"Drift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nation have avowed such principles, and published such threats, the Congress have, by a resolution of the 30th of October, solemnly and unanimously declared that they will retaliate. Whatever may be the pretences of the enemy, it is the manifest drift of their policy to disgust the people of America with their new alliance, by attempting to convince them that instead of shielding them from distress, it has accumulated additional calamities ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... who do not display any aptitude for letters till late in life. His class—a fourth, which, at least as regards the greater names of literature, is perhaps the smallest of all—comprises those who may almost be said to drift into literary work and literary fame, whose first production is not merely tentative and unoriginal, but, so to speak, accidental, who do not discover their real faculty for literary work till after a pretty long course of casual ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... sled against a drift and waited for Billy to cross the farmyard. He was a large, awkward boy several years older than Lydia. He seemed a very homely sort of person to her, yet she liked his face. He was as fair as Kent was dark. Kent's features were regular and clean-cut. Billy's were rough hewn and irregular, ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... of pleasure as his schoolfellows jumped on board. He had, glancing over his shoulder, seen them drift out of sight round the point, and had felt certain that they had reached shore. It was, however, a great pleasure to be assured ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... few moments, as if she could find no further words to say. Her father, observing her embarrassment, brought back the conversation to its original drift, by inquiring into the nature of the demand which ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... He let himself drift slowly down, staring and staring, and full of wonder. His eyes were now so used to the starshine on the river that he could see the water in front of the building like a smooth, pale plain, and it was empty—it was perfectly empty. Who had struck that light about the water-level? It was ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... coldly; "but I do not perceive your drift. Doubtless it arises from my stupidity, but such is the fact, to use ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Chat-ham boat. She's crep' up sence last night. An' see that big one with a patch in her foresail an' a new jib? She's the Carrie Pitman from West Chat-ham. She won't keep her canvas long onless her luck's changed since last season. She don't do much 'cep' drift. There ain't an anchor made 'll hold her. . . . When the smoke puffs up in little rings like that, Dad's studyin' the fish. Ef we speak to him now, he'll git mad. Las' time I did, he jest took an' ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... and yet, as the repetition of two or three notes of a bar of music brings to recollection the whole melody to which it belongs, the few kind words of Bigot, spoken that morning, swept all before them in a drift of hope. Like a star struggling in the mist the faint voice of an angel was heard ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to drift is observable at tennis, golf, base-ball and cricket; but this effect is explainable by the inequality of pressure due to a vortex of air carried along by the rotating ball, and the deviation is in the opposite direction of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... garrisoned and scantily supplied, and that its alcayde was careless of his charge. This important post was built on the crest of a rocky mountain, with a strong castle perched above it upon a cliff, so high that it was said to be above the flight of birds or drift of clouds. The streets and many of the houses were mere excavations wrought out of the living rock. The town had but one gate, opening to the west and defended by towers and bulwarks. The only ascent to this cragged fortress was by roads ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... to find out what If you wish the most conclusive proof In a broader and a larger sense In a sense, and a very real sense In answer to this singular theory In like manner In order to carry out In proof of this drift toward In proportion as In proportion, then, In pursuance of these clear and express In saying all this, I do not forget In something of a parallel In such cases In support of this claim In support of ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... lord Wolseley and by lord Hartington, afterwards the duke of Devonshire, who always stood loyally by him, and repeatedly urged that help must be sent instantly, while his colleagues in the Cabinet waited to see how things would drift, till the time for help ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... snow-drift in a secret green valley between dark mountains. The sun must travel far and be risen high to reach it; but when it does, its rays pour down from near the zenith and are most powerful and warm; then in a little while the whole valley is green again and a white mist, rising ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... in the flashlight kindled by Brady's slow, inexorable summing up of detail, to see the drift of recent happenings, the meaning of each small, disconcerting fact that added a fresh link to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Austria seemed to be making these the starting point of her policy, His Majesty's Government were bound to look at the question primarily from the point of view of the maintenance of the peace of Europe. In this way the two countries might easily drift apart. ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... the description which Helene Vauquier had written out, and read it through carefully. Then he asked a question, of which Ricardo did not quite see the drift. ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... are deposits of peat from ten to thirty feet thick, formed in the hollows or depressions of the northern drift or bowlder formation. These beds of peat have been examined to the bottom, and they reveal the history of vegetation in those localities, and the contemporaneous history of human progress. Beginning at the top, the explorer finds the first layers to contain ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... you're my anchor to windward, as they say down here. If I lost you, goodness knows where I should drift. Don't you ever talk ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of old. That motive is the idea of human ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... influence with her," joined in Bertha, suspecting the count's drift, and feeling desirous of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... didn't. I went on over to the Headquarters House. It was beginning to get dark; and the snow was falling again. The door was stuck fast, but I set my shoulder against it and pushed it open. The snow had blown in the crack and made a drift halfway across the floor. I put my hand on the stove. It was cold, and ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth
... intent only on a place to nest. They wage war against robins and wrens, pick quarrels with swallows, and seem to deliberate for days over the policy of taking forcible possession of one of the mud-houses of the latter. But as the season advances they drift more into the background. Schemes of conquest which they at first seemed bent upon are abandoned, and the settle down very quietly in their old quarters in remote ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Christ's death is looked at in them only in its bearing upon Himself, as an act of obedience and of condescension, and why even that death in which Jesus stands most inimitable and unique is presented as capable of being imitated by us. The general drift of these verses is clear, but there are few Scripture passages which have evoked more difference of opinion as to the precise meaning of nearly every phrase. To enter on the subtle discussions involved in the adequate exposition of the words would far ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cast off from the island. The jangada, again started on the river, began to drift off diagonally. Araujo, cleverly profiting by the bendings of the current, which were due to the projections of the banks, and assisted by the long poles of his crew, succeeded in working the immense ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... of rock Jolly Roger found a huge snow drift. This drift was as long as a church and half as high, with its outer shell blistered and battered to the hardness of rock by wind and sleet. Through this shell he cut a small door with his knife, and after that dug out the soft snow from ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... up his mind that he could not let the son of his only brother, the youth whom he had regarded almost as a son, and who had lost so much by the discovery of the child, drift away into expatriation, without being personally satisfied as to these new companions. This was ostensible reason enough for a resolution to go out himself to the transatlantic Northmoor to make arrangements for his nephew. Moreover, he was bent on doing so before the return of Mrs. Bury and ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her suggestion that a secretary should be engaged. At first her brother waived this proposal aside; but at length it became imperative that help should be sought. "Cobbler" Horn was like a man who attempts, single-handed, to cut his way through a still-accumulating snow-drift. The man must perish, if help do not come; unless "Cobbler" Horn secured assistance in dealing with his letters, it was impossible to tell what his fate might be. It was now simply a question by what means the needed help might best be obtained; and both "Cobbler" Horn and his sister agreed ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... is six weeks all but a day since we left London. We might have reached Hopedale three days ago, for we were within eighty miles. But a dense fog made it impossible to venture among the islands, where drift ice might be added to the dangers of rocks. So we have been driving to and fro for the last three days and nights over a high sea, studded with icebergs hidden from us by a thick white mist, which made everything wet ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... Looking back upon our track, it proves to be like all other human paths, straight in intention, but slightly devious in deed. We have gay companions on our way; for a breeze overtakes us, and a hundred little simooms of drift whirl along beside us, and whelm in miniature burial whole caravans of dry leaves. Here, too, our track intersects with that of some previous passer; he has but just gone on, judging by the freshness of the trail, and we can study his character and purposes. The large ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... grim abutment at least eighteen hundred feet high; at its base two rocks, which had tumbled ages ago from the summit, formed a rude breakwater; and on this barrier had collected a bed of coarse pebbles, strewn with driftwood. Here they stopped their flight, unloaded the boat and beached it. The drift-wood furnished them a softer bed than usual, and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Charles, coming to meet me. "I thought I had seen the last of you when I left you reclining on George in the drift. I do believe you have got yourself into this state of fever-heat purely to be of use to us two; and I treated you very cavalierly, I am sure. Let by-gones be by-gones, and let us shake hands while you ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... and being, like most of the women of the island, not altogether without nautical skill, she rowed some distance out to sea, and then hoisted sail, and cast away oars and tiller, and let the boat drift, deeming that a boat without lading or steersman would certainly be either capsized by the wind or dashed against some rock and broken in pieces, so that escape she could not, even if she would, but must perforce ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... good practical reform and back it. Pound away on it until the people identify you with it. Take direct legislation as your text, say. There's going to be a strong drift that way in the next ten years. Machines and bosses are going to be ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... interpreter of the thought of the Victorian age. Huxley called him "the first poet since Lucretius who understood the drift of science." In these four lines from The Princess, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the world, from nebula ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... dazzling lightning, prevented his hearing or seeing my signals. This is the sole instance of a vessel anchoring in the night in the open sea upon an unknown coast. I set sail, and allowed the vessels to drift, taking constant soundings. I at first found fourteen, then twenty, then twenty-five, at last twenty-eight fathoms. Then I suddenly lost the bottom altogether, proving that we had passed above a submarine mountain. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... women are living. They seem utterly destitute of purpose. They make no effort to give them shape or plan, or to set up a goal in the distance, to be reached by some kind of industrious application. They drift along listlessly and mechanically, in the old well-worn tracks, trusting to accident to give them a new direction. It is a sad thing, this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... young soldiers, Clark and Hunter, were called in for their statements. They, too, had enlisted in a spirit of patriotism and desire for adventure; never knew Benton till the voyage was nearly over, then they seemed to drift together, as it were, and kept up their friendship after reaching Manila. Benton was not his real name, and he was not a graduate of any American college. He had been educated abroad and spoke French and German. No, they did not know what university ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... sent its unobstructed splendors over the land, and we saw a prodigious host moving slowly toward us, with the steady drift and aligned front of a wave of the sea. Nearer and nearer it came, and more and more sublimely imposing became its aspect; yes, all England was there, apparently. Soon we could see the innumerable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... since the Great Ice Age, these tracks or evidences can still be seen by any one who lives in this region or who can visit it. The principal ones are: (1) Boulders or Lost Rocks which were brought down by this glacier; (2) The Glacial Drift or Boulder Clay which covers nearly all of the glaciated region; (3) Scratches on the bed-rock which show the ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... quotations and this appreciation of Sterne is proof sufficient that Goethe considered Sterne the author of the Koran at the time when the notes were made. At precisely what time this occurred it is now impossible to determine, but the drift of the comment, combined with our knowledge from sources already mentioned, that Goethe turned again to Sterne in the latter years of his life, would indicate that the quotations were made in the latter part of the twenties, and ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... at my first meeting informed me he was known as Lying Bill, explained to me that some ignorant landsmen stated that this tidal regularity was caused by the steady drift of the tradewinds at certain ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... they were naked, but each bore in his hand a long gun. These were rateros, or the common assassins and robbers of the roads. We halted and cried out, "Who goes there?" They replied, "What's that to you? pass by." Their drift was to fire at us from a position from which it would be impossible to miss. We shouted, "If you do not instantly pass to the right side of the road, we will tread you down between the horses' hoofs." They hesitated ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... all, is evident. The learned or college-bred use one pronunciation, and for that class that is the standard. Those who are deficient in education do not follow that standard. As the educated seem to drift naturally to centres of population, there is assumed to be a city standard and a country standard of pronunciation. The professor tells us that the country standard must be abolished, the city standard adopted, and then the new era will ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... transport her into a dazzling fairyland, whence she would fall back worn out, surprised each time by this awakening like a physical fall. She used to draw a comparison between herself and those jelly-fish whose transparent brilliancy, so much alive in the cool movements of the waves, drift to their death on the shore in little gelatinous pools. During those times devoid of inspiration, when the artist's hand was heavy on his instrument, Felicia, deprived of the one moral support of her ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... of the usual gayeties, she lived quietly, accepting few invitations, and rarely going into society at all, except under her father's wing. On those accidental occasions when Carli Wappinger came within their range of vision, it was only as a distant ship drifts into sight at sea—to drift silently away again. If Dorothea perceived him, she gave no sign. It was clear to Derek that her spurt of rebellion was over, and that her little experience had done her no harm. The name of Wappinger being tacitly ignored ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip'. If you look in the margin of your Bible, you will see the words, 'run out as leaking vessels', and in the Revised Version the words read, 'drift away from them'. You see the idea is, that unless you are careful you will lose your blessing after having ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... Point Masalla, our "Diamond Rock," a reef ending in a triangular block, towering abruptly, and showing by drift-wood a flood-line now twelve feet high. There are several of these "bench-marks;" and the people declare that after every few years an unusual freshet takes place. Here the current impinges directly upon the rocks, making a strong ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... hat waving in unison with her eloquent words and gestures, while Lydia and I exchanged amused glances; but our merriment was destined to be but short lived. The strangers, who were standing near us, could not, of course, get the drift of what Miss Cassandra was saying, but one of the party, a man of strongly marked personality, evidently caught the word "Mexico," and pricked up his ears when she repeated it. In an instant, a heavy hand was laid upon her ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... whose faculties were concentrated upon the ground. With a swinging gait the human bloodhound traveled swiftly and silently along the edge of the crevasse, noting every bunch of moss, fragment of stone, drift of snow or bit of moist earth, reading the shorthand notes of Nature with facility which far excelled the ability of my own stenographer to read her own notes when the latter are a few hours old. But a short time ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... begun to drift away, and I was presently left alone with Father Payne. "Now you come along of me!" he said to me; and when I got up, he took my arm in a pleasant fashion, led me to a big curtained archway at the far end of the hall, under the ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... afterward. The spot seemed to have a fascination for him. And within sound of the cheerful hubbub and busy whir of the industry he would lean over the palings and look at the grave, covered sometimes with a drift of leaves, and sometimes with a drift of snow, and think of the two men that it had successively housed, and nurse his grudge against the company. With an unreasoning hatred of it, Hanway felt that both were victims of the great strong corporation that was to reap the value of the discovery ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... answer. Through Olaf's binoculars he picked out the Scotchman's cabin. It was Sandy McCormick, Olaf had assured him, who knew every eddy and drift in fifty miles of coast, and with his eyes shut could find Mary Standish if she came ashore. And it was Sandy who came down to greet them when Ericksen dropped his anchor in ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... oars and take down a sail as I could never do it,—and—he has accepted a strange and difficult situation heroically. 'You must not be involved in any trouble by a knowledge of our movements.' So Prince Humphry said, when I saw him last,—though I did not then understand the real drift of his meaning. And time goes on— and time seems wearisome without any tidings of those ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Leaving word with one of the night men to send him any radio despatch at once, he followed Dickie to the beach, where the service men sat cross-legged about a blazing fire of drift-wood. Gregory sank to the sand beside the dark mound of dampened kelp and watched the operations of the chef as he busied himself in removing the heavy pieces of canvas ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... their thirst, they now looked about in search of food. A few shell-fish were found along the shore, and Diego Mendez, striking a light, and gathering drift-wood, they were enabled to boil them, and to make a delicious banquet. All day they remained reposing in the shade of the rocks, refreshing themselves after their intolerable sufferings, and gazing upon Hispaniola, whose ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... If you miss one line you find the idea repeated or persisting in the next. It is quite possible to derive pleasure from the Faerie Queene by attending to the leading words, and, for the rest, floating onward on the melody. You can catch the drift with ease. The stream circles in so many eddies that to follow it laboriously throughout its course is felt to be hardly necessary: miss it once and you can often join it again at very near the same point. "But a ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... me this lang time," answered Dow, declining, with Scotch instinct, to give an answer, before he understood all the drift of the question. A Scotchman would always like ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the welcome shade was over, and, after a preliminary cast or two to get the line out, she was sending her fly well across, and letting it drift quietly down the stream, to be recovered by a series of small and gentle jerks. Lionel was supposed to be looking on at the fishing; but, when he dared, he was stealing covert glances at her; for this was ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... the glade, Is ostentatious of his aid. Caesar turns to another row, Where neither sun nor rain could go; He, for the nearest cut he knows, Is still before with pot and rose. Caesar observes him twist and shift, And understands the fellow's drift; "Here, you sir," says th' imperial lord. The bustler, hoping a reward, Runs skipping up. The chief in jest Thus the poor jackanapes address'd "As here is no great matter done, Small is the premium you have won: The cuffs that make ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... that is simply beating the air. Each succeeding “school” has sounded its death-knell by asserting that certain combinations alone produced beauty—the weakness of to-day being an inclination to see art only in the obscure and the recondite. As a result we drift each hour further from the truth. Modern intellectuality has formed itself into a scornful aristocracy whose members, esteeming themselves the élite, withdraw from the vulgar public, and live in a world of their own, looking (like the Lady of Shalott) ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... boy was so full of, and so fond of, did not inspire him to write plays, to pour them out, tragedy upon tragedy, till the world was filled with tears and blood. Perhaps it was because his soul was so soaked, and, as it were, water-logged with the drama, that it could only drift sluggishly in that welter of emotions, and make for no point, no port, where it could recover itself and direct its powers again. The historical romance which he had begun to write before the impassioned ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... was late in the evening when finally they came to anchor off Camp Wau-Wau. The surf was running so high that it was decided not to put the girls ashore until the following morning, though the "Sue" was cast off from her tow and allowed to drift into the bay. From here her crew rowed ashore and informed the anxious Camp Girls that everyone of their ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... true philosophy. Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive deep enough to find ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... was not an unrelieved calamity, because, fortunately, the floods that seemed to be sweeping so much away were not the mountain torrent, which covers fruitful fields with worthless drift, but the overflowing Nile with its rich deposits. Over all the regions covered by the barbarian inundation a new stratum of population was deposited, a new soil formed that was capable of nourishing a better civilization than any the world ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... "Leaves of Grass" is no more difficult of comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped to inspire it. The starting point of the book is a mystical illumination regarding the unity and blessedness of the universe, an insight passing understanding, but based upon the revelatory experience of love. In the light of this experience, all created things ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the drift of Dorothy's fears, Garrison led her to a parlor of the house, looking at her in a manner so fixed that she realized their troubles were not confined to the ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... The society is not a cent out of pocket over him, and forlorn and friendless he lands here with from $2 to $15 in his pocket. He has got the cheap suit of clothes he wears, one handkerchief and one pair of stockings extra. It is almost certain he will speedily drift into crime, spending the remainder of his life in prison, and finally dying ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... to fill her jib and drift out with the ebbing tide, keeping a straight course for the Nab, and steering herself by means of the dragging net astern; neither the services of Bob nor of Dick being required any further at the ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... to this talk about Alberich, an ancient enemy of theirs. The cleverer brother asks Loge, "What great advantage is involved in the possession of the gold, that the Nibelung should find it all-sufficient?" Loge explains. There drift back to Wotan's memory runes of the Ring, and the thought readily arises that it would be well he possessed the ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the thing. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapour streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, half-way up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... was so far above the point where the cascades began, that nothing was to be feared from them. The clumsiest raft could be ferried over by a child before it would drift into danger, while in case of swimming, ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... principles won't admit of his drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it's so calm they won't drift." ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... efforts of the squaws. One chief, however, remembered the advice during the next winter. Far out on the plains that border on the Missouri River he and his party were overtaken by a blizzard. Each one wrapped himself in his blanket and let the snow drift about and over him. With a little dried buffalo meat which they divided among them, they kept alive until the storm was over. While lying here, knowing not whether his companions were dead or alive, expecting himself to be a victim of either the cold or hunger or both, Chief Cloud ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... take shelter—if calm, the waters, though blue, pure, and clear, look monotonous and dead. The very ships look lonely things; their hulls and sails are white, and some of them have been known in time of cholera to drift over the lake from day to day, with none to guide the helm. The shores, too, are flat and uninteresting; my eyes wearied of following that interminable boundary of trees stretching away to ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... as a windy and withering moon Seen through blown cloud and plume-like drift, when ships Drive, and men strive with all the sea, and oars Break, and the beaks ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... have neither the courage of a martyr, nor the faith of a saint; and so I drift along, trying to make the condition of our slaves as comfortable as I possibly can. I believe there are slaves on this plantation whom the most flattering offers of freedom would not ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... the assembled nation, stood an Elk of wondrous stature, the great chief, or as my brother would call it, the King of the Valley. He was so large, that the biggest of his people seemed but musquitoes by the side of a buffalo. His legs were so long, that the deepest snow-drift was no impediment to his running his blithest race; and his skin, which was covered with red and grey hair, was proof against the utmost fury of the Ottawa bender of the bow. From each of his shoulders proceeded an arm, which well supplied the place, and performed the uses, of the same limb ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... are content just to drift with the tides. They go along with the crowd, whichever way sentiment goes, and are quite content. They are no real moral force in their community or in the church. They are aware of the fact, and they seem to be satisfied to have ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... it cam' awa ane o' the dreadfu'est storms that e'er mortal was out in. The snaw literally fell in a solid mass, and every now and then the wind cam' roarin' and howlin' frae the hills, and the fury o' the drift was terrible. I was driven stupid and half suffocated. My faither was on a strong mare, and I was on a bit powney; and amang the cattle there was a camstairy three-year-auld bull, that wad neither hup nor drive. We had it tied ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... wonderful, Baroness," Mrs. Slifer gasped, as she skipped along on her short legs beside the goddess-like stride of the great woman, who held her—who held her very tightly. "We were just going to drift along up to Tintagel and then work up to London, taking in all the cathedrals we ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of my feelings get hold of the sense. She talked apparently of life in general, of its difficulties, moral and physical, of its surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first connected statement I caught) that Mills ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... she said in a more sympathetic tone, "every girl finds her own level sooner or later. The basis is not money or social rank of the families at home. It is not brains or clothes or stuff like that. It is simply that the same kind of girls drift together. They're congenial. It seems to be a law. A general law, you understand. Of course," she hesitated for an instant before being spurred on by her sense of scrupulous honesty, "there are exceptions. Once in a while a girl fails to find her special niche. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... the drought came they drift about in a throng, Like autumn leaves blown by the dreary winds. ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... the owner's successful conduct of the business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... that it would not last. Even in April I was saying that winter would soon be here. Yet somehow it had begun to seem possible lately that a miracle might happen, that summer might drift on and on through the months—a final upheaval to crown a wonderful year. The celery settled that. Last night with the celery ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... to be one of those young men who do not know what they want to do in life, and the reaction from the strain of his military life had, as was natural, intensified this tendency to drift. After the time that he had determined to be a soldier, then to go West and hunt Indians and grizzly bears, and then shifted to the desire to be a pirate or a policeman, Tom Cameron had really expressed very little ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... said Sam. "I'll be there." Sam's chance had come. He was invited to fill an humble but respectable position. Would he give satisfaction, or drift back after a while to his vagabond habits? Young outlaw as he had been, was he likely to grow into an orderly member of society? If any of my readers are curious on this subject, they are referred to the next volume of this ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... her silken lap, and looked out upon river and sky and ceaseless drift of colored leaves. "You can never go out of my life," she said. "Why the power to vex and ruin was given you I do not know, but you have used it. Why did you ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... revenue in the long run. The inequality of income distribution is one of the most extreme in the world. The government and international donors continue to work out plans to forward economic development from a lamentably low base. Government drift and indecision, however, have resulted in low growth in 2002-03 and dim prospects ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... her battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The clean and healing forest, with its whispering wind and imperious solitude, had come between Ellen and the meaning of the squalid sheep ranch, with its travesty of home, its tragic owner. And it was coming between her ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... in front of him a number of letters and newspapers. With these in his hand, he left the study, and followed a path of broad, flat stepping-stones across the garden towards the cherry-orchard. Here the way sloped rapidly downward under a drift of fallen petals. On the black naked twigs of the cherry-trees one or two sturdy blossoms still clung pathetically, like weather-beaten butterflies. Beyond a green shrubbery, on a little knoll, a clean newly-built Japanese house, like a large rabbit hutch, rested in a patch ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... concluded it was nearly time to drift back to Mrs. Hartley, Patty noticed a gentleman who stood at a little ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... of all things, and contended that for wise purposes God not only permitted sin, but had a hand in its essence, namely, "in the privity, and ataxy, the anomye, or irregularity of the act" (if that makes it any clearer). A single passage will convey the drift of the seventy-six pages devoted to this ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... her head, like one imprisoned in a sand drift, not to be crossed in any direction, but closing in and weighing down. She was in a pitfall, overpowered like Gratian had been, subjugated, soon to be put to the yoke and compelled to draw steadily the harrow of transcendental politics. Her ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... a basic principle, you can see that it is only a question of controlling yourself and directing your moods with those currents whose augmentation can bring you good. You must never be negative and drift. You can be drawn in any adverse ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... Strait being all that has kept marsupials and mammals apart, though the separating power has been increased by the rapid current setting through. This has decreased the chance of creatures carried to sea on drift-wood or uprooted trees getting safely over to such a degree that apparently none have survived; for, had they done so, we may be certain that the mammals, with the advantage their young have over the marsupials, would soon have run them out, the marsupials ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... that they had interfered in a matter which did not concern them. For a time, this seemed likely to provoke a bitter outbreak of American feeling; but, fortunately, the whole matter was allowed to drift by. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... teak wood drift slowly downstream to the saw-mills below the town, where trained elephants stack the logs with almost human intelligence, and queer uptilted rowing boats, called "sampans," ferry passengers across the river, ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... health. The breezes that blow from it and the fogs that drift down over the ridges combine to give San Francisco a paradoxical climate—winters as warm as those in the south and summers that are matchless ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... "You might drift around by there if it ain't too much out of your way, and see if he's got a man on the ranch," Lone suggested. "But you better not touch anything in the house, Swan. The coroner'll likely appoint somebody to look around ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... various conditions among which you must choose pass before you. If you drift along in your torpor and your heedlessness, all the evils of slavery await you—deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of the conqueror; you will be pushed about from pillar to post, because you have never ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... awoke, I jumped out of bed and stepped into some snow that had sifted in through the cracks and formed a little drift over my leather breeches, which were frozen hard as a board. I shook the snow off them, and, grabbing up my clothes, ran downstairs, pulled the ashes off the coals, and fanned them till they were bright, and built a good fire in the fireplace. I warmed my leather breeches over ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... flowed out from the lake, its bed strewn with tumbled rocks and easy enough to cross, the water being less in volume by reason of the dry weather. All at once I stopped, for amid these rocks and boulders I saw caught all manner of drift, as sticks and bushes, branches and the like, washed down by the current and which, all tangled and twisted together, choked this narrow defile, forming a kind of barrier against the current. Now as I gazed at this, my eyes (as if directed by the finger of God) beheld ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of people in a street, is like a drift of wood in a river. It chokes up the stream, and catches all the other ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... discover if there were any other homesteads in the vicinity. His view was restricted, but there was no sign of life on the quarter-circle it commanded. A flat, grassy waste, broken only by a few clumps of brush, ran back to the horizon, and by the cold blue of the sky and the drift of a few light clouds floating before the prevalent westerly wind, he knew he was looking north. This was the way he must take if he could escape, but there was no house in which he could seek refuge, and scarcely any cover. It was clear that he must obtain a good start ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... This was now the case at the village, where, though the remaining tenants of each hut had combined to occupy one of the apartments, a great part of the bed-places were still bare, and the wind and drift blowing in through the holes which they had not yet taken the trouble to stop up. The old man Hikkeiera and his wife occupied a hut by themselves, without any lamp, or a single ounce of meat belonging to them; while three ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... was out. A long waved line of sea-shells and drift-wood marked the place to which it had risen the last time before it began to recede. They were unconsciously following this line of ocean debris. Occasionally Marie would stop to pick up a spotted shell which was more pretty than the rest. Finally, when they ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... of Glastonbury, Connecticut, attended this convention, and were most cordially welcomed. The officers[5] for the centennial year were chosen and a campaign[6] and congressional[7] committee appointed to take charge of affairs at Philadelphia and Washington. The resolutions show the general drift of the discussions:[8] ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... tailor and outfitter's bill, bought a $100 watch on credit, and gave a wine supper on borrowed money. Soon after this I went to board at the old St. Nicholas, the then fashionable hotel. From that time I began to drift more and more away ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... His gaze shifted. It turned half vaguely upon the little man Peters. Then it seemed to drift unmeaningly toward the rancher. A moment later it fell upon the papers he was so tightly gripping. It was then that realization seemed to come upon him. He reached out and handed the deeds to their owner. A moment later he was on his feet, and had moved across to the front of the veranda, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... the course of another twenty minutes it was again held up. The process of breaking through was renewed, and the train doggedly resumed its way, encountering and surmounting fresh hindrances at frequent intervals. After a standstill of unusually long duration in a particularly deep drift the compartment in which Abbleway was sitting gave a huge jerk and a lurch, and then seemed to remain stationary; it undoubtedly was not moving, and yet he could hear the puffing of the engine and the slow rumbling and jolting of wheels. The puffing and rumbling grew fainter, as though it were dying ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... relative mortality of these injuries I can give little idea of, but it was a high one both on the field and in the Field hospitals; thus of 10 cases treated in one Field hospital, after the battle at Paardeberg Drift, no less than 8 died; while of 61 cases from various battles who survived to be sent down to the Base during a period of some months, only 4 or 6.55 per cent. died. Many of the latter, as is seen ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... crisis the same general good-will he had enjoyed four years before, he might have bid defiance to the rage of his enemies, and have escaped, in spite of all the suspicious circumstances by which he stood environed. For the general drift of sentiment in the West has always been against capital penalties, and it is next to impossible to carry such penalties into effect against a popular favorite. In a country like this we might as soon expect to see the hands of a clock move in a direction contrary to the machinery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... to crumble and disappear; that any concession to Germany, abridging the right of Americans to travel on the seas, would necessitate a concession to Great Britain; and that such a weakening of American policy would cause the country to drift toward war. Asked what would happen if a German submarine sank an armed merchantman with the loss of American life, the President was quoted as intimating that in that event only a break in diplomatic relations would follow; ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... They pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the place. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapor streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the flat ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... clothed the sides of the coomb; the hollows were full of the tree-fern; the grass had little white and purple flowers in it. At the valley-bottom a little stream, that would be a river after the first rains, wimpled over sandstone boulders, the barbel rose at flies. There was a drift lower down. It was all the goaded, worn-out oxen could do to stay the huge creaking waggons down the steep bank, and drag them over the river-bed of sand and boulders, through the muddied, churned-up water that they were dying for, yet not ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... you tripped and fell down in the snow drift, and oh, grandfather, you ought to have seen him when he got up; he was a sight. But it all ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... With bellying sails move onward. From the rock Hangs motionless the torrent: rivers run Uphill; the summer heat no longer swells Nile in his course; Maeander's stream is straight; Slow Rhone is quickened by the rush of Saone; Hills dip their heads and topple to the plain; Olympus sees his clouds drift overhead; And sunless Scythia's sempiternal snows Melt in mid-winter; the inflowing tides Driven onward by the moon, at that dread chant Ebb from their course; earth's axes, else unmoved, Have trembled, and the force centripetal Has tottered, and the earth's compacted frame Struck by ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... quite understand the drift of this remark, but her father dismissed the subject in his lightest manner before she could ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... indented Atlantic coast. In two of these cases (Iroquoian and Siouan) history and tradition indicate expansion and migration from the land of bays between Cape Lookout and Cape May, while in the third there are similar (though perhaps less definite) indications of an inland drift from the northern Atlantic bays and along the Laurentian river ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... the river side trying to find a place where we could cross. Finally we found a lot of drift wood clogged together, extending across the stream at a narrow place in the river, upon which we crossed over. But we had not yet surmounted our greatest difficulty. We had to meet one which was far more ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... friend again. I am glad to feel that friendships springing from the pure and good feelings of the heart are not so transient as I have sometimes been tempted to think them. They may be buried for years under a drift of new interests; but give them air, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Nehemiah by his countrymen's sorrows, which influenced his whole future, contains some very plain lessons for Christian people, the observance of which is every day becoming more imperative by reason of the drift of public opinion, and the new prominence which is being given to so-called 'social questions.' I wish to gather up one or two of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 7 A.M. At 10 A.M. arrived at a very narrow and shallow portion of this chaotic river completely choked by drift vegetation. All hands worked hard to clear a passage through this obstruction until 2.30, when we passed ahead. At 4 P.M. we arrived at a similar obstacle; the water very shallow; and to-morrow we shall have to cut a passage through the high grass, beneath which there is deeper water. I ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... little child whose face I cannot see, I feel your presence very near tonight, I feel the warmth of you creep close to me... The grey moths drift across the candlelight, And tiny shadows sway across the floor, Like wistful elves who do a fairy dance; The wind is tapping softly at the door, And rain is beating, like a silver lance, Against the tightly curtained window pane. Oh, little child whose face I cannot see, The loneliness, ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... departure, full of girls' profuse adieux, and then the hush of vacancy fell on the wide halls and airy rooms of the great house. That evening, with slow steps, he came down the staircase. In the twilight of the parlors showed dimly outlined a drift of woman's drapery, and the piano was murmuring inarticulately. Outside, on the broad stone doorstep, showed another drift, resolving itself into the muslins of Miss Nelly Morris, springing up with glad words of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ashore first. It will be dark in less than an hour; but we are too far out yet to venture swimming. We shall have to hang tight to the raft a while yet, and drift; the current is carrying us all right. Do you see any sign of ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... stirred with a murmurous movement by faintest zephyrs—a wind no louder than a sigh. Brian proposed that they should go on the river; his boat was there ready, it was only to step into the light skiff, and drift lazily with ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... right, friend," said Del, apparently relieved. "I didn't know but you'd drew to the red-headed waiter girl. I sorter 'lowed I'd drift over in ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... No drift or dream of passing bell, Dying afar in twilight dell, Hath any heard, Whose chimes have stirred ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter |
