trained. With the other, it was a lark at first, but business it soon would be, and a dashing business at that. There was the same crowd before the tent—Judith, who greeted him with gracious frankness, but with a humorous light in her eye that set him again to wondering; and Phyllis and Phyllis's mother, Mrs. Stanton, who no sooner saw Crittenden than she furtively looked at Judith with a solicitude ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... transformed. Nothing was able to prevent her steady progression and bloom. She grew plumper and fairer and became so much more attractive that the young Germans thickened round her, and one or two Yankee boys looked her way. Through it all Claude kept up his half-humorous banter and altogether serious daily advice, without once realizing that any-thing sentimental connected him with it all. He knew she liked him, and sometimes he felt a little annoyed by her attempts to please him, but that she was doing all that she did and ordering her whole ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... interest attached to these writings of Mrs. Shelley's. The fact that the same mind which had revelled, a few years earlier, in the fantastical horrors of Frankenstein's abortive creation, could now dwell on the melancholy fate of Proserpine or the humorous disappointment of Midas, and delight in their subtle poetical or moral symbolism—this fact has its significance. It is one of the earliest indications of the revival, in the heart of Romanticism, of the old love of classical myths and ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... jeweller-shop at midnight, betokened the accomplished scoundrel within. But in his conversation there was no trace of evil; nothing equivocal; he studiously shunned an indelicacy, never swore, and chiefly abounded in passing puns and witticisms, varied with humorous contrasts between ship and shore life, and many agreeable and racy anecdotes, very tastefully narrated. In short—in a merely psychological point of view, at least—he was a charming blackleg. Ashore, such ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... verse, or a collection of articles as a magazine, or a book as a sex story, or a man as a journalist, or a tendency as erratic or erotic, you think you have said something. May the muse of clear thinking, and the little humorous gods who keep the sense of proportion balancing, protect us ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... him," she declared to my aunt. "He is so awfully humorous—his droll sayings and antics keep us in a perfect roar each night at dinner. He's ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... of a sense of humor betokens shallowness in that it reveals an inability to feel deeply. People who feel deeply often laugh in order to forestall tears. Lincoln was a great soul and his sense of humor was one element of his greatness. His apt stories and his humorous personal experiences often carried off a situation where cold logic would have failed. Whether his sense of humor was a gift or an acquisition, it certainly served the nation well and gave to us all an example ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... again; though it was by no means as serious a hurt as it might have been. Piegan himself seemed to consider it a good deal of a joke on him, and when I remarked that I failed to see how a bullet-hole through any part of one's person could be regarded in a humorous light, Piegan snorted, and told me that I would know more when I grew up. A little ventilation, he declared, was something a man's system ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of hers, as usual. No matter what I say, it gets open-faced motions out of Helma. But I really wasn't feelin' so humorous. Whoever he was, this Creighton guy had come the wrong evenin'. Course, I judged it must be Vee he's callin' on, and I wasn't strong for a three-handed session just then. There was something special I wanted ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... a day with laughter and jest to sweeten the fare. For their faith in him they were riding early and late, enduring hardships and laughing at them. If he failed, he knew that they would hide their disappointment under some humorous phase of the failure;—if they could find one. He could not tell them how close he was to failure. He could not tell them in plain words how much hung upon the coming of that storm in time for him to reach ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... Pecksniff, Dickens wrote in the preface to "Martin Chuzzlewit," "All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that no such character ever existed. I will not offer any plea on his behalf to so powerful and genteel a body." Mrs. Gamp, though one of the humorous types that have, perhaps, contributed most largely to the fame of Dickens, does not appear in this epitome, the character being a minor one in the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... urgent call from the skipper, who was waiting at the small-boat, Timmie ran out. As he stumbled down the path, emitting guffaws and delicious chuckles, he conceived—most unhappily for us all—an infinitely humorous plan, which would still give him the delight of a rough passage to our harbour: for Timmie loved a wet deck and a reeling beat to windward, under a low, driving sky, with the night coming down, as few ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... the known copies of the ballad are as early in date as The Knight of the Burning Pestle (a play by Beaumont and Fletcher, first produced, it is said, in 1611), in which the humorous old Merrythought sings two fragments of this ballad; stanza 5 in Act II. Sc. 8, and the first two lines of stanza 2 in Act III. Sc. 5. As there given, the ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... day; and although he did not make many works, yet those that he did make are worthy of commendation. Nor is there any need to marvel that only very few works issued from his hands, for the reason that, being a gay and humorous fellow and a lover of good cheer, he harboured but few thoughts and would never work save when he could not help it; and so he used to say that doing nothing else but labour, without taking a little pleasure in the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... habit—to judge people by their eyes and mouths. Ste. Marie's mouth pleased her because the lips were neither thin nor thick, they were not drawn into an unpleasant line by unpleasant habits, they did not pout as so many Latin lips do, and they had at one corner a humorous expression which she found ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... He spurns the literal and yet superabounds in the characteristic, and if he makes the strange familiar he makes the familiar just strange enough to be distinguished. Everything is so human, so humorous and so caught in the act, so buttoned and petticoated and gartered, that it might be round the corner; and so it is—but the corner is the corner of another world. In that other world Mr. Abbey went forth to dwell in extreme ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... a supposedly humorous speech in broken English, quoted from the London Lancet, in which the Doctor is satirized. Continuing, ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... rough on a feller, missy," said Mr Lathrope, pretending to be very serious over the matter, in his humorous way. "I cave in to the fifty, that's a fact, as I kinder wanted to pile on the agony; but when I took my stand to be euchred on twenty-five miles, I meant the distance we've tramped over, and nary ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the printer," I exclaimed, And, in my humorous way, I added (as a trifling jest), "There'll ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... priceless asset to his client when he undertakes the task of bamboozling a dozen unhappy countrymen penned in a box. It is hard to picture to yourself this impressive figure giggling sycophantically at the pleasantries of a humorous judge. But he must have conformed to convention in this matter in the past, for how otherwise could he now be an ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... known and greatly admired by the school, even the teachers gave her credit for a knack at humorous sketches rather unusual. She was to be, perhaps, a second John Saxe, possibly an Oliver Wendell Holmes, who could tell? The gift was worth cultivating, particularly as it did not interfere with Kate's soberer and more ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... Court of Session from 1843, author of Gleams of Thought reflected from Milton, etc. It was of this witty and humorous judge Mr. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... so unsuited to the needs of a decent clerk or shopman, fountains charged with the dangerous suggestion that it becomes a man of gaiety and spirit to make love, gallantly and rather carelessly. It seemed to him that evening to be handsome and humorous and practicable to make love to all his cousins. It wasn't that he liked any of them particularly, but he liked something about them. He liked their youth and femininity, their resolute high spirits and their ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... poems who should suppose from their tone that her mind was of a gloomy or despondent cast, would be curiously mistaken. She was exceedingly humorous, and had a great delight in humour. Cheerfulness was habitual with her, she was very ready at a sally or a reply, and in her laugh (as I remember well) there was an unusual vivacity, enjoyment, and sense of drollery. She was perfectly unconstrained and unaffected: ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... appearance,—the strong figure in its every-day clothes, his unstudent-like vigor, and easy step as he went by. She liked him still, but she hated love, it was making her so miserable,—even when later she told Captain Parish some delightful Oldfields stories, of so humorous a kind that he laughed long and struck the table more than once, which set the glasses jingling, and gave a splendid approval to the time-honored fun. The ducklings were amazingly good; and when Captain Walter had tasted his wine and read the silver label on the decanter, which ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... third line, without previous example, is so rhymed within itself that one scarcely perceives the omission. Double rhymes are said by some to unfit this metre for serious subjects, and to adapt it only to what is meant to be burlesque, humorous, or satiric. The example above does not confirm this opinion, yet the rule, as a general one, may still be just. Ballad verse may in some degree imitate the language of a simpleton, and become popular by clownishness, more than ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... it does," declared Jimmy, though it could be seen that a humorous expression had taken the place of that look of fear on ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... of the "Trip through Ceylon" could not be gainsaid, and the humorous film caused much laughter, and boisterous merriment. Finally the announcement was made that they were now about to be treated to a most wonderful series of pictures, showing the details of how one of the best-known companies ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... horses to take care of themselves, while he sips refreshing glasses of tea. When it suits his convenience he returns to splash buckets of water between the horses' legs and under their tails. This, he told me, in all seriousness, was to prevent sunstroke (really, the Persian can be humorous without knowing it), and was a preventive imported with civilised ways from Europe! The ears and manes of the animals are then pulled violently, after which the horses are considered able ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... address was quiet enough—there was even a humorous element in it, as he narrated imaginary experiences of his boyhood. People tittered, and then glanced at one another with an apologetic air, as if shocked at such a monster's daring to amuse them. Suzanne whispered to Quinquart: "Too cheerful; he hasn't struck the right note." Quinquart whispered ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... sweet will, see down the court along which they are strolling, three lampions flare, which indicate some big place or other where the "respectables" do congregate; and the woman says to her companion, with a humorous sarcasm, "Put forward your best foot!" that is, we must be very correct passing along here ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Napoleon, dryly; "and sometimes what is a joke for the man of mirth is likewise in the end a serious matter for that same humorous person. This may turn out to be the case in the present emergency. What was the joke? If I do not find it a humorous joke, I'll give you a parting caress which you ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... of things the local paper gave a humorous account of the affair, which was copied into one of the London dailies, and this it was that eventually brought ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... students of Orientalism assure me that they are anxious to have the work in its crudest and most realistic form. I have received letters saying, Let us know (you who can) what the Arab of The Nights was: if good and high-minded let us see him: if witty and humorous let us hear him: if coarse and uncultivated, rude, childish and indecent, still let us have him to the very letter. We want for once the genuine man. We would have a mediaeval Arab telling the tales and traditions with the lays and legends of his own land in his own way, and showing the world what ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... a prosperous man. I had the happiness of enjoying his delightful and instructive society on many occasions. We had rare cracks on all subjects, but especially respecting old places and old characters whom we had known at Edinburgh. His natural aptitude to catch up the salient and most humorous points of character, with the quaint manner in which he could describe them, gave a vast charm to his company and conversation. Added to which, the wide range and accuracy of his information, acquired by his own industry and quick-witted ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... typical Irish "bhoy," which is high praise. He was broad and hearty, with a broad and hearty grin. He was loved and lovable, blessed with a comely countenance and the joy of a humorous outlook on life and its vicissitudes. You could not down Jimmy so low that he might not see some bright and funny aspect in the situation. This was not only a happy temperamental trait, but it also had a distinct advantage, for in the moments of deepest self-invited ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... she will marry Bertel and no one but Bertel. The latter begs Gertrude, who has long possessed the Burgomaster's affections, to soften the father's heart. Gertrude promises to do her best, with which consolation the couple together with Frau Willmers take their departure. In a humorous monologue Gertrude decides to accept the Burgomaster. She is interrupted in her soliloquy by Lampe, the Beadle, who is a regular old Paul Pry, and boasts to the widow of his smartness and sagacity. According to himself he can ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... of her asking him a question of this kind that he charged her, with a humorous emphasis in which, also, if she had been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless ardor, with having an insatiable avidity for facts. "You are always snatching at information," he said; "you will never consent to have ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... side, too, does not recognise them. The chief peculiarity of Lieutenant Hlopakov consists in his continually for a year, sometimes two at a time, using in season and out of season one expression, which, though not in the least humorous, for some reason or other makes everyone laugh. Eight years ago he used on every occasion to say, "'Umble respecks and duty," and his patrons of that date used always to fall into fits of laughter and make him repeat ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... with humorous decision, watching Kit as he spoke, "already I have been told of your great kindness in the giving of beds and rooms of comfort. Why, with a house big enough, you could jail all the district of Altar! Not my head ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... him a good deal when it was new and had saved him a good deal since in straw hats which he had not been compelled to buy so long as this one held together. It was pulled down in front so that it shaded his face—a face lean and lined and dark, with thin lips that could be tender and humorous in certain moods. His eyes were hazel, like the eyes of Starr, yet one never thought of them as being at all like Starr's eyes. They burned always with some inner fire of life; they laughed at life, and ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... an extraordinary absence of humour about Professor Newman that made him at times unconsciously very humorous. I wish I could remember the quaint wording of an advertisement of his for a cook in a vegetarian paper. There was a long and precise account of the services required for "the smallest possible family," and application was to be made by letter to "Emer. Prof. F. W. Newman," ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... that it were hard to say whether it was the result of labour or of tact, of calculation, or the mere impulse of mother-wit. The ropes of his face, when drawn taught, peculiarly commanded the attention of the Caledonian, while the sly and humorous glance of his half-shut eye was acknowledged by the Hibernian to whom it was addressed; the snow drift of powder which lay in patches on his long, straight hair, agreed with the taste of his dramatic nursling; the far-extended cambric of white frill imposed upon the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... uncorked the bottle of wine, and sat down in a ditch with our canoe aprons over our knees. It rained smartly. Discomfort, when it is honestly uncomfortable and makes no nauseous pretensions to the contrary, is a vastly humorous business; and people well steeped and stupefied in the open air are in a good vein for laughter. From this point of view, even egg a la papier offered by way of food may pass muster as a sort of accessory to the fun. But this manner of jest, although it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of his troubles toward the close of his life, he has a strange, humorous imagination, in every way worthy of his peculiar genius: "My bedfellows are cough and cramp; we ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... man in Belgium. Six feet five in height, a thin, scholarly face, with grayish white hair, and a forehead so white that one feels one looks on the naked bone, he presented the appearance of some medieval ascetic. But there was a humorous look about his mouth, and an expression of sympathy and comprehension which gave the effect of a keenly intelligent, as well as ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... great Murray family belonged to the elder and the higher, and the titular rights of the Dukedom of Athol were held by a cadet of the house. My father's elder brother, Adam Goudie Murray, professed to hold this belief stoutly, and he and the reigning duke of a century ago had a humorous spar with each other about it on occasion. "I presume your Grace is still living in my hoose," ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... loose-jointed man, with long black hair that lay well over his Byronic collar. He had a humorous eye and a cavernous mouth that was always twisting itself into grimaces, alternately side-splitting and terrifying. On occasions he would use the birch—and very thoroughly, too, as I have reason ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... of the Boston Courier contains the following humorous but not untruthful description of this franking business, written by a ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... a sense of something whimsical in their companionship seemed to have taken entire possession of his rude brain. The bare fact of being patronised by a great man whom he could have crushed with one hand, appeared in his eyes so eccentric and humorous, that a kind of ferocious merriment gained the mastery over him, and quite subdued his brutal nature. He roared and roared again; toasted Mr Tappertit a hundred times; declared himself a Bulldog to the core; and vowed ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... were his pranks! He first plundered a rice plantation, and then he cracked cocoa-nuts; then he washed his face and arranged his toilet with, his right paw; and finally he ran a race with his own tail, which humorous appendage to his body was very wittily performed for the occasion by a fragment, of an old tarred rope. His gambols were so diverting that they even extracted applause from his enemy the one-eyed serjeant; and, emboldened by the acclamations, from monkeys the conjuror began ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Henry, where gangs of men were busied under his eye in building three sloops and making several hundred whaleboats to carry the army of Ticonderoga. The season was advancing fast, and Winslow urged him to hasten on the work; to which the humorous Bagley answered; "Shall leave no stone unturned; every wheel shall go that rum and human flesh can move."[395] A fortnight after he reports: "I must really confess I have almost wore the men out, poor dogs. Pray where are the committee, or what are they about?" He sent ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... story, abounding in stirring incident and in humorous descriptions. A thoroughly healthy tale to place in the hands of a boy. It ought to become popular both as a ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... a humorous twinkle in the dark eyes of the Princess, and Warren observed, down the passageway to the private stateroom, the smiling face of Nita, ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... glimpse of her, it was in the conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!" exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, your mistress," replied the ghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and I will be ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... brother-in-law, had knotty hands and a tanned complexion that years of "inside business" had not sufficed to smooth. The little habit of kneading the palm which you felt when he shook hands, and the broad, humorous smile, had not changed as the years passed him on from success to success. Mrs. Hitchcock still slurred the present participle and indulged in other idiomatic freedoms that endeared her to Sommers. These two, plainly, were not of the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... stupid thief!" (the word "thief" was often used in Ireland in the humorous way we sometimes use the word "rascal") said the postmaster, taking up the letter, and going to serve a customer ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... spirit present of fear, and the shadow of fear, misgiving. Nothing less grimly humorous than the notion of such an offer being made now, or of the alleged consequences of such an offer, in the instant streaming away of all His Majesty's Forces in Mesopotamia, could have made so complete a purgation. Comedy took upon herself the office of Tragedy. When ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... sharply and met Pixie's watching eyes fixed upon him. His own glance was tense and shamed, but to his amazement hers was friendly, humorous, undismayed. There was no displeasure in her face, no hint of humiliation nor discomfiture— nothing, it would appear, but ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... which can add to the attractions of such scenes are assiduously improved; that liveliness of disposition is prized beyond all other qualities, while those eccentricities of manner, which seem to form a component part of what we call humorous characters, are excluded; that even childish amusements are preferred to solitary occupations; that taste is cultivated more than morality, wit esteemed more than wisdom, and ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... to relieve him of the perilous imputation of being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something deeper than popularity. His judgment of persons was penetrating, but its process was internal; ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... song, bursts of laughter, echoed here and there in the night. Laughter! What on earth was there to laugh at? The wretched improvised shelters on and into which rain crept, lashed earthwards by a howling wind? The cold, chilly feet, clinging clothes and wet skin? Or is there anything refreshingly humorous in the knowledge that Death groped about in the night for his own ... found them? Is there a mirth-provoking element in the ten to one chance that YOU may ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... pungent, humorous sketch.... A bright, amusing book, which is thoughtful as well as amusing, and may stimulate, somewhere, thinking that shall bear fruit in some really ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... the well-known, anthologized The South Country; another is a passage in the mainly humorous poem called Dedicatory Ode which we have quoted in another connexion; two occur in The Four Men. All of them deal with places and country, they are all by way of being melancholy and express the quite human ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... of that joyous Saturday might have asked was it whippets, horses, or the ring which best explained this lank, keen-eyed, humorous-lipped, uneven-gaited fellow; but none would have suspected a masquerade in the figure offered to their eyes with an assurance ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... affording us enjoyment, would ere long do us a serious injury. So we never stayed at the bottom as long as we might have done, but came up frequently to the top for fresh air, and dived down again immediately. Sometimes, when Jack happened to be in a humorous frame, he would seat himself at the bottom of the sea on one of the brain corals, as if he were seated on a large paddock-stool, and then make faces at me, in order, if possible, to make me laugh under water. At first, when he took me unawares, he nearly succeeded, and I had to shoot to ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... yet humorous comprehension. "Now I begin to understand. If she is caught, that gives you a ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... nature, have climbed up through a graduated series of births, from the merest elementary existence, to the plane of human nature. A gifted author, Dr. Hedge, has said concerning pre existence in these two methods of conceiving it, writing in a half humorous, half serious, vein, "It is to be considered as expressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If here and there some pure liver, or noble doer, or prophet voice, suggests the idea of a revenant who, moved with pity for human kind, and charged ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... carriages! Being farmers mostly, they are interested in the unhedged fields and the acres of cloches. They go into hysterics of laughter when the French people assail them with smiles, broken English-French, and long loaves of bread. They think the long loaves very humorous! There are Y.M.C.A. canteens at most stations, so we are well fed. The horses are miserable, of course. They were unhappy on board ship. A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to. And now they are wretched ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... Maxim, Get a Reputation, and lye a Bed, not to mention how many lye a Bed before they can attain it, according to the humorous Turn of the late ingenious Mr. Farqubar; but there's at this Time a greater necessity for a Man to be wakeful, when he has acquir'd a Reputation, than at any Time before; he'll find abundantly more difficulty attend the ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... to give offence," said the Idiot. "I've read so much of yours that was purely humorous that I believe I'd laugh at a dirge if you should write one; but I really thought your lines in the Observer were a burlesque. You had the same thought that Rossetti expresses in ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... in several tunnels at different times, fitted with air pumps and perhaps even electric light—who knows? Digging oneself out is, at the best of times, a slow and difficult proposition, which is almost invariably discovered sooner or later. The humorous side of tunnelling is so pronounced that, could "Bairnsfather" view one such episode, our bookstalls would shortly be surrounded by eager crowds, clamouring for the first edition of "Fragments from Germany," depicting mud-bespattered "Old Bills" crawling for their very lives down ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... the girlish portraits of his mother—or he imagined so—until he noticed that her hair was yellow and her eyes blue. And he laughed crazily to himself, inwardly convulsed; and then his own voice sounded again, low, humorous, caressingly modulated; and he listened to it, amused that he was able to speak ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for getting on: it hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete the hopelessness of Ralph Marvell's case. He had accepted the fact with a humorous fatalism. Material resources were limited on both sides of the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants—enough to buy books (not "editions"), and pay now and then for a holiday dash to the great centres of art and ideas. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... give "Khaki Boys," which roused her audience to an even higher pitch of patriotic fervor. A recitation, "Our Hockey Match," by Agnes Heath, was felt to be particularly appropriate to the occasion. It was a very good "school piece," humorous as well as exciting, and Agnes had enough dramatic ability to do justice to it. Her own form in particular stamped lustily. The prefects motioned her forward again, but she shook her head. The clapping redoubled. Agnes, ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... stories, but only one difficult kind —the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the MANNER of the telling; the comic story and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to her identification by any friend of his, and she could make allowance for bursts of confidence; but there remained the awkward fact that he himself knew her to be the heroine of the episode. What annoyed her most was that Neigh could ever have looked upon her indiscretion as a humorous incident, which he certainly must have done at some time or other to account for his telling it. Had he been angry with her, or sneered at her for going, she could have forgiven him; but to see her manoeuvre in the light of a joke, to use it as illustrating his grim ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... I am not recommending Fielding to boys and girls. "Tom Jones" was one of the works that Lydia Languish hid under the sofa; even Miss Languish did not care to be caught with that humorous foundling. "Fielding was the last of our writers who drew a man," Mr. Thackeray said, "and he certainly did not study ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... meaning "Good-bye," "A pleasant passage." Skippers fell into the habit of dipping their flags to him as they were towed out to sea, and a few amused themselves while at anchor by pulling out their bags of bunting and signalling humorous conversations, though their topmasts reached so near to the boy's platform that they might with less labour have ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... skirt which had recently become fashionable. Addison, in a humorous paper in the 'Tatler' (No. 116), describes one as about twenty-four yards ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... Alaska. Above all, they told the story of the building of old San Francisco, when the "finest collection of humanity on God's earth, sir, started this town, and the water came up to the foot of Market Street." Very terrible were some of the tales, grimly humorous the others, and the men in broadcloth and fine linen who told them had ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... it was pleasant to go over his remarkable adventures, but it could not have been half as pleasant as it was to hear them, told as they were with a keenness of description and brilliancy of humorous comment that made them gems ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... with anecdotes and observations relating to the humorous side of life, intimate bits of interesting personalia, and bright and witty chat concerning things in ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... meanwhile Hurstwood encountered a humorous item concerning a stranger who had arrived in the city and became entangled with a bunco-steerer. It amused him immensely, and at last he stirred and chuckled to himself. He wished that he might enlist his wife's attention and read ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... noises, followed her example, but alas! not to sleep. She tossed on her bed, sacred for many years to the ponderous weight of old Mrs. Ponsonby, till suddenly all she had suffered from the maxims and example of her mother-in-law took form, and she wove a story half humorous, half pathetic, that she longed to commit to paper; but her delicacy forbade. She was even ashamed to have found a passing amusement at the expense of Simeon's mother, and she tried to make her mind a blank and go to sleep. Toward morning she must have lost consciousness, for she dreamed—or ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... new to the General, but he remarked now that it must be pretty nearly correct; and his eye turned a moment upon his forty troopers waiting there, grim and humorous; for they knew that the thicket was looking at them, and it amused their American minds to wonder what the Old Man was going to do ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... elated by "having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been though worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himaniopus, with no back toe, and therefore "liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... accompanied his father into the senate-house, as was usual formerly for sons to do who had taken the toga praetexta, enquired of her son what the senate had been doing; the youth replied, that he had been enjoined silence. This answer made her the more importunate and he adopted this humorous fallacy—that it had been discussed in the senate which would be most beneficial to the state, for one man to have two wives, or for one woman to have two husbands? Hearing this, she left the house in no small trepidation, and went to tell other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... were clear and forceful, and filled with many surprising and humorous touches. Of Bach he said, 'Bach spoke in close, scientific, contrapuntal language. He was as emotional and romantic as Chopin, Wagner or Tchaikovsky; his emotion was expressed in the language of his time. Young women who say they adore Bach play him like a sum in mathematics. They find a grim pleasure ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... I had four definite ambitions: first, to secure an election to a coveted secret society; second, to become one of the editors of the Yale Record, an illustrated humorous bi-weekly; third (granting that I should succeed in this latter ambition), to convince my associates that I should have the position of business manager—an office which I sought, not for the honor, but because I believed it would enable me to earn an amount of money ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... not catch Dr. Blake unawares. He laughed a laugh which rang as true as Mrs. Markham's. He even ventured on a humorous monologue in which he accused his sex of every possible failing, ending with a triumphant eulogy of the other half of creation. But Mrs. Markham, though she listened with outward civility, appeared to take all his jibes seriously—miscomprehended ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... Turtle, who outgeneralled the Americans at the defeat of St. Clair, used to tell with humorous relish how he once trusted a white man adopted into his tribe. This white man was very eager to go with him on a raid into Kentucky, and when they were stealing upon the cabin they were going to attack, nothing could restrain his desire to be ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... a live lord—a young nobleman, said to have been of high promise, Lord Daer, eldest son of the then Earl of Selkirk. He had been a former pupil of Dugald Stewart, and happened to be at that time his guest. Burns has left the following humorous record of his own feelings ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... do when they ride, and when he had laughed his good-natured, half-cynical laugh, he closed his lips beneath a huge gray mustache. So far as one could judge from the action of a square and deeply indented chin, his mouth was expressive at that time—and possibly at all times—of a humorous resignation. No reply was vouchsafed to him, and Karl Steinmetz bumped along on his little Cossack horse, which was stretched out ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... even in that jumbled moment I had time to realize that these folk could restrain curiosity better than we can atop the earth. There was no hub-bub, no running out to tag after the queerly dressed foreigner and shout humorous remarks ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... In this humorous allegory the poet bewails his unhappy lot on having fallen on an age so unpropitious to poetry, contrasting it with the happy times so responsive to his predecessors who piped to a world prepared to dance to their music. However, he must toil and be satisfied if he ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... strongly on everything that the war has brought into question for the Anglo-Saxon peoples that humorous detachment or any other thinness or tepidity of mind on the subject affects me as vulgar impiety, not to say as rank blasphemy; our whole race tension became for me a sublimely conscious thing from the moment Germany flung at us all her explanation of her pounce upon Belgium for massacre ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... lad was that, despite his exuberant, rollicking nature, he had no taste for humorous music. When she asked him to sing a lively song, he shook his head. He not only knew none, but had no wish to learn any. His liking was for sentiment and tenderness of feeling. Moore's melodies were his favorites and he knew few others. At the last meeting of Mike and the lady she ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... said afterwards that, when he heard this, he fairly groaned. He wasn't by any means humorous as a rule, and, so far as he was concerned, the joke had gone far enough; and he used to add as a warning that a man may go so far in a joke he can't help but go farther—'tis like hysterics with women. At any rate, he saw the soldiers ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... also a nuisance to the passing public because of such inconvenience as the asymmetrical main road. It hinders local development and the development of a local spirit. It may, of course, appeal perhaps to the humorous outlook of the followers of Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, who believe that this war is really a war in the interests of the Athanasian Creed, fatness, and unrestricted drink against science, discipline, and priggishly keeping fit enough to join the army, as ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... thirty, handsome in the bold way of longshore men, and ruddy-faced. He had crisp, short, sandy hair; his cheeks, chin, and lip were scraped as clean as his palm; his eyes were like blue-steel points, but with humorous wrinkles at the outer corners of them, matched by a faint smile that almost always wreathed his lips. Altogether he was a man that a woman would be sure to ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... instantly crossed his hands piously over his breast and bowed before a good-looking, sleek-faced woman of forty, who was elegantly dressed, and who greeted him with a humorous smile. Having heard much of the woman's scandalous past, I naturally regarded her with considerable curiosity. She was a woman of destiny. Petrograd had not long before been agog with the scandal following her marriage with a young naval officer, who had gone to the Baltic, and unexpectedly returning ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... of the year in Newfoundland, thus escaping alike the rigorous winters of the northern island and the fierce summer heat of the southern one. The Bishop himself was a Newfoundlander, as were many of the Church of England clergy in Bermuda. A humorous friend of mine, a sapper in charge of the "wireless," shared to the full my liking for the islands and their pleasant inhabitants, but positively detested Prospect Camp where he was stationed. Prospect, though healthy enough, is wind-swept, very dusty, and ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... House. I found him not very well, and with his feet considerably swollen. He was sitting on a chair, with his feet resting on a table, while a barber was shaving him. Shaking him by the hand, and asking after his health, he answered, with a humorous twinkle of the eye, that he would illustrate his condition by telling me a story. Said he: "Two of my neighbors, on a certain occasion, swapped horses. One of these horses was large, but quite thin. A few days after, on inquiry being ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... suppose you think,' said their father in his half-humorous, half-serious voice, 'that you were really ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... glanced at the presents laid out on the dining-room table, but they looked unattractive. Even the brown plush monkey she had bought for Thor with such enthusiasm seemed to have lost his wise and humorous expression. She murmured, "All right," to her mother, lit ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... little soul of the late Master Billy Fribble, a young gentleman of French extraction, whose friends came and settled in the country about fifty years ago. His play fellows dignified him with the humorous title of the little Monsieur, not so much on account of his diminutive stature, as for that trifling and finical behaviour which distinguishes the least respectable, though, by many thoughtless persons, ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... was just like the rippling of silvery music and of the most catching, contagious nature. She generally only smiled, at even the most humorous incidents; and her smile was the sweetest I ever saw in anyone. It lit up her whole face with merriment, giving the grey eyes the most bewitching expression, and bringing into prominent notice a tiny, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... political renegade. He accordingly gives him no quarter, and seems determined to draw blood at every stroke. Mrs. Sherlock is of course not forgotten, and one of the happiest passages in the Tritheism charged is the well-known humorous illustration of Socrates and Xantippe, p. 129. It is somewhat curious that, notwithstanding these two works of South have attracted so much notice, it seems to be quite unknown that he also published a Latin tract against Sherlock, in further continuation of the controversy, in which the attack ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various
... holes. Livingstone's audience, appreciative of his tact and levity, laughed long and hearty. Business men still chuckle over the joke in Centralia. "As funny as a funeral" is no longer the stock saying in this humorous little town; "as comical as a coroner" ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... contribution to the fray. According to the author's own account, this play was written in fifteen weeks on a report that his enemies had entrusted to Dekker the preparation of "Satiromastix, the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet," a dramatic attack upon himself. In this attempt to forestall his enemies Jonson succeeded, and "Poetaster" was an immediate and deserved success. While hardly more closely knit in structure than its earlier companion pieces, "Poetaster" ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... dressed it in the morning, and she undressed it at night, and she prepared food for it; but the caretakers who called up smiles to the little white face, who caused the baby to show that enticing little dimple which it had in one of its cheeks, who made that strange, sweet, half-pathetic, half-humorous look come into its eyes, were the children and the dog. The baby had a sad history; it had entered the world with sorrow. Its mother had died at its birth, and the little wee orphan creature had been brought away almost directly ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... takes away the breath of modern strait-laced commentators. Life that came easily into the world was spent as recklessly, and blood flowed as plentifully as wine. Rough horseplay and rude practical joking were of the essence of humorous courtliness. Immense processions filled with life and colour, jesting at everything sacred or profane, crowded with symbols decent and indecent, made up the sum of public happiness. Close at men's elbow lay the heavy hand of a merciless and blood-stained law. Once beneath ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... had opened the stable-door and let them out. But the bear—alas! I never saw him again; he left the place in sore dudgeon—so that the peasants saved the remains left to put up with certain rude remarks from my cousin Jack. I believe he thought these remarks humorous, but I assure you they were ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... cause of everything offensive to the majority—if money is scarce, it is England that has occasioned it—if credit is bad, it is England—if eggs are not fresh or beef is tough, it is, it must be, England. They remind you of the parody upon Fitzgerald in Smith's humorous and witty 'Rejected Addresses,' when he is ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... rich in pungent humor and extremely clever in their portrayal of quaint and amusing character, deserve a place among the choice specimens of American humorous literature—which means the best humorous literature in the ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... perverse; bashful to very fear of a lady's dress; unable to restrain himself in anything, but yet with a conscience that was always stinging him; a loving friend, though very quarrelsome; and, perhaps, of all men I have known, the most humorous. And he was entirely unconscious of his own humour. He did not know that he could so handle all matters as to create infinite amusement out of them. Poor W—— A——! To him there came no happy ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... person by whom any young man could be bored. If she kept cats they must be pedigreed Persian cats, and well worth keeping, Johnnie decided. The girl—and she was a girl—had brought into the room an electric vitality, a breeziness hard to describe. Her eyes were humorous and intelligent; her teeth, which she seemed always ready to show in a friendly, generous smile, were strong and white and sparkling. Altogether she was such a vision of healthy, unaffected, and smartly gotten-up young womanhood that O'Reilly could only stammer his acknowledgment ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... sitting there and telling me these things in a gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him, mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... session and another, for literary occupations. He wrote about one-third of an annual collection of miscellanies entitled, the "Talisman," which was published by Dr. Bliss in the year 1827 and the two following years. To these volumes he contributed the "Peregrinations of Petrus Mudd," a humorous and lively sketch, founded on the travels of a New Yorker of the genuine old stock, who when he returned from wandering over all Europe and part of Asia, set himself down to study geography in order to know where he ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... girl pleads with her father to make peace, with humorous naivete argues with the counsellors of state, tries to bribe the seers, and finally resorts to magic. When nothing avails, she secures Carme's aid. The lock is cut, the city falls, the girl is captured by Minos—in true Alexandrian technique ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank |
