"Speculator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... travelled over an old Spanish military road, crossing rich rolling prairies, here and there watered by clear streams, the banks of which are sheltered by magnificent oaks. Fifteen miles from Austin there is a remarkable spot, upon which a visionary speculator had a short time before attempted to found a city. He purchased an immense tract of ground, had beautiful plans drawn and painted, and very soon there appeared, upon paper, one of the largest and handsomest cities in the world. There were colleges and public squares, penitentiaries, banks, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... William's reign could remember the days when there was not a single banking house in London. Goldsmiths had strong vaults in which masses of bullion could lie secure from fire and robbers, and at their shops in Lombard Street all payments in coin were made. William Paterson, an ingenious speculator, submitted to the government a plan for a national bank, which after long debate passed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... slaves. Mr Baker gained much information about the slave trade of this part of the world. Most of those engaged in this nefarious traffic are Syrians, Copts, Turks, Circassians, and some few Europeans. When a speculator has determined to enter into the trade, he engages a hundred and fifty to two hundred ruffians, and purchases guns and ammunition, and a few pounds of glass beads. With these he sails up to Gondokoro and, disembarking, marches into the interior till he arrives at the village of some ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... of man was incapable of the finer qualities. There are charming rich men, but either they inherited their wealth, or made it in some high pursuit to which gain was only an incident, or they are exceptional cases. But of course Bagley isn't even a fair type of the regular money-grinder—he's a speculator in anything, and a boor compared with ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... is a lot of middle men and drummers, the buyers at the producer's end, the wholesalers or middle men at the consumer's end, with speculator and landowner at both ends. All of these have to be supported by the system, and the dear ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... to purchase beef for the army! The schedule price is from 16 to 20 cents, and he pays no more, for the government—and if he buys for himself, it is not likely he pays more—and so we have a government agent a speculator in meat, and co-operating with speculators! Will Mr. Secretary ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... Court, and found that many of their forbears were sullied by the taint of Trade. The founders of both Prince Tapfer von Schneiderleinberg's and Count Daumerlingenstamm's houses were tailors; Baron von Bohnenranken derived his title from a speculator who, after a remarkably unsuccessful venture in cattle, had made a colossal coup in beans. As for Prince Hansmeinigel, his pretensions to high descent were even more questionable—at least, if it was actually the fact, as the Fairy ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... the speculator," she said, "who bought and sold negroes, and kept dogs to chase runaways; old Mr. Fetters—you must remember old Josh Fetters? When I was a child, my coloured mammy used him for a bogeyman for me, ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... bearing much resemblance to our most fashionable sociables with a standing awning; so much so, that the first of them I saw I mistook for a mourning sociable. Some are ornamented with black feathers. Caparisons, hangings, every thing is in black, as well as the coachman. This speculator also lets out mourning coaches, black without and within, like those in use in London. At a few funerals, these are hired for the mourners, and at a recent one, fifteen of these carriages were counted in the procession. However, this luxury of burials is not entirely come again into fashion. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... years old, was put on the speculator's block and sold at Charlottesville, North Carolina. My mother was sold on the same day. They sold her to a man named Paul Barringer, and refugeed her to a place near Sardis, Mississippi, to the cotton country. Before ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... I agree with Mr. Fiske that we have here "the most subtle conclusion now within the ken of the scientific speculator, reached without any disregard of the canons prescribed by the doctrine of relativity," I would like to point out to minds less clear-sighted than his, that this same "doctrine of relativity" effectually debars us from using this "conclusion" as an argument of any assignable value in favour ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the orderly arrangement of the arguments and the elegant lucidity of the style are such as we are accustomed to expect from French essay-writers. And what is still more admirable is the way in which the enthusiasm characteristic of a genial and original speculator is tempered by the patience and caution of a cool-headed critic. Patience and caution are nowhere more needed than in writers who deal with mythology and with primitive religious ideas; but these qualities are too ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... take a minute...." Ere he finished there stalked in a wild-eyed individual clad in boots, the slouch hat of the mining man, a suit of handsome broadcloth, mud-bespattered and a heavy golden watch chain with the usual nugget charm. He was a clean-cat type of mining speculator ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... AGAINST THE SPECULATOR.—The Chicago city council has offered to reduce the theater licenses in amounts from one thousand to five thousand dollars if the theater managers will refuse to take back from agencies unsold tickets. Nine ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... in the Roman commonwealth attached to the possession of land, and from its constituting the sole basis of political privileges—a basis which was infringed for the first time only towards the close of this epoch (35)—it was undoubtedly at this period already usual for the fortunate speculator to invest part of his capital in land. It is clear enough also from the political privileges given to freedmen possessing freeholds,(36) that the Roman statesmen sought in this way to diminish the dangerous class of the rich who had ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... pushed too violently. He who would cast the horoscope of humanity, or of any human activity, must neither neglect history nor trust her overmuch. Certainly the neglect of history is the last mistake into which a modern speculator is likely to fall. To compare Victorian England with Imperial Rome has been the pastime of the half-educated these fifty years. "Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento," is about as much Latin as it is ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... beggaring them. If the landed man cried for peace, he was answered by the Whig stock-jobber that peace meant the ultimate repudiation of the National Debt, with the certainty of the reign of the Pretender. If the landed man spoke for the Church, the Whig speculator raised the shout of "No Popery!" The war had transformed parties into factions, and the ministry stood between a Scylla of a peace-at-any-price, on the one side, and a Charybdis of a war-at-any-price on the other; or, if not a war, then a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... trotters and race horses. On some of the farms around here, the people have gone mad on breeding fast horses. An old farmer out in the country had a common cart-horse that he suddenly found out had great powers of speed and endurance. He sold him to a speculator for a big price, and it has set everybody wild. If the people who give all their time to it can't raise fast horses I don't see how the farmers can. A fast horse on a farm is ruination to the boys, for it starts them racing and ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... we shall see an illustration of the naive shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life has become not an affair of inward conviction, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... they did not exert themselves to produce what they could. They often abandoned their crops before harvest, knowing that they had already spent them. In cases, however, where the Negro tenants had acquired mules, horses or tools upon which the speculator had a mortgage, the blacks were actually bound to their landlords to secure the property. It was soon evident that in the end the white man himself was the loser by this evil system. There appeared waste ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... excitement. In his hand he carried a small circular cage, containing two or three rats for immediate use. On the receipt of sixpence, one of these was liberated; and a few yards start being (sportsmanlike) allowed, the speculator's terrier was then let loose, joined gratuitously, after a short interval, by a perfect pack in full cry, with a human chorus of "Hoo rat! Too loo! loo dog!" The rat turned, twisted, doubled, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... well as reprobate person, who not only deserts a beautiful, charming, and affectionate wife, but treats his lower-class loves shabbily, and allows himself to be swindled and fooled to the nth by an adventuress of fashion and a plausible speculator. On the other hand, one of this book's rather numerous grisettes, Ninie, is of the more if not most gracious of that questionable but not unappetising sisterhood. Dubois, the funny man, and Jolivet, the parsimonious reveller, who generally manages to make his ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... from Kennedy to me, to see what impression his theory made. On me at least it did make an impression. Hartley Langhorne, I knew, was a Wall Street broker and speculator who dealt in real estate, securities, in fact in anything that would appeal to a plunger as promising a ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... he lent money. Castanier went forthwith in search of the said Claparon, a merchant who had a reputation for taking heavy risks that meant wealth or utter ruin. The money lender walked away as Castanier came up. A gesture betrayed the speculator's despair. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... times—surely there must have been many; and this proves to us, that he was a low fellow without political connections, and that he never had been behind the curtain. Now, what business had such a man to set himself up for a writer of history and a speculator on politics? Besides, his history is imperfect; and, suppose it were not, what is its subject? Why simply one single war; a war which lasted twenty-seven years; but which, after all, through its whole course was enlivened by only two events worthy ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... soul enter heaven at the very same moment? Is heaven in the atmosphere? He who asserts it is a very bold speculator. Is it out in the ether? If so, where? And how is it our telescopes cannot detect it? If heaven is a place, as it must be if it exists at all, it cannot very well be within the astronomical universe. Now the farthest stars are inconceivably remote. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... helped to baffle the police, who saw Silva living at the rate of twenty thousand a year, and were unable to trace the source of his income. That he had estates in Portugal was known; but they had been acquired, apparently, on the profits of the music-hall. He was not a speculator, though he was a shareholder in a number of companies which were controlled by the colonel; and he was certainly not a gambler, in the generally ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... whether he will sign a pardon. Gobseck would take anything, from the present of game sent him by some poor devil or the pound's weight of wax candles from devout folk, to the rich man's plate and the speculator's gold snuff-box. Nobody knew what became of the presents sent to the old money-lender. Everything went ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... becoming a martyr to his republicanism, or submitting to any serious loss on account of it, they much mistook the man. He entertained their principles sincerely and not the less that they were found impracticable; for the miscarriage of his experiment no more converts the political speculator, than the explosion of a retort undeceives an alchymist. But Bletson was quite prepared to submit to Cromwell, or any one else who might be possessed of the actual authority. He was a ready subject in practice to the powers existing, and made little difference betwixt ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the track, and who goes mad with dreams of incalculable power, a study, in fact, of financial megalomania. It was said, at the time, that Ibsen was originally led to make this analysis of character from reading in the Christiania newspapers a report of the failure and trial of a notorious speculator convicted of fraud in 1895, and sentenced to a long period ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the atmosphere of the West, with a cowboy, land speculator, and lover for its hero, Mr. Whitson's new novel, without being in the least a copy, has many of the attractions of Mr. ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... if you think he's a rank bad speculator like yourself, sonny, you're mistaken. I didn't make my money that way, and I don't reckon to lose it that way either. But Gardner's right. Those shares are safe. They aren't going ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... slaves. With him farming is no mere amusement, nor again is it mere labour. It is primarily and throughout a means of making money, and indeed the only strictly honourable one. However, Cato so far relaxed the strictness of this theory that he became "an ardent speculator in slaves, buildings, artificial lakes, and pleasure-grounds, the mercantile spirit being too strong within him to rest satisfied with the modest returns of his estate." As regarded slaves, the law considered them as chattels, and he followed the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... but this business, honest enough in itself, only veiled the man's real trade, in which he defied alike the laws of honesty and of his country. The other was by turns a gentleman of property, a merchant, a cattle owner, or a speculator, in all of which characters he acted excellently, and succeeded in making the acquaintance of men whom ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... quite clear that Jevons's business was the business of the speculator who loves the excitement of the risks he takes. I remember exhorting him to prudence. I said: "This isn't art, it's speculation. You're taking considerable risks, ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... press. He's on his way to Algiers too, and will be more successful in liberalizing the Arabs than the French. That old chap over yonder with the snuffy nose, the snuffy wig, and snuffy coat, is a grand speculator in horses, on his way to the richest cavalry corps of the army; and, as for our maitre d'hotel at the head of this segment, pauvre diable, you see what he is without a revelation. The pestilence ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... of the useful arts have its own proper origin, referrible to some particular place, time, and community, there must have been an era when it was wanting to mankind. Hence, an ante-metallic age is as much the conception of the speculator, as the discovery ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... hated to hear that any one of our fine fellows had been killed," he said with a nervous laugh, "but my, what a swell little afternoon hanging that would have been! Nathan Hale with the original cast wouldn't have had a speculator in front of his doors. His front-row seats would be selling at box-office prices, while we would have sold out the house at ten thousand times the cost of the production before the first-nighters had even seen a press notice. ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... only practicable for a nation. The things I recollect of the life in the village of Melrose, of 700 inhabitants, have been talked over with my mother, and many embodied in a little MS. volume of reminiscences of her life. I hold more from her than from my father; but, as he was an unlucky speculator, I inherit from him Hope, which is invaluable to a social or political reformer. School holidays were only a rarity in harvest time for the parish school. At Miss Phin's we had, besides, a week ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... long before they had, at any time, the profusion which our modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and in the hard beginnings the orchard and the garden were forgotten for the fields. Their harvests must pay for the acres bought of the government, or from some speculator who had never seen the land; and the settler must be prompt in paying, or else see his home pass from him after all his toil into the hands of strangers. He worked hard and he fared hard, and if he was safer when peace came, it is doubtful if he were otherwise more fortunate. As the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... among the earliest products of the dawning intellectual activity of man. In those early days positive knowledge was not to be had, but the craving after it needed, at all hazards, to be satisfied, and according to the country, or the turn of thought, of the speculator, the suggestion that all living things arose from the mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from some more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient resting-place for his curiosity. The myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... or receives company. Part of his money is supposed to be in the Funds, and part laid out in railway investments, which have survived the panic of eighteen hundred and forty-six, and are rapidly rising in value. He is said to be a bold speculator. Since his arrival in England he has invested, with great judgment, in house property. He has some houses in remote parts of London, and some houses in certain watering-places on the east coast, which are shown to be advancing in public repute. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... disgraceful; in fact not because I'm in... hm! Well, anyway, I won't say why, I daren't.... But we all saw to-day when he came in that that man is not of our sort. Not because he had his hair curled at the barber's, not because he was in such a hurry to show his wit, but because he is a spy, a speculator, because he is a skin-flint and a buffoon. That's evident. Do you think him clever? No, he is a fool, a fool. And is he a match for you? Good heavens! Do you see, ladies?" he stopped suddenly on the way upstairs to their rooms, "though all my friends ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... A man kept me to breed chil'en for market, and sold 'em as fast as they got big enough; last of all, he sold me to a speculator, and my Mas'r got ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that M. Hardy, instead of being what he is, had only been a cold-hearted speculator, looking merely to the profit, and saying to himself: 'To make the most of my factory, what is needed? Good work—great economy in the raw material—full employment of the workman's time; in a word, cheapness of manufacture, in order to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... The old standards were scope enough for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute—and "fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone." He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered. I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend G.'s "Antonio." G., satiate with visions of political justice (possibly not to be realized in our time), or willing to let the sceptical worldlings see, that his anticipations of the future did ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... then we turn for the most striking example of the playwright's powers. This first appeared as Le Faiseur (The Speculator), being originally written in 1838-40. Justice compels us to state, however, that another hand is present in the perfected play. In the original it was a comedy in five acts; but this was revamped and reduced to three acts by ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... I will venture to hope is, that I have opened to thee one true, and not utterly hacknied, page in the various and mighty volume of mankind. In this busy and restless world I have not been a vague speculator, nor an idle actor. While all around me were vigilant, I have not laid me down to sleep—even for the luxury of a poet's dream. Like the school boy, I have considered study as study, but ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... speculator insists that virtue lies in a constant and fierce struggle between the will and the passions, between man and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... the unmistakable click of a roulette-wheel. Men talked loudly of their projects and ambitions shortly to be accomplished. An epic poet was about to publish his magnum opus, the birth of a new star in the poetical firmament; a speculator had made his great coup—to-morrow he would ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... half nude of body and wholly nude of mind, each in their turn have given their sign and seal to their especial century, for better or for worse. The nineteenth century has some touch of all, but its own novelty of production is the female speculator. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... particular spot, or whether "it is just lying around there loose." (Renewed laughter.) I really can not tell whether it is one of those ethereal creations of intellectual frostwork, more intangible than the rose-tinted clouds of a summer sunset,—one of those airy exhalations of the speculator's brain, which I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with Government subsidies, luring the unwary settlers as the mirage of the desert lures the famishing traveler on, and ever on, until it fades away ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... brushed, and lived in fine style, with a livery-stable carriage by the month, a stall at the opera, and his particular table at Bignon's. And he showed himself wherever it was the correct thing to be seen. For the rest, he was a speculator, a Stock Exchange gambler, not caring one single rap about art. But he unfailingly scented success, he guessed what artist ought to be properly started, not the one who seemed likely to develop the genius of a great painter, furnishing food for discussion, but ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... from actual existence in the mind of others, as to perceive and appropriate them. Beyond this it would be difficult to advance our speculation with any degree of certainty; but if speculation may be at all indulged in such a question, it might, perhaps, be allowed to a sanguine speculator to surmise that, possibly, the mind in that state may be put en rapport with not only the ideas and emotions of another particular mind, but with the whole of the external world, and with all its minds. Another step would carry us to that participation in the whole scheme of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... light, took a book from his pocket: The Speculator's Manual of Proudhon, and set to reading it attentively and to marking the passages ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... countenance altered; it lost its frank, affectionate beauty: sullen, abstracted, morose, it showed that some great care was at the core. Then Lucretia herself began grievingly to notice the change to Susan; gradually she altered her tone with regard to the speculator, and hinted vague fears, and urged Susan's remonstrance and warning. As she had anticipated, warning and remonstrance came in vain to the man who, comparing Lucretia's mental power to Susan's, had learned to despise the unlearned, timid sense ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... slipping away for her bit of fun. Grown a beauty, too, as anybody but a thundering, juicy, damned fool might have known she would! He swore bitterly, thinking what a gold-mine a face and figure like that might have proved to an honest speculator up Johannesburg way. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... fine country for the poor labourer, who, after a few years of hard toil, can sit down in his own log-house, and look abroad on his own land, and see his children well settled in life as independent freeholders. It is a grand country for the rich speculator, who can afford to lay out a large sum in purchasing land in eligible situations; for if he have any judgment, he will make a hundred per cent as interest for his money after waiting a few years. But it ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... stories high, sinister of aspect, and standing quite alone, could just be distinguished in the darkness. It was already falling to pieces, and yet it was not entirely completed. Plainly enough, the speculator who had undertaken the enterprise had not been rich enough to complete it. On seeing the many closely pierced windows of the facade, a passer-by could not fail to divine for what purpose the building had been erected; and ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... around in all directions to make sure that nobody was observing him, he produced from under his blanket a piece of gold-bearing quartz. Without saying a word, he held the bit of rock before the eyes of the speculator. ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... island of Vlieland. Slatius and others were also intercepted in their attempts at escape.—Stoutenbourg, the most culpable of all, was the most fortunate; probably from the energy of character which marks the difference between a bold adventurer and a timid speculator. He is believed to have passed from The Hague in the same manner as Grotius quitted his prison; and, by the aid of a faithful servant, he accomplished his escape through various perils, and finally reached Brussels, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... becomes a vice of theft. So it is with gambling. It is giving the natural tendency to chance, to risk an illegitimate play. The person who is afraid to risk anything accomplishes but little in any way, is seldom a speculator, and never a gambler. Usually the gambler is the man who is naturally full of hazard, who loves to run risks, to take chances. Nor will one find a more practical and useful tendency in one's make-up than this. See the discoverer of America and his ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... fellers to fish from 'em, too. Humph! I guess I'm out of soundin's. When I thought fifteen dollars was a high price for paintin' a view of a house I was slightly mistaken. Next time I'll offer the paintin' feller the house and ask him what he considers a fair boot, besides. Sam Cahoon's a better speculator than I thought he was. Hello, Commodore! what's ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... two children, and about to be presented with a third, Proudhon was obliged to devise some immediate means of gaining a living; he resumed his labors, and published, at first anonymously, the "Manual of a Speculator in the Stock-Exchange." Later, in 1857, after having completed the work, he did not hesitate to sign it, acknowledging in the preface his indebtedness ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... That a speculator in his closet should have concocted such a theory is comprehensible; paper will take all that is put upon it, while abstract beings, the hollow simulacra and philosophic puppets he concocts, are adapted to every sort of combination.—That a lunatic in his cell should adopt and preach ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... what mines are in best repute on any stock exchange. All engineers must wish to have the industry under them in high repute. The writer knows of several mines paying 20% on their stocks which yet stand lower in price on account of short ore-reserves than mines paying less annual returns. The speculator, who is an element not to be wholly disregarded, wishes a rise in his mining stock, and if development proceeds at a pace in advance of production, he will gain a legitimate rise through ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... Tom Simson, otherwise known as "The Innocent," of Sandy Bar. He had met him some months before over a "little game," and had, with perfect equanimity, won the entire fortune—amounting to some forty dollars—of that guileless youth. After the game was finished, Mr. Oakhurst drew the youthful speculator behind the door and thus addressed him: "Tommy, you're a good little man, but you can't gamble worth a cent. Don't try it over again." He then handed him his money hack, pushed him gently from the room, and so made a ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... supposing some Platonic speculator were to come along and insist upon our leaving room for an alternative conclusion; suppose he were to urge upon us that all this process of material development, with the discovery of which our patient study has been rewarded, may be but the temporary manifestation of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... him (which was a lie), hoped he had had a pleasant journey through the bush; asked how things were going on in Melbourne, and made enquiries about old friends there. But all the while he was calculating chances. He had acquired the valuable habit of the gambler and speculator, of talking about one thing while he was thinking about another. His thoughts ran on in this style: "This fellow (he could not think of him as a gentleman) wants to see my cash; haven't got any; must be near five hundred pounds short ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... a year ago that he had plunged into its wildest excesses,—a reckless gambler among speculators, a hopeless speculator among gamblers, until the little fortune he had brought thither ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... objects of rural fancy, after describing some of the offices of the landscape designer, adds, that 'he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind.' Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of 'a sullen and surly speculator.' The anxious life of Shenstone would indeed have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of Whateley on the Leasowes; which, said he, 'is a perfect picture of his mind—simple, elegant and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... manifest advantage to them. As the matter stands now the moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and thus at great expense aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited speculator (who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing) rushes the same book on the market and robs the respectable publisher ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... cooking a bit, Doctor," Billie was saying. "Especially with Nancy, although I suppose I am really her assistant. She makes things exciting enough. I think she's a kind of culinary speculator and takes a lot of chances, but she's awfully lucky. She takes all sorts of rag-tag ends of things, chops them into bits and turns out what she ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... this effort, appalled at having two women, two children, and two maids on his hands, he was incapable of the struggle to maintain a family by his pen when he had failed to maintain even himself. So he let things take their chance. Then the ruthless speculator exaggerated the farce of love-making at home to secure ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... modern housing of families do we not all have to depend upon the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live? Is, then, the shelter of the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... abhorred the growing latitudinarianism of those times more than Dodwell. Yet no man had more reason to rejoice in it. For, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, a speculator who had dared to affirm that the human soul is by its nature mortal, and does, in the great majority of cases, actually die with the body, would have been burned alive in Smithfield. Even in days which Dodwell could well remember, such ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... can hear. There is no jar,—there is no forced advancement in this school; there is no upward step for any, who have not first been taught to see it, who have not, indeed, already taken it. For it is an artist's school, and not a pedant's, or a vague speculator's, who knows not how to converge his speculation, even upon his mode ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... a speculator in town-lots—a profession that was, just then, in high repute in the city of New York. For farms, and all the more vulgar aspects of real estate, he had a sovereign contempt; but offer him a bit of land that could be measured by feet and inches, and he was ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... the world, how was it with them? But one thought, one desire, filled their hearts; one object, one intention, was their aim. What of the speculator and extortioner of the South, Christian as well as Jew, Turk as well as Infidel! From the hour that the spirit of avarice swept through the hearts of the people, the South became a vast garden of corruption, in which the pure and uncorrupted were as pearls among ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... may be prejudiced without knowing it. But it really seems to me that the future is full of great promise. The South, after all, is growing more prosperous. It is producing more and more every year, until in time it will become wealthy. The West is growing almost beyond the imagination of a speculator, and the Eastern and Middle States are much more than holding their own. We have now fifty millions of people and in a few years will have a hundred. That we are a Nation I think is now settled. Our growth will be unparalleled. I myself expect to live ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... billiard-tables; that there are no front-row seats for the Follies, no berths in any cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges a front-row seat, and the ship's doctor sells you a berth in the sick bay. But in Salonika the rule failed. As already explained, Salonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly, added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000 Greek soldiers, their officers, and with many of them their ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... he would lose it. This time the slump was really unexpected by all, even by the magnates—the mysterious and all-powerful "they" of Freeman's—so that the loss of the second fortune did not reflect on Gilmartin's ability as a speculator, but on his luck. As a matter of fact, he had been too careful and had sinned from over-timidity at first, only to plunge later and ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre
... some of the offices of the landscape designer, adds, that "he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind." Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of a "sullen and surly speculator." The anxious life of Shenstone would, indeed, have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of Wheatley on the Leasowes; which, said he, "is a perfect picture of his mind—simple, elegant, and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether the spot ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Crawford. "Joseph was a very rich man, and all due to his own clever and careful investments. A bit of a speculator, but always on the right side of the market. Why, he fairly had a corner in X.Y. stock. Just that deal—and it will go through in a few days—means a fortune in itself. I shall settle ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... feature of his character, he had determined not to return until fortune should have bestowed upon him wealth at least equal to the inheritance from which he had been ousted. In Spanish America he had striven to accumulate that wealth in vain. As vequero, traveller, speculator, sailor, he had toiled for fourteen years, and had failed. Worn out and penitent, he had returned home to find a corner of English earth in which to lay his weary bones. The tale was plausible enough, and in the telling of it he was armed at all ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Mr. Darwin with the superciliousness of a young schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves or perhaps desires. One would think that Mr. Butler was the travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the pert speculator, who takes all his facts ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... phrase, and so enduring seemed its popularity, that a speculator, who knew not the evanescence of slang, established a weekly newspaper under its name. But he was like the man who built his house upon the sand; his foundation gave way under him, and the phrase and the newspaper were washed into the mighty sea of the things that were. The people ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... through to the front ranks. In many respects those were singular and unusual elements which had gone to the making of his success. His had not been the victory of honied falsehoods, of suave deceit, of gentle but legalised robbery. He had been a hard worker, a daring speculator with nerves of iron, and courage which would have glorified a nobler cause. Nor had his been the methods of good fellowship, the sharing of "good turns," the camaraderie of finance. The men with whom he had had large dealings he had treated as enemies rather than friends, ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... identify Monsieur Dominique Gayarre with my avocat of the Rue —, New Orleans. No doubt remained on my mind that it was the same. A lawyer by profession, but more of a speculator in stocks—a money-lender, in other words, usurer. In the country a planter, owning the plantation adjoining that of Besancon, with more than a hundred slaves, whom he treats with the utmost severity. All this is in correspondence ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... amount of land granted to absentee owners, and to the policy of free land grants announced by Simcoe, land was sold at a very low price. In some cases two hundred acre lots were sold for a gallon of rum. In 1791 Sir William Pullency, an English speculator, bought 1,500,000 acres of land in Upper Canada at one shilling an acre, and sold 700,000 acres later for an average of eight shillings an acre. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that many Americans, ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... for that exceeding and eternal weight of glory which is to be theirs as they enter in at the gate. Bunyan has thus, in this blissful passage from the river to the gate, done what no other devout writer, or dreamer, or speculator, that we are aware of, has ever done; he has filled what perhaps in most minds is a mere blank, a vacancy, or at most a bewilderment and mist of glory, with definite and beatific images, with natural thoughts, and with the sympathizing communion of gentle spirits, who form, as ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... striking: Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of accepted ideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent speculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one who cared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn. Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued with the sentiments of chivalry; Jean was a bourgeois, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... by pointing out the means by which a copy might be acquired. To assign such significance to the word 'begetter' was entirely in Thorpe's vein. Thorpe described his role in the piratical enterprise of the 'Sonnets' as that of 'the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,' i.e., the hopeful speculator in the scheme. 'Mr. W. H.' doubtless played the almost equally important part—one as well known then as now in commercial operations—of the 'vender' of the property ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... request he played "Yankee Doodle," and imparted to it a revolutionary dash, a piquant mocking defiance, which convinced me that he knew its history and was interpreting it from his own heart—a fact which a subsequent conversation confirmed. I often wonder that no musical speculator has ever organized a band of Russian, Hungarian and English gypsies. Certainly, it would give us a far more characteristic entertainment than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... proved so successful, that like a true speculator it made me want to plunge deeper—into the pumpkin field! I find myself this morning dissatisfied with what I have done—and beg to send a cake to go along with the pies—to be apportioned of course as your judgment shall suggest. I begged the cake from Sophy, ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... may at first appear of keeping such a commodity for a voyage of probably a hundred days in such latitudes, I am informed the speculator is assured, that with an ordinary run, enough of his cargo may be landed to pay a ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... near it. These winding lanes lead eventually to the lonely little church hamlet of Salcombe Regis—"King Athelstan's salt-works in the Combe." This is one of those sweetly-pretty lost villages by the sea which one hesitates to mention lest a speculator should investigate with the idea of an elaborate "simple life" hostel in his mind. But Salcombe is too difficult of approach, even for faddists, although only a nominal two miles separates it from ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... there was need of one from the top of Trinity Church steeple to the moon! The greater facility of travel, the greater prosperity! But I am opposed to all railroads, the depot for which is an unprincipled speculator's pocket. ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... attended the land sales the squatters had little respect; so they "Resolved that for the purpose of garding our rights against the speculator we hereby pledge ourselves to stand by each other and to remain on the ground until all sales are over if it becomes necessary in order that each and every setler may be secured in the claim or claims to which he is justly entitled by the Laws of this association." And ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... more patriotic than the hardy and brave men of the frontier, or more ready to obey the call of their country and to defend her rights and her honor whenever and by whatever enemy assailed. They should be protected from the grasping speculator and secured, at the minimum price of the public lands, in the humble homes which they have improved by their labor. With this end in view, all vexatious or unnecessary restrictions imposed upon them by the existing preemption laws should be repealed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... euenire non posse, quod autem non potest non euenire id ex necessitate contingere, meque ad hoc nomen necessitatis adstringas; fatebor rem quidem solidissimae ueritatis sed cui uix aliquis nisi diuini speculator accesserit. Respondebo namque idem futurum, cum ad diuinam notionem refertur, necessarium, cum uero in sua natura perpenditur, liberum prorsus atque absolutum uideri. Duae sunt etenim necessitates, simplex ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... the volumes of our old friends Weld, Ashe, Fearon, &c. It is entitled "A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois, with a winter residence in Philadelphia; solely to ascertain the actual prosperity of the Emigrating Agriculturist, Mechanic, and Commercial Speculator"—by Adlard Welby, Esquire, of South Rauceby, Lincolnshire. This esquire has said enough, should he be believed, to settle ultimately the point of the truth or falsehood of Godwin's notable doctrine, that we owe the increase of our numbers ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... famous, had, for his sole fortune, one of the handsomest houses in Paris, purchased in 1834 in preparation for his marriage, situated on the boulevard between the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Louis-le-Grand. A speculator had built two houses between the boulevard and the street; and between these, with the gardens and courtyards to the front and back, there remained still standing a splendid wing, the remains of the magnificent mansion of the Verneuils. The younger Hulot had purchased this fine ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... extent, it had been laid out in excellent taste. Flower-beds and lawns, a handsome fountain, seats shaded by groups of fine trees at their full growth, completed the pastoral charm of the place. A winding path led across the garden from the back of the house. It had been continued by the speculator who purchased the property, until it reached a road at the extremity of the grounds which communicated with the Crystal Palace. Visitors to the hotel had such pleasant associations with the garden that many of them returned at future opportunities instead of trying ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... political economy, in which Froude fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour. "If," wrote the younger historian, "the tendency of trade to assume a form of mere self-interest be irresistible," etc. "And is it?" comments the elder. "Let us all get prussic acid, then." A recent speculator preferred cyanide of potassium. But if "mere self-interest" comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support from political economy. When Carlyle drew up a petition to the House of Commons for amending the law ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... with the advancing rate of interest; and experience has shown, that it is not until that rate declines to two per cent that deposited money is usually withdrawn, which is the signal of commencing speculation. To the mere speculator the banks afford no facilities, but the reverse. Their cash credits are only granted for the daily operations of persons actively engaged in trade, business, or commerce. So soon as that credit appears to be converted into a different channel, it is withdrawn, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... know big casino from little, though he had once almost acquired a passion for checkers—the give-away game. Some submerge themselves in money-getting. Rudd would not have given up the serene certainty of his little salary for a speculator's chance to clean up a million, or lose ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... government, in which the property is in complete subjection, and where nothing rules but the mind of desperate men. The condition of a commonwealth not governed by its property was a combination of things which the learned and ingenious speculator Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms, never could imagine to be possible. We have seen it; the world has felt it; and if the world will shut their eyes to this state of things, they will feel it more. The ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... is she but a speculator? she is ever busy, always alive and speculating with some unfortunate beings, name or ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... delightful it is when we find that even in these new ages the Creeds, which so many fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the finest and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast, but of the subtle artist and the daring speculator. Blessed it is to find the most cunning poet of our day able to combine the rhythm and melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to the martyrs at the stake, to see in the science and the history of the nineteenth century new and ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... assure you Mr. Harrison exists very decidedly—a Wall-street speculator, and well known as such by business people, a capital man behind a trotter, an excellent judge of wine. Probably he will come here from the city once or twice before we leave, and I shall find an opportunity ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... disunion. Its extension from individuals to communities. Foreign trade stimulated by variations of value in different communities. Specialization increases efficiency, but makes the worker a machine, and a speculator on the chance that others will want what he makes. International trade also promotes both unity and friction. On the whole, commerce a great promoter of unity. Likewise finance, or money-dealing. Its origin and development. London's catholic taste ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... lodging of his friend Marcel, who had for some time given him shelter. As he entered Marcel's studio, Rodolphe's pockets rang like a village-steeple on a grand holiday. On hearing this unusual sound, Marcel supposed it was one of his neighbors, a great speculator, counting his profits on 'Change, and muttered, "There's that impertinent fellow next door beginning his music again! If this is to go on, I shall give notice to the landlord. It's impossible to work with such a noise. It tempts one to quit one's condition of poor artist and turn ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... his presence. Yet, once more in my office, with the locked door between, I began to doubt, and tried to find some hidden meaning in each word and look. What plan was he revolving in that fertile brain? I could not guess. The mystery of the great speculator was beyond my power to fathom. And we worked, each in ignorance of the other's purposes, ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... worst sort of economy. It excludes the honest workman, who knows the real value of the service to be performed, and is unwilling to undertake to do his duty well, at the expense of himself and family; while it lets in the needy and greedy speculator who, having nothing to lose in point of character or money, will readily undertake what he can not perform, and become dependent upon the magnanimity of Congress for remuneration for his losses, real or fictitious. ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... practice; the discontents of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature, and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional history and by every speculator on government and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... employ of James Cameron, the wealthy speculator, but was regarded by that worthy gentleman as an adopted son rather than merely as a worker in his office force. Seven years before, Mr. Cameron had become interested in the bright-faced newsboy, and had taken him into his own home, where ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... villainy in the casual tourist's face is the real Paris, as it would be for a man from the interior of the United States to visit New York and, after interviewing one Bowery bouncer, one Tenderloin cabman, and one Broadway ticket speculator, go back home and say he had met fit representatives of the predominant classes of New York society and had found them unfit. Yes, it would be even more unfair. For the alleged gay life of New York touches at some point of contact or other the lives of most New ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... gives us the same warning, in his story of "A Little Journey in the World." In this Mr. Warner tells us of one of the sweetest and purest of young women, who has the highest ideals, and whose standards of morality are of the noblest, who is married to an unprincipled young speculator on Wall Street, New York; and under the influence of her husband, and the society into which she is drawn by his business relations, in which he gathers millions of money, all her holy and lofty ideals are overthrown, and she becomes simply ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day. The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring forth. Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. But is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the Chinese, or even French philosophy and much of German criticism. Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. "There ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... never was surpassed in fertility. After leaving the bottom the country is rather hilly and barren. Traveled twenty-two miles and lodged at Waterloo, a town without houses. Only two families in the place. Every land speculator produces one or more of these dirt-cabin villages. Indeed, two-thirds of the travelers met with are land speculators. The inhabitants of this part of the country appear to be a wretched set of beings. Their great-coats are made out of a blanket, with a cap or hood out of the same piece. Then ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... that eagerness for gain and rage for improvement which keep our people continually on the move, and our country towns incessantly in a state of transition. There the magic phrases, "town lots," "water privileges," "railroads," and other comprehensive and soul-stirring words from the speculator's vocabulary, are never heard. The residents dwell in the houses built by their forefathers, without thinking of enlarging or modernizing them, or pulling them down and turning them into granite stores. The trees, under which they have been born and have played in infancy, flourish undisturbed; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... means of making money and gaining power. There was scarcely a Roman Catholic "community" in the world, in which Gherardi had not a share,—and he was particularly concerned in "miraculous shrines", which were to him exactly in the same category as "companies" are to the speculator on the Stock Exchange. He had been cautious, prudent, and calculating from his earliest years,—from the time when, as the last male scion of the house of Gherardi he had been educated for the Ecclesiastical career at the "College of Nobles". He had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... though Captain Patterdale gave him sufficient excuse for doing so, or even for cutting his acquaintance. The rich man continued to talk with Don John, to the intense disgust of the speculator, who stood looking at a tin box, painted green, which lay on a chair. Perhaps he looked upon this box as the grave of his hopes; for it contained the money he had just paid to the captain—the wasted money, because the rich man would not embark with him in his ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... other widout dat dey had a ticket wid em. I see Sam Watson catch many of dem dat had run way en buff en gag em. Never have no jails nowhe' in dat day en time. Dey sho sell de colored peoples way plenty times cause I see dat done right here to Marion. Stand em up on a block en sell em to a speculator dere. I hear em bid off a 'oman en her baby dere en den dey bid off my auntie en uncle way down to de country. Dey wouldn' take no whippin off dey Massa en dat how-come dey get rid of em. My gran'pappy been worth ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... came out a full-fledged speculator. He sold out of four mines and bought into six; he changed his ventures three times in twenty-four hours, each time on a slight rise. He haunted the stockbroker's offices, watching out for "pointers"; he button-holed every third man on the street; he drank in every ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... of his studio, and went on composing. Decidedly an original! Everybody was longing to know him. The libraries and the box-office of the Opera House were bombarded with demands for seats for the first performance, at which the beautiful Annie Meredith, singer, actress, dancer, speculator, and breeder of prize bulldogs, was to appear in the ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... land always looks greener in the eyes of settlers than the land they occupy. It is hinted that Oloffe the Dreamer encouraged these notions; having, as has been shown, the inherent spirit of a land speculator, which had been wonderfully quickened and expanded since he had become a landholder. Many of the common people, who had never before owned a foot of land, now began to be discontented with the town lots which had fallen to their shares; others who had snug farms and tobacco plantations ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... their schooner sailed for another swing about the French groups of islands. Llewellyn and David were associates in planting, curing, and shipping vanilla-beans, but were roisterers at heart, and ever ready to desert their office and warehouse for feasting or gaming. Polonsky was a speculator in exchange and an investor in lands, and was reputed to be very rich. He, too, would leave his strong box unlocked in his hurry if cards or wassail called. These same white men were sib to all their fellows in the South Seas except a few sour men whom avarice, satiety, or ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... above all for private capital. It could never be available for the very poor unless it assumed the form of colonisation, and the senate looked on transmarine colonisation with the eye of prejudice.[16] It took a different view of the enterprise of the foreign speculator and merchant; this it regarded with an air of easy indifference. Their wealth was a pillar on which the State might lean in times of emergency, but, until the disastrous effects of commercial enterprise on foreign policy were more clearly seen, it was ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... I am not a speculator; and if you are not prepared to pay money, why, it is useless ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... Baudoyer and Elisabeth Saillard, born in 1812. Reared by her parents with the idea of becoming the wife of the shrewd and energetic speculator Martin Falleix, brother of Jacques Falleix the stock-broker. [The ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the land he had acquired, with its fine fringe of firm sand, soon made themselves apparent, and the Crescent, Hothampton Place and several other terraces in what is now the centre of modern Bognor quickly appeared. A determined attempt to change the name to Hothampton failed, and as soon as the speculator died, his gamble a personal failure, the town reverted to ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... his chin almost divided into two parts by a mark which looked very much like a sabre-cut, would have made his face that of a brigand, had not the harshness of his features been tempered by the assumed amenity and the servile smile of a speculator who has many dealings with the public. He was dressed in very cleanly fashion in a cinnamon-coloured jacket embroidered with silk of the same colour, gaiters of the same stuff, a white vest adorned with buttons like chamomile ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... for intuitions, and sometimes a seemingly positive preference for the bird in the bush," which latter may account for that skilful Yankee versatility so perfectly exemplified in the chaplain, poet, editor, merchant, speculator, politician, historian, and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... constituted that main highway of the future Victoria. My object was to escape the swampy vicinities of Brunswick, a village about three miles out of town, consisting for a number of years of three small brick cottages, adventurously rather than profitably built by an early speculator. With firm footing and under a bright moon, I had a pleasant walk through what is now the beautiful Royal Park, when, judging that I must be nearing Melbourne, I perceived quite a number of lights ahead. There were as yet no public lights to scattered little Melbourne ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... undeveloped enterprise. These risks must be carried by somebody, but clearly they constitute an activity for specialists who study conditions, becoming relatively expert in determining how and when to act. These specialists are drawn principally from two classes: First, the professional speculator, who knows his markets and makes a business of buying and selling future risks; such men perform a great service in handling our seasonal crops and in other directions, and are entitled to a reasonable profit. Second, the man of wealth who may use part of his surplus in ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... my pappy and mammy come from? Mammy was born a slave in de Furman family in Charleston, but pappy was bought out of a drove dat a Baltimore speculator fetch from Maryland long befo' de war. Doctor practice all 'round and 'bout Monticello, happen 'long one day, see my pappy and give a thousand dollars for him, to dat speculator. I thank God ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... word, and ask a favour. I am a speculator in rarities, and I have dealings with persons interested in numismatics all over the world. I can make a profit on this purchase, just as it stands; but there is a way, if I can get your approval, whereby I can make ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... from which they had hitherto derived the greatest profit. That the commerce of the interior of Africa offers the most tempting advantages to the enterprising British merchant cannot be doubted, for the two articles alone of indigo and ivory would repay the speculator with a profit of nearly 1000 per cent. This circumstance was sufficient to arouse the commercial spirit of the merchants of Glasgow, who, on the return of the Landers with the information of the discovery of the termination ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... laughed. "You make a good bid, sir," he said, in his slow American way, emphasising all the most unimportant words: "But you overlook one element. I am a man of science, not a speculator. I have trained myself for medical work, at considerable cost, in the best schools of Europe, and I do not propose to fling away the results of much arduous labour by throwing myself out elastically into a new line of work for which my faculties ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... The latter can present us with a faint trace of the long-faded civilization of their Aztec kindred, while the former have only borrowed a few of the rudest arts of the white, and are protected from extinction merely by the barrier of a frontier more and more violently assailed each year by the speculator and the settler, and already passed by the railway. If we cannot exactly say that the Indian, alone of all the throng at the exhibition, goes home uninformed and unenlightened, what ideas may reach his mind will be soon smothered out by the conditions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... should not advise you to mention Barr's name as the manufacturer of the Buzzards. He has a business deal on in which it is important he should not be known as an aeroplane speculator. If he learns that you are giving his secrets away, he will make it hot for you, I can tell you. You were sent to Bellevue ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... mourners back to their own habitation, but respectfully leaving them at its entrance. The peddler and Katy were followed into the building by one man, however, who was well known to the surrounding country by the significant term of "a speculator." Katy saw him enter, with a heart that palpitated with dreadful forebodings, but Harvey civilly handed him a chair, and evidently ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... meet her master. The town, being unfamiliar to her, struck her newly. She saw the expression on its face better. It was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in by hills. It had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade, having shops in the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are cottages in other cities, there were mills here; the trees, which some deluded dreamer had ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis |
