"Small hours" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Gabriel saw, and was troubled thereby from the time of his daily journey a-field to the time of his return, and on to the small hours of many a night. That he was not beloved had hitherto been his great sorrow; that Bathsheba was getting into the toils was now a sorrow greater than the first, and one which nearly obscured it. It was a result ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... her—his existence was pure indifference to her. I answer for it! They tried his father for the atrocity. Even a French jury could not find extenuating circumstances for that kind of cold-blooded assassin who slays in the small hours the wife of his bosom—after having cast her off and driven her to evil ways, poor, spotless angel! They brought him in guilty of a foul murder and he was guillotined—gentleman and artist of merit though he was. They were kind to his young son; his friends made up a purse ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... parting with his mother. The emigrants' train started in the small hours, and the emigrants were to rendezvous at a common lodging-house close by the big terminus. We inquired about poor Mrs. Sheeny with feeling. Mick responded with a return of tears that he'd left her screeching ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... were found dead, killed mysteriously and half eaten, as if by wild beasts. The fugitives were demented, babbling of black shapes that swept down out of the dark forest upon the little town in the small hours ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... the band played, and the figures of the dancers swayed to the music, and she felt her own figure swaying too, with youthful spirits so close on every side—then her happiness reached its height, her eyes sparkled, she must go on and on into the small hours of the morning. For a moment Lord M. ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... remained in Springfield to see that it got safely over to the House. The two women wished the bill to go into the friendly Elections Committee and the opponents were planning to put it into the Judiciary Committee, where it would remain during the rest of the session. The suffrage lobby worked into the small hours of the night making plans to frustrate this scheme. Arrangements were made with Speaker McKinley to turn it over to the Elections Committee, and when the morning session opened this was done before the opponents realized ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... and gossip was prolonged till something after one o'clock. Malkin was never known to retire willingly from an evening's congenial talk until the small hours ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... good guess at it, for he came to tell me that the latest news from Stone was that the Duke was moving south again at top speed, with the intention of getting between the Prince and London if he could. He told me further that Charles had joined Murray at Ashbourne in the small hours, and that their reunited forces had started out for Derby. In all these important matters he was, as is obvious enough now, fully and exactly informed, and I expressed my admiration ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... to lie in that foul, unspeakable den until the small hours of to-morrow morning? Good God! ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... departure of the two young men, the rest of the guests left the Clays' house. There was no special run on the pawnshop that night. Saturday night was the real night for business; then work went on until far into the small hours of the morning, and Louisa was obliged to turn to and help her father, but to-night there was nothing to prevent her going to bed. She lit her candle in the hall, and turned to say ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... on, as Mr. James said afterwards, 'like my old mare Betsy, a step and a stumble, a nod and a flop, and home in the Lord's own time—that's to say, the small hours.' ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... made a conscious effort to recover it, of his audacious success during the small hours of that morning in bringing triumphantly into the world the small new life that Pollard would have destroyed, came back to fortify him; no trace of his own afterglow that had so fascinated and alarmed his sister. "I shall sleep fast for ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... beautiful woods, and near by was a lovely pond; and young and gay hearts were often there to wake the echoes with their cheerful, laughing voices. Cato played on the violin, and, when the evenings were chilly or rainy, the young people danced till the small hours of the night. ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... Denvil was written in the small hours. Harry never discovered its contents; but his mother, after reading it half a dozen times, locked it up with a hoard of sacred treasures pertaining to her boy. And soon after six, in the pitiless gold of dawn, the two men cantered ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... youths with curled hair and redolent with perfumes, as yet beardless or with the first down upon their chins, wearing scarves and veils and sleeved tunics reaching to their ankles, industrious but only with the dice-box, night-watchers but in the supper- rooms, in the small hours before dawn, immodest, dissolute boys, whose education had been in learning to love and to be loved, to sing and to dance naked at the midnight orgies, and along with it to handle poniards and ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... delighted in were all rich in this quiet humor. I heard of one he used to tell about a man who, when he went to his club at night, often lingered too long over his cups, and came home befuddled in the small hours, and was frequently hauled over the coals by his wife. One night he again came home late, and was greeted with the usual upbraiding in the morning. "It was not late," he said, "it was only one o'clock." "It was much later than that," said the wife. "It was one o'clock," repeated ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of their little houses and dug-outs to gather around the brazier; and for every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event, an American appearing in the trench in the small hours of ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... surmise that Rooke would take Nan first of all to London, he doubted his own ability to persuade her to return with him, and even if he were successful in this, there still remained the outstanding fact that by no human means could she reach Mallow until the small hours of the morning. He could well imagine the consternation and scandal which would ensue should she arrive back at the Court about five ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... I'm Cribb."[683] W*** seized the great pugilist's hand, and shook it warmly, got him to his own rooms in college, collected some friends, and had a symposium which lasted until the large end of the small hours. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... laugh had not been completely against him. He had received the honourable distinction of extra lesson for ragging in French. He had been "touched up" by the prefect of his dormitory for creating a disturbance in the small hours. In fact, he had gone through all the usual preliminaries, ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... smoking in his shirt-sleeves in the summer evenings—crowding the pit of the Odeon and every part of the Theatre du Pantheon—playing wind instruments at dead of night to the torment of his neighbors, or, in vocal mood, traversing the Quartier with a society of musical friends about the small hours of the morning—getting into scuffles with the gendarmes—flirting, dancing, playing billiards and the deuce; falling in love and in debt; dividing his time between Aristotle and Mademoiselle Mimi Pinson ... here, and here only, in all his phases, at ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... of the late professor! Rachel forgot her grudge against his widow; she pulled the outer door, and pushed the inner one, just as she had done in the small hours of that fatal morning, but this time all was darkness within. She had to put on the electric light for herself. The necessity she could not have explained, but it existed in her mind; she must see the room again. And the first thing she saw was that the ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... aside to his wife on the nest below; and now bursting out into that song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds sorrow, he himself surely finds none. All the morning he will sing; and again at evening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn: but if his voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only mocked by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright morning that which it is, the fulness of joy and ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... that what we had considered an unmitigated nuisance, had been our salvation. One night, in our anxiety to push on, the Indians decided not to go ashore and camp, but to sail on all night as the wind was favourable. During the small hours the wind increased almost to a gale, while dark clouds obscured nearly every star. Big Tom—hero that he was—stuck to his post and, nobly aided by his experienced Indians, under close-reefed sail, sped rapidly on in the gloom. The missionary and his wife were sleeping in their camp bed, which ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... tears in his eyes he agreed. There was nothing he had not done, no advance he had not made, to endeavour to bridge the gulf. All in vain! Never were such obstinate fellows as these Hindus. And he proceeded once more to "multiply examples." As we said "Good-bye" in the small hours of the morning he pressed into our hands copies of his speeches and addresses. And we left him perorating on ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... evening and far into the night it rained and rained, and the fowls cuddled close to each other to keep warm, and Flaps did not return. In the small hours of the morning the rain ceased, and the rain-clouds drifted away, and the night-sky faded and ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... power on earth would cause him to sign a Mandate possessing no legality behind it; and he indeed obstinately resisted every attempt to seduce him. Although his resignation was refused he stood his ground manfully, and it became clear that some other expedient would have to be resorted to. In the small hours of the 13th June what this was was made clear: by a rapid reshuffling of the cards Dr. Wu Ting-fang's resignation was accepted and the general officer commanding the Peking Gendarmerie, a genial soul named General Chiang Chao-tsung, who had survived unscathed the vicissitudes ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... branch of manufacture, which had been so far successful as to supply him with a small capital. He seemed to work hard, leaving home at nine each morning, getting back to dinner at half-past six, and, as often as not, spending the evening away from home, and not returning till the small hours. He had the feverish eye of a man whose subsistence depends upon speculative acuteness and restless calculation. No doubt he was still so far the old Paul, that, whatever he undertook, he threw himself into ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... a.m.—The day by preference for a big fight. Last night—about 8—the Turks appear to have made a feint attack on the French, this going on for hours, the rifle fire very heavy. Then in the small hours of this morning they had concentrated on our left—the other end of the line—where they were in great force. My informants are three wounded from the Essex Regiment who have walked in to hospital. They say the Turks were ten to our one, and they came on with great ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... he had always visualized the recovery of his scarab as a thing of the small hours, a daring act to be performed when sleep held the castle in its grip. That an opportunity would be presented to him of walking in quite calmly and walking out again with the Cheops in his pocket, had never occurred to him as ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... being that we were always forewarned whenever it was proposed to send off a balloon. Sometimes we received by messenger, in the evening, an intimation that a balloon would start at daybreak on the morrow. Sometimes we were roused in the small hours of the morning, when everything intended for despatch had to be hastily got together and carried at once to the starting-place, such, for instance, as the Northern or the Orleans railway terminus, both being at a considerable distance from our flat in the Rue de Miromesnil. Those were by no means ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... mainsail, huddled up together for the sake of warmth, like animals in a nest. At intervals we got up to peep over the gunwale or to bale the boat out. Then with comic sighs we coiled down together again. It was bitterly cold in the small hours. We pooled our vitality, as it were, and shared and shared alike. When we finally awoke, about five in the morning, the wind had died down, the sky and moon were clouded, and a dull mist was creeping ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... with Mat, malicious Fate so ordained it that he passed one of those late—or, to speak more correctly, early—public-houses, which are open to customers during the "small hours" of the morning. He was parched with thirst; and the hiccuping fit which had seized him in the company of his new friend had not yet subsided. "Suppose I try what a drop of brandy will do for me," thought Zack, stopping at the fatal ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... has been a sinner in his day—a rattler of the ivories at Almack's, and an ogler of wenches in the gardens of Vauxhall, a sanguine backer of the Negro against the Suffolk Bantam, and a devil of a fellow at boxing the watch and wrenching the knockers when Bow Bells were chiming the small hours. Nor do we feel that he is a penitent. He is too Olympian for that. He has merely put these things behind him—has calmly, as a matter of business, transferred his account from the worldly bank to the heavenly. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... heights where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below! If you could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big rooms of ancient inns at night, until long after the small hours had come and gone, or smelt but one steam of the hot punch (not white, dear Felton, like that amazing compound I sent you a taste of, but a rich, genial, glowing brown) which came in every evening in a huge broad china bowl! I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... told us during the small hours, sandwiching his discourse with slices of bread spread with cheese and washed down with wine. All the tobacco was burned out. Now and then the hackney coaches clattering across the Place de l'Odeon, or the omnibuses toiling past, sent up their dull rumbling, ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one of Booth Tarkington's amusements: standing in mid-campus in the small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing mingled emotions in the couched undergraduates according to ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... me that sitting up late one night talking with Tennyson, the latter remarked that he had not kept such late hours since a recent visit of Jowett. On that occasion the poet and the philosopher had talked together well into the small hours of the morning. My father asked Tennyson what was the subject of conversation that had so engrossed them. "Murders," replied Tennyson. It would have been interesting to have heard Tennyson and Jowett discussing such a theme. ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... 'ooman, you turn in," said Adams, when the small hours of morning had advanced a little. "You'll only be unfit for work to-morrow if you sit up bobbin' about on ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... friends came to the conclusion that the sepoys at Peshawur must be disarmed. They carried their arguments at once to Sydney Cotton, and convinced the Brigadier of the necessity for such drastic action. This decision was arrived at in the small hours of the 22nd of May. By six o'clock the same morning the colonels of the sepoy regiments had received their orders, and by seven the work ...
— John Nicholson - The Lion of the Punjaub • R. E. Cholmeley
... at least until he had reconsidered them. But he lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water pink and then green, and he created a snail, which he miraculously annihilated, and got himself a miraculous new tooth-brush. Somewhere in the small hours he had reached the fact that his will-power must be of a particularly rare and pungent quality, a fact of which he had indeed had inklings before, but no certain assurance. The scare and perplexity of his first discovery ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... aeroplanes occasionally tried to "lay eggs," a by no means easy affair with a moving train as a target. Whatever the reason was, and I never succeeded in discovering it, the trains invariably left Baghdad in the wee small hours, and as the station was on the right bank across the river from the main town, and the boat bridges were cut during the night, we used generally, when returning to the front, to spend the first part of the night sleeping on ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... "Your book came one mail after your letter; I went to a medical meeting in the evening; during my absence my oldest daughter read the book, and on my return, when I opened the door, she told me how well she liked it. I had to sit down and read it, and I did so until far out in the small hours. I must say that the book opened new views to me, and I am sorry that I did not know the many valuable facts contained in it when I was in Berlin last year, when you know the wind that was blowing was anything but Philhellenic. What a forcible argument against the prevailing order of things ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... must surely spread and widen and change and dominate all the affairs of men, but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything but a narrow and personal light. Several people heard him pacing in the small hours—for the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor editor who, before all understood compression. And about five o'clock, if not before, Filmer left his room and wandered out of the sleeping house into the park, alive by that time with sunlight and birds and squirrels ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... fancy. Where be his gibes now? How is he to cope with the fiendish ingenuity of the examiners? How is he to master the contents of a book of Thucydides in a couple of days? It is a fearsome problem. Perhaps he will get up in the small hours and work by candle light from two till eight o'clock. In this case he will start his day a mental and physical wreck. Perhaps he will try to work and be led away by the ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... through the small hours of the warm midsummer night there is no sharp-etched picture on the memory page. As I recall it, no spoken word of Jennifer's or mine came in to break the rhythm of the hasting voyage. Our paddles rose and fell, dipping and sweeping in ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... venue: a second report said Newbury, or at any rate a point south-west of Reading. Fire drives out fire: a third report swore positively that Clark and the Dustman were in Portsmouth, in hiding, and would run the cordon in the small hours ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... end with a trumpery match on the Saturday, which two or three of us intended abandoning early in order to return to town that night. The match, however, was never played. In the small hours of the Saturday morning a tragedy ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... always in good repair, and yields an excellent supply of water, greatly to the convenience of the neighbourhood. Both the pump and the prayers are the legacy of an old fish-woman of the last century. It is said, that for forty years of her life she was in the habit of purchasing fish in the small hours of the morning at Billingsgate Market; these she washed and prepared for her customers at a small spring near St Antholin's Church, and afterwards cried them about the town upon her head. Having prospered in her calling, she bequeathed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... I always associate her with japonicas, which she usually wore in her hair and of which her numerous bouquets were chiefly composed. Her father frequently accompanied her to balls, and in the wee small hours of the night, as he became weary, I have often been amused at his summons to depart—"Addie, allons." As quite a young woman, Addie Cutts married Stephen A. Douglas, the "Little Giant," whom Lincoln defeated in the memorable presidential election of 1860. It is said that her ambition to grace ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... then followed songs and parlour games, and it was in the small hours when the merry goodnights were all said and we had retired to rest. Aunt Helen dropped to sleep in a short time; but I lay awake listening to the soft distant call of the mopokes in the scrub ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... walked the streets, some one I met told me that my friend, the man I am writing of, was ill. I went at once to his room, which was in the building over the printing office where he had now gotten to be foreman. I found him restless and feverish, and at his request I stayed with him until the small hours of the night. Then I went home. No one saw me going in or out of his room, but I met two or three stragglers on my way home. I had been half an hour in bed when an alarm of fire was sounded, and I rose and joined the crowd in the streets. The —— Mills were burning, and in ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... at hand, and ready to be seized at a moment's notice. Frederick fully appreciated the peril of his situation, and was not to be taken by surprise by his active foes. And thus the night moved on until midnight passed, and the new day began its course in the small hours. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... like a brute, but I'm going to tell you to go to bed as per promise. I've got two big guns from Broadway putting licks on the production of 'The Purple Slipper' until the small hours to-night, right here in the office. I'll tell Miss Hawtry about it, ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... that Sheard—whom he strongly suspected, might hold interviews with the mysterious and elusive Severac Bablon in the small hours of the morning, at his own house, when the rest of the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... mistake, the canoe proved as dry as a bottle, and we paddled bravely on through the mists of night. About midnight we halted for supper, making a fire amidst the long wet grass, over which we fried the sturgeon and boiled our kettle; then we went on again through the small hours of the morning. At times I could see on the right the mouths of large rivers which flowed from the west: it is down these rivers that the American Indians come to fish for sturgeon in the Rainy River. For nearly 200 miles the country is still theirs, and the Pillager and ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... In the small hours of that fine morning, as Saul slept and as his guards were heavy with sleep about him, David put one over on his pursuer—an act of kindness which overwhelmed him with shame. David had not only to fight a natural ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats. There, too, among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above, was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small hours, by a nightly resurrection of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... was first to turn in, it was along in the wee small hours of morning before slumber crept in on ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... out Sombre Lives, I sometimes saw Sawa in the small hours of the morning, his long locks flowing, and followed by his dog. He always gripped my hand with such force that it did me some hurt, and then he would say to ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... will arrive. You must do the rest for yourself, and then you must strike straight across country for here. You can look up your routes on the map. There will be less risk of attracting attention if you come and go by different ways. You ought to be here again some time in the small hours. I'll let you in, and you'll have cleared your own score with Rupert Dunsmore and earned more money than you ever have had in all your life before. Now, can I depend ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... her to bed and kept her there by main force until she was exhausted. They were up with her all night, and she died in the small hours of the morning. There was nothing for it but to bury ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... With the small hours of the night came a cold so intense that he was driven to sleep in the cabin where reigned the small iron stove that brewed the skipper's odorous pot. After he had slept a good way into the next day, he came up again to find the gale still strong and the prospect coloured ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... position, that was to be positively the last, lost its virtue in the space of three minutes, till the sheet—that was too narrow for the mattress—became ruckled into hills and valleys and made things worse than ever. Having started like this, he knew himself capable of keeping it up gaily till the small hours; and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... always excellent, now became not quite so excellent. I had been accustomed to read myself back asleep when I chanced to awake. But now this began to fail me. When I had read two or three of the small hours away and was as wide awake as ever, I found that a drink furnished the soporific effect. Sometimes two ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... graze until about ten o'clock and then sleep on well into the small hours, wake and begin to feed again at dawn," continued ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... the small hours it would seem that young Caddies came to the shadowy quiet of Regent's Park, stepped over the railings and lay down on a grassy slope near where the people skate in winter time, and there he slept an hour or so. And about six o'clock in the morning, he was talking to a draggled woman he ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... from the hills thirsting for the blood of Greek and Mohammedan victims: should the massacre they meditated take place, M. Venizelos would never leave Athens alive.[16] The news was of a nature to compel him at last to take the plunge; and in the small hours of 25 September, the National Leader stole out of Greece on a ship escorted by a French torpedo-boat. His flight had been organized by the French Secret Service like a carnival masquerade, on the painful details of which, says Admiral Dartige, it would be better ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... home to-night till the small hours have struck. Miss Atherton will take care of that. There is no fear of her finding us ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... committees of citizens, giving directions to officers of companies and regiments, accommodating himself to the wilful democracy of our institutions which insists upon seeing the man in chief command and will not take its answer from a subordinate, until in the small hours of the night the noises were hushed, and after a brief hour of effective, undisturbed work upon the matters of chief importance, he could leave the glare of his gas-lighted office, and seek a few hours' rest, only to renew the same wearing labors ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the favourite rendezvous after the play. Here till the small hours assembled nightly the elite of European Tiflis. Russian and Georgian officers in gorgeous uniforms of dark green, gold lace, and astrachan; French and German merchants with their wives and daughters; with a sprinkling demi-mondaines from Odessa or Kharkoff, sipping tea or drinking ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... and their eyes ever turned towards that dark line of forest whence came nothing but the singing of night birds and the calling of wild animals. Yet Trent would have no caution relaxed, the more they progressed, the more vigilant the watch they kept. At last came signs of the men of Bekwando. In the small hours of the morning a burning spear came hurtling through the darkness and fell with a hiss and a quiver in the ground, only a few feet from where Trent and the boy lay. Trent stamped on it hastily and gave no alarm. But the boy stole round with a whispered warning to ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... strong hands of the Romans before the multitude had learnt that anything was going on, there would be nothing to fear. So the Sanhedrim was assembled under cloud of night; and the proceedings went forward in the small hours of the morning in the house of Caiaphas, to ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... in my glorious youth except the violence of our family quarrels. Reckless waves of high and low spirits, added to quick tempers, obliged my mother to separate us for some time and forbid us to sleep in the same bedroom. We raged and ragged till the small hours of the morning, which kept us thin ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... possessed. On Sunday he read from morning till night, and once or twice his assistant John, hammering outside for admittance in the winter dark, wakened the master of the shop from the rickety chair where he had fallen asleep over his books in the small hours of the morning. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conducted in the small hours, it was cruel to disturb their infant slumbers. If you want to do that here you will have to get Mabel's consent; it is out of my province. Best play with your children before ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... true; Celestina could vouch for that. After ten years of residence in the gray cottage she had become too completely inured to hearing the muffled sound of saw and hammer during the wee small hours of the night to question the verity of the statement. Therefore she was quite ready to agree that there was no peace for Willie, or herself either, until the particular burst of genius that assailed him had been transformed from a mirage of the imagination to ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... on a sofa, and then crept away into the night to catch a mail train which, rumbling northwards through the hills in the small hours, sometimes stopped near here to water. Late the next afternoon he acquainted his relatives of his intentions, spent a day or two with them, wished them a cheery farewell, and early the next Sunday, ere the morning mists in the gullies had fled before the first rays, he was ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... clothing, which as it froze on us made progress as difficult as if we were encased in armour. But dancing up and down before a huge fire in the crisp open air under God's blue sky gave as pleasing a reaction as doing the same thing in the dusty, germ-laden atmosphere of a ballroom in the small hours of the night, when one would better be in bed, if the joys of efficiency and accomplishment are the durable pleasure ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... lowered the system and depressed the spirits. The careless and jovial temperament of the people, however, was never much affected by the change of seasons—they drank more hot coffee than usual, and kept their feet warm by dancing from midnight up to the small hours of the morning. The cholera was a thing of the past—the cleansing of the city, the sanitary precautions, which had been so much talked about and recommended in order to prevent another outbreak in the coming year, were all forgotten and neglected, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... not said my mother is the most wonderful of women? I waked her in the small hours with the startling information that Mary Virginia was downstairs in John Flint's workroom, and that she herself must dress and accompany her home. And my mother, though she looked her stark bewilderment, plagued ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... his acts were irreparable. He could undo them. He could make amends. The small hours of the morning are not perhaps the most suitable time for making amends, but Mr. Bennett was too remorseful to think of that. Do It Now had ever been his motto, so he started by ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... measure health by the pound," Lonegan observed, regarding the other's bulk with one eye shut. "I never heard of Mowbray spending much time in bed outside of the small hours." "How old is ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... woolsack might want re-stuffing. Returning home from exciting political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr Black, coming in the broadest ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... calling. They would leave home well before the theatre doors were open to the public, with their faces made up all ready to go on the stage; also, they were apparently so reluctant to leave the scene of their labours that they would commonly not return till the small hours. The top front room was rented by an author, who made a precarious living by writing improving stories for weekly and monthly journals and magazines. Whenever the postman's knock was heard at the door, it was invariably followed ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... practice to keep one of these books by his bedside, in case an idea occurred to him during the night, and it is told that he was once aroused by the knocking of a neighbour who had been accidentally locked out of his house in the small hours of the morning. The irate neighbour knocked four raps at a time, with a pause at the end of every fourth rap, and the rhythmic regularity of the sounds not only startled Beethoven out of his sleep, but suggested a musical idea to ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... wry mouth over the letter. But into the small hours of the morning she lay awake, thinking of her mother and of the old days. Odd little memories came to her: the saucer pies that she and Sally used to have for their tea-parties, out under the lilac trees, and a day when she, Martie, had been passionately ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... long halls on the ground floor of tall buildings—nearly always on the business street of the city—kept open until the small hours of morning. There was always a brass band in front, and a string band, or orchestra, in the extreme rear, so if one wished to dance, he could select a partner of most any nationality; dance a set, step up to the bar, pay two bits or twenty-five ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... she lingered in the soundless saloon long after the fire had gone out. There was no danger of her feeling the cold; she was in a fever. She heard the small hours strike, and then the great ones, but her vigil took no heed of time. Her mind, assailed by visions, was in a state of extraordinary activity, and her visions might as well come to her there, where she sat up to meet them, as on her pillow, to make a mockery of rest. As I have ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours, her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined—ruined—that was what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find herself cramped, restricted—to be warned that she must ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose—as I did there, over and over, in the small hours—that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart, and their fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... the amount of information that the lawyer carried back with him to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and fro, until the small hours of the morning began to grow large. It was a night of little ease to his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... sorrowfully in his mind. He kept his window slightly open at night, in all weather; and open also that night was one of the windows of Mr. and Mrs. Faringfield's great chamber below. A sound that reached him in the small hours, of Mrs. Faringfield whimpering and weeping, decided him. And the next morning, after another silent meal, he contrived to fall into Mr. Faringfield's company on the way to the warehouse, which ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... waste and might seem to indicate soreness on his part. It cost him a good many pegs before he thought the matter out in all its bearings, for, as has been said, he was a gunner, but as he sauntered away from the club in the small hours a happy thought came ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... described as being "a short way from here." It would have taken eight or nine hours—a day's journey. Mr. Pickwick left Eatanswill about one or two, for the lunch was going on, and got to Bury in time for dinner, which, had he left Yarmouth, would have taken him to the small hours ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... We got cold and wet through in the evening; we sat up talking till the small hours; we got cold and wet again this ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... notice them, rolled in the dust under his carriage wheels. There was never a moment when somebody was not calling with a bust of the Emperor or Empress, price three hundred francs. And itinerant bands played under his windows into the small hours of the morning. I can imagine him saying, in the words of ORESTES, "Dis is a dam country." ORESTES was the guide who conducted Mr. PICKTHALL through the island. It revolted him, but he did it. "I tink we better leave to-morrow," was a sort ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's Needle, to Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and twenty centuries old, recited by the ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... say goodbye to the apples, that will all be plucked by the end of the month, is so strong that forest trees are duped, and are ready to do their part towards a green Yule if only the midday warmth will linger on to those deadly small hours of the morning, when hoarfrost gets the thin end of its wedge into the almanack, and sleepers go the length of coming out of bed for something to put over their feet, and end by putting it over most of their total. From ten till five, at least, the last ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... next morning I cannot say, but we determined his actions from the other end. Having first appeared before him by Black Wood and lifted the curtain on the second act of my romantic comedy, I remained there a while, then ascended to Strete Farm and presently, in the small hours, awakened the farmer, showed myself stealing food ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... old ball and a cut-down cleek stolen from his father; or some spavined elder who not only rubbed it into them, but was apt, between strokes, to bore them with personal reminiscences of the Crimean War. So they began to play together early and late. In the small hours before breakfast, long ere the first faint piping of the waking caddie made itself heard from the caddie-shed, they were half-way through their opening round. And at close of day, when bats wheeled against the steely sky and the "pro's" had stolen home to rest, you might see them ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... little folk, who are in bed and asleep as a rule between eight and nine in the evening, to feel lively and larky, and quite up to any holiday pranks at four o'clock on a summer's morning; but the older and less wise people who sometimes do not close their eyes until the small hours, are often just enjoying their deepest and sweetest slumbers about the time the ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... close by. He also caused a telephone communication to be set up between his own house and Selwood's bedroom, so that he could summon his secretary at any hour of the night. Herapath occasionally had notions about things in the small hours, and he was one of those active, restless persons who, if they get a new idea, like to figure on it at once. All the same, during those three weeks he had not once troubled his secretary in this fashion. No call came ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... At least, that is what he thinks himself with more pride than sentiment. I am glad I have made friends with him. As a companion he acquires more importance than he ever had as a sort of minor genius in his way—as an original Italian sailor whom I allowed to come in in the small hours and talk familiarly to the editor of the Porvenir while the paper was going through the press. And it is curious to have met a man for whom the value of life seems ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... given Jim's people such a feeling of confidence that he ventured to leave the battery under charge of two elderly Bugis who had seen some fighting in their day, and went to join Dain Waris and the storming party who were concealed in the ravine. In the small hours they began creeping up, and when two-thirds of the way up, lay in the wet grass waiting for the appearance of the sun, which was the agreed signal. He told me with what impatient anguishing emotion he watched the swift coming of the dawn; how, heated with the work and the climbing, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... one another's gaps; and there were plenty of them towards the morning; but, luckily, people don't notice those things when the small hours draw on.' ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... the gorge and added fuel to the fire. For a time the wind increased in velocity until a stiff gale was blowing, then, as the small hours came on, it waned, and the beacon flared straight ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... Mrs. Halliday occupied themselves in the pursuit of pleasure or business, as the case might be. They were eager for amusement: went to exhibitions in the day and to theatres at night, and came home to cozy little suppers in Fitzgeorge-street, after which Mr. Halliday was wont to waste the small hours in friendly conversation with his quondam companion, and in the consumption of ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... to a bath and dressing in his rooms. This was something not so unpleasant to contemplate. It was the afterwards that repelled him: the dinner at Sherry's, the subsequent tour of roof gardens, the late supper at a club, and then, prolonged far into the small hours, the session around some green-covered table in a close room reeking with the fumes of good tobacco and hot with the ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... as if he disapproved of the lamentable want of truth displayed by the majority of their number. Artists also congregated there to paint the ivy-covered porch. At the back of the house were bedrooms, to which the fishermen would make their way in the small hours of a summer morning, arguing to the last as they stumbled upstairs. One of these bedrooms, larger than the others, had been converted into a gymnasium for the use of mine host's brother. Thither he brought pugilistic ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... ten-mile spin she stretches her limbs, She golfs, she punts, she rows, she swims— She plays, she sings, she dances, too, From ten or eleven til all is blue! At ball or drum, til small hours come (Chaperon's fans concealing her yawning) She'll waltz away like a teetotum. And never go home til daylight's dawning. Lawn-tennis may share her favours fair— Her eyes a-dance, and her cheeks a-glowing— Down comes ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... at it all day, and he went on far into the small hours, shaking his body backwards and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... hundred yards or more out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protection from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning, I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... inoffensive old party,' 'a cheery soul,' 'a genial old boy,' and in like terms of approval. That half of society which did not visit in Arlington Street, in whose nostrils the semi-aristocratic, semi-artistic, altogether Bohemian little dinners, the suppers after the play, the small hours devoted to Nap or Poker, had an odour as of sulphur, the reek of Tophet—even this half of the great world was fain to admit that Sir George was harmless. He had never had an idea beyond the realms of sport; he had never had a will of his own outside his stable. To shoot pigeons at Hurlington ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... she pursued her medical studies far into the night, and Miss Birdseye, who was nothing of a sleeper (Mary Prance, precisely, had wanted to treat her for it), had heard her, in the stillness of the small hours, with her open windows (she had fresh air on the brain), sharpening instruments (it was Miss Birdseye's mild belief that she dissected), in a little physiological laboratory which she had set up in her back room, the room which, if she hadn't been a doctor, might have been her "chamber," ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Indians brought venison, the Italians brought red wine, the French brought walnuts and chestnuts, and the good God sent a blessing. Almost every man found up either a wife or a sweetheart or a daughter or a niece to come with him, and the feast went on to the small hours of Friday. The Mayor came down on time, and being an accomplished man, addressed them in English, in Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, and in Tuscan. And it is to be hoped that they ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... angularly active style, singing a song the while from the gladness of his heart. It was a merry song, about mother slowly going down the hectic path of phthisis pulmonalis, and sister, who has—one is led to believe—taken to small bottles, small hours and undesirable companions, refusing to come home and lift the mortgage which is shortly to be foreclosed—all in the ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Easter I was called away suddenly on business for a day, and, on returning, was surprised at receiving a visit from the Dean. He appeared annoyed, and complained that his rest had been broken the previous night by someone playing the organ quite into the small hours. He was surprised beyond measure on my informing him of my absence from home. We tried to discover a solution to the mystery, but failed. One day, however, I showed the Dean the old manuscript in my possession, and was surprised to hear that he knew of a tradition of the appearance, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... area of deck unoccupied by feet or Filipino babies, Chinamen or ants, I spread an army blanket out and went to sleep in spite of the incessant drizzle which the rotten canopy seemed not to interrupt. I was awakened in the small hours by the rattle of the winch. These little boats make more ado in getting under way than any ocean steamer I have ever known. Becoming conscious of a cloud of opium-smoke escaping from the cockpit, which was occupied by several Chinamen, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert |
