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More "Desperate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the aid of the prince Cid Hiaya, and made a desperate attempt to dislodge the enemy from this formidable position, but the night had closed, and the darkness rendered it impossible to make any impression. The Moors, however, kept up constant assaults and alarms throughout the night, and the weary ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... day she abandoned that area, flying heavily eastward. The droning and swooping gnats of aircraft plainly distressed her. At first she had only tried to avoid them, but now and then during her eastward flight from St. Louis she made short desperate rushes against them, without skill or much sign of intelligence, screaming from a wide-open mouth that could have swallowed a four-engine bomber. Two aircraft were lost over Cincinnati, by collision with each other in trying to get out of her way. Pilots were then ordered ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... classes of men aside, as having no special call on the sympathy of the Catholic, of course he does most deeply enter into the feelings of a fourth and large class of men, in the educated portions of society, of religious and sincere minds, who are simply perplexed,—frightened or rendered desperate, as the case may be,—by the utter confusion into which late discoveries or speculations have thrown their most elementary ideas of religion. Who does not feel for such men? who can have one unkind thought of them? I take up in their behalf St. Augustine's beautiful words, "Illi in ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... women, when quite young, are pretty and graceful. Their huts are often tastefully decorated, the floors being spread with yellow mats, embroidered with red and violet designs. The Afars are divided into many sub-tribes, each having an hereditary sultan, whose power is, however, limited. They are desperate fighters and in 1875 successfully resisted an attempt to bring them under Egyptian rule. In 1883-1888, however, their most important sultan concluded treaties placing his country under Italian protection. The Afar ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... would seem to me merely tedious, smile behind your hand, and remember the little dears are all in a blue funk. It must be very funny, and to a spectator like yourself I almost envy it. But never get desperate; human nature is human nature; and the Roman Empire, since the Romans founded it and made our European human nature what it is, bids fair to go on and to be true to itself. These little bodies will all grow ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which fact, somehow, he should feel less stranded. It wasn't that he wanted to be pitied—he fairly didn't pity himself; he winced, rather, and even to vicarious anguish, as it rose again, for poor shamed Bloodgood's doom-ridden figure. But he wanted, as with a desperate charity, to give some easier turn to the mere ugliness of the main facts; to work off his obsession from them by mixing with it some other blame, some other pity, it scarce mattered what—if it might be some other experience; as an effect of which larger ventilation it would have, after a fashion ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... remained mysterious. Turner said on his trial that he had not been unkindly treated, and there was no evidence of provocation by special abuse. There was no trace of any instigation from the North in any form. It seemed not a stroke for freedom by men worthy to be free; not even a desperate revolt against intolerable wrong; but more like an outbreak of savagery, the uprising of the brute in man, thirsty for blood. The fear at first prevailed that there existed a widespread conspiracy, and various legislation for protection ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... stigmatise all the inhabitants of the southern world, and attributing to the whole the character of convictism. A more serious consideration is the positive injury inflicted upon the islanders of the Southern Ocean by scattering among them desperate men who have been perfected in all the arts of wickedness, and who are placed within reach of an interesting and rising people, whom they too often shock by their vices and oppress by their crimes. We submit, sir, to your humanity as a British fellow subject, and ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... active magistrate (for he had been in the commission for some time), well acquainted with the law, and no less so with the haunts and habits of the illicit traders. He had acquired the latter kind of experience by a former close alliance with some of the most desperate smugglers, in consequence of which he had occasionally acted, sometimes as partner, sometimes as legal adviser, with these persons. But the connection had been dropped many years; nor, considering how short the race of eminent characters ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... to add more than a word to the published accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed—cold, epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And once more it was his fate to make us ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... and frequently disappointed in their hopes of being relieved from their depredations, by the failure of the numberless schemes that were formed and set on foot for that purpose, began at last to consider the case as quite desperate; and to submit patiently to an evil for which they saw no remedy. The consequences of this submission are easy to be conceived; the beggars, encouraged by their success, were attached still more strongly to their infamous profession; and others, allured by their indolent lives, encouraged by ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... that danger, and I will promise you none on my account. Suffer me to enter the convent of Bielany: we cannot be far from it; and then, do you provide for your own safety.' Kosinski, though rendered desperate by the circumstances in which he was involved, replied, 'No; I have sworn, and I would rather sacrifice my life than ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... they laid to my charge things that I knew not of." This kind in the highest way (that is, in judicial proceedings) is more rare; and of all men, they who are detected to practice it are held most vile and infamous, as being plainly the most pernicious and perilous instruments of injustice, the most desperate enemies of all men's right and safety that can be. But also out of the court there are many knights-errant of the poet, whose business it is to run about scattering false reports; sometimes loudly proclaiming ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... midnight the quarrels, fights, and disturbances, are so noisy and so frequent that none can hope for a night's rest until they are inured by habit; where, night after night, they witness the most desperate encounters between drunken men and women, kicking, biting, and tearing one another's hair out, as they roll together in the gutter, or, as is too often the case, using deadly weapons, and where the crowd, instead of interfering ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... life about him, the torch from which all others drew their light, to understand the horror of the void that was now about me. All things were there, the same, but the spirit that gave life to them was extinct, like a blown-out flame. I now understood the desperate desire of lovers never to see each other again when love has flown. To be nothing where we were once so much! To find the chilling silence of the grave where life so lately sparkled! Such comparisons are overwhelming. I came at last to envy the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... was considered as a concession to the views of the majority of the French Academy. La Bete Humaine exhausted the details of railway life. L'Argent treats of financial scandals and panics. La Debacle, 1892, is a realistic picture of the desperate struggles of the Franco-Prussian war. Le Docteur Pascal, 1893, a story of the emotions, wound up the series. Through it all runs the thread of heredity and environment in their influence on ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... from the Portages du Rat into the Lake of the Woods. I had added another man to my crew, which now numbered seven hands, the last accession was a French half-breed, named Morrisseau. Thomas Hope had possessed himself of a flint gun, with which he was to do desperate things should we fall in with the French scouts upon the lake. The boat in which I now found myself was a large, roomy craft, capable of carrying about three tons of freight; it had a single tall mast carrying a large square lug-sail, and also possessed of powerful ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the truth," answered Hokosa in a voice of desperate calm. "I have knowledge of the plot, for it was I who wove it; but whether or not Hafela will carry it out altogether I cannot say, for as yet no word has reached me from him. King, this was the plan that I made." And he told ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... solid, desperate mass, and then at the thin, struggling French line feeling its way cautiously forward; and a daring resolve came to him as the drums began to roll and he ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... except once these three: Es geht an (It is beginning). Shortly after, as Ew. Wohlgeboren knows, was the public tranquillity here, as in Berlin, threatened by a Sedition of the Tailors. Nor did there want Evil-wishers, or perhaps mere desperate Alarmists, who asserted that the closing Chapter of the Clothes-Volume was to blame. In this appalling crisis, the serenity of our Philosopher was indescribable; nay, perhaps through one humble individual, something ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the barricade when the last of the defenders had entered. By the time this was finished the battle below began in earnest. The infuriated assailants had pulled the doors outwards and were making desperate efforts to climb the pile of logs. This they soon found to be impossible, and began with their halberts to pull them down, and it was not long before they had dislodged sufficient to make a slope up which they could climb. Their ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... him, it would be of no use. I prefer to agree with him and get him to bed; then, at least, it's over at once and I'm quiet. Besides, he isn't ill-natured, he loves me very much. You could see that just a moment ago when he was desperate to give me a kiss. That's quite nice of him. There are plenty of men, you know, who after drinking a bit don't come straight home but stay out chasing women. Oh, he may fool around with the women in the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... difficult for a person in his humble circumstances to substantiate his claim, or secure the services of a lawyer bold enough to take his case in hand, and refrained from demanding his rights until 1849; in which year, rendered desperate by delay, he went personally to Ashton Hall, obtained an interview with Sir John Smyth, and communicated to him his relationship and his claims. The meeting was much more satisfactory than might have been expected. As Sir John had been party to certain documents which were executed by his brother ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... the estate of poetry in the eyes of even such poetical English publishers as Mr. Moxon, who can write sonnets himself. Poetry is in their eyes just a desperate speculation. A poet must have tried his public before he tries the publisher—that is, before he expects the publisher to run a risk for him. But I will make any effort you like to suggest for any work of yours; I only tell you how things are. By the way, if I ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... choice between the river and the fire. She was alone; there was none to advise or help her or be her companion in inevitable death. Her thoughts must have gone to her brother, with his strength and courage, his skill as a swimmer; but he was far away, unconscious of her desperate extremity. She had to choose, and the river was her choice. With that tragic conception of the drowning of Zenobia fresh in his mind, the realization of his sister's fate must have gained additional poignancy in my father's imagination. He ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; large scale migration of Zimbabweans to surrounding countries - as they flee a progressively more desperate situation at home - has increased; rural Zimbabwean men, women, and children are trafficked internally to farms for agricultural labor and domestic servitude and to cities for domestic labor and commercial sexual exploitation; young ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... winced beneath the contemptuous gaze of his wife. He had made a desperate struggle to screw up his courage, but it was ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... instead of keeping along their edge. The Froom was down there, and he knew of quiet pools in that stream to which death would come easily. But he was too old to put an end to himself for such a reason as love; and another thought, too, kept him from seriously contemplating any desperate act. His affection for her was strongly protective, and in the event of her requiring a friend's support in future troubles there was none but himself left in the world to afford it. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... reason to think so meanly of them. And, if I am rightly informed, when that measure was debated in Parliament, a very different reason was assigned by the author's great friend, as well as by others, for that reduction: one very different from the critical and almost desperate state of our finances. Some people then endeavored to prove, that the reduction might be made without detriment to the national credit, or the due support of a proper peace establishment; otherwise it is obvious that the reduction could not be defended ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rooms had been engaged for them at the Grand Palestine Hotel, but, on leaving the Town Hall, were surrounded by the crowd, which had now swelled to nearly a million and fought for the privilege of escorting the visitors to the station with such desperate enthusiasm that at a late hour on Saturday night no traces of Prince Ongtong or any of his choir could be discovered. This is all the more to be regretted as arrangements had been made for a competition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... about down and out; no one would hire him any more, even in the most menial capacity. His poor, hard-working wife had at last taken the pledge not to support him any longer in idleness, so it was up to Dennie to do something desperate. The most desperate thing he could think of was to swear off. So before the priest he took a solemn vow not to touch a drop ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... Now, listen: I have cut a hole through the wall from your room into Jack's. You can hear every word he speaks. Have you pencil and paper? Good! Jot down every word you hear. And don't make a sound. If you are discovered—well, they're a desperate gang. Come!" ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... was about: on the very Sunday when Wagstaff took possession of Salisbury, Cromwell occupied Chichester by horsemen, sent there at daybreak; and he dispatched a warning to Portsmouth, that 'some desperate design was on foot.' But he kept his soldiers away from Salisbury. He took this course, although he knew that Salisbury Plain had been named as a Levellers' rendezvous; and although he had received a report, about three weeks before the 11th ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... eyes literally blazing with fury, his lips working under his tawny, leonine beard. At every syllable he could have thrown himself afresh upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as so much carrion; yet the impotence that truth so often feels, caught and meshed in the coils of subtlety—the desperate disadvantage at which Right is so often placed, when met by the cunning science and sophistry of Wrong—held the Seraph in their net now. He saw his own rashness, he saw how his actions could be construed till they cast a slur even on the man he defended; he saw how legally ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... climbed to six. So far the sophomores had gained nothing. Then Ellen Seymour made a spectacular throw to the basket and brought her team up two points. With the realization that they were facing defeat the freshmen rallied and made a desperate effort to hold their own, bringing their ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... direct attack on the Cabinet, of which, of course, Lloyd George was a member. His words meant that the Government was proceeding along conventional paths, and not rising to great emergencies, and was lacking that desperate resolution so necessary in war. Thus it was that Lloyd George threw out to the world more than a hint of the difficulties he had had with ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... you are far more anxious about others. I've had time to think. A swoon is not such a desperate affair. You guessed rightly—a thunderstorm prostrates me, but as it passes I ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... (imaginative) person who visits the fall; but most persons, through predominant subjectiveness, would scarcely be conscious of the feelings, or, at best, would never think of employing them in an attempt to convey to others an impression of the scene. Hence so many desperate failures to convey it on the part of ordinary tourists. Mr. William W. Lord, to be sure, in his poem 'Niagara,' is sufficiently objective; he describes not the fall, but very properly, the effect of the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... rushing, eager to see, quick to share in a fight. Believing them to be enemies, Hanscom with instant rush struck the first man a heavy blow, caught and wrenched his weapon from his fist, and so, armed and desperate, faced the circle of inflamed ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... war. Whether or not this comes about, Lee can never supplant Grant as our national military hero. He fought to destroy the Union, not to save it, and in the end he was beaten by General Grant. However much men may praise the personal virtues and the desperate achievements of the great warrior of the revolt against the Union, they cannot conceal that he was the defeated leader of a lost cause, a cause which, in the chastened judgment of coming time, will appear to all men, as even now it does to most dispassionate ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... every tender heart. From early childhood they lead worse than a dog's life. Uncultivated and treated like brutes, they are prone to suicide, and, when desperate, they act more like infuriated beasts than ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... desperate, and yet resistance would have been unwise. Sadly resigned, he turned his head upon the pillow, and soon snored in unison with Hersch. A half-hour of profound silence, then the culprit rose, and making sure that his wife was sleeping the sleep of the just, he cautiously took his ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... was, to be sure, when Tom and the Harrisons met! The brothers were for seizing Tom in place of Yaspard; and nothing but Signy's vehement protestations that he was under a flag of truce, so to speak, prevented their carrying out some desperate measure of the sort. They wouldn't see the difference between Yaspard caught at sea after discharging a hospitable duty, and Tom a ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... sparrow or the goldfinch. It is a race of surprising speed and agility. It is a test of wing and wind. Every muscle is taxed, and every nerve strained. Such cries of terror and consternation on the part of the bird, tacking to the right and left, and making the most desperate efforts to escape, and such silent determination on the part of the hawk, pressing the bird so closely, flashing and turning, and timing his movements with those of the pursued as accurately and as inexorably as if the two constituted one body, excite feelings of the deepest concern. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... stood scared by this desperate answer to his words. Then he put his burden down, approached Chris, knelt beside her, and tried to raise her. She sat up at last with panting breast and eyes ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... world ever saw, what would have become of Felicissimus and him long since? This horse, by second-nature, religiously respects all fences; gallops, if never so madly, on the highways alone;—seems to me, of late, like a desperate Sleswick thunder-horse who had lost his way, galloping in the labyrinthic lanes of a woody flat country; passionate to reach his goal; unable to reach it, because in the flat leafy lanes there is no outlook whatever, and in the bridle there is no guidance whatever. So he gallops ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... board a ship with yellow fever is held responsible for his mischance, no matter what his being kept in quarantine may cost him. He may catch the fever and die; we cannot help it; he must take his chance as other people do; but surely it would be desperate unkindness to add contumely to our self-protection, unless, indeed, we believe that contumely is one of our best means of self-protection. Again, take the case of maniacs. We say that they are irresponsible for their actions, but we take ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... nine hard at it, and four of them with knock-me-down Virginia tobacco, the single human odour could not contend against such powerful odds; as well might a musquito sneeze against thunder. I always loved a cigar; but here I learnt its true value in a desperate emergency. ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... his hand, fall upon the counter. "I told you poplars, distinctly. The elm-tree gate is at least a quarter of a mile this side. But, to settle the matter at once," and the doctor, speaking like a man who was about doing a desperate thing, turned to his shelves and took therefrom a bottle of the Universal Restorer—"here's the medicine. I know it will cure you. Take a bottle. It shall ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... what was meant; with the sagacity of a long-trained hunter, he made a desperate effort to gain the advantage by a circuitous route. Twice the stag turned irresolute, as if to face his foe, and Wolfe, taking the time, swam ahead, and then the race began. As soon as the boys saw the herd ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... however, and solid order could not be observed throughout. At length, when they had gained a brookside at the very edge of the wood, the column staggered, quailed, fell into disorder, and then fell back. Some of the more desperate dashed singly into the thicket, bayoneting their enemies, and falling in turn in the fierce grapple. Others of the Confederates ran from the wood, and engaged hand to hand with antagonists, and, in places, a score of combatants met sturdily upon the plain, lunging with ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most barren and forlorn doctrine,—as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... or the virtue and use of that water in curing of desperate diseases, with directions and rules necessary to be considered by all that ...
— The Compleat Cook • Anonymous, given as "W. M."
... words, but I look at them in as pleasant a way as I know how, partly because I like to be friends with servants, and partly because I'm rather afraid of them and don't want to rouse them to Mutiny or do anything desperate, but Boggley discouraged me at the outset. "You needn't grin at them so affably," he remarked, "they will only think you are weak in the head." They quite evidently regard me as a poor creature, even Bella, though she humours me and condescends ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... to let him see the world and the usages of honourable warfare for a year or two; but my Lilias could not bear the thought of her young Ensign's coming home without an arm or a leg, or perchance being slain in some desperate conflict with savage Indians, or scarcely less savage Americans; and I did not press my plan of giving Edward for a time to the service of the King. He, I am bound to say, was eager to take up a Commission; but the tears and entreaties of my Daughter, who thinks War the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... comment, he was too desperate for that. He knew well enough that if his quiet, patient little Nan had gone away, she must be in a state of mind out of which tragedies come. He would go and rouse Jim Lincoln, who slept in the stable loft, and they would search for her. Mrs. Forest watched her ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... to avoid the first cut, and he was about to make a desperate attempt to close, when a large stone whizzed past his ear and hit his adversary full on the chest, sending ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... The war with the natives was ignominiously ended by Charles V. in 1533, who found that the colony was growing too poor to pay for it. He despatched a letter to the cacique who had organized this desperate and prolonged resistance, flattered him by the designation of Dom Henri[19] and profuse expressions of admiration, sent a Spanish general to treat with him, and to assign him a district to inhabit with his followers. Dom Henri thankfully accepted this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... two tigers, with an air at once gentle and proud, he leaned with one hand upon a thyrsus, and with the other guided his savage steeds in tranquil majesty. By this rare mixture of grace, vigor, and serenity, it was easy to recognize the hero who had waged such desperate combats with men and with monsters of the forest. Thanks to the brownish tone of the figure, the light, falling from one side of the sculpture, admirably displayed the form of the youthful god, which, carved in relievo, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Lee, Id., vol. ii. p. 1012; vol. v. p. 769.] The contrast between promise and performance in his case had been ludicrous. When we entered the valley, we heard of his proclamations and orders, which breathed the spirit of desperate hand-to-hand conflict. His soldiers had been told to despise long-range fire-arms, and to trust to bowie-knives, which our invading hordes would never dare to face. We found some of these knives among the arms we captured at the Gauley,—ferocious-looking weapons, made of broad files ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... their ruin and their annihilation breathed again and leaped for joy; and the Parliament and the robe destroyed by edicts and by revolutions, flattered themselves the first that they should figure, the other that they should find themselves free. The people ruined, overwhelmed, desperate, gave thanks to God, with a scandalous eclat, for a deliverance, their most ardent ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... In other words, he was hungry. Gingerbread and apples do not satisfy little boys as roast beef does. Archie's stomach was quite empty, and began to cry with an unmistakable voice, "I want my dinner, I want my dinner. Give me my dinner quick, or I shall do something desperate." Everybody in the world has to listen when voices like these begin to sound inside of them. All at once home seemed the most attractive spot in the world to Archie. Visions of Mamma and bread and milk and a great plate full of something hot ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... After all the years, Thou'rt with us yet. To-day, as heretofore, Men see Thee still and they cast off their fears, And take fresh courage to press on once more. The soldiers, bearing from the desperate fight A wounded brother, see Thee, in the way, And know Thee for the Saviour, Healer, Friend, For once again, Thy loved ones hear Thee say (O Christ! White Comrade, in their stand for right!) "Lo, I am with ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... her necessities grew more pressing, and finally became so desperate, that, braving everything, she went boldly to headquarters, and asked ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... eyes as she finished her lover's letter. His unwonted humility touched her as no arrogance could ever have done. His appeal to his desperate need moved her profoundly as such appeals will always move woman. It is an old tale and one oft repeated. Man crying out at a woman's feet, "Save me! Save me! Myself I cannot save!" Woman, believing, because she longs to believe it, that salvation lies in her power, taking on herself ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... had enough and beat a retreat. At once Kitchener pressed on to Omdurman, but the bloody day is not yet at an end. The dervish horsemen rally yet once more. The Khalifa's standard is planted in the ground on a mound, and beside it the Prophet's green banner calls the faithful together for a last desperate struggle. The English and their Egyptian allies fight with admirable courage, and the dervishes strike with a bravery and contempt of death to which no words can do justice. Under the holy banner a detachment advances ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... Wingate with delight shining in her dark eyes and a beautiful pink rising up in her pale cheeks. "I wish I COULD do something to please him and make him feel how—how—grateful I am—for the hope he's given me. I was so hopeless and unhappy—and desperate when I came. But I believe my voice is coming back! Every day it's stronger and you are so good to me and make me so happy that I'm not afraid any more. You give me faith to hope—as well as to mix biscuits." And a pearly ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... evils of gold-seeking, I fell under the fascination of what was then a wonderful town, especially wonderful from its youth. The ever-moving crowds which thronged the streets, every man of which appeared to be full of important business and in a desperate hurry, reminded one of the City in London. Smart carriages with well-dressed ladies drove rapidly past, the shops were cunningly arranged with tempting wares, and all this bustle and traffic was restored in little over a week. A fortnight previously a revolution was impending and a siege was looming ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... than you were, King Midas!" said the stranger, looking seriously at him. "Your own heart, I perceive, has not been entirely changed from flesh to gold. Were it so, your ease would indeed be desperate. But you appear to be still capable of understanding that the commonest things, such as lie within everybody's grasp, are more valuable than the riches which so many mortals sigh and struggle after. Tell me, now, do you sincerely desire to rid ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... word of father was like Persey's shield, to make the poore maid stone, now nurse doth threat Vnlesse she will in gentle manner yeeld, she would to morrow shew how in a heat She would haue made away her desperate life, and she must tell the man that forc'd that strife within her brest through feare she thus did frame and made her toung ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... of trust and longing, ventured himself on the wave, and as soon as he felt the cold water creeping above his knees lost his trust, and so lost his buoyancy, and was ready to go down like a stone? He had so little faith, that he was beginning to sink; he had so much that he put out his hand—a desperate hand it was—and cried, 'Lord, save me!' And the hand came, and that steadied him, and bore him up till the water was beneath the soles of his feet again. 'Lord! I ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... she did Jeff look so miserable. Perhaps some time she would reward him—after a long while, though. Thus, poor Jeff spent many a wretched hour cursing his fate and cursing Pick Lawrence. He thought he would create a diversion by paying desperate attention to Margaret's guest; but it resolved itself on the first opportunity into his opening his heart and confiding all his woes to her. In doing this he fell into the greatest contradiction, declaring one moment ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... Portugal, and his ostentatious passion for Leonora de Guzman, who bore him a large family of sons, set Peter an example which he did not fail to better. It may be that his early death, during the great plague of 1350, at the siege of Gibraltar, only averted a desperate struggle with his legitimate son, though it was a misfortune in that it removed a ruler of eminent capacity, who understood his subjects well enough not to go too ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to tell Laura and Marian how my desperate venture had ended, and what the next event in our lives was likely to be. I left all details to be described later in the day, and hastened back to St. John's Wood, to see the person of whom Count Fosco had ordered the fly, when he went ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... dance, was now freed. And Monday—when she had promised to go to town and look for hats with Dorothy, and Tuesday, when those women were coming for lunch—it was all miraculously cancelled. A mere chance had loosed the bonds that neither her own desperate resolution nor Bert's could break. She was Nancy Bradley again, a wife and mother and housekeeper first, and everything ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... realise their position they found themselves being carried along in the human stream well out of reach of the blows being showered down by the rallying party from the house, who literally drove their enemies before them, at first step by step, striking back in their own defence, rendered desperate by their position, then giving up and seeking refuge in flight, when with a rush their companions gave way more ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... seeing that her secret had been discovered handed the rings to Ethel saying that she should kill herself. The girls, seeing that she was desperate, replied that as one of their "seven laws" was to "render service," if she would confess why she had taken the rings they would shield her. Overjoyed, the girl did so. She told everything. She had done ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... Romans caught them by the middle, and destroyed at once their ships and themselves who were taken in them. And for such as were drowning in the sea, if they lifted their heads up above the water, they were either killed by darts, or caught by the vessels; but if, in the desperate case they were in, they attempted to swim to their enemies, the Romans cut off either their heads or their hands; and indeed they were destroyed after various manners every where, till the rest being put to flight, were forced to get upon the land, while the vessels encompassed ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... "dangerous" man. And when it was noised abroad that he had proposed that all the colored men of the county should band together to protect themselves against this evil, as he chose to regard it, he was at once branded not only as "dangerous" but as a "desperate" and "pestiferous" nigger, instead of being ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... been these impressions upon his imagination, they were soon thrown off, and the mad youth rushed on in his desperate career of vice and folly. Is he then left to fill up the measure of his iniquities? No, the Lord has a great work for him to do. HIS hand is not shortened that he cannot save. Bunyan has to be prepared for his work; and if terrors will not stop him, manifested mercies ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... further up the river, when we discovered the European boats and crews lying at anchor abreast of the smoking ruins of what had been a Malay town. Here we learnt that the pirates had been completely routed, after a desperate resistance, that four large towns had been burnt, and seventy-five brass guns of the country, called leilas, had been captured. The victory, however, had not been gained without loss on our side, and had the pirates ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... Otherwise, says Roland-Holst, "the greater has been the success of the working people at the beginning, the greater has been the terror of the middle classes," and as a consequence the measures of repression in the end have been proportionately desperate. But this applies only when such strikes are for aggressive ends, like that of 1910 in France, and promise nothing to any element of society ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... you can give me, doubtless, further proof. You have now a desperate woman to deal with, and if you have lied to me, I will be revenged on both ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... sadly changed. Instead of being one of the most light-hearted girls, I heard that she used to sit day after day in her mother's house and wring her hands and weep and that her mother's heart was almost broken. Friends feared that Lucy was losing her mind and might do some desperate deed, but she did not. I left about that time to teach school in a distant village, and when I returned home I heard sad tidings of poor Lucy. She was a mother, but not a wife. Her brothers had grown angry with her for tarnishing their family name, of which they were ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... himself. He had read the 'Anabasis,' some Herodotus, three plays of Euripides, and was now making some desperate efforts on Aeschylus and Sophocles. Any Plato? David made a face. He had read two or three dialogues in English; didn't want to go on, didn't care about ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... who was as susceptible to the temperature of rooms as a thermometer, tried each window in succession during the afternoon, and came to the desperate conclusion that the rain came from all quarters of the leaden ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... did not march away with music and banners. They went in silence, looked at and gazed after by eyes filled with tears. They went to meet, not an equal, but a superior—to fight five times their number—to make a desperate stand—to stop the advance of the enemy, and then, when their ammunition gave out, seek the protection of rocks, of ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... Vaudois hero, disabled by age and wounds, was still alive—an exile at Geneva—and he was consulted on the subject. Javanel embraced the project with, enthusiasm; and the invasion of the valleys was resolved upon! A more daring, and apparently more desperate ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... standing up well under the attack of the monster he had first wounded. Ned, watching his chance, got in several blows, first at one and then at the other of the huge creatures. The third devil fish, which had not been wounded, had disappeared. Finally Koku, with a desperate blow, succeeded in severing the tail from the beast attacking him, ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... before quoted. "The laws and customs of England conspire to sink this class of English women into a state of vice and misery below that which necessarily belongs to their condition. Hence their extreme degradation, their troopers' oaths, their love of gin, their desperate recklessness, and the shortness of their ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... many desperate attempts which were made from time to time to dethrone her, the following ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... pass, of course. One need not be derisively cynical over that. Infatuation succeeds infatuation. Dream succeeds dream. The loyalty of a life-long love was not his. His life ended indeed before youth's desperate experiments were over, before the reaction set in. But the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... when everything went wrong at Plumfield; times were hard, the school dwindled, Jo overworked herself and had a long illness; Laurie and Amy were abroad, and the Bhaers too proud to ask help even of those as near and dear as this generous pair. Confined to her room, Jo got desperate over the state of affairs, till she fell back upon the long-disused pen as the only thing she could do to help fill up the gaps in the income. A book for girls being wanted by a certain publisher, she hastily scribbled a little story describing a few scenes and ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... possible on this memorable night that within a few days these two Democratic chieftains would be challenging each other and engaging in a desperate struggle to decide the question of ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... feather worn by a warrior represents an enemy slain or captured—man, woman or child; but the Dakotas, before they became desperate under the cruel warfare of their enemies, generally spared the lives of their captives, and never killed women or infants, except in rare instances, under the lex talionis. ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... he looked up at her, and their eyes met, hers with desperate expectation and his holding her gaze in an unmoved questioning. "Did she give it to you?" he asked, and she shook her head with a negation almost imperceptible. "No," said Jeffrey to himself. "She didn't have it. Who did ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... of ships bound to New Zealand. They keep further north for Auckland, further south for New Plymouth, and the ship had struck just between these two points, on the desert region of the shores of Ika-na-Mani, a dangerous, difficult coast, and infested by desperate characters. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... hold our case to be desperate, to whom the disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the vast heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought nothing but a mood of deep pessimism. The sentiment is perhaps natural, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... enlightened freedom to our minds, who are themselves the slaves of passion, avarice, and pride. They offer us their protection! Yes, such protections as vultures give to lambs,—covering and devouring them! They call on us to barter all the good we have inherited and proved, for the desperate chance of something better, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... promontory at Beachley, but from which they were quickly dislodged by Massy. We know he was present when the same effort was renewed a month later, and had a second time to be relinquished, Sir John Winter only effecting his escape by hard riding, and making a desperate descent upon the river Wye, by which he was only just enabled to reach the Prince's ships ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... repeatedly wounded, he survived twelve years of constant fighting with no {21} more serious casualty than a broken arm which he carried away from the siege of Orbitello. By the time peace was signed at Muenster he had become a soldier well proved in the most desperate war which had been ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... have been commonly found insurmountable. The latter being the intention of this book, the task has been undertaken with a perfect consciousness of all its difficulties, and with scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de Societe in this country; still useful glances may possibly be made even in that direction, and we trust that the fidelity of one or two of our portraits will be recognized by the looker-on, although they will very ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... first of a five and came Of a coifed sisterhood. (O Deutschland, double a desperate name! O world wide of its good! But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town, Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood: From life's dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... escaped all the dangers he so recklessly braved, and all the bad speculations he embarked in turned out good. Somehow or other, the moment he took part in a desperate scheme it ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... not doing anything but drill in Archangel. Of course he had only half-truth. That is the way misunderstandings and bad feelings feed. At that moment a company of the Archangel Regiment was at a desperate front, Bolsheozerki, standing shoulder to shoulder with "M" Company out of "I" Company's own battalion. But these American soldiers at that moment with their feelings growing warmer with expression of them, thought only of the drilling Russian soldiers in Archangel and ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... with me, I will goe seeke the King, [Sidenote: Come, goe] This is the very extasie of Loue, Whose violent property foredoes[4] it selfe, And leads the will to desperate Vndertakings, As oft as any passion vnder Heauen, [Sidenote: passions] That does afflict our Natures. I am sorrie, What haue you giuen him any hard ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... entangled itself in its toils. No burning language of prophecy would be too solemn and too stinging for the premeditated wretchedness, and incurable calamity, of such a bond. No; if we must violate the simplicity of our national interests by such degrading, and such desperate involvements—if we should not shrink from this conspiracy against mankind, let it, at least, not be consummated in the face of day; let us at once abandon the hollow pretences of human honesty; let us pledge ourselves to a perpetual league of rapine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... some particular hints, concerning his character, that excited my curiosity, and I ventured to ask him a few questions. He was reserved in his replies, but, after hesitating for some time, he owned, that he had understood abroad, that Montoni was a man of desperate fortune and character. He said something of a castle of Montoni's, situated among the Apennines, and of some strange circumstances, that might be mentioned, as to his former mode of life. I pressed him to inform me further, but I believe the strong interest I felt was visible in my manner, and ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... arm! With the same astounding discovery came one more terrible: that arm belonged to the weight that was pressing him down; and now, assisted by his struggles, it was slowly slipping toward the brink of the ledge and the abyss below! With a desperate effort he turned on his side, caught the body,—as such it was,—dragged it back on the ledge, at the same moment that, freeing his head from its covering,—a feminine skirt,—he discovered it ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... the first. You see the very doom burning out of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Bayard announced that he would cast the single vote of his State for Jefferson. "You cannot well imagine the clamor and vehement invective to which I was subjected for some days," he wrote to Hamilton. "We had several caucuses. All acknowledged that nothing but desperate measures remained, which several were disposed to adopt, and but few were willing openly to disapprove. We broke up each time in confusion and discord, and the manner of the last ballot was arranged but a few minutes before the ballot was taken." How narrowly the Federalists ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... point Mrs. Langton came rustling down, and Vincent rose to meet her, with a desperate hope that he would be asked to spend the whole of his last evening with them—a hope that ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... and they echoed the word: the sound, bandied about at random, came at last to ears which, but for its universality, it might never have reached; and at the very crisis when I had tried my last effort and knew not what to do, Fortune looked in at me one morning, as I sat in drear and almost desperate deliberation on my bedstead, nodded with the familiarity of an old acquaintance—though God knows I had never met her before—and threw a prize into ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... water birds the wing quills disappear nearly all at once and the birds are unable {64} for a short time to fly; but being at home in the water, where they secure their food, they are not left in the helpless, even desperate, condition in which a land bird would find itself if unable to fly. In a few cases birds begin to migrate before this moulting takes place, but with the great majority the moult is complete before they leave ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... thought Charteris, rapidly diagnosing the case. 'By Jove, if he comes rotting about with me I'll kill him.' Having to do anything in a desperate hurry always made Charteris's temper slightly villainous. He turned the corner at a sharp trot, and came upon two youths who seemed to be engaged in the harmless occupation of trying to ride a bicycle. They were of the type which ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Accordingly Japan, having rightly or wrongly concluded that not only her civilisation but her national life, her independent existence, were menaced by the presence and the increasing number of these foreigners, she decided, on the principle that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, to expel them and to effectually seal her country against any possibility of future foreign invasions. I am not, I may remark, defending her action in the matter; I am only putting forward ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... desires, save a longing for his fair young wife, were lost out of his mind, and he thought of Bertha only in a dim and formless way—feeling his need of her and dumbly wondering why she did not come. In final, desperate agony, he lifted the phial of strychnine to his lips, hoping that it might put an end to his suffering; but before this act was completed a sweet, devouring flood of forgetfulness swept over him, his hand dropped, and the unopened bottle ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... actually joined the Duke of Monmouth?" exclaimed Alice, turning pale. "I urged him not to join so desperate a cause as that which the Duke's must be when he comes ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... little time it was all we could do to keep a few yards in front of the flames, the heat of which was roasting our backs and necks. At last, in a desperate effort, we managed to get slightly ahead, and when we descended—some of the animals rolled down—into a deep depression, we found ourselves clear of the smoke. The wind was unfortunately blowing the way we were travelling, but in that depression ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... shining in the sun, flung back the light, from end to end of the undulating column. Billows of smoke, out-puffing unexpectedly, anywhere and everywhere along the line, marked down the tragedies where desperate bunnies, scudding from cover and racing up or down before the red men, were targets for fiercely biting hail of lead from two or three or more of ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the bird, which, after striking at him two or three times, made a desperate effort to rise, fluttering and beating with its wings, and hopping a little, but trailing its broken leg as it made for the pen, within which were all ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... Triggvi yielded to his false friend's wish, and on reaching the place of meeting he was foully murdered with all his men. His cousin, King Gudrod Biornson, was at about this same time surprised at a feast by Harald Greyfell and slain after a desperate fight. ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... numbers by numerous sanguinary battles; "* (* Battles and Leaders volume 2 page 389.) and he records his conviction that pity for his troops had much to do with the general's inaction. Hill would have probably come nearer the truth if he had said that the tired regiments were hardly to be trusted in a desperate assault, unsupported by artillery, on a position which was even stronger than that which they had stormed with such loss at ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... used a slow match," put in Jack. "These captains always have their enemies, who are desperate fellows and ready to do almost anything to injure them. The steamer might be set afire by means of a slow match, which would give the villain ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... lamentations, vii. 3—months in which the brooding mind of the sufferer has had time to pass from resignation to perplexity, and almost to despair. Again, the words of Job are not to be taken too seriously; they are, as he says himself, the words of a desperate man, vi. 26, and the commendation in the epilogue may be taken to apply rather to his general attitude than to his particular utterances. Some kind of introduction there must undoubtedly have been; otherwise the speeches, ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... not what to do, father; I find myself in a most desperate condition; and so is the colonel, for ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... deft-fingered man with a beard, twirled the waxen-faced figure to show the "semi-princesse back" and the "near-Empire front." Corn-blue chiffon and panne velvet are not much worn in Fourteenth Street. The auctioneer grew desperate. "Twenty-five dollars," he repeated with such scorn that the timid woman who had made the bid wished herself at home ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... the Spanish sharpshooters shot our mules as soon as they came anywhere near the lines, and it was impossible to move supplies. Very soon after the firing began our Colonel was killed, and the most of our other officers were killed or wounded, so that the greater part of that desperate battle was fought by some of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry without officers; or, at least, if there were any officers around, we neither saw them nor heard their commands. The last command I heard our Captain ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... days, just before formality had become unbearable, and the reaction of simplicity had set in; and Estelle had undone two desperate knots in the green and yellow silks before the preliminary compliments were over, and Lady ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have drawn any one of us from our places that hour. We watched, holding our breaths. The mate paused in her search; we could hear the wash beating along her sides; reared her neck as high as she could reach, blind and lonely in all that loneliness of the sea, and sent one desperate bellow booming across the swells as an oyster-shell skips across a pond. Then she made off to the westward, the sun shining on the white head and the wake behind it, till nothing was left to see but a little pin point of silver on the horizon. We stood on our course again; and the Rathmines, ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... hour of this, Schott gets desperate. "Yes, sir," says he, shoutin' above Dowd's monologue, "but what about this ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... vandalism. It being one of my principal duties, as Constitutional Emperor and Defender of this vast Empire, to adopt all measures to render effective the security of the country, and its defence efficient against further and desperate attempts which its enemies may adopt; and also to deprive, as far as possible, the inhabitants of that kingdom from continuing to act hostilely against Brazil—tyrannizing over my good and honourable subjects— deem it well to order that there ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... side, which effectually awakened me; and then I saw, or rather heard, that a perfect deluge of rain was descending upon our luckless heads, and that I had been reposing in the centre of a large puddle. This state of things was desperate; and as the poor Indians seemed to be as thoroughly uncomfortable as they possibly could be, I proposed to start again—which we did, and before daylight were many a mile from our wretched encampment. As the sun rose the weather cleared up, and soon after we came to the end of Knee ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... thundered the other, who was himself quite nonplussed over the situation, and felt Titus's bold chatter would goad him into something desperate. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... in a leisurely manner to my side and looked out. As he did so I felt his hand tighten on my shoulder with a desperate grip. Down the wall of red which surrounded us was coming an object of some kind. The thing was fully seventy-five yards long and half as wide at its main portion, while long irregular streams extended for a hundred ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... hear you, desperate brother, in your might Whistle and howl; I shall not tarry long, And though the day be blind and fierce, the night Be dense and wild, I still am glad and strong To meet you face to face; through all your gust and drifting With brow held high, my joyous hands ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... quick ears detected the sound of footsteps on the stairs. He drew both his pistols, and prepared for a desperate encounter. ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... not guess, while Felix carried a similar article in reserve, as it were. The little man's earnestness was so convincing that the King could not choose but believe that some scheme that offered salvation was in train. But it might fail! The door might be forced before his own desperate alternative could be adopted, and the consequences to Joan of failure were too horrible to be risked. A panel shivered into splinters and the muzzles of two revolvers frowned ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... her, especially as Father Roche and Mr. M'Cabe, his curate, were obliged to give her up, and forbid her the parish; but Funny Eye only winks and laughs at them and the world. She's the last, sir—but I'll be on the look out, God willin', for a few more desperate cases to crown our victory over the dev—ahem! over Satan ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... a Deputy Sheriff of Arizona, a member of the Northwest Mounted Police, and a desperate ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share in her escape. The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was frightened, she was desperate—what more natural than that she should be grateful to her rescuer? The pity was that her gratitude put her, in the law's eyes and the world's, on a par with her abominable husband. Archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do; he had also made her understand that ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... Oneida was launched the gallant young officers resolved to celebrate the event by giving a ball. "This was an enterprise of a desperate character;—building a brig hundreds of miles from a ship-yard was a trifle to giving a ball in the wilderness. True, one fiddle and half a dozen officers were something; refreshments and a military ball-room might be hoped for; but where, pray, were the ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... like a fat cat, and made a desperate search for the path, and this time he actually succeeded in finding it. He chuckled to himself as he plunged into the passage and began to climb. He had gone about a third of the way up, when he reached the narrowest ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... never think hardly of her, for she had been brought up in that atmosphere of almost desperate pride which is too frequently the curse of the poverty-stricken aristocrat. She made a ghastly mistake, and paid for it afterwards every day of her life. And she was urged into it by her father, who declined to recognize me in any way, and by her mother, who made her life at home ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... fires she had wilfully hidden, even from herself. For four years she had lived a life of desperate calculation against all those things she most dreaded, till she felt she had converted herself into a machine free from all trammeling emotions, equipped solely to execute the purpose she ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... And ruddy cherries eaten, and the dogs Mumbling the bones, this elder brother of mine— This man, that never felt an ache or pain In his broad, well-knit frame, and never knew The trouble of an unforgiven grudge, The sting of a regretted meanness, nor The desperate struggle of the unendowed For place and for possession—he began To sing a rhyme that he himself had wrought; Sending it out with cogitative pause, As if the scene where he had shaped it first Had rolled it back ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... it is anything but complimentary to the lady it mentions," I remarked. "He must have had, or imagined he had, some desperate grievance, to provoke him to the use of such plain language in regard to one he can still characterize as ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... twenty minutes the serio-comic game went forward merrily: the women playing in desperate earnest; the men making broad farce out of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... out a decided individuality, to the good points of which we could not lay claim, and into the faults of which we could not but be afraid of falling. For him who felt any thing productive in himself it was a desperate condition. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... fainted. He felt as if he were losing his reason, and he longed to die. His brain refused to recognize what had happened. He kept thinking that there was a mistake, some misunderstanding, and that his plight was not as desperate and deplorable as he imagined. Yet the actual fact remained, and ever darker ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... almost indispensable possession both by Royalists and Parliamentarians. Its vigorous resistance to the King is one of the outstanding incidents of the war; Blake, afterwards Admiral, conducting the marine defence. The beseiged were successful after two months of the most desperate fighting, and the women of Lyme proved Amazonian in the help they gave their menfolk. In 1672 the Dutch gave the English fleet a trouncing within sight ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... multiplied and tenacious threads of his web, but still more redoubtable to himself than to his enemies, soon caught in his own meshes,[4138] believing that France and the universe conspire against him, deducing with wonderful subtlety the proofs of this chimerical conspiracy, made desperate, at last, by his over-plausible romance, and strangling in the cunning toils which, by dint of his own logic and imagination, he has ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... knights, who had ever lived in the realms of romance. Maria addressed the Hungarian barons in an impressive speech in Latin, the language then in use in the diets of Hungary, faithfully describing the desperate state of her affairs. She committed herself and her children to their protection, and urged them to drive the invaders from the land or to perish in the attempt. It was just the appeal to rouse such hearts to a phrensy of enthusiasm. The youth, the beauty, the calamities of ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... back just as they had thought to start for Behring's Strait. On the 12th August the ice broke up, and Parry wanted to send his men to Europe, and himself complete by land the exploration of the districts he had discovered, but Captain Lyon dissuaded him from a plan so desperate. The vessels therefore returned to England with all hands after an absence of twenty-seven months, having lost but five men, although two consecutive winters had been ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Ephesus who had become a Christian, and of whom St. John was very fond, got into trouble while St. John was away, and had to flee for his life into the mountains. There he joined a band of robbers, and was so daring and desperate that they soon chose him as their captain. St. John came back, and found the poor lad gone. St. John had stood at the foot of the cross years before, and heard his Lord pardon the penitent thief; and he knew how to deal with such wild souls. And what did he do? Give him up for ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... Union army. Their commanders always pushed them forward and always fresh men were coming. Skilled cannoneers sent grape shot, shell and round shot whistling through the Southern ranks. The Northern cavalry whipped around the Southern flanks and despite the desperate efforts of Ashby, Sherburne, and the others, began to clip off ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... infantry, and Kitchener's Horse to stave off the Boers, who were already descending by the same steep kloof up which the yeomen had climbed, the General bent all his efforts to getting the big naval gun out of danger. Only six oxen were left out of a team of forty, and so desperate did the situation appear that twice dynamite was placed beneath the gun to destroy it. Each time, however, the General intervened, and at last, under a stimulating rain of pom-pom shells, the great cannon lurched ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the time we write, Florence had passed through her ages of primitive religions and republican simplicity, and was fast hastening to her downfall. The genius, energy, and prophetic enthusiasm of Savonarola had made, it is true, a desperate rally on the verge of the precipice; but no one man has ever power to turn back the downward slide of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... moment a mist floated before my eyes—I endeavoured to shout—but although I used the utmost exertion, I could not produce a sound—I felt as if palsied and enchained—my situation was desperate—what species of civility could I expect from the spirits, (for that they were supernatural beings I could no longer doubt) of those chairmen who during their mortal career are so noted for their brutality? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... smashed the bones; further, he generally broke both its legs in order to prevent it from wandering of nights; and as if that were not enough, he bored holes in the stomach, the shoulders, and the lungs, and filled the holes with stones, so that even if the poor ghost should succeed by a desperate effort in dragging his mangled body out of the grave, he would be so weighed down by this ballast of stones that he could not get very far. However, after roaming up and down in this pitiable condition for a time in their old ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... conclusions about Esme," advised his friend. "Most men think her a desperate flirt. She does like attention and admiration. What woman doesn't? And Esme is ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and wanted to have "a healthy dash" of some kind. A class of Irish exquisites, they appeared to be,—good for a fight, a card-party, or a hurdle jumping,—but entirely too Quixotic for the sober requirements of Yankee warfare. When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted, the Irish brigade was called upon. But, ordinarily, they were regarded, as a party of mad fellows, more ornamental than useful, and entirely too clannish and factious to be entrusted with power. Meagher himself seemed to be less erratic ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. The nation has suffered its tenth year of ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of rodent animals, basking upon some sunny bank, raising their great rabbit-like heads, and gazing curiously at the passing periagua. Perhaps before the travellers had lost sight of them, the whole gang would be seen suddenly starting from their attitudes of repose, and in desperate rush making for the water. Behind them would appear the yellow-spotted body of the jaguar—the true tyrant of the Amazonian forest, who, with a single blow of his powerful paw would stretch a chiguire ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... a young man is as bad as the man who slays the innocence of a young girl. And that's what she did. Finally, when this had lasted for a year and a half, and Harfleur had gone back to England, one day, when I was perfectly desperate and could have killed her, Milly, as she lay at full length on her damned sofa—pardon, my dear, no, don't kiss my hand, child, don't—dressed in some rose-colored stuff all trailing about her and her hands clasped ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... such desperate efforts to learn all about poetry that her system got quite out of order. But although she did not in the course of the day hit upon anything, she quite casually succeeded in her dreams in devising eight lines; so concluding her toilette and her ablutions, she hastily jotted ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the Indian a jug of whiskey, or a small bag of silver, for the fraud, and so become lords of the soil. Great dissatisfaction arose, and lives were lost. An anonymous letter opened the eyes of government. The white speculators were so desperate and dangerous that any other mode of information was unsafe. Investigators were appointed to examine into the validity of Creek sales, and the examiners met at the time I went to witness a great Indian religious ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... whose sickness being desperate, did kill her poor father; and he being dead for sorrow, she could not recover, nor desire to live, but from that time do languish more and more, and so ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... all, has my beloved to act. If she forgive me easily, I resume perhaps my projects:—if she carry her rejection into violence, that violence may make me desperate, and occasion fresh violence. She ought, since she thinks she has found the women out, to consider ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... against the strength and ferocity of savage animals were peculiarly distinguished by the name of bestiarii. In general these unhappy persons were slaves or condemned criminals, who, by adopting this profession, purchased an uncertain prolongation of existence, but freemen sometimes gained a desperate subsistence by thus hazarding their lives; and in the decline of Rome, knights, senators, and even the emperors sometimes appeared in the arena, at the instigation of a vulgar and degrading thirst for ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... that the colonel was a cool and desperate man, who was absolutely determined that nothing should stand in the way of his little game, like those out-and-out pirates who will leave no survivor from a captured ship. Well, every moment now is precious, so if you feel equal to it we shall go down to ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... she could do to force the words from her dry throat. With a desperate effort she pulled herself together and tried to talk ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... even when we meditate a sacrifice. We are easily led at such times to make a compromise of the question; and this was my present resource. I resolved that very night to ride to Versailles; if I found affairs less desperate than I now deemed them, I would return without delay to my troop; I had a vague idea that my arrival at that town, would occasion some sensation more or less strong, of which we might profit, for the purpose of leading forward ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Wolfe, disabled by fever, began to sink under the fearful strain. He laid before his chief officers three desperate methods of attacking Montcalm, all of which they opposed, but proposed to convey five thousand men above the town, and thus draw Montcalm from his intrenchments. General Wolfe acquiesced and prepared to ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... I will goe seeke the King, [Sidenote: Come, goe] This is the very extasie of Loue, Whose violent property foredoes[4] it selfe, And leads the will to desperate Vndertakings, As oft as any passion vnder Heauen, [Sidenote: passions] That does afflict our Natures. I am sorrie, What haue you giuen him any ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... him, I'd have deceived God Himself—I was so desperate. You've never been right down in the mud. You can't understand ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... stratagem. Application was made to Eusebius, whose ambassadorial character would protect him from an outbreak, and he was requested to let Perozes know how he was situated, and exhort him to endeavor to extricate himself by counsel rather than by a desperate act. Eusebius upon this employed the Oriental method of apologue, relating to Perozes how a lion in pursuit of a goat got himself into difficulties, from which all his strength could not enable him to make his escape. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... much!' he groaned, in the silence of his chamber. 'She's doing it with malice. I'll not be trifled with. I—I'll do something desperate. I'll pretend to faint, and she'll have to get down and bandage ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... of the colonists, the problem of fighting the full power of England was apparently a desperate one. The militia, with superior numbers, had chased the British from Concord, and had made a stubborn defence at Bunker Hill; but the British were about to move with overwhelming strength. To raise, equip, clothe, and feed ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... horse-hirer to let us have the horses a few hours earlier. In spending time in long conversations mixed with civilities and bows the Japanese are masters. Of this bad habit, which still often makes the European desperate, it will not perhaps be long necessary to complain, for everything indicates that the Japanese too will soon be carried along at the endlessly roaring speed of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... too much broken to resent this laugh as furiously as he might, had he been a degree less desperate. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... slipped through his horse's bridle; with the other he flicked the pebbles in the road with the tip of his riding-whip. Cannon-balls were plowing the earth about him. He seemed indifferent to this great drama on which hung all his hopes. Never had he played so desperate a game—six years of victory against the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Philadelphia. Whatever difficulties they, or their ancestors, struggled formerly with, are now over; their lands are cleared, and in the bosom of a fine country, with a sure market for every article of produce they can possibly raise, and entirely out of the reach of the most desperate predatory ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... Sophy; the delightful image of her ideal is too deeply graven in her heart. She can love no other; she can make no one happy but him, and she cannot be happy without him. She would rather consume herself in ceaseless conflicts, she would rather die free and wretched, than driven desperate by the company of a man she did not love, a man she would make as unhappy as herself; she would rather die than live ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... 1811.—"I have hardly patience to take up my pen But I shall do something desperate, if I don't relieve my ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... was praying in the chapel and I began to think seriously of all my troubles, how dark and gloomy they looked and how weak and cowardly I seemed! Suddenly a little voice within me began to ask: 'Why don't you make some desperate effort to save those whose misfortunes are making you so miserable? Why would you not try some daring sacrifice for instance, so that your brother be set free and the ultimate recovery and conversion of his wife be obtained?' I hesitated ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... accompany the doing of a desperate deed, there comes in the minds of men a dead calm. The still small voice of Wisdom, unheard while Passion's tempest was raging, whispers grave counsel or mild reproof; and Folly, who, seen athwart the storm-cloud, sublime in the glare ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... eyes. He had the letter now, and a gleam of joy danced in his eyes as he tore it open. A hasty glance showed him what his prize was; then, coolly and deliberately he settled himself to read, regarding neither Rischenheim's nervous hurry nor my desperate, angry glance that glared up at him. He read leisurely, as though he had been in an armchair in his own house; the lips smiled and curled as he read the last words that the queen had written to her lover. He had indeed come on more than ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... sought to force the division of our fleet among our ports. That the Spanish Government was thus goaded and taunted, at the critical period when Cervera was lying in Santiago, is certain. To that, most probably, judging from the words used in the Cortes, we owe the desperate sortie which delivered him into our hands and reduced Spain to inevitable submission. "The continuance of Cervera's division in Santiago, and its apparent inactivity," stated a leading naval periodical in Madrid, issued two days before the destruction of the squadron, "is causing ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... Tom discovered it was no other than Van Butchell,{1} whom he observed to Bob, there was little doubt had been summoned on some desperate case, and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... After desperate charging with horse and man, much blood was shed; and our noble Guy laid about him like a lion, among the princes; here lay one headless, another without a leg or an arm, and there a horse. Guy still, like Hercules, charged desperately, and killed a German Prince and his horse under ...
— Traditional Nursery Songs of England - With Pictures by Eminent Modern Artists • Various
... so close to me in his desperate efforts, that I could have touched his horns with the muzzle of my gun; and I had prepared to give him a blow whenever I could get a good chance. I never saw a creature behave so fiercely. The fact was, that ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... Why do you stay so long, my lords of France? Yon island carrions,[15] desperate of their bones, Ill-favour'dly become the morning field: Their ragged curtains poorly are let loose,[16] And our air shakes them passing scornfully: Big Mars seems bankrupt in their beggar'd host, And their executors, the knavish crows, Fly o'er them, all impatient ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... the Crown-Prince, he has not fallen desperate; no; but appears to have strange schemes in him, deep under cover. "He has said to a confidant [Wilhelmina, it is probable], 'As to his ill-treatment, he well knew how to free himself of that [will fly to foreign parts, your Highness?], ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Every commander fought his own part of the battle to the best of his ability, and I think the feeling of all was that unless they won they would have to go to Richmond, as the enemy was in the rear, which fact made us desperate in meeting and defeating the continued attacks of the enemy. I sent for reinforcements once when the enemy was clear around my right flank and in my rear, and they sent me a part of the Eighth Indiana, two companies of the Third Illinois Cavalry, and a section of a battery. The battery ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... Desperate was the defence in the Serpent, and there was the heaviest destruction of men done by the forecastle crew, and those of the forehold, for in both places the men were chosen men, and the ship was highest, but in the middle of the ship the people were thinned. Now when Earl Eirik saw there were but ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... matter to me, knowing as I did from past experience that I cannot sleep on the ground long without growing very tired, when I lose my nerve and am afraid to do anything. I did not like to think of the possibility of either growing desperate and wanting to turn back or breaking down under the strain of going on. Some one would have to go back for the tube, and time was precious now. It would be trying to lose a day. While I sat rather disconsolate ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... impossible positions. The idea of a profile view seemed particularly strange to them, and they always presented either their back or their front view. The poor things got more and more nervous, the men roared, I was desperate,—altogether it ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... fire and by the light of a bright pinon blaze I began to read Great Expectations, a paper edition with the last leaves gone having gotten into camp. As I read Pip's interview in the twilight with the convict on the dreary marshes I was in deep sympathy with the desperate hunger of the terrible man, and when Mrs. Joe buttered the end of the loaf and carved off the slices I myself was hungry enough to cook supper over again. Butter had now been absent from my bill of fare, with a few exceptions, for nearly two years. I was careful to place my ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... shields with a clashing noise, while the ranks behind shot a shower of arrows among the Saxons. These at once replied. The combat was not continued long at a distance, for the Danes with a mighty shout rushed upon the Saxons. These stood their ground firmly and a desperate conflict ensued. The Saxon chiefs vied with each other in acts of bravery, and singling out the leaders of the Danes engaged with them in ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... Isegrim both mad and desperate, so that he knew not how to express his fury; his wounds bled, his eyes smarted, and his whole body was oppressed. So that in the height of his fury he lifted up his foot and struck the fox so great a blow that he felled him to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... also, but Mr. Kendal stopped them, and lingered a moment or two, making an excuse of looking for a needless umbrella, but in fact to avoid the general gaze. As if making a desperate plunge, however, and looking up and down the broad street, so as to be secure that no acquaintance was near, he emerged with Albinia from the gate, and crossed the road as the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to time his old self rose against this new self that was the slave of comfort. It made desperate efforts to shake off the strangling lethargy. When he went about saying that he was getting rusty, that he ought never to have left Leeds, and that it would do him all the good in the world to go back there, he was saying what ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... community. But Montague was at an important crisis in a suit which he had taken up against the Tobacco Trust; and he had no idea that he was in any way concerned in what was taking place. The newspapers were all making desperate efforts to allay the anxiety—they said that all the trouble was over, that Dan Waterman had come to the rescue of the imperilled institutions. And Montague believed what he read, and ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... Margaret beckoned me, and I went out with her to bring in Silvio. He came to her purring. She took him up and handed him to me; and then did a thing which moved me strangely and brought home to me keenly the desperate nature of the enterprise on which we were embarked. One by one, she blew out the candles carefully and placed them back in their usual places. When she had finished she ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... Baba too, a Turkish cawass, is awfully bilious; he says he is 'sick from beating men, and it's no use, you can't coin money on their backs and feet when they haven't a para in the world.' Altogether everyone is gloomy, and many desperate. I never saw the aspect of ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... this, at the sack of Troy, he had shown a want of self-control, and yielded to a mad passion of desperate fighting that is not to be found in the Aeneas of the last ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... gave way. Its unseasoned troops fled into Brooklyn. There was the end of the island. They could go no farther without swimming. With a British fleet in the harbor under Admiral Lord Howe, the situation was desperate. Sir Henry had only to follow and pen them in and unlimber his guns. The surrender of more than half of Washington's army would have to follow. At headquarters, the most discerning minds saw that only a ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... same time the little principality of Amorbach was devastated by the French, Russian, and Austrian armies, marching and counter-marching across it. For years there was hardly a cow in the country, nor enough grass to feed a flock of geese. Such was the desperate plight of the family which, a generation later, was to have gained a foothold in half the reigning Houses of Europe. The Napoleonic harrow had indeed done its work, the seed was planted; and the crop would have surprised Napoleon. Prince Leopold, thrown upon his own resources at fifteen, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... and, second, for the arrival of this precious 'Merode' with the remaining half of the document. I've sent Dollops there to carry out his part of the programme, and when once I get the password Margot requires before she will hand over the paper, the game will be in my hands entirely. They are desperate to-night, Miss Lorne, and will stop at nothing—not even murder. There! the rug's replaced. Quick! lead me to the baron's room, there's not a minute ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Italy likewise the peoples that had come into collision and conflict gradually settled on a permanent footing and within more defined limits. The migrations over the Alps ceased, partly perhaps in consequence of the desperate defence which the Etruscans made in their more restricted home, and of the serious resistance of the powerful Romans, partly perhaps also in consequence of changes unknown to us on the north of the Alps. Between the Alps and the Apennines, as far south as the Abruzzi, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of the Venganza, as is often the case with cowards when driven to desperation, had become perfectly frantic, and also mutinous. With furious execrations, they compelled Captain Pinto to make a desperate attempt to board the American ship, and decide the action. For this purpose the helm of the guarda-costa was put hard down, and she immediately ran on board the Albatross, her bowsprit passing over that ship's larboard gangway, and coming in contact with the fore part ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... who was in that war, told me the following story. The Japanese troops were attacking one of the forts near Port Arthur with their usual desperate valour. They cut zig-zag trenches up the hillside, and finally stormed and took a Russian trench close under the guns of the fort. The Russians fled, leaving their dead and wounded behind. After the melee, when night fell, five Japanese found themselves in that particular trench with seven ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... great Lady, Why will you flatter thus a desperate Man That is quite cast away? O had you not Procur'd the Senates Warrant to enforce My stay, I had not heard of these sad News. What ...
— The Laws of Candy - Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (3 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... With a last desperate effort to free herself, which was futile, and with the dark face drawing with mocking slowness toward her own, she realized her utter helplessness and ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... not tell me that it was an accident," Mr. Quivey was saying, very decidedly. "She is just the sort of woman for desperate remedies; and she is tired of living, with that vampire friend of hers draining ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... with the Army of the Potomac on Malvern Hill (July 1, 1862) was a desperate position to attack in front, but it could have been turned on the right. The hill dominated the ground to the north, and also the road on which Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was approaching, and was ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... of the desperate battle for the defense of the mine, and the sound that had reached the two in ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... better known under the name of Milord Marshal, was the eldest son of William Keith, Earl Marshal of Scotland. He was an avowed partisan of the Stuarts, and did not lay down the arms he had taken up in their cause until it became utterly desperate, and drew upon its defenders useless dangers. When they were driven from their country, he renounced it, and took up his residence successively in France, Prussia, Spain, and Italy. The delicious country and climate of Valencia he ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... hapless M—— M——," said I to myself, "must have left her convent, desperate—nay, mad; for why does she still wear the habit of her order? Perhaps, though, she has got a dispensation to come here for the waters; that must be the reason why she has a nun with her, and why she has not left off her habit. At all events the journey must ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... might have thought that all trails led to the Star Circle Ranch, that gloomy night, for from every point of the compass came riders, alone, by twos, and by threes. Desperate, hard men, who had used their bodily strength to conquer the elements and to build up their herds, as mine-owners use machinery to crush the gold out of the ore. For this war of the sheep against the cattle was ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... and over frozen mountains, until they reached Quebec. On the last day of December, with the ground frozen and covered with snow, the two American armies made a combined attack on the city; but Quebec did not surrender, though the patriots fought with desperate courage and daring. The gallant Montgomery led his men up the heights, dashing forward with the cry, "Push on, my brave boys! Quebec is ours!" A volley from a cannon killed him and scattered his men. The Americans suffered terrible losses. In the death of General ...
— George Washington • Calista McCabe Courtenay
... strong current to endeavour to pass ahead of us and cut off our retreat; but in the eagerness of their pursuit they seemed to lose sight of this advantage, for they continued to head straight for us, while we, impelled by the full strength of our thirty paddles, now plied with desperate energy by our freely perspiring crew, gradually drew out and threw our pursuers still further on our quarter. Yet they were steadily nearing us, and I did not see how we could scrape clear without something in the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... moment after, left the office. Those who were present thought they saw in the stern, determined expression of his countenance grounds for apprehension and alarm; having the most extravagant opinion of the desperate and daring courage of the Americans, they looked to see the ensuing night signalized by some desperate attempt on the part of the seaman, to release his companions from imprisonment. Their apprehensions were confirmed in a space ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... be founded on some reasonable process, but it is not a process which we can follow or comprehend. And moreover the dictation is not continuous, or not continuous except in very lively and well-living natures; and betweenwhiles we must brush along without it. Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than the toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid judgment and prompt action are alone possible and right. As a matter of fact, there is no one so upright but he is influenced by the world's chatter; and no one so headlong ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a matter of fact, I'm a bit suspicious," I declared, still speaking in French. "Of late there was a desperate attempt ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... Wilkinson were directed against the Miamis and Shawnees, and served only to exasperate them. The burning of their towns, the destruction of their corn, and the captivity of their women and children, only aroused them to more desperate efforts to defend their country, and to harass their invaders." The review of Secretary of War Knox, communicated to President Washington on the twenty-sixth of December, 1791, however, contains the following: ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... doorways. Advertisement bills in blue and red were displayed on the lintels and doorposts, while fierce door-gods guarded against the admission of evil spirits. Brave indeed must be the spirits who venture within reach of such fierce bearded monsters, armed with such desperate weapons, as were here represented. I stood on the edge of the town overlooking the valley while my mule was being saddled. Patches of wheat and beans were scattered among fields of white-flowered poppy. Coolies carrying double buckets of water were winding up the sinuous ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... fight against your enemies." His twelve sons then took up their stand in twelve different places, leaving considerable intervals between one and another, and Jacob, a sword in his right hand and a bow in his left, advanced to the combat. It was a desperate encounter for him. He had to ward off the enemy to the right and the left. Nevertheless he inflicted a severe blow, and when a band of two thousand men beset him, he leapt up in the air and over them and vanished from their sight. Twenty-two myriads he slew on this day, and when evening came ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... softly to herself, and, with a great lump in her throat, sped swiftly through the village and up to the "Great House." The result of her interview with Miss Campion we have seen. Father Letheby has scored again. There were heavy bets of fifteen to one in half-gallons of porter, laid by desperate gamblers, that Father Letheby would make Mrs. Darcy wash her face. It was supposed to be a wild plunge in a hopeless speculation. I am told now, that the betting has gone up at the forge, and is now fifty to one that, before a month, she'll have a lace cap and "sthramers" like the maids ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... barbarism rather than a loss of personal freedom. In 1524 Cortex sent an officer "to reduce the people of Chiapas, who had revolted, which that commander effectually performed, for, when they could resist no longer, these desperate wretches cast themselves with their wives and children headlong from precipices, so that not above two thousand of them remained, whose offspring inhabit that province at this time." The inhabitants ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... found out what had become of her daughter, but was not a whit happier than before. Her case, on the contrary, looked more desperate than ever. As long as Proserpina was above ground there might have been hopes of regaining her. But now, that the poor child was shut up within the iron gates of the king of the mines, at the threshold of which lay the three-headed ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... Themistocles the patriots in convention at Corinth determined upon desperate resistance to the Barbarians. It was at first decided to concentrate a strong force in the Vale of Tempe, and at that point to dispute the advance of the enemy; but this being found impracticable, it was resolved that the first stand against the invaders should ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Cellini, and to conclude. On laying down his 'Memoirs,' let us be careful to recall our banished moral sense, and make peace with her, by passing a final judgment on this desperate sinner, which perhaps, after all, we cannot do better than by employing language of his own concerning a monk, a fellow-prisoner of his, who never, so far as appears, murdered anybody, but of whom Cellini none the less felt ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... there were others who had wandered in from the Koyukuk with the first frosts, foot-sore and dragging, the legs of their skin boots eaten to the ankle, and the taste of dog meat still in their mouths. Broken and dispirited, these had fared as well through that desperate winter as their brothers from up-river, and received pound for pound of musty flour, strip for strip of rusty bacon, lump for lump of precious sugar. Moreover, the price of no single thing had risen throughout ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... thus strongly and beautifully. It seemed to him, as if the river had something special to tell him, something he did not know yet, which was still awaiting him. In this river, Siddhartha had intended to drown himself, in it the old, tired, desperate Siddhartha had drowned today. But the new Siddhartha felt a deep love for this rushing water, and decided for himself, not to leave ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... sector collapse, which helped precipitate an unprecedented default on external loans later that year. Continued economic instability drove a 70% depreciation of the currency throughout 1999, which eventually forced a desperate government to "dollarize" the currency regime in 2000. The move stabilized the currency, but did not stave off the ouster of the government. The new president, Gustavo NOBOA has yet to complete negotiations for a long sought IMF accord. He will find it difficult to push ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... situation desperate Col'o Magaw dispatched a flag to Gen. Howe who Commanded in person, proposing to surrender on certain conditions, which not being agreed to, other terms were proposed and accepted. The garrison, consisting of 2673 privates, & 210 officers, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... which had been so desperate for the national administration, changed rapidly for the better with the victory at Gettysburg, which forced General Lee out of Pennsylvania and back into Virginia, and also by General Grant's wonderful series of victories at Vicksburg ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... and they made a rush past him for the open air. Taken by surprise, Sam was almost upset, and they took full advantage of the chance. A howl of pain showed that Tige had nipped the taller one, but he shook the dog off and ran after his companion, who was making a desperate effort to ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... fall into the weakness of their brethren. They turn over the opposing seat, elevate their nobler shins, and droop languid heads over the ticklish plush chair-back. Strange aliens lie spread over the seats. Nowhere will you see so many faces of curious foreign carving. It seems as though many desperate exiles, who never travel by day, use the Owl for moving obscurely from city to city. This particular train is bound south to Washington, and at least half its tenants are citizens of colour. Even the endless gayety of our dusky brother is not proof against ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... snapped the stranger, stamping his foot, "I am a swashing, ruffling, desperate Dick, and not to be made a common jest for Stratford dolts to giggle at What! These legs, that have put on the very gentleman in proud Verona's streets, laid in Stratford's common stocks, like a silly apprentice's slouching heels? Nay, nay; some one should taste old Bless-his-heart here first!" ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... shattered homes and ruins be She fights through dark and desperate days; Beside the watchers on the sea She ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... timid mind, the very function of the Creator, looked absurd and futile—hateful even. For these things, bearing, as it was possible, after all, no relation to actual life, had she spent her days in desperate service. Then, suddenly, it swept over her, like a blasting wave of ignited gas, that she never had had the pure scientific flame! She had not worked for Truth, but that David might reap great rewards. ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... friends, they were hurrying along, when the Indians opened a fire upon them. The horsemen galloped off in a cloud of dust, and reached the station in safety. The soldiers on foot, in their effort to escape, plunged into the cornfields on either side of the road, only to meet the enemy. A desperate fight commenced on both sides: two soldiers were killed; the rest—four of them having dangerous wounds—reached the pickets. The exasperated Indians, disappointed at the escape of this party, now wreaked their vengeance by killing all ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip
... Demons), landed his indiscreet relative, gave her four arquebuses for defence, and with an old woman nurse who had pandered to the lovers, left her to her fate. Her gallant threw himself into the surf, and by desperate effort gained the shore, with two more guns and a supply of ammunition. The ship weighed anchor, receded, vanished; they were left alone. Yet not so, for the demon-lords of the island beset them day and night, raging round their hut with a confused and ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the business of the community. The persecutions that our people had borne had schooled them to co-operation. They were ready, helping one another, to advance together to a common prosperity. They were under the leadership chiefly of the man who had guided them out of a most desperate condition of oppression toward the freedom of sovereign self-government. In that progress he had saved everything that was worthy in the Mormon communism; he had discarded much that was a curse. I knew that he ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... of life; comfortable life being altogether out of the question. The course of the administration of the civilized states, and the recent dire combustion into which they have almost unanimously rushed, as in emulation which of them should with the least reserve, and with the most desperate rapidity, annihilate the resources that should have been for the subsistence and competence of their people, have resulted in such destitution and misery in this country as were never known before, except ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... year of his residence in Virginia that the rebellion in Ireland broke out, and foremost among the patriots was young Robert Dulan, a brother of the doctor. All know how that desperate and fatal effort terminated. Soon after the martyrdom of the noble Emmet, young Dulan was arrested, tried, condemned, and followed his admired leader to the scaffold, leaving his heart-broken young wife and infant boy in extreme penury and destitution. As soon as she recovered from the first stunning ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... into a free-fall in 1999. The beginning of 1999 saw the banking sector collapse, which helped precipitate an unprecedented default on external loans later that year. Continued economic instability drove a 70% depreciation of the currency throughout 1999, which eventually forced a desperate government to dollarize the currency regime in 2000. The move stabilized the currency, but did not stave off the ouster of the government. The new president, Gustavo NOBOA has yet to complete negotiations for a long sought ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... once when his injured leg trailed in the snow. Still, with the most strenuous effort she had ever made she moved him a yard or so, and then staggering fell with her side against the sleigh. She felt faint with the pain of it, but with another desperate lift she drew him into the sleigh, and let him sink down gently upon the bag that still lay there. His eyes had shut again, and ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... much suffering and bloodshed—was again to be repeated. This attack has demanded thus far, as it will demand until the end, the united efforts of practically all the people of the earth in order to defeat this the most desperate attempt at conquest, undertaken under the most favorable conditions, and after the most perfect preparation known to history. If hesitation or treachery had arisen at any important point the well-laid plot would ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... whose growing power has at last obtained the name of enemies; the people with whom they have engaged this country in war, and against whom they now command our implicit support in every measure of desperate hostility—this people, despised as rebels, or acknowledged as enemies, are abetted against you, supplied with every military store, their interests consulted, and their ambassadors entertained, by your inveterate enemy! and our ministers dare not interpose with dignity or effect. Is this the honor ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... humans. They knew of the defeat and forced emigration of their fellow-Huks in other solar systems. They'd hidden from humans—and it must have outraged their pride. So they must be ready to put up a desperate and fanatical fight if they were ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... third time, with desperate vehemence, turning suddenly about and retiring a little distance, as if it were by no means for his own pleasure that ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... me," he said. "I'm a man of few words. You won't go further this voyage. Captain Barker has surrendered the ship. You'll drop those desperate things in your hands and go for'ard. ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... despair And deep reflections on his fair Had swell'd his heart, and made it rise And run in tears out at his eyes, And those sweet airs, which did appease Wild beasts, could give their lord no ease; Then, vex'd that so much grief and love Mov'd not at all the gods above, With desperate thoughts and bold intent, Towards the shades below he went; For thither his fair love was fled, And he must have her from the dead. There in such lines, as did well suit With sad airs and a lover's lute, And in the richest ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... his peace by flight to seek - But how then lecture, if he dar'd not speak! - Now as the Justice for the war prepared, He seem'd just then to question if he dared: "He may resist, although his power be small, And growing desperate may defy us all; One dog attack, and he prepares for flight - Resist another, and he strives to bite; Nor can I say, if this rebellious cur Will fly for safety, or will scorn to stir." Alarm'd by this, ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... very thing of all others best calculated to harass her mind and fill it with inexplicable mysteries. She constituted her own reason the sole judge; and then, dubious of the verdict, arraigned reason itself before itself. Now began the desperate struggle. Alone and unaided, she wrestled with some of the grimmest doubts that can assail a human soul. The very prevalence of her own doubts augmented the difficulty. On every side she saw the footprints of skepticism; in history, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... springing to his feet. "You must not forget that she is young and very beautiful and she'll probably be very poor. And God knows there are plenty of us who would like to marry her!" He took a turn or two up and down the room and then stopped before Thorpe, in whose eyes there was a new and desperate anxiety, born of alarm. "She wants me to arrange matters so that she can begin turning over this money soon after she comes down in September. She hasn't touched the principal. If she sticks to her intention, ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... Leigh and a small party of gentlemen rode, had made a succession of desperate charges into the midst of the fugitives; and he now said to Leigh and three ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... bygone days were designed by class-hatred, or hatred of race, are dying, very surely dying. The costermonger with his pearl-emblazoned coat has been driven even from that Variety Stage, whereon he sought a desperate sanctuary. The clinquant corslet of the Swiss girl just survives at bals costumes. I am told that the kilt is now confined entirely to certain of the soldiery and to a small cult of Scotch Archaicists. I have seen men flock from the boulevards of one capital ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... free and, a bit breathless, but with the same desperate gaiety, exclaimed: "If this is ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... once more the room from which Mr. Walters and his friends made so brave a defence. There is but little in its present appearance to remind one of that eventful night,—no reminiscences of that desperate attack, save the bullet-hole in the ceiling, which Mr. Walters declares shall remain unfilled as an evidence of the marked attention he has received at ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... cattle stolen, and have always attributed the thefts to the Whipples. All I know about the gang is that it was founded by a fellow named Whipple, an outlaw on the scout, who attracted to himself a desperate gang of fugitives from justice who had taken refuge in ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... might now come at any moment, but the man awaiting him had not yet made up his mind how to word what he had to say—how much to tell, how much to conceal from, his wife's old friend. He was only too well aware that if the desperate attempts which would soon be made to raise the Neptune were successful, and if its human freight were rescued alive, the fact that there had been a woman on board could not be concealed. Thousands would know to-night, and ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... to stake all and to lose—not only for ourselves, but for all others here—that is a weighty decision to make, Gordoon. But the trap promises. Let us think on it for a space. Do you also consult with the Rovers if they wish to take part in what may be desperate folly." ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... this grew desperate, but the more he drove his heels into the horse, the less he stirred him; and not having any suspicion of the tying, he was fain to resign himself and wait till daybreak or until Rocinante could move, firmly persuaded that all this came of something other than Sancho's ingenuity. So he ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Franspoort. To the right and left of us some desperate fighting went on for several days, and at Donkerhoek a fierce battle took place, but we were ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... you, and you only. To let me be with you. To let me win you in time, as you should be won. I am not mad, though I am desperate. I know what is due to your station and mine—even while I dare to say I love you. Let me hope, Maruja, I ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... gasped Frank. He had come upon it in a last desperate dive into his watch-pocket, in which he never by any chance kept anything. Of course it was for that very reason, that it might be alone and accessible, that he had placed it there. Ring and note were handed to the vicar, who deftly concealed the one ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... Roland, and to his glory as the unyielding champion of France and Christendom. It is not as in the Iliad, where different heroes have their day, or as at Maldon, where the fall of the captain leads to the more desperate defence and the more exalted heroism of his companions. Roland is the absolute master of the Song of Roland. No other heroic poetry conveys the same effect of pre-eminent simplicity and grandeur. There is hardly ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... some of us who have come to believe that in the dead earnest, daily, almost desperate struggle of modern life, the real solid idealist will have to care enough about his ideals to arrange to have two complete sets, one set which he calls his personal ideals, which are of such a nature that he can carry them out alone and rigidly and quite by himself, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the Hospital of S. Maria Nuova commissioned him to paint a panel: but when he saw it sketched, having little knowledge of that art, the Saints appeared to him like devils; for it was Rosso's custom in his oil-sketches to give a sort of savage and desperate air to the faces, after which, in finishing them, he would sweeten the expressions and bring them to a proper form. At this the patron fled from his house and would not have the picture, saying that the painter had ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... frame. I closed my eyes, as if about to roll to the bottom of the abyss, and I gave to my body a violent impulse on the side next to the hacienda, the surface of which offered not a single projection, not a tuft of weeds to check my descent. This sudden movement joined to the desperate struggles of my horse, was the salvation of my life. He had sprung up again on his legs, which seemed ready to fall from under him, so desperately did I ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... escape from this evil fate. The crew were all removed from the ship, excepting Lyde and one boy, who, under a prize-master and six men, were to help in sailing her to St Malo. The idea of returning to the identical prison where he had endured such misery made Lyde desperate, and, finding no easier expedient, he determined to pit himself against the seven as soon as he could persuade the boy to join him. The boy, not unnaturally, hung back from such a venture, and before he could screw his courage to the sticking-place they had arrived off a small harbour ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... whom I have already spoken and who have an appetite for human flesh. There are likewise different species of birds, and in many places bats[4] as large as pigeons flew about the Spaniards as soon as twilight fell, biting them so cruelly that the men, rendered desperate, were obliged to give way before them as though they had been harpies. One night, while sleeping on the sand, a monster issued from the sea and seized a Spaniard by the back and, notwithstanding the presence of his companions, carried ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... be too wise not to see the fatal consequence of this usurpation and wish to resist it, yet the torrent of violence has been strong enough to compel their acquiescence, till a sufficient force shall appear to support them. The authors and promoters of this desperate conspiracy have, in the conduct of it, derived great advantage from the difference of our intentions and theirs. They meant only to amuse by vague expressions of attachment to the parent state, and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me, whilst they were preparing for a general revolt. ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... Rendered desperate by the nature of his situation Perk threw up both hands and chancing to come in contact with a human form, closed in with what might almost be called a death grip—his one object being to thus hold the unseen enemy close and prevent him ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... soberness with a headache, or, in more serious cases, until proper conveyance could be got round for Godstone. The cage has seen at least one exciting rescue. This was some fifty or sixty years ago, when a number of desperate characters vaguely described as the Copthorne poachers were captured and haled into prison. As to the exact number of captives, tradition varies; but the legend which is the most respectful to the powers of the local constable sets it at ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... too raised Yon rustic tomb, and 'twas this cave received her When, desperate at your loss, she fled the court. Here long she sorrowed, here at length she died, Died of a broken heart! Ay weep, my father; For know the king shall pay each tear thou ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... don't take care I'm ruin'd still. They're growing desperate, and making tow'rd me With ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... planter, considerably advanced in life, had come from his farm to be a spectator of the shipwreck; his heart was melted at the sight of the unhappy seamen, and knowing the bold and enterprizing spirit of his horse, and his particular excellence as a swimmer, he instantly determined to make a desperate effort for their deliverance. He alighted, and blew a little brandy into his horse's nostrils, and again seating himself in the saddle, he instantly pushed into the midst of the breakers. At first both disappeared, but it was not long before they floated ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... downstairs to watch proceedings, leaving Matthieu by the window, ready at a moment's notice to put his desperate project into execution. ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... A sort of desperate hope gleamed in the eye of the other competitor in the final. He swung with renewed vigour. His ball sang through the air, and lay within chip-shot distance ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... whether my predilection was really bona fide love or not; it didn't seem like the love I had read about in novels; and yet I felt very miserable at the idea of Ellen's loving anybody else. I was in a desperate quandary. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... pursuit with marvelous agility and cunning, but one by one we captured them, and punished them summarily. At last we surrounded a band of Thugs, and to our amazement found among them a European and a small boy. At our attack the Hindus made a desperate resistance, and killed themselves rather than fall into our hands; but the European, leading forward the little boy, fell on his knees and implored us ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... went up again at once, and more than an hour subsequently, when their father paid one of his domiciliary visits, there they still were, with their Latin and Greek spread out, Norman trying to strengthen all doubtful points, but in a desperate desultory manner, that only confused him more and more, till he was obliged to lay his head down on the table, shut his eyes, and run his fingers through his hair, before he could recollect the simplest matter; his renderings alternated with groans, and, cold as was the ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... for his head, which they proceeded to kick until he died. Nor did they spare the notaries of Roumanian origin, which made it seem as if this outbreak of lawlessness—directed from who knows where—had the high political end of making the country appear to the Entente in such a desperate condition that an army must be introduced, and as the Serbs were thought to be a long way off, with the railways and the roads before them ruined by the Austrians, it looked as if Roumania's army was the only one available. On the Monday and the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... him on the field of slaughter. I will telegraph pages. I will refurbish my military vocabulary, and speak of deploying and massing and throwing out advance guards, and that sort of thing. I will move detachments and advance brigades, and invent strategy. We will have desperate fighting in the columns of the Argus, whatever there is on the fields of Canada. But to a man who has seen real war this opra-bouffe masquerade of fighting——I don't want to say anything harsh, but to me it ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... knowing how unlikely it was that any one would be so desperate as to shoot at him. "You can't stop me with that ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... a case of being allowed," he said. "I should never be left quite alone like that; and anyway, they don't lay down a code of morals for us in the Queen's Regulations. It is understood that a British officer will play the man, even in desperate straits." ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... that she might sleep without dreaming that I was stealing upstairs to cut her throat. In America I went out west and fell in with a man who was wanted by the police for holding up trains. It was he who had the idea of holding up motors cars—in the South of Europe: a welcome idea to a desperate and disappointed man. He gave me some valuable introductions to capitalists of the right sort. I formed a syndicate; and the present enterprise is the result. I became leader, as the Jew always becomes leader, by his brains and imagination. But with all my pride of race I would give ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... child," Doris was pleading, rather than explaining. "I think at the first he will agree to the proposal—what else can he do? The shock—remember, he does not even know that a child is expected! Dare we refuse Meredith's child this only and desperate chance—knowing what we do?" ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... them, and hung up some of the carcass left by the bear near by. When he attempted to get this meat, he would tread on the trap, and the teeth would spring together, and catch him by the leg. They always fought to get free. I once saw a bear that had been making a desperate effort to get away. His leg was broken, the skin and flesh were all torn away, and he was held by the tendons. It was a foreleg that was caught, and he would put his hind feet against the jaws of the trap, and then draw by pressing ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... was quick to appropriate, Mr. Buckton having so frequent a perverse instinct for catching first any eye that promised the sort of entertainment with which she had her peculiar affinity. The amusements of captives are full of a desperate contrivance, and one of our young friend's ha'pennyworths had been the charming tale of "Picciola." It was of course the law of the place that they were never to take no notice, as Mr. Buckton said, whom they served; but this also never prevented, certainly on the same gentleman's ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... and met him more than half-way. Then he goes to London, gets better information, looks at the will in Doctors' Commons, maybe, finds it a slowish speculation, and wants to let her down easy; whereof she has no notion, writes two letters to his one, as we know, gets desperate, and makes ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "Sit down awhile that I may tell you; my story is very long and tedious. I am caught in the claws of love, for which reason I am desperate." On hearing this, he unfastened his waist band, and having washed his hands and face, he took some food and gave me some likewise. When he finished his meal, he said, "Say what has befallen thee?" I related all the adventures of the old ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... Le Chevalier, who had just returned from a journey to Paris, heard from the lawyer Vanier, who was quite as much in debt as his client, that the pecuniary situation was desperate. "I dread," wrote Vanier, "the accomplishment of the psalm: Unde veniet auxilium nobis quia perimus." To which Le Chevalier replied, as he invariably did: "In six weeks, or perhaps less, the King will be again on his throne. Brighter days will dawn, ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... once set up, must run its course, I suppose. It never has appeared to me that I slept at all that night, yet perhaps I did. Long before daylight, however, I was again shedding hot tears and laying wild plans. But my thoughts had now taken on an even gloomier and more desperate shade. What was the use of my going home, I thought; my mother did not want me there. What was the use of living in such a hopelessly dreary world! Live there at the Old Squire's I could not, would not; of that I was certain. I never could endure it. The thought of existing there, as ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... courage—that their hatred, their abhorrence of Colonel Hannay was such that they clung round him by thousands and thousands;—that when Major Naylor rescued him, they refused life from the hand that could rescue Hannay;—that they nourished this desperate consolation, that by their death they should at least thin the number of wretches who suffered by his devastation and extortion. He says that, when he crossed the river, he found the poor wretches quivering upon the parched banks of the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... if men wished to get rid of slavery in our country they must be ready to sacrifice themselves if need be. His words sank deep into my mind, and I have sometimes thought that they may have had something to do in leading John Brown to make his desperate attempt on ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... out ever before me, sleeping or waking. Each moment as the express rushed south increased the distance between us, yet was I not on my way back to England with a clear and distinct purpose? I snatched at any clue, however small, with desperate eagerness, as a drowning man clutches ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up, he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right value, in the pauses of his anecdotes. You, meanwhile, were infinitely tired of watching the ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... thought was to attempt to rush toward the vessel, to seize one of the four canoes which lay at the head of the bay, and endeavour to force a passage on board. But the utter impossibility of succeeding in this desperate task soon became evident. The country, as I said before, was literally swarming with the natives, skulking among the bushes and recesses of the hills, so as not to be observed from the schooner. In our immediate vicinity especially, and blockading the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man's face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other, Trent noted with admiration the man's breadth of shoulder and lithe, strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it; in his handsome, regular features; in his short, smooth, yellow ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... 6: It was this Vlakfontein which was destined to become notorious in the later history of the war. On the 29th of last May (1901), the 7th Battalion I.Y. lost heavily in a desperate fight at this place. Of the many gallant officers and men killed, all the members of the Battalion, past and present, must specially deplore the death of Surgeon-Captain Welford, one of the kindest and most self-sacrificing of men. Also Captain ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... You win everything from me, Jackson. I'm a lame duck now, and if my luck doesn't soon begin to turn, I'll—do something desperate, I believe." ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... too. He felt that he was on the wrong road, that he was getting into a rut at Carthage, as he had got into a rut at Thagaste. He must succeed, whatever the cost!... And then he gave way to one of those moments of weariness, when a man has no further hope of saving himself save by some desperate step. He was sick of where he was and of those about him. His friends, whom he knew too well, had nothing more to teach him, and could not help him in the only search which passionately interested him. And his entanglement became irksome. Here was nine ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... had arrived within sight of Thermopylae. He had heard that a handful of desperate men, commanded by a Spartan, had determined to dispute his passage, but he refused to believe the news. He was still more astonished when a horseman, whom he had sent to reconnoitre, brought back word that he had seen several Spartans ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... them, nor did they see me; I thought it would be better to keep out of the way of such desperate characters in a lonely place. I learned from a friend of theirs at Date Creek that they intend to open a ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could believe it, sitting in that hut,—he scarcely could), a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... only made matters worse. The horse leaped and plunged, slipped badly on the hills, progressed awkwardly over the fallen logs, and flew into wild panic when he came to the quagmires. The man's temper fell far below the danger point in the first hour, and he was savage and desperate before half of ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... herself to look old. She brisked up with a kittenish purr when disturbed, and remarked that the Hengishire air was like champagne. "My spirits are positively wild and wayward," said the would-be Hebe with a desperate attempt ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... helped to make it safe for their children's children. Now it's behind the frontier and women of your kind live there. In other words"—I was growing a trifle desperate, for her gaze, while persistent, was rather blank—"you don't fit in out here. I doubt if you know how to run bullets or load a gun or throw an ax. I'm sure you'd find it very disagreeable to go barefooted. It isn't your place. Your values shine when you are back ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... the strange story of a sharp encounter with the hostile Kookies, in which a couple of English mountain guns, long before abandoned by a British expeditionary force, had been served with due professional skill and most desperate dash by a reckless man, easily recognized as an English refugee artillerist. The wounded escaped British soldier, who had died after denouncing the deserting adventurer, had left his parting advice to the Royal Artillery to burn the fearless ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... Miss Grace Mavis, to represent that Mrs. Allen had recommended them—nay, had urged them—just to come that way, informally and without fear; Mrs. Allen who had been prevented only by the pressure of occupations so characteristic of her (especially when up from Mattapoisett for a few hours' desperate shopping) from herself calling in the course of the day to explain who they were and what was the favour they had to ask of her benevolent friend. Good-natured women understand each other even when so divided ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... inexactly and meditated a desperate resignation of the whole job to Mrs. Rabbit. Then he made an effort ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... insane man who deliberately bored holes through his skull, and at different times, at a point above the ear, he inserted into his brain five pieces of No. 20 broom wire from 2 1/16 to 6 3/4 inches in length, a fourpenny nail 2 1/4 inches long, and a needle 1 5/8 inches long. Despite these desperate attempts at suicide he lived several months, finally accomplishing his purpose by taking an overdose of morphin. MacQueen has given the history of a man of thirty-five, who drove one three-inch nail into his forehead, another close to his occiput, and a third into his vertex ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... that their situation was still desperate. Should a storm spring up,—even an ordinary gale,—not only would their canvas water-cask be bilged, and its contents spilled out to mingle with the briny billow, but their frail embarkation would be in danger of going to pieces, or of being whelmed fathoms deep under the frothing waves. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... rendered the year's work of the National Assembly fruitless, and its members gradually dispersed, with the exception of the radicals, who made a last desperate effort to found a republic. Austria now insisted upon the restablishment of the old diet, and nearly came to war with Prussia over the policy to be pursued. Hostilities were only averted by the ignominious submission of Prussia to the demands of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... what I say applies to almost all. You see, you must get down beneath the gentleman or would-be gentleman-farmer, down to the man who never conceived the idea of ruffling it with gentlefolk. Also, you must not go down to the mere labourer. But they are desperate gossips—gossips not so much in matters local and insular, as in matters universal. The gossiping tone does proceed into the universal, does it not? The hilarity with which they will range the far horizons of thought is so childlike (you know how children are about that); a chatter that sparkles ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... revenues. He declared that he could have endured the calamity if penury had been all. Early in 1604 he wrote that, if Sherborne could be assured, he should take his loss for a gain, nothing having been lost that could have bettered his family, 'but the lease of the wines, which was desperate before his troubles.' He did not wish for his wife and son, 'God knows, the least proportion of plenty, having forgotten that happiness which found too much too little.' His one desire was that they should be able to eat ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... to go with me to see Doctor Phelps about Tim!' she said. 'I can manage to get leave of absence for both of us in one way or another, for I am desperate ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... turned and was bracing his back against the Fat Woman, his heels digging into the shifting cinders in a desperate attempt to prevent the woman's slipping ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... how strong the swimmer. For the current was stronger than the mere strength of a human being. She knew that if Hap Smith clung tight to his reins he might be pulled ashore in due time, if all went well for him. She knew that Winifred Waverly had never been in such desperate straits. And finally she understood, and the knowledge was infinitely sweet to her in her moment of need, why the man yonder had been sitting his horse so idly in the rain, and just why ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... of the tale is just war, pure and simple. Launcelot retreated to his town and castle of Joyous Gard, and gathered there a great following of knights. The king, with a great host, went there, and there was desperate fighting during several days, and, as a result, all the plain around was paved with corpses and cast-iron. Then the Church patched up a peace between Arthur and Launcelot and the queen and everybody—everybody but Sir Gawaine. He was bitter about the slaying ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Dutch, and carried to its culmination by the English centered on the west coast near the seat of perhaps the oldest and most interesting culture of Africa. It came at a critical time. The culture of Yoruba, Benin, Mossiland, and Nupe had exhausted itself in a desperate attempt to stem the on-coming flood of Mohammedan culture. It has succeeded in maintaining its small, loosely federated city-states suited to trade, industry, and art. It had developed strong resistance toward ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... clear away all the guns, and to open the arm-chest, to come at the muskets and pistols. I heard the rattling of the boarding-pikes, too, as they were cut adrift from the spanker-boom, and fell upon the deck. All this sounded very ominous, and I began to think we should have a desperate engagement first, and then have ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... the paper, Grogan; I'll be responsible for its safety," returned the captain, who seemed to be drawn more and more toward a belief in Jack's innocence; for there was something in the clear gray eyes that met his gaze to convince him that this lad could never be a desperate criminal. ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... from the Solomon, the Republican, the Arkansas valleys. A settlement was raided on Smoky Fork; stages were attacked near the Caches, and one burned; a wagon train was ambushed in the Raton Pass, and only escaped after desperate fighting. Altogether the situation appeared extremely serious and the ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... that come under the shade fall down dead! You give upas juice in these desperate cases: ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the barren bluff the slender woman's figure stands on the pinnacle of night, outlined against a starry sky. The cool night breeze wafts to her burning ear snatches of song and drum. With desperate hate she bites ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... until fifteen minutes before one o'clock on Sunday—the day before the wedding. The last train by which I could possibly reach home in time was to leave Orange Court House for Richmond at six o'clock that evening, and the Court House was nineteen miles off. It seemed pretty desperate, but I was bound to make it. I had had a very slim breakfast that morning; I swapped my share of dinner that evening with a fellow for two crackers, which he happened to have, and lit ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... sprang, and it was said that he had been a camel driver. He was called Mohammed the Lame, because a leg badly set after a fracture had left him halting, and he was a shrewd man, far-seeing, ruthless, and ambitious. With a few companions as desperate as himself, he attacked the capital of a small state in the North which was distracted by the death of its ruler, seized it, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... advise or help her or be her companion in inevitable death. Her thoughts must have gone to her brother, with his strength and courage, his skill as a swimmer; but he was far away, unconscious of her desperate extremity. She had to choose, and the river was her choice. With that tragic conception of the drowning of Zenobia fresh in his mind, the realization of his sister's fate must have gained additional poignancy ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... north, and added to his kingdom some of the outlying regions of Media. Artabanus now at length resolved to bestir himself, and collecting his forces, took the field in person. Invading Persia Proper, he engaged in a desperate struggle with his rival. Three great battles were fought between the contending powers. In the last, which took place in the plain of Hormuz, between Bebahan and Shuster, on the course of the Jerahi river, Artabanus was, after a desperate ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... come round with me?" he croaked. How he had managed to acquire the nerve to make the suggestion he could never understand. I suppose that in certain supreme moments a sort of desperate recklessness ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... admitted by some, and by others rejected. But even those that admit them, can admit them only as pleas of necessity; for they consider the reception of mercenaries into our country, as the desperate "remedy of desperate distress;" and think, with great reason, that all means of prevention should be tried, to save us from any second need of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... we'll call to Nell. I am afraid the case must have been desperate, for I am seldom the victim," I said in an undertone to our host, who acquiesced with a laugh. "Harriet Henderson must be dead, for Nell usually sends the worse one to her," ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... "To tell you the truth, Norrie, I can't bear to look at that jewel-case of hers. I believe, upon my word, that it is nearly empty. She is very generous, is your mother. She's a very fine woman, and I am desperate proud of her. When M'Dermott helps me to tide over this pinch I'll have all those jewels back again by hook or by crook. Your mother shan't suffer in the long run, and I'll do a lot to the old place—the old house ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... him, and Nan stood very still, her arms hanging down at her sides. But Maryon could read the stricken expression in her eyes—the desperate appeal of them. They ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Charleroi, and the British army prolonged the line to the east of Mons. Against this dike there now burst the full fury of the German advance made by the armies of Kluck and Buelow. (Vol. II, 46-49.) Again the French were defeated after a desperate battle about Charleroi (Vol. II, 54), this time without any rout and after having inflicted very heavy losses. But retreat was inevitable because the Germans succeeded in forcing the crossings of the Meuse at Dinant—that is, in the rear of the main army—while the fall of Namur (Vol. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... large. Men felt a sudden reverence for a mind and heart developed to these noble proportions in so unfriendly a habitat. They turned instinctively to one so familiar with strife for help in solving the desperate problem with which the nation had grappled. And thus it was that, at fifty years of age, Lincoln became a ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... of pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the feet. If the weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too appalling to be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes; your blind steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not very severe and searching, is the same. The leader can rely on the faithfulness of his host: the comrade is sworn to serve. Master Ripton Thompson was naturally loyal. The idea of turning off and forsaking his friend never once crossed his mind, though his condition was desperate, and his friend's behaviour that of a Bedlamite. He announced several times impatiently that they would be too late for dinner. His friend did not budge. Dinner seemed nothing to him. There he lay plucking grass, and patting the old dog's nose, as if incapable of conceiving what a thing hunger ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bounding and barking through the sage-brush after him. Wahb tried to run, but it was no use; the Coyote was soon up with him. Then with a sudden rush of desperate courage Wahb turned and charged his foe. The astonished Coyote gave a scared yowl or two, and fled with his tail between his legs. Thus Wahb learned that war is the ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton
... suffragettes known as the "militants" resorted to open violence. When arrested for damaging property, they went on a "hunger strike," refusing all nourishment. This greatly embarrassed the government, which in 1913 devised the so-called "Cat and Mouse Act," whereby those who are in desperate straits through their refusal to eat are released temporarily and conditionally, but can be rearrested summarily for failure to comply with the terms of their parole. The weakness in the attitude of the ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... contending for the possession of a bone drawn from the slush of the kennel. I have seen boys fight and bruise each other for a crust of bread dropped upon the pavement, and covered with wet mud, or even unsightlier filth. I have entered the abode of this desperate poverty, led thither by children, who have clamored at my side for alms, and found such misery as I am incompetent to express in words. I have seen the living unable to rise from sickness, in the same bed with the dying and the dead. I have known ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Glyde that he had reached this transcendental eyrie of his by painful degrees. No person of Sanchia's acquaintance had suffered more than he by her desperate affair. He had been her first lover, and her only confidant, for she had been what one calls a "difficult" girl, who gave out nothing and had no friends. Her sisters knew very little about her, her mother nothing. It had been Senhouse who had called up the spirit that was in her—that ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Nivelles, and Bluecher's on that of the Meuse from Nivelles to Liege. Both the allied armies hastened to unite at Quatre Bras; but their junction there was already impossible. Bluecher with eighty thousand men was himself attacked by Napoleon at Ligny, and after a desperate contest driven back with terrible loss upon Wavre. On the same day Ney with twenty thousand men, and an equal force under D'Erlon in reserve, appeared before Quatre Bras, where as yet only ten thousand English and the same force of Belgian troops had been able to assemble. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... to him that Mrs. Carter was in pursuit of these treasures, but he did realise that her presence there amongst them brought peril to his mother. Moved then by some desperate urgency which had at its heart his sense that to be left alone in the black passage was worse than the actual lighted vision of his Terror, he crept with trembling knees across the ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... not the artillery that saved Hooker from irretrievable disaster.* (* Lieutenant-Colonel Hamlin, the latest historian of Chancellorsville, has completely disposed of the legend that these fifty guns repulsed a desperate attack on Hazel Grove.) As they followed the remnants of the Eleventh Army Corps, the progress of Rodes and Colston had been far less rapid than when they stormed forward past the Wilderness Church. A regiment of Federal cavalry, riding to Howard's aid by ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... though, of course, the independent worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank, hungry-looking creatures, who ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... room with leisurely self-possession that might have been real or a desperate assumption. He was a slightly built young man of about twenty-five, with black hair and eyes, a small, carefully trained moustache, and a dark olive skin. His physiognomy was not displeasing, but his expression had a harsh and supercilious tinge. In attire he erred ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... treatment would drive Essex to madness. "These same gradations of yours"—so Bacon represents himself expostulating with the Queen on her caprices—"are fitter to corrupt than to correct any mind of greatness." They made Essex desperate; he became frightened for his life, and he had reason to be so, though not in the way which he feared. At length came the stupid and ridiculous outbreak of the 8th of February, 1600/1601, a plot to seize the palace and raise the city against the ministers, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... comprehension of which all her "advanced" reading and study had left her mind as blankly ignorant as a little child's. Now it was vain to try to shut her thoughts away from Jermain. She lived over and over the scene with him, she endured with desperate passivity the recollection of his burning lips on her bosom, his fingers pressing into her side. Why not, if every man was like that as soon as he dared? Why not, if that was all that men wanted of women? Why not, if that was the sole ghastly reality which underlay the pretty-smooth ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... of which he delivered a speech which marked him out as the coming man of the French republic, from the spirit of hostility it manifested against the Empire; at the fall of the Empire he stood high in public regard, assumed the direction of affairs, and made desperate attempts to repel the invading Germans; though he failed in this, he never ceased to feel the shame of the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and strove hard to recover them, but all his efforts ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the irresistible impulse of which nothing could stay. Macdonald had already reached Sussenbrunn, where the archduke and his generals had concentrated their last effort; and the French columns were stopped by their desperate resistance. For a moment they seemed destined to retreat in their turn; but Davout had succeeded in his attack against the heights of Neusiedel. The plateau of Wagram was in our hands; General Oudinot had effected his junction, after taking the position of Baumersdorf; and the Prince of Hohenzollern ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... to the number of fifty or more, and are sure at last to torture him to death, and use him up at a meal. The Buffalo, however, is a huge and furious animal, and when his retreat is cut off, makes desperate and deadly resistance, contending to the last moment for the right of life, and oftentimes deals death by wholesale to ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... such a fate, and this seemed to me to indicate that moral stirrings were at work within me. One night I was amorously attacked in my bedroom by two of the domestics. I experienced an acute horror which I hid under laughter; my resistance was so desperate that I escaped with a tickling. I had been accustomed to sit on the servants' knees, a habit I had innocently retained from childhood; I can now recall in detail the approaches these women had been used to make me. At the time ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... way towards the colonel's quarters," whispered Lennox. "Here, sergeant, there must be some desperate plot—a mine, perhaps, close up to that hut. Quick! ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... they proceeded to walk up and down the hall, she being saved only by her escort from collision with various other couples similarly employed. This interesting exercise lasted for some minutes, varied by attempts at conversation which were about as natural as spasms. Marjory took a desperate resolution. This absurd state of things should not last much longer, if she could help it. "I never could act as if nothing was the matter when something was," she began, "and I can't help it if this is not polite; but I think, from what Mrs. Grove said ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... devoted the whole of my modest fortune to the objects of that society, but had actually been selected as leader of 200 Socialists into the interior of Africa! It was some days before she could grasp and believe the monstrous fact; then followed entreaties, tears, desperate reproaches, and expostulations. I might let the fellows have my money—over which, however, she felt that she should have kept better guard—but, for heaven's sake, could I not stay like an honest man at home? She consulted our family physician as to my responsibility for my actions; but she ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the light of a bright pinon blaze I began to read Great Expectations, a paper edition with the last leaves gone having gotten into camp. As I read Pip's interview in the twilight with the convict on the dreary marshes I was in deep sympathy with the desperate hunger of the terrible man, and when Mrs. Joe buttered the end of the loaf and carved off the slices I myself was hungry enough to cook supper over again. Butter had now been absent from my bill of fare, with a few exceptions, for nearly two years. I was careful to place my ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... method of procuring ushers is by advertisements. None will apply who are not in desperate circumstances, and these are your men. If they know little it is no great matter; they will be the more diligent: and should the children detect their ignorance, or the parents complain, you may easily dismiss them; others such-like are to be had; and it will ...
— The Academy Keeper • Anonymous
... door along the little gallery, and up to the saloon, where they laid him down to die at his mother's feet. But there was comfort exchanged between them; for he knew from the glance of his mother's eye, that the purpose of his desperate defence was attained. Ah! I remember,' she continued, 'I remember well to have seen one that knew and loved him. Miss Lucy St. Aubin lived and died a maid for his sake, though one of the most beautiful and wealthy matches in this country; all the world ran after her, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... mountain tops, so that it is seen from far and wide, and long before it is approached. We had made the first part of our journey at a snail's pace. No sooner were we on the verge of the hills looking down upon La Bresse, than we set off at a desperate rate, spinning breathlessly round one mountain spur after another, till we were suddenly landed in the village street, dropped, as ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... pressed forward gallantly. The ground was uneven, however, and solid order could not be observed throughout. At length, when they had gained a brookside at the very edge of the wood, the column staggered, quailed, fell into disorder, and then fell back. Some of the more desperate dashed singly into the thicket, bayoneting their enemies, and falling in turn in the fierce grapple. Others of the Confederates ran from the wood, and engaged hand to hand with antagonists, and, in places, a score of combatants ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... about six miles further up the river, when we discovered the European boats and crews lying at anchor abreast of the smoking ruins of what had been a Malay town. Here we learnt that the pirates had been completely routed, after a desperate resistance, that four large towns had been burnt, and seventy-five brass guns of the country, called leilas, had been captured. The victory, however, had not been gained without loss on our side, and had the pirates been better prepared, ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... hunger had made desperate, drew his sword, intending to take their meat by force, and said: 'Forbear and eat no more; I must have your food!' The duke asked him, if distress had made him so bold, or if he were a rude despiser of good manners? On this Orlando ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... blame him if just then a desperate longing seized him to throw all prudence, all dignity and honour to the winds and to clasp this exquisite woman for one brief and happy moment in his arms—to forget the world, her position and his—to risk disgrace and betray hospitality, for the sake of one kiss upon ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... together for a moment and then went into the house with hands close-locked and a kind of sad, desperate courage in their young hearts. What would either of them have done, each of them thought, had she been forced to endure alone the life that went on day after day in Deacon ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Army are a remarkable body of men. They are all converted, many from lives of desperate sin. Others have grown up in The Army; almost all have learned what they know of music in the ranks. Twenty years ago, the latter remark might have been received with a smile. Not so to-day, for while the object of Salvation Army music is the same as when it was ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... conditions; he may wait until his last morsel of bread has been eaten." The messenger was a clever man who afterward rendered his own name, that of Klenau, illustrious. He recognized Bonaparte, and, glancing at the terms, found them so generous that he at once admitted the desperate straits of the garrison. This is substantially the account of Napoleon's memoirs. In a contemporary despatch to the Directory there is nothing of it, for he never indulged in such details to them; but he does say in two other despatches what at ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... stab. Bobby stood looking out of the front door, which was open, into the sunny garden beyond, and there the sight of his father's small motor standing puffing away upon the drive filled him suddenly with a desperate resolve. ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... had never before encountered so desperate a knave. As we have said, the affair troubled him greatly. True, he was determined to investigate it thoroughly, but he could not well afford the time to go himself to New York. His chief man at the paper mill had failed to accomplish ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... team at the well, with the sound of oaths. He was tired, hungry, and ill-tempered, but she was too desperate to care. His poor, overworked team did not move quickly enough for him, and his extra long turn in the corn had made him dangerous. His eyes gleamed wrathfully from his ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... very effective prescriptions, but if a person has any heart trouble I would not advise their use except under a physician's care. (Sometimes a patient with neuralgia gets desperate, and he will even resort to morphine). Antipyrine is one of the simplest coal tar remedies, and most persons can safely take it. Persons who are subject to neuralgia or headaches need to take good care of themselves. Get plenty of rest and sleep. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... contained the criminals alleged to be desperate, and as they stood at the windows the chains on their right legs were in sight. It was plainly seen in several cases that the links of the chains used were about three inches long and that three or four turns were taken around the right ankle. In a group of prisoners waiting for ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... himself by reaching for Berry's shoulder with his forepaws, but at the critical moment his buffer flinched, the paws fell short of their objective, and with a startled grunt the terrier fell heavily into the bath, his desperate claws leaving two long abrasions upon ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... were in the same house, she could not withhold herself from endeavours to revive their mutual cordiality; and unsuccessful endeavours continually added fuel to the fire that destroyed her. She formed a desperate purpose to die. ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... round by Fort Pitt to the Chatham lines. And there—who can doubt?—if he seemed to hear the melancholy wind that whistled through the deserted fields as Mr. Winkle took his reluctant stand, a wretched and desperate duellist, his thoughts would also stray to the busy dockyard town and "a blessed little room" in a plain-looking plaster-fronted house from which dated all his early readings ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... enter on that long war which began with the League of Augsburg in 1686, and continued to the peace of Ryswick in 1697,—nine years of desperate fighting, when successes and defeats were nearly balanced, and when the resources of all the contending parties were nearly exhausted. France, at the close of the war, was despoiled of all her conquests and all the additions to her territory made since the Peace of Nimeguen, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... case in a definite shape before you. Here is a mother in the pangs of parturition. An organic defect, no matter in what shape or form, prevents deliverance by the ordinary channels. All that medical skill can do to assist nature has been done. The case is desperate. Other physicians have been called in for consultation, as the civil law requires before it will tolerate extreme measures. All agree that, if no surgical operation is performed, both mother and child must die. There are the ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... the right HOLY WATER,[18] all other is counterfeit: it will drive away devils and spirits; it will cure enchantments and witchcrafts; it will heal the mad and lunatic (Gal 3:1-3; Mark 16:17,18). It will cure the most desperate melancholy; it will dissolve doubts and mistrusts, though they are grown as hard as stone in the heart (Eze 36:26). It will make you speak well (Col 4:6). It will make you have a white soul, and that is better than to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of money. My poor father sent me his pension, all the little sums he received, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one day he answered me: "Non habeo," I sent him a desperate telegram in which I besought him to mortgage the estate. A little later I begged him to get money somehow on a second mortgage. He did this too without a murmur and sent me every farthing. Ariadne despised the practical side of life; all this was no concern of hers, ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... absolutely compromised? And yet how could he part company from the others, swim ashore, and save himself while they were being drowned? It was a grave problem, and with his frantic desire to retain power, he made desperate endeavours ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... within an ace of the match. Miss Wilson served to me in the left court—a good service out on the side line. I played a straight back-hand shot down the line, passing Mr. Gore's forehand—rather a desperate stroke, as if it failed to pass him it meant certain death from one of his straight-arm volleys. Perhaps he was not guarding his line so well as usual, under the impression that I would not have the courage to try to pass ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... Sir Robert Peel's bold and comprehensive policy, was to devise some method of recruiting forthwith its languishing vital energies—to rescue its financial concerns from the desperate condition in which he found them. With an immediate and perspective increase of expenditure that was perfectly frightful—in the meditation and actual prosecution of vast but useless enterprises—of foreign interference ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... wouldn't do, Jeanne," Harry said with a slight smile, shaking his head. "It was a desperate enterprise for two of us. Besides, it would never do for you to run the risk of being separated from Virginie. Remember you are father and mother and elder sister to her now. The next plan I thought of was to try and get appointed as a warder in the prison, but that seems full of difficulties, ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... the colonists were hardy, but they loved as truly and tenderly as in more peaceful days. Thus, while the hero's adventures with pirates and his search for their hidden treasure is a record of desperate encounters and daring deeds, his love-story and his winning of sweet Mary Vane is ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... think," she objected, shaking her head. "I did not believe that there would be any real danger, with the three servants in the house. Only at the last did I realise the desperate nature ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... armed men accompanied the deported wickedness of Poker Flat to the outskirts of the settlement. Besides Mr. Oakhurst, who was known to be a coolly desperate man, and for whose intimidation the armed escort was intended, the expatriated party consisted of a young woman familiarly known as the "Duchess"; another, who had won the title of "Mother Shipton"; and "Uncle Billy," a suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... is she, my child? Where is your angel mother, whom I have sought sorrowing so many years? They tell me that you are married,—that it is your husband who watches you with such jealous scrutiny. He must not know who I am. I am a reckless, desperate man. It would be dangerous to us both to meet. Guard my secret as you expect to find your grave peaceful, your eternity free from remorse. When can I see you alone? Where can I meet you? I am in danger, distress,—ruin and death are hanging over me,—I must flee from the city; but I must see you, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... almost to the very letter, had vowed to annihilate every soldier of the British army with the exception of one man, who should reach Jellalabad to tell the story of the massacre of all his comrades. Pottinger was well aware how desperate was the situation of the hapless people on whose behalf he had bent so low his proud soul. Mohun Lal warned him of the treachery the chiefs were plotting, and assured him that unless their sons should accompany the army as hostages, it would be attacked ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... louder the ringing of the hoof-beats. Once he stole a hurried glance through the window which gave on the turnpike. Not half a mile away, their figures black against the sky-line, fiercely lashing their tired horses to fresh effort, were three desperate riders. The couple before him did not raise ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... into the yard, whence his voice could be heard in explosions of laughter. Cameron in the meantime was making heroic attempts to cover up the sound by loud-voiced conversation with Haley, and, rendered desperate by the exigencies of the situation, went so far as to venture a word of praise to Mrs. Haley upon the excellence and abundance ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... "Well," roared the desperate man, throwing the door wide open and stalking out among the crowd, "well, jest you two wimin put on your duds and go right straight home and bring back the old man and woman, and your grandfather, who is nigh on to a hundred; bring ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... deer. In that dizzy moment her feet to her scarce seemed to touch the ground, and a moment brought her to the water's edge. Right on behind they came; and, nerved with strength such as God gives only to the desperate, with one wild cry and flying leap she vaulted sheer over the turbid current by the shore on to the raft of ice beyond. It was a desperate leap—impossible to anything but madness and despair; and Haley, Sam, and Andy, instinctively cried out, and lifted up ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... off. Then Crinkett with his sharp eyes saw another boat pushed off from the shore, and heard a voice declare that the Julius Vogel had received a signal not to start. Then Crinkett knew that a time of desperate trouble had come upon him, and he bethought himself what he would do. Were he to jump overboard, they would simply pick him up. Nor was he quite sure that he wished to die. The money which he had kept had not been obtained fraudulently, and would be left to him, he thought, ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... for, since he had cheated the publishing house which employed him of all he had been able to get into his hands. There was reason to believe that he had heavy debts, especially gambling ones, and that he had become desperate since he no longer had his step-sister to ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... every wrong—nay, it is not every grievous wrong—which can justify a resort to such a fearful alternative. This ought to be the last desperate remedy of a despairing people, after every other constitutional means of conciliation had been exhausted. We should reflect that under this free Government there is an incessant ebb and flow in public opinion. The slavery question, like everything human, will have its day. I firmly believe ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... gorge, seemed in danger of perishing to the last man, so cleverly and sagaciously were the commandant's measures taken. But Hulot's cannon were powerless at these two points; and here, the town of Fougeres being quite safe, began one of those desperate struggles which denoted the character of ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... impalpable Undine, a creation of sea-foam and sea-flower; an exquisite suggestion of the ethereal which floated beauty, as it were, into her face. I know little of women, save what these past few grievous months have taught me; but I know that hours of anxious thought and desperate hope lay behind this effect of fragile loveliness. The wit of woman could not have rendered a woman's body a greater contrast to that of her rival; and with infinite subtlety she had imbued the contrast with the deeper ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Beata was no thaumaturgist; only a loving woman, standing where science had failed, translating another's desperate need from her own depths of sympathy—arresting the oncoming shadow because of her faith and ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Shall we find ourselves already fettered when we wake, or will there be one moment, just one moment, in which we can spring up? At any rate, hitherto, the English have always been at their best, not their worst, in desperate positions. They hate exciting themselves, and refuse to do it until the crisis is actually on them. But then they become ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... expecting an easy victory over the youth. But Rodrigo was strong as a man, and his deadly hate of the count added vigor to his arm. Though soon wounded and bleeding, he yet parried with skill the blows aimed at his heart, and finally, with one desperate effort, drove the sword of Mudarra through and through the body of Gormaz. The head of his fallen enemy Rodrigo carried home in triumph to the proud Diego. Thus did the youthful Ruy Diaz de Bivar avenge the wrongs of ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... other rocks are near? Well, the Frost Giants carried these boulders about, and dropped them down miles away from their homes, as you might take a pocketful of pebbles, and drop them along the road as you walk. Sometimes they roll great rocks down the mountain-sides, playing a desperate game of ball with each other. Sometimes they are sent to make a bridge over Niagara Falls, or to build a dam across a mountain torrent in an hour's time. Now and then they have to rake off a steep mountain- side as ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... forward at the same reckless pace, regardless alike of the dirt and wet which flew about his head, the profound darkness of the night, and the probability of encountering some desperate characters abroad. At every turn and angle, even where a deviation from the direct course might have been least expected, and could not possibly be seen until he was close upon it, he guided the bridle ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... my trespass? He watches his eye, he measures his limbs, his strength, and his agility. Though they have met in the deserts of Africa, where there is no law to punish the violator, he knows that he exposes himself to a fearful hazard; and he enters upon his purpose with desperate resolve. All this and more must occur to the man of violence, within the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... man sees this, what will he think of himself?—A. Then he will not only think but conclude, that he is an unclean thing, that his heart has deceived him, that it is most desperate and wicked, that it may not be trusted by any means, that every imagination and thought of his heart, naturally, is only evil, and that continually (Isa 64:6; Prov ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... as the greatest wonder in history how a poor Man, who preached in Palestine for about two years, who scarcely had a hundred followers at the end of His mission, who was crucified and died a shameful death, whose cause seemed a quite desperate episode, scornfully rejected or fearfully abandoned by all those who knew it—how this poor Man replaced successively the mightiest gods the human imagination ever invented: Zeus in Olympus, Jupiter in the Capitol, Wothan in the North, and at last also Perun in Kieff. ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... the power of laying our hands upon him. This I expect very shortly to do. I have good hopes of managing it through my own arrangements; but it is a thing which needs delicate handling, for we have a shrewd and desperate man to deal with, who is supported, as I have had occasion to prove, by another who is as clever as himself. As long as this man has no idea that anyone can have a clue there is some chance of securing him; but ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... squirm to the door and wriggle out. Other mothers say: 'If you don't, I shall tell your father!' 'Do as I tell you, and ask no questions.' 'I never heard of such behavior in my life!' 'Haven't you any sense of propriety?' 'If this happens again I shall have to do something desperate.' 'Leave the room at once,' and so on; but ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... my mind that he understood the girl's desperate ruse, and that he was waiting for the issue. I picked furiously at the ropes which bound my hands, and a long strand uncoiled and whipped ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... seen," answered Olaf. "Now I came to know if you were yet landless and desperate so that you would sail to Norway with me. But now I cannot ask you that. Nevertheless I shall be more glad to see you wedded and at rest here, for I think that you have seen ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... turned her back upon her fellow-passengers, stretched in mute misery in their chairs or huddled in cheerful groups behind sheltering projections, and stood watching the dip and rise of the steamer's bow as it drove onward into the mist. Whither was she going, and to what? With a desperate sense of her ignorance and impotence, she strained her eyes into the white, dimly translucent bank, from which stray drops repeatedly lashed her face, as though its vaporous wall alone stood between her and the ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from—will you risk the commission of so fearful ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... a leap forward, and on the following days reached and crossed the Marne, seizing, after desperate fighting, guns, howitzers, mitrailleuses, and 1,300,000 cartridges. On the 12th it established itself on the north edge of the Montagne-de-Reime in contact with our centre, which for its part had just forced the enemy to retreat ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... it's rarer: as if we were to be shut up in families to tread on one another's corns! Dear me! and after a time we should be having rank jesuitry advertised as the specific balsam for an unhappy domesticated population treading with hard heels from desperate habit and not the slightest intention ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... He might, so I liked to think, chase Selby-Harrison round the College Park with a drawn sword in his hand. Then there would be complications. The Provost and senior fellows, not understanding Titherington's desperate plight, would resent his show of violence, which would strike them as unseemly in their academic groves. Swift, muscular porters would be sent in pursuit of Titherington, who would, himself, still pursue Selby-Harrison. The great bell of the Campanile would ring furious alarm peals. The Dublin ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... to reply. Her one thought was to reach the refuge of her own apartment, and to this end she concentrated her failing energies. The climb to the ladies' dressing-room was a desperate effort; but when she was once outside the house the cold, pure air ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... the strange actions of Marufa the more he was persuaded that that wily colleague was acting upon sound information, and the tangle of his affairs made him so desperate that he decided to gamble upon that assumption: for magician Bakahenzie began to realize that Marufa had somehow scored a point and that now was approaching the crux which would determine whether he won back or lost for ever that which was the essence of life ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... poor Jean, so desperate that he did not understand, his soul quite overwhelmed, his heart bursting, but not yet understanding himself. Then the girl seated herself beside Luc, and ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... forward up the heights. Two minutes would bring them about the little party in overwhelming strength. Flight anywhere downhill was impossible. The one refuge in sight was that beleaguered little clump of buildings just beyond them up the slope, garrisoned by a dozen desperate men who had shouted warning again and again, they'd shoot down the first man that showed a head ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... of what had happened began to grow in force and keenness and, of a sudden, the thought of Calypso smote me like a sword! Spurred to desperate effort, I stood up on the instant and leaned against a rocky wall. Miracle of miracles! I could stand. I was not dead, after all. I was not, indeed, so far as I could tell, seriously hurt. Badly bruised, of course—but no bones broken. It seemed incredible, ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... that new mill, and of the states of society consequent on the changes involved by the suggestive dates of either building. She remembered the times when watchers or wakeners in the night heard the distant word of command, and the measured tramp of thousands of sad desperate men receiving a surreptitious military training, in preparation for some great day which they saw in their visions, when right should struggle with might and come off victorious: when the people of England, represented by the workers of Yorkshire, Lancashire, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... kennels, and vulgarly spotless houses. But when I go down a street which has been left so long to itself that it has acquired a distinct outward character, I find plenty to think about. The scraps of sodden letters lying in the ash-barrel have their meaning: desperate appeals, perhaps, from Tom, the baker's assistant, to Amelia, the daughter of the dry-goods retailer, who is always selling at a sacrifice in consequence of the late fire. That may be Tom himself who is now passing me in a white apron, and I look up at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... 1718. The effect of the proclamation, in conjunction with the measures taken in the Bahamas, was very great. By the 1st July, 1719, to which date the time of grace was extended, all but three or four of the most desperate rovers had retired from business. But against the most audacious of them more vigorous ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... might have been expected; for there was nothing he could do but wander about, and try to amuse himself without using his eyes. Anyone who has ever been condemned to that sort of idleness knows how irksome it is, and can understand the state of mind which caused Mac to say to Rose in a desperate ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... case, what must have been Galeotto's? He was of iron, it is true. But consider that he had ridden this way at as desperate a pace already, to save me from the clutches of the Inquisition; and that, scarce rested, he was riding north again. Consider this, and you will not marvel that his weariness conquered him ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... take this resolution so suddenly? There was time, all the time in the world, and having once neglected the thing at the very start, it was curious that she should now, at this late date, make her desperate resolve. Preston had not been worse, more difficult to handle. In fact, when the two women had grown used to his case, the management had been simple enough. He had thought she was inured to the disgust and the horror—placid almost, and taking the thing ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... crushed in the narrow space, and the idea of being thus suddenly torn away from my betrothed filled me with terror. I made a desperate effort to spring out again; but a soft, strong hand gripped my arm and held me still, and in a moment we were borne swiftly away from the courtyard ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... twentieth century will find the pattern Man ready to their hand. Be the demands of the coming years what they may, God is able to raise up men to meet them, men after His own likeness—men of right, men of light, men of might—men who will follow Him in the desperate fight with the hydra-headed monsters of evil of every kind, and who will, by His Name, deliver the souls of men from the slavery of sin and the Hell to which ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... was a fair prospect of carrying the bastions by another assault. A terrible bombardment was begun on the fifth, and continued to the eighth of September, when both the Redan and the Malakhoff were taken by storm. But the struggle was desperate, and the losses on both sides immense. The Russians blew up their fortifications on the south side of the harbor, and retreated across the bay. Nor did they afterward make any serious attempt to regain the stronghold which the allies had wrested from them. The victors for their part proceeded ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... mysticism, nurtured by busy ecclesiastics, developed itself in her; she became possessed of the idea that she was a chosen instrument in the Church's hands to further its interests; and with feverish, desperate energy she devoted herself to literary work as its champion. She had her own press, which set up each day's work and showed it to her in proof the next. She did not leave Rome except on one occasion, and then for less than a day, during the ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... if he had been a lawyer," says I. "But never mind that; I'm going to make a guess—a desperate guess, mind. Should I be altogether in error if I thought that this letter had been stolen; and that the fingers of Mr. Davager, of suspicious commercial celebrity, might possibly be the fingers which ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... with a desperate matter-of-factness. It was half-past nine o'clock. Nothing had happened yet, at any rate. Beside her, Carlisle had more difficulty with her breakfast, hampered by her continuing mind's-eye picture of Jack Dalhousie, lying on his back ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... season set in; we might tell of the "tall times" the boys had whipping the trout-streams, of the trials of speed that came off on the river, when it turned out, as Archie had predicted, that Charles Morgan's sloop "couldn't sail worth a row of pins;" and we might tell of many more desperate "scrapes" that came off between the bully and his sworn enemies the Hillers; but we fear, reader, you are already weary of the Young Naturalist's home-life, and long to see him engaging in his favorite recreations—roaming through the woods, with ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... the last shoe, and Joel ran into the water. West, pale of face, but with a determined look in his blue eyes, followed a moment later, a yard or two behind, and the two set out with desperate strokes to reach the scene of the disaster. As he had taken the water Joel had cast a hurried glance toward the spot where Clausen had sunk, and had seen nothing of that youth; only Cloud was in sight, and he seemed to ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... at last become that the clergymen arose in a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of singing that they were accustomed to; and they gave many objections to the new-fangled idea of singing ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the coldness that bound her became by slow degrees a numbness, paralyzing her faculties, extinguishing all her powers. There arose a great uproar in her brain, the swirl as of great waters engulfing her. She raised her head with a desperate gesture. She met the searching of his eyes, and goaded as it were to self-defence, with the last of her strength, she told him the ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... her out of his sight; he had even inquired about what friends she had to ascertain whether there was much danger of her being traced. He had meant to get her alone in his car, then stupefy her in some way and bring her here. Her telephoning to the chemist had precipitated matters, made him take a desperate chance and act quickly. At least that was how she construed things. How he had managed to get her out and into his car was a mystery. She had just sent that message to Roger, she recalled. Two minutes, one minute's delay, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... afterwards turned away for his misconduct. He spent his own money and nearly all the stores among the half-bloods upon the beach, and being turned away, went up to the Presidio, where he lived the life of a desperate "loafer," until some rascally deed sent him off "between two days," with men on horseback, dogs, and Indians in full cry after him, among the hills. One night, he burst into our room at the hide-house, breathless, pale as a ghost, covered ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... arm, and attempted to reach it, but without success. At length, while making a desperate effort to regain it, she lost her balance, ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... beginning of a long and intimate acquaintance. In the course of conversation I disclosed to Charles Webster—such was his name—the desperate state of my affairs, with the gloomy prospect they entailed. The remedy he proposed—and when sober he spoke well and sensibly—was drastic and by no means unfeasible. "Cut it all and go to sea," he said. "You've enjoyed yourself while your money lasted, and what's the good of money but ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... they found him at least as strong as themselves, and began to fancy that be might be stronger. A few experiments soon taught them that there was no weakness there. On one occasion the Rothschilds, true to their ordinary selfish policy, made a desperate attempt to crush the new house which dared to enter into rivalry with them. Widespread plans were arranged in such a way that large demands were made upon them on one day. The amount was nearly two millions. Smithers ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... his harem with desperate fierceness, watches over its number while they feed or sleep, chooses the ground for browsing and rest—defends them against enemies—heads them in the advance, and covers their retreat with his own 'person'— such is the domestic ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... their thin clothes could not be imagined; they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to the right nor to the left, but stared straight on and pressed straight on rather rapidly, with such desperate tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble terror which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the best effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a little way before I gained courage to speak to the man, who seemed to have been sick, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... to approach Captain Lake, on the quarter deck, and with an anxious petitioning countenance, asked for the goods, which had been promised him. Prepared for the desperate game he was about to play, it was the object of Lake to gain as much time as possible, that he might get his vessel under way, before he came to an open rupture. Therefore, he pretended to be busy ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... get the horse-hirer to let us have the horses a few hours earlier. In spending time in long conversations mixed with civilities and bows the Japanese are masters. Of this bad habit, which still often makes the European desperate, it will not perhaps be long necessary to complain, for everything indicates that the Japanese too will soon be carried along at the endlessly roaring speed ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Tom," cried Mark, "and make a desperate effort ourselves. If the boats get here first, they will claim to have taken the schooner, and rob ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... He was at the wrong end of the whip. Thorpe's game was desperate, but so was his need, and this was a backwoods country a long ways from the little technicalities of the law. It was one thing to serve an injunction; another to enforce it. Thorpe finished his drive with no more ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... beaten, once near the White Columns, and again near Labranda, and their victory at Pedasos suspended merely for an instant the progress of the Persian arms, so that towards the close of 497 the struggle was almost entirely concentrated round Miletus. Aristagoras, seeing that his cause was now desperate, agreed with his partisans that they should expatriate themselves. He fell fighting against the Edonians of Thrace, attempting to force the important town of Enneahodoi, near the mouth of the Strymon (496);* but his defection had not discouraged any one, and Histiseus, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... seizing Don Benito by the throat he added, "this plotting pirate means murder!" Here, in apparent verification of the words, the servant, a dagger in his hand, was seen on the rail overhead, poised, in the act of leaping, as if with desperate fidelity to befriend his master to the last; while, seemingly to aid the black, the three white sailors were trying to clamber into the hampered bow. Meantime, the whole host of negroes, as if inflamed at the sight of their jeopardized captain, impended ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... at a glance, and the horror of it struck her dumb. Once, twice, three times she tried to call. If she could only get Guard away the cattle would follow him; but no voice came. She grew desperate, mad with fear for her sister. Oh, if she could but get them to come towards her and leave Pen. She tried to whistle, but her lips trembled too much. She tried to shriek and failed, and when at last she succeeded, the weak, strained voice could hardly be recognised as ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... homewards after yielding a reluctant consent to the flight, we are invited to contemplate the agony of his soul. The form which it takes is curiously characteristic. No vehement pangs of remorse, or desperate hopes of escape, overpower his faculties in any simple and straightforward fashion. The poor minister is seized with a strange hallucination. He meets a venerable deacon, and can scarcely restrain himself from uttering blasphemies about the Communion-supper. Next appears an aged widow, and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the features of the strike begin to get dramatic than they were instantly submerged in the flood of conversation that was let loose over them. Mrs. Anthony pitied the poor editors and reporters while Parliament was sitting. She saw them as rather silly, violent and desperate men, yet pathetic in their silliness, violence and desperation, snatching at divorces, and breach of promise cases, and fires in paraffin shops, as drowning men snatch ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... fence, tore up small trees, and seized anything and everything that would serve for a weapon, and maintained the fight for a half an hour, before the police arrived. The second portion went by Eighth Avenue, and intercepted a large body of Orangemen that had retreated from the woods, and a desperate battle followed. There were only two policemen here, and of course could do nothing but stand and look on the murderous conflict. In the meantime, the force telegraphed for by Captain. Helme arrived. It consisted of twenty men, to ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... which we call revolution, is for the time simply impossible. So long as many old leaves linger on the November trees, you know that there has been little frost and no wind; just so while the House of Lords retains much power, you may know that there is no desperate discontent in the country, no wild agency likely ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... one people there was equal bravery, talent, and determination on both sides; which made the struggle a very desperate one," ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... altogether overgrown by the fat of the publican. Though it was not eleven o'clock, a great tankard of bitter ale stood upon the table before him, and he was busy cutting up a plug of black tobacco and rubbing the slices into powder between his horny fingers. For all his record of desperate battles, he looked what he was—a good-hearted, respectable householder, law-abiding and kindly, ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sensation supplied a large part of the material for his poetry, and among the senses it was especially the one that has the remotest association with ideas that he drew upon most constantly—the sense of smell. In his desperate search for new and strange sensations he went the round of violent and exhausting dissipations, and as his senses flagged he spurred them with all sorts of stimulants. Meanwhile he observed himself curiously ; the result in his poems ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... able to conjure all evil. Those desperate enemies of mankind which lie in siege of us all around grew feeble and were silent when she came. Nor has any other force than hers dared to enter the rooms where she had lived: it is her influence alone which inhabits them to-day. There is a vessel of copper, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of payment to correspond with the reduction in time! They had done this so often in the canning establishments that the girls were fairly desperate; their wages had gone down by a full third in the past two years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to break any day. Only a month after Marija had become a beef-trimmer the canning factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the girls' earnings ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... terribly as Dickens in his "Tale of Two Cities"; yet what man, conversant with slave-biographies, can read that narrative without feeling it weak beside the provocations to which fugitive slaves testify? It is something for human nature that these desperate insurgents revenged such wrongs by death alone. Even that fearful penalty was to be inflicted only till the object was won. It was admitted in the "Richmond Enquirer" of the time, that "indiscriminate massacre was not their intention, after they obtained foothold, and was resorted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Ralph," Edgar said. "At first we were greatly in favour of Ghent, seeing that they were in a desperate strait and that all reasonable terms were refused them, but of late we have not been so warm in their cause. Van Artevelde himself is assuredly honest and desirous of doing what is right, but methinks ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... meantime everything had been put in order, the tent set up, and the dogs fed. Now came the great question: What was there on the other side of the ridge? Was it the same desperate confusion, or would the ground offer better facilities? Three of us went off to see. Excitement rose as we neared the saddle; so much depended on finding a reasonable way. One more pull and we were up; it was worth the trouble. The first ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... short of such a conviction would have enabled her to play a part among kings and queens, and so many of the ablest statesmen of that most able age. Nothing else could have tempted her, on the failure of her prophecies, into the desperate career of treason into which we are soon to ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... hitherto retained, and went into the country "in a very weak and deplorable condition." He was suffering from jaundice, dropsy, and asthma, under which combination of diseases his body was "so entirely emaciated, that it had lost all its muscular flesh." He had begun with reason "to look on his case as desperate," and might fairly have regarded himself as voluntarily sacrificed to the good of the public. But he is far too honest to assign his action to philanthropy alone. His chief object (he owns) had been, if possible, to secure some provision ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... took no steps in this direction. She did not seek for cheap lodgings, not for a rise of salary, nor even for the money illegally detained by her brother for his own profit. She never spoke to her married sister, nor to any one, of her desperate position. The father of her child had disappeared and she never gave information against him for fear of divulging her secret. Moreover, the law at St. Gall only admitted the charge of paternity against unmarried men! She found no practical way of ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... lying upon some harrows, in the condition described. He was picked up, and carried to a gentleman's house, where, being well cared for, he narrated the remarkable adventure which had befallen him. Before long, however, he "grew into a frenzy so desperate that they were afraid to stay in his chamber," and the gentleman of the house, not knowing what to do, "sent for the parson of the town." Prompted, it is supposed, by the Satanic influence which still held him, Mr. Leech ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... head. From a mischievous love of sport, I took the lady's part; and very gravely said, 'I think it is but fair to give him an offer of it. If he does not choose it, he may let it alone.' 'I think so,' said the lady, looking at her brother with an air of victory. Sir Allan, finding the matter desperate, strutted about the room, and took snuff. When Dr Johnson came in, she called to him, 'Do you choose any cold sheep's-head, sir?' 'No, Madam,' said he, with a tone of surprise and anger. 'It is here, sir,' said she, supposing he had refused ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... never will. But I'll tell you what. I shall get into some desperate scrape about her. Of course she'll marry, and that soon. Then I shall make a fool of myself. When I hear that she is engaged I shall go and quarrel with the man, and kick him,—or get kicked. All the world will turn against me, and I shall ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... a musing sort of tone, as he laid his hand on Mr. Carlyle's shoulder, which his own head scarcely reached, "I am sometimes at death-beds where the clergyman is sent for in this desperate need to the fleeting spirit, and I am tempted to ask myself what good another man, priest though he be, can do at the twelfth hour, where accounts have not ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... presence and the desperate efforts of Murat, Poniatowski, Victor, Macdonald, and thousands of nameless heroes, barely held off the masses of the allied Grand Army. On the north and north-east, Marmont and Ney were equally overborne.[382] Worst of all, the supply of cannon balls was running low. With pardonable ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... at this time the fall of the desperate Communards, who held Paris and defied the government of Versailles, while experts vowed that the end could not be far off. It seemed impossible that a rabble under the command of first one and then another adventurer could hold the capital against disciplined troops, ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... to see him and walk with him, as he asked, if he returned with clean hands. While the letter which she had read neither proved nor disproved such a supposition, the woman yet felt a secret and sure conviction in her heart that Noy was coming back innocent at least of any desperate action. That he was in Cornwall again and a free man appeared to her proof sufficient that he had ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... themselves in safety, had not quitted their homes, and had only sent off their women, children, and old men to Brussels; therefore the gendarmes met with resistance when they arrived; but death howled behind them, and they attacked like desperate men, triumphed over all obstacles, lost ten men, but established the others, and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... gave a lurch; then righted herself; then began to circle down, making desperate efforts to cross the neutral line. But the British airman headed her off. Next moment she lurched again, and then took a "nosedive" straight into the British trenches. She fell on open ground, a few hundred yards behind our second line. The place ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... this, the lion caught up with them and diminished their number by five. Finally there was only one left and the coast was a full day's march away. Could he make it? It looked like a desperate chance, but he still had hopes. He noticed with pleasure that the lion was becoming fat and probably could not travel fast. But he also noticed with displeasure that he had forty feet of chain ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... him during their drive what the source of her illumination was; described Anthony March's visit on that most desperate day of all, the vividness of his concern over the outcome of the fight and his utter unconcern about the effect of it upon his own fortunes. She had been reading Kipling aloud, out at the farm, to the boys and Aunt Lucile and a memory of it led her to make a comparison—heedless ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... charge was larceny, the police assured me that the defendant had been arrested fifty times. It seemed such a desperate case that I gave him the longest term allowed by the law. After he had been in jail a few days, I discovered that his aged father and mother were sick and helpless, and needed his support. I set aside the judgment and allowed him his liberty upon the understanding that if he ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the people are brutal— That their instincts of beauty are dead— Were it so, shame on those who condemn them To the desperate struggle for bread. But they lie in their throats when they say it, For the people are tender at heart, And a wellspring of beauty lies hidden Beneath their life's ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... to fame under the title of the Master of the Rolls; but he was young and unspoiled: whereas this man was a monstrous feather-bed in person, fifty years old, and totally out of condition. Spite of all this, however, and contending against me, who am a master in the art, he made so desperate a defence, that many times I feared he might turn the tables upon me; and that I, an amateur, might be murdered by a rascally baker. What a situation! Minds of sensibility will sympathize with my anxiety. How severe it was, you may understand by this, that for the first thirteen rounds ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... believe either that Austria would claim, or that the other powers of the earth, and chiefly Great Britain and America, would permit the intervention of Russia. I could not believe that Austria would resort to this desperate remedy, because (and it is a remarkable circumstance which I mention now for the first time) it was Austria which but a few years before, when, in the transactions with Turkey, the question of foreign interference for the maintenance ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... withdraw it the very last, of the adherents of the hapless Charles. So long did he resist in arms, so pertinaciously did he uphold the authority of the first Charles, so early did he rise again in behalf of the second, that he was noted by the Parliament as an incorrigible and most desperate malignant; and, had it not been that, by his gallantry in the field, and his humanity when the strife was ended, he had won the personal good-will of Cromwell, it is most likely that it would have gone hard with his fortunes if not ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... This desperate aspiring to paradise lost, this deformed dream of the beautiful, is not less tenacious on the part of the man. He turns towards the woman; and this preoccupation, become insensate, persists even when the dreadful shadow of the two red posts ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... hospitality. The Bajada is the capital of Entre Rios. In 1825 the town contained 6000 inhabitants, and the province 30,000; yet, few as the inhabitants are, no province has suffered more from bloody and desperate revolutions. They boast here of representatives, ministers, a standing army, and governors: so it is no wonder that they have their revolutions. At some future day this must be one of the richest countries of La Plata. The soil is varied and productive; and its almost insular ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... for their victualls failed them altogether at once: and they had nothing for their more assured refuge but their shooes and leather ierkins which they did eat. (M416) Touching their beuerage, some of them dranke the sea water, others did drinke their owne vrine: and they remained in such desperate necessitie a very long space, during the which part of them died for hunger. Beside this extreme famine, which did so grieuously oppresse them, they fell euery minute of an houre out of all hope euer to see France againe, insomuch that they were constrained to cast the water continually out, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... Then lightly cast his cloth and covered them. But these, fluttering aloft, bore with them there Nala's one cloth; and, hovering overhead, Uttered sharp-stinging words, reviling him Even as he stood, naked to all the airs, Downcast and desperate: "Thou brain-sick Prince! We are the dice; we come to ravish hence Thy last poor cloth; we were not well content Thou shouldst depart owning a garment still." And when he saw the dice take wings and fly, Leaving him bare, to Damayanti ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... through rents made by British cannon. The two vessels had again come closer, but not so as to prevent the guns from being handled. While the cannon roared and the flames shot up, the two crews again met in desperate hand-to-hand strife, for it was evident that one of the two vessels must be lost. By the light of the flames Jones saw that the mainmast of the Serapis was cut almost in two. Quickly he gave the order, and another double-headed shot finished the work. Captain Pearson, who had commanded his ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... must have made the other guy desperate, because he made a dive and let his needle ray burn out a slashing beam that zipped across over my head. My forty-five blazed twice. He missed but I didn't, just as the throb of the stun-gun rang the air again. ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... transgression followed in their train. They supported a large number of tippling-houses, to which they would decoy the youthful and unsuspecting, and, after stripping them of their possessions, send them forth into the world the ready and desperate instrument of vice. Our streets were ever resounding with the echoes of their drunken and obscene mirth, and no citizen was secure from their villainy. Frequently, in armed bodies, they have disturbed the good ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... is also certain, that they are much mistaken that think the poverty of a nation is a means of the public safety. Who quarrel more than beggars? Who does more earnestly long for a change, than he that is uneasy in his present circumstances? And who run to create confusions with so desperate a boldness, as those who have nothing to lose, hope to gain by them? If a king should fall under such contempt or envy, that he could not keep his subjects in their duty, but by oppression and ill usage, and by rendering them ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... that he had stirred he found himself some distance away, standing still beside a chestnut-tree. A great wave of depression and fear and hopelessness swept him, and he shivered under it. He had an instant's wild panic, and mad, desperate thoughts surged upon him. He saw utter failure confronting him. He saw himself as helpless as a little child, his feeble efforts already spent for naught, and, like a little child, he was afraid. He would have rushed at that grim encircling wall and fought his way up and over it, but even ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... end of the year 1916 the situation was already becoming almost desperate, even if the putting away of the horrible Rasputin did seem for a moment to relieve the gloom. Officers high up in the army were imploring our military representatives for British intervention with their rulers. Our ambassador appears to have done everything that man could do, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... him what I thought thereof; and Beorn, who must needs listen to all this, ground his teeth and cursed under his breath, for there seemed to have come some desperate fury on him in place of his cold despair of an ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... wretch! he is half crazed with fear; that makes mean men cruel; care not for him;' and when we were ready, giving our packages to Will, she led the way out with a determined aspect, having, as I soon found, embraced a strange—nay, a desperate resolution. For Will asking her, 'Which way will ye turn now, mistress? In this street no inn will open to us, ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... read. The brave knight fought till he was victorious, or dead. Only the fatally wounded surrendered. All this had Walter's hearty endorsement: He would not have acted differently. The beautiful heroine was loved by everybody; and the rejected suitors died of despair, or joined some desperate band. All quite proper. The good remained steadfast, in spite of the Devil and all his machinations—yes, in spite of tedium. Once selected by the author to be a high-toned, moral hero—then spotless garments! Walter wondered if such a one could have a pain in the stomach, or ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... the valuable aid of the cleverest man in the whole camp, read in the Times' columns the details of that great campaign, while we, the actors in it, had enough to do to discharge our own duties well, and rarely concerned ourselves in what seemed of such importance to you. And so very often a desperate skirmish or hard-fought action, the news of which created so much sensation in England, was but little regarded at ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... cut off from the timber, struck out upon the prairie; but the great hound soon overtook him; and after a short but desperate fight, put an end to ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... that, of course, before you stain your neck, and must stain the skin where you have cut off your hair, also. I am giving you these instructions now, because when the time comes there may not be a minute to spare, though, of course, I hope there will be no desperate hurry." ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... unite. Johnston's assistants in command were Beauregard and Bragg, both able and experienced officers. On the morning of April 6, the Confederates fell upon Grant's outposts and drove them headlong against the main body. Desperate valor was shown in the ensuing attack, and before the afternoon it seemed that nothing could save the Union army and its commander from complete disaster. The river was in high flood, two impassable creeks flanked the Federals, while the victorious Confederates ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... let out a yell of terror, and then, certain that he was about to take an awful plunge into some deep part of the lake, made a desperate ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer
... some funereal spell Drawn down through desperate ways that lead not back We seem to move, bound forth past flood and fell ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 'I'm very miserable—very nearly desperate. What remains for me—what remains? Fortune has done her worst—thrown in the dust, her wheels rolled over me; and the servile world, who follow her chariot like a mob, stamp upon the mangled wretch. All this had passed over me, and left me ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... the Gruensberg Leather Company; she did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them; but she was one of the people who give an agitating impression of being on the point of doing something desperate—of leaving a job or a husband—without ever doing it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott's hesitant ardors that he became the playful parent. When he returned from the Elks he peered coyly into the living-room and gurgled, "Has our Kenny been here to-night?" He never credited ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... a fair land, for those who have lingered in its byways: but, alas, a troubled tide of strange metres, of desperate rhythms, of wild conjunctions, of panic-stricken collocations, oftentimes overwhelms it. "Sordello" grew under the poet's fashioning till, like the magic vapour of the Arabian wizard, it passed ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... get someone," replied Barney. "We're a pretty hard combination to beat, aren't we, Margaret? There will be a man to take the service at Bull Crossing if I have to take it myself—a desperate ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... mortified, as they lie in the straw, entirely occupied with breathing. They breathe eternally little short breaths, a hundred or a hundred and ten to the minute, like some sort of pump. They wish passionately not to die, and yet they know with desperate certainty that they are going to die. They lie down there in a tiny, little black hell of their own and fight with all their might and main, feeling that they will die instantly if they skip one little short breath. (I was going to say they fight with all their soul and body, but they no longer ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... gateway-bars, lances and shields, and beaks torn from warships. He too sat there, with the divining-rod of Quirinus, girt in the short augural gown, and carrying on his left arm the sacred shield, Picus the tamer of horses; he whom Circe, desperate with amorous desire, smote with her golden rod and turned by her poisons into a bird with patches of colour on his wings. Of such wise was the temple of the gods wherein Latinus, sitting on his father's seat, summoned the Teucrians to his house and presence; and when they entered ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... plain, At last, in tears and pain. * * * * * Who spurns the shrine of Right, nor wealth nor power Shall be to him a tower, To guard him from the gulf: there lies his lot, Where all things are forgot. Lust drives him on—lust, desperate and wild Fate's sin-contriving child— And cure is none; beyond concealment clear Kindles sin's baleful glare. As an ill coin beneath the wearing touch Betrays by stain and smutch Its metal false—such ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... that it could be pulled up over the barricade when the last of the defenders had entered. By the time this was finished the battle below began in earnest. The infuriated assailants had pulled the doors outwards and were making desperate efforts to climb the pile of logs. This they soon found to be impossible, and began with their halberts to pull them down, and it was not long before they had dislodged sufficient to make a slope up which they ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... rush in one by one without torches and stand as if turned to stone. OLAF comes into view up in the opening, which he seeks to widen with desperate efforts.] ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... bombshell playing havoc with the house of cards which had been so carefully erected. But the intrigue had gone so far, and the prizes to be won by the monarchical supporters were so great that nothing could induce them to retrace their footsteps. For a week and more a desperate struggle went on behind the scenes in the Presidential Palace, since Yuan Shih-kai was too astute a man not to understand that a most perilous situation was being rapidly created and that if things went wrong he would be the chief victim. But family ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... sworn he was a trump, not a dozen ever entered the house a second time. Do what he would, Bowley could not create a business; and the corners of his mouth began visibly to decline ere the experiment had lasted a couple of months. He made a desperate effort to get up a Free-and-easy; he had the old piano tuned, and set an old fellow to play upon it with open windows; exhibited a perpetual announcement of 'A Concert this Evening;' and himself led off the harmony, to the tune of Tally-ho, at the top of his voice. It was all of no avail. The ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... prepared for some sort of gun-play, for the crooks were desperate characters, and I myself was surprised to encounter nothing but physical force, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... blunt, brutal way this Southern Democrat talked. He couldn't believe in his honesty. Beneath those bushy eyebrows burned a wolf's hunger for office and power. On the surface he was loyal to the Union. He wondered if he were not in reality playing a desperate waiting game, ready at the moment of the crisis to throw his information to either side? The air of Washington reeked with suspicion and ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... to hail Mr O'Neil or somebody; I thought I oughter 'ave summun by to 'elp me, in case he becomed desperate-like, and I couldn't make no one hear on deck, and that's why I comed when I knowed you was a-passing ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... Dot's Kangaroo look in that desperate moment, standing erect, waiting for her foe, and conquering her naturally frightened nature by a grand effort of courage, that it seemed impossible that either dogs or men should be so cruel as to take her life. For a moment the dingo hound seemed daunted by her bravery, ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... course is to be taken in bad cases." (or), "A desperate case must have a desperate course." ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... ray was thrown against it in order to make the defenders keep their screens up continuously. The edge of the apron was bearing the brunt of that vicious and never-ceasing attack, and most concerned the desperate defense. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... advised her!" the poor woman passionately retorted. "Look at me in my misery and refuse to help me! Oh, you need n't be afraid, I know I 'm a fright, I have n't an idea what I have on. If this goes on, we may both as well turn scarecrows. If ever a woman was desperate, frantic, heart-broken, I am that woman. I can't begin to tell you. To have nourished a serpent, sir, all these years! to have lavished one's self upon a viper that turns and stings her own poor ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... it for the sake of establishing and giving authority to the good precepts and doctrines Jesus taught; because such a course would have been in the plainest antagonism to all those principles themselves, and because, too, they must have known both the utter wickedness and the desperate hazards and forlornness of such an attempt to give a fictitious sanction to moral truths. In such an enterprise there was before them not the faintest probability of even the slightest success. Every selfish motive would tend to deter them; for poverty, hatred, disgrace, stripes, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... or would he remember her complaint of being tired, a complaint she so seldom made? It was as a blow to Elinor when she heard his step go on past her door: and yet she was glad. Had he come in there was a desperate thought in her mind that she would call him to her bedside and in the dark, with his hand in hers, tell him—all that there was to tell. But it was again a relief when he passed on, and she felt that she was spared for an hour or two, spared for the new ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... also for them order for the repayment of an olde and desperate debt of three thousand marks, a debt so desperate, as foure yeeres left out of their accounts, and by the opinion of them all, not thought fit to be dealt with, for too much offending the Emperour, or impeaching his other businesse, which was ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... we shall find her before then," returned the Colonel earnestly. "We ought not to delay an instant, with that idea in view. Indeed, our theory may be quite wrong and Alora be in desperate ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... thorny, rugged; knotted, knotty; invious^; pathless, trackless; labyrinthine &c (convoluted) 248; intricate, complicated &c (tangled) 59; impracticable &c (impossible) 471; not feasible &c 470; desperate &c (hopeless) 859. embarrassing, perplexing &c (uncertain) 475; delicate, ticklish, critical; beset with difficulties, full of difficulties, surrounded by difficulties, entangled by difficulties, encompassed with difficulties. under a difficulty; in a box; in difficulty, in hot water, in the suds, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... door and walked slowly down the passage. Having reached his room, he stamped with anger, uttered desperate words, struck his forehead with his fist, vented his impatience, because he could see no solution of his difficulties. He paced the room like a madman, fought the air, stopped, resumed his walk,—until exhausted he threw himself into a chair. Sorrow, anguish, and rage, ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... however," he proceeded cheerfully, "that notwithstanding my own experience of the habits of the sordid herd, I saw one card I was surprised to find, though really"—shrugging his shoulders—"I ought to have been less surprised to find it than to find any other. But it was bold. I suppose the fellow is desperate." ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... received an expected visitor at her apartment. Expecting him, she made a desperate effort to appear as strong and unconcerned as she had been on the occasion of a former meeting. There was little in her appearance to suggest worry, illness or alarm when she entered the rather unsettled little library and confronted the ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... from others that she was sadly changed. Instead of being one of the most light-hearted girls, I heard that she used to sit day after day in her mother's house and wring her hands and weep and that her mother's heart was almost broken. Friends feared that Lucy was losing her mind and might do some desperate deed, but she did not. I left about that time to teach school in a distant village, and when I returned home I heard sad tidings of poor Lucy. She was a mother, but not a wife. Her brothers had grown angry with her for tarnishing their family name, of which they were ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... his first two volumes he made no direct reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent narrative. He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish Catholics. He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who gave evidence for Arthur O'Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and especially to Grattan. That O'Connor was engaged in treasonable correspondence with France there can be no doubt now. But he did not tell his ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... however, the news which he had to communicate was less satisfactory. Garret himself was gone—utterly gone. Dalaber was obstinate, and no clue to the track of the fugitive could be discovered. The police were at fault; neither bribes nor threats could elicit anything; and in these desperate circumstances, as he told the bishop, the three heads of houses conceived that they might strain a point of propriety for so good a purpose as to prevent the escape of a heretic. Accordingly, after a full report of the points of their success, Doctor London went on ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Unto me bending down from above, Thy radiant vision appearing As an angel of beauty and love. 'Mid the torments of desperate sadness, In the torture of bondage and sighs, To me rang thy voice so beloved— And I dreamed thy miraculous eyes. But the years rolled along—and life's tempests My illusions, my youth overcame, I forgot that sweet voice full of music— ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... improperly melancholy, or metaphorically mad, lightly mad, or in disposition, as stupid, angry, drunken, silly, sottish, sullen, proud, vainglorious, ridiculous, beastly, peevish, obstinate, impudent, extravagant, dry, doting, dull, desperate, harebrain, &c. mad, frantic, foolish, heteroclites, which no new [795] hospital can hold, no physic help; my purpose and endeavour is, in the following discourse to anatomise this humour of melancholy, through all its parts and species, as it is an habit, or an ordinary disease, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... her it did not win the shadow of a reply again and again. She laid her hand then upon Mrs. Rossitur's shoulder, but the very significant answer to that, was a shrinking gesture of the shoulder and neck away from the hand. Fleda, growing desperate, then implored an answer in words prayed for an explanation with an intensity of distress in voice and manner, that no one whose ears were not stopped with a stronger feeling could have been deaf to; but Mrs. Rossitur would not ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... children at home. He was furious against the poor girls, as if they had led their brother into danger. In his violent rage he was a perfect maniac, and the young men pushing him away, cried shame on him. In a while, the desperate man, torn by a hurricane of passion, sate himself down on a crag, and burst into a tempest of tears, and struck his head violently with his clenched fists, and cursed himself and every body. It was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... of General Banks's critical position, I have been compelled to suspend General McDowell's movements to join you. The enemy are making a desperate push upon Harper's Ferry, and we are trying to throw General Fremont's force and part of General McDowell's ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... They that led him changing the good will they bare him a little before into hatred, because the foresaid speeches proceeded, as they thought, from a desperate mind. ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... Example of others: But when they had touched the Threshold, it was a strange Shock to them to find that the Delusion of Errour was gone, and they plainly discerned the Building to hang a little up in the Air without any real Foundation. At first we saw nothing but a desperate Leap remained for us, and I a thousand times blamed my unmeaning Curiosity that had brought me into so much Danger. But as they began to sink lower in their own Minds, methought the Palace sunk along with us, till they were arrived at ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... steadily, systematically, inexorably, propelled by many powerful tendencies of the age, and checked only by assassination. What are the agrarian outrages which have become so terribly rife of late, but the desperate struggles of a doomed race to break the instruments which pluck them out of their native soil? A generation of instruction in the national schools and a generation of intercourse with the free citizens of the United States, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... Aid to his Brother.—During all the years Hannibal was waging war in Italy, his brother Hasdrubal was carrying on a desperate struggle with the Roman armies in Spain. At length he determined to leave the conduct of the war in that country to others, and go to the relief of his brother, who was sadly in need of aid. Like Pyrrhus, Hannibal had been brought to realize that even constant victories ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... "Turkey number one!" he called out. I missed a big gobbler on the run. Copple shot again. "Turkey number two!" he called out. I could not see what he had done, but of course I knew he had done execution. It roused my ire as well as a desperate ambition. Turkeys were running up hill everywhere. I aimed at this one, then at that. Again I fired. Another miss! How that gobbler ran! He might just as well have flown. Every turkey contrived to get a tree or bush between him and me, just at the critical instant. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... that our horses had arrived at La Bizaie early that morning, having crossed by the raft bridge the day before. Silver as usual made a desperate fuss, and was eventually knocked into the river by a mule who was crossing with him. He swam up and down the river for twenty-five minutes, refusing to come out—poor Catley in desperation all the time. But he was eventually hauled out, with my saddle and bags, of course, sopping wet. ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... amongst what looked like the fragments of a ship. She had given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded, too, before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... forces in the East. Indeed it seems so reckless that I can only account for it by supposing either that they are confident of rushing Petrograd and paralysing Russia within a few weeks: or that they are in a desperate ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... working it with a tea-kettle, is preposterously abs ... In one of his visions he claims to have seen a gathering of people, called a city, in which there are to be more than four million souls, and governed not by the virtuous, as in our own day, but by the most desperate political malefactors that ever banded together for plunder, and this at the direct request of the people themselves! I am perfectly aware that human nature is weak, and given over at times to strange delusions, but that any body of self-respecting persons should deliberately and of their ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... of steel, and terminating in a long, narrow, and very sharp blade: this, with a hunting-knife, or hanger, completed his offensive arms. Thus equipped, the hunter would either encounter his enemy face to face, confront his desperate charge, as with erect tail, depressed head, and flaming eyes, he rushed with his foamy tusks full against him, who either sought to pierce his vitals through his counter, or driving his spear through his chine, transfix his heart; or failing those ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... ford before his pursuers overtook him. But Andrew felt that the narrow strip of wood beside which he was racing could not afford him shelter and that the ford would avail him nothing. In his extremity he made up his mind to a desperate venture. ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... them to be used as a courier. Blakely's opportune coming had cheered not a little the flagging defense, but, not until forty-eight hours thereafter, by which time their condition had become almost desperate and the foe almost daring, did the lithe, big-eyed, swarthy little Apache reach them. Blakely knew him instantly, wrote his dispatch and bade the boy go with all speed, with the result we know. "Three more of our party are wounded," he had written, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... charge on foot. After a long and difficult contest, the Helvetian warriors were driven back, but the hardest struggle was about the chariots and the camp, for the Helvetians made a stand there and a desperate resistance, and also their wives and children, who fought till they were cut to pieces, and the battle was hardly over at midnight. This glorious deed of victory Caesar followed up by one still better, for he ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... Tozer's nose had ceased to bleed, the signal was given for the gates to be thrown open; and out rushed Proctor, Marshal, Bull-dogs, and undergraduates. The Town was in great force, and the fight became desperate. To the credit of the Town, be it said, they discarded bludgeons and stones, and fought, in John Bull fashion, with their fists. Scarcely a stick was to be seen. Singling out his man, Mr. Tozer made at him valiantly, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
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