"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hours, while I tried in vain to save him, this weird drum filled my ears with its monotonous, intermittent and incomprehensible tone, and I felt lay hold of my bones fear, real fear, hideous fear, in the presence of this beloved corpse, in this hole ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... without knowing it rendered it, as we shall see, so great a service. But the body of Theodoric did not long remain in the enormous silence of that sepulchre. Even in the time of Agnellus (ninth century) the body was no longer in the mausoleum and what had become of it will always remain a mystery. A weird and awful legend, in keeping with the tremendous tragedy that was played out in his time and in which he had filled the main role, relates how a holy hermit upon the island of Lipari on the day and in the hour of the great king's death saw him, his hands and feet bound, his garments all disarrayed, ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... trees in Western Minnesota and the Dakotas are those found along the lakes and water courses, and west of the Missouri the trees and shrubby growth, even in such places, becomes very scanty or entirely disappears, giving a weird appearance to one who has always associated water and trees together in his mind. As we draw near the Montana line, trees begin to appear on the tops of the buttes and high bluffs on the distant horizon. Traveling on the railroad I have wondered what they were. With our own ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... scalp-dance by the Sioux. They had a fresh scalp, said to be off a Chippewa chief. It was stretched on a sort of hoop, formed by a green twig, or limb. It was all very weird. ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... Titanic. Its huge shapes, its weird effects, its mighty passions, its wild display of the forces of earth and air,—these impress us chiefly at first; but its ethical interest is far greater. Zeus is apparently represented in it as relentless, cruel, and unjust,—a lawless ruler, who knows only his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... creeping thing on the verge of destruction, gripped by ruin in the midst of a whole world ready for lethargic sleep. I rose, oppressed by weird terrors, and took some furious strides down the path. "No!" I cried out, clutching both my hands; "there must be an end to this," and I reseated myself, grasped the pencil, and set seriously to work at ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... bearing rosy flowers and the Chartreux pansy; that lake of salt water, the sandy dunes, the view of Croisic, a miniature town afloat like Venice on the sea; and, finally the mighty ocean tossing its foaming fringe upon the granite rocks as if the better to bring out their weird formations—that sight uplifts the mind although it saddens it; an effect produced at last by all that is sublime, creating a regretful yearning for things unknown and yet perceived by the soul on far-off heights. These wild and savage ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... grandeur. It is true that the flaming bonfires and the colored lights and the tiny figures of men and women standing in the gorge within the depth of the arch made the scene theatrical, but it was strange and weird and awful, like the fantasy of a Walpurgis' Night or a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and terror-stricken, for the last reverberations of the thunder, the whistle of the Fast Express, bound from Millville to the great city, rose wildly on the air, like the scream of an exultant demon, and died away in a series of weird and mocking echoes into ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... tangle of leaf-thick branches, and stillness Keeps in the strange-coiled stems, ferns, and wet-loving weeds. Hither comes Pan, to this pregnant earthy spot, when his piping Flags; and his pipes outworn breaking and casting away, Fits new reeds to his mouth with the weird earth-melody in them, Piercing, alive with a life able to mix with the god's. Then, as he blows, and the searching sequence delights him, the goat-feet Furtive withdraw; and a bird stirs and flutes in the gloom Answering. ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and happy, with a hungering tenderness, moved her hand over the head of her poor dwarf, as though she would know if he were truly her own son. A new spirit also had come into Parpon's eyes, gentler, less weird, less distant. With the advent of their joy a great yearning came to save Elise. They hung watchful, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... epoch began. Rose-red gladioli among corn, in among the rocks, and small irises, black-purple and yellow blotched with brown, like a wasp, standing low in little desert places, that would seem forlorn but for this weird, dark-lustrous magnificence. Then there were the tiny irises, only one finger tall, growing in dry places, frail as crocuses, and much tinier, and blue, blue as the eye of the morning heaven, which was a morning earlier, more pristine than ours. The ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... about it; no more to be said. I now comprehended this, as I stood lacing my rifle-shirt and watching him at his weird self-embellishment. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... ordinary small hut. Outside the hut was what he took for a curiously shaped log of wood. The inside of the hut was in shadow, but as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw something in one corner. It was a weird-looking head, also of wood. ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... together to look into that mystery ahead, toward which this universe and we within it are so prodigiously plunging on. Do we not often feel, upon this earth whirling through space, like men and women who by some weird chance have found themselves upon a ship, ignorant of their point of departure and of their destination? For all the busyness with which we engage in many tasks, we cannot keep ourselves from slipping back at times ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... weird, rugged spot, covered with great boulders that had rolled down the hill-sides, and with gaps and chasms here and there of considerable depth, that suggested the idea of volcanic action having visited the place at some remote period. These ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... with its broad main street, with an arcade and cafes under awnings on one side, and in the roadway such weird and unfamiliar objects as vehicles drawn by horses, and even motor-cars noisy and fussy, is a long canal packed with orange-sailed fishing boats and crossed by many little bridges and one superb broad white one. All the men ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... a rosebush as they approached her. Her eyes were wide open, and her dark hair floated over her shoulders. In her white nightdress, the moonlight full upon her, she looked very pretty and yet so weird that Betty could ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir, but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... can't make her out. She puzzles me more than Archie does. Now that a week has gone by and the first shock is over, she's like a person coming out of a trance. She's so sweet and gentle that it's positively weird. Of course she's always been sweet—that's her style—but not in this way. Upon my word, I don't know whether she has a soul or not—whether she never had one, or whether one is being born in her. But she's patient, and you might even say resigned. There's ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... attempt being made to molest them in any way, Blazius after a time forgot his fears, which had been excited by the vindictive character of the Duke of Vallombreuse, but Isabelle could not banish from her memory the wicked plot to abduct her, and many times saw again in her dreams Chiquita's wild, weird face, with the long, tangled elf-locks hanging around it, just as it had appeared to her that dreadful night at the Armes de Frame, glaring at her with fierce, wolfish eyes. Then she would start up, sobbing and trembling, in violent agitation, and it required ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... were, but cheerless—so cheerless! Even the sea birds that circled around them seemed screaming a dirge. An opening in a wall of rock took us at length into a long, winding fiord, or arm of the sea, with green bare fields on every side, and wild, weird-like sheep that gazed on us for a moment, then bleated and fled. Right at the end of this rock stood my friend's house, comfortable and solid-looking, but unsheltered by ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... being offered a coffee and liqueur. We can give him something decent—Where's the waiter?" Angus lifted his pinched, ugly bare face and looked round with weird command for the waiter. The waiter, having not much to do, and feeling ready to draw these two weird young birds, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... And that's not all, James. For I've got to tell you that the girl entertains some rather weird and dreadful socialistic notions. She talks socialism—a mild variety—from public platforms. She admits very frankly that she entertains no respect for accepted conventions. And while I have no reason to doubt her purity of mind and personal chastity, the unpleasant ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... gentlemen strolling from room to room, contrasting somewhat strangely in their gayety with the solemn pictures hanging on the walls, and a sense of shadowy presence which seems to haunt those dusky interiors. An odd discrepancy between the modern company and the surroundings, a weird mingling of the past and the present, made any apparition appear possible, and left room only for a faint thrill of surprise when a voice by my side ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... the steady flame from cherry, the hot and rapid disintegration of sycamore, and the steady and thorough combustion of soft apple wood soon become familiar characteristics to those who have the opportunity to lay the fire in variety. Then there is, of course, the fascination and the weird coloring in a driftwood fire—most spectacular of all but unfortunately denied ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor
... out again, and the priest was left alone. The fire had died out, and the only light in the hut was that of a dim lantern. For the first time that night he began to feel that he was in a weird place, and the old woman's words, "Whatever you do don't peep into the back room," aroused his curiosity and ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... finding his sitting-room transformed into an atelier strewed with miscellaneous drawings and with the contents of two chests from Rome, the lower half of the windows darkened with baize, and the blonde Hans in his weird youth as the presiding genius of the littered place—his hair longer than of old, his face more whimsically creased, and his high voice as usual getting higher under the excitement of rapid talk. The friendship of the two had been kept up warmly since the memorable Cambridge ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... clear-cut and outstanding. Men and women who met him for the first time felt that in conversation he held them by some curious, indescribable influence—held them as long as he cared, until by his will they were released from a strange thraldom that was both weird and astounding. ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... Among the most common were the box, wattle, and cherry; but undoubtedly the most prominent everywhere in the landscape were the old gum trees, and the huge iron stringy-bark trees, which, now with shattered and weird appearance, had braved the fierce storms of winter and the hot blasts of summer for centuries. Many strange birds flew by overhead, and still stranger wild animals started up from beneath some sheltering bush, and ran off along the fresh glades, all reminding the ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... Twain's home, and instead of the usual essay he read them a story: "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut." It was the story of a man's warfare with a personified conscience—a sort of "William Wilson" idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more verisimilitude. It was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the author's daily self-chidings. The climax, where conscience is slain, is a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. So vivid is it all, that ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... impression of extreme loneliness. As its weird, half-availing notes ring out and are answered back from the distant rocks shrouded in night, and perhaps concealing the lurking foe, the soldier remembers that he is far away from home and friends—deep in the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... fame which it acquired from the poems and stories of Scott. The thousands of pilgrims who come every year are attracted by this alone, since the abbey had no extraordinary history and no tomb of king or hero is to be found in its precincts. Were it not for the weird interest which the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" has thrown around Melrose, its fame would probably be no greater than that of the abbeys of Jedburgh and Kelso in the same neighborhood. Abbottsford House is only three miles from Melrose, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... The column of weird-colored flame had quickly died and only a few flickering pieces of wood from the cauldron fire burned in scattered spots about the yard. Of the ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... puzzling over the meaning of these apertures there came a repetition of the weird cry, but this time the lad was so startled that he almost lost ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Neal waited for an hour while the June twilight slowly faded. He watched the sandhills round his lair turn from bright yellow to grey, watched them while they seemed in the fading light to grow loftier, and assume a weird majesty which was not their's in the daytime. The objects near at hand, the faded flowers, and the snail-shells, and the rods of woven bent, lost their bright colours and became almost invisible. The eternal ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... before the final catastrophe clearly anticipated what the end would be. When they gathered at their nocturnal meetings there was unwonted light in their eyes; a spirit of hope and cheerfulness such as they had never known before gave new life to their hymns, which had too often been sad or weird; their feelings became irrepressible. There were signs and tokens of various kinds which the working slaves well understood, whatever this child of a slave-mother may have made of them. There was something in the air which told that something uncommon was coming—"a ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... wealth of fresh impressions and some freedom from the tyranny of tradition, and the twofold stimulus stirred the speculative activity of a great variety of men from old Claude Duret of Moulins, of whose weird transformism (1609) Dr Henry de Varigny ("Experimental Evolution". London, 1892. Chap. 1. page 14.) gives us a glimpse, to Lorenz Oken (1799-1851) whose writings are such mixtures of sense and nonsense that some regard him as a far-seeing ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... figure rose and stopped him. The man turned an electric torch on Dr. Mannering, and recognized him. It appeared that while one detective kept guard outside, the others watched within. At the sound of voices the door of the Grey Room opened, and in the bright light that streamed from it a weird figure stood—a tall, black object with huge and flashing eyes and what looked like an elephant's trunk descending from between them. The watchers, wearing hoods and gas masks, resembled the fantastic ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... said, for his intention beneath the weird jargon was somehow benevolent. "And if you'll be good enough to wait until I have taken tea ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... he poured out upon me a flood of burning words—words which, in the silence of the wood, frightened me because they carried with them an impression of something preternatural, something indefinably weird and compelling. He was no longer the humble suppliant of that morning in the park, spoke no more of his diffident hopes, his half-mystical aspirations, his incurable sense of sorrow. This time he did not beg and entreat. It was the voice of passion, full of audacity and virile ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... the creek and from the pastures and meadows, When from the spring-house and lane and from the mint-bed and orchard, When from the redbud and gum and from redolent lilac, When from the dirt roads and pikes comes that calling for Peter; Cometh the dolorous cry, cometh that weird iteration Of "Peter" and "Peter" for aye, of "Peter" and "Peter" forever! This is the legend of old, told in the tumtitty meter Which the great poets prefer, being less labor than rhyming (My first attempt at the same, my last attempt, too, I reckon,) Nor have I further ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... S.: It is useless. Listen. In the course of a long and adven- turous career in the principal European Courts, it has been revealed to me that I unconsciously exercise a weird and supernatural fascination over all Crowned Heads. So irre- sistible is this singular property, that there is not a European Monarch who has not implored me, with tears in his eyes, to quit his kingdom, and take my fatal ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... looked. The breathless silence, the sweet, childish voice, the childish face, the long, unchildlike words, produced a weird effect. ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... The red-haired girl had lived at Krindlesyke, Instead of me, this forty-year: and I— I might ... But we must dree our weird. And yet, To think what my life might have been, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... a weird time for a match!" said Blossom, re-reading the letter to her chums. "But their captain says it's the only time they can get their field. It's used by another club in the afternoons, ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... does not believe in magic. Whatever Maga thought, the old hag was delighted. She began to croak an incantation, shuffling first with one foot, then with the other, and finally with both together in a weird dance that almost shook her old frame apart. Then she went through a pantomime of finger-pointing, as if transferring from herself to Maga the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... of Glena Bay, we pass Stags, Burnt, and other islands, and come to Glena Cottage, hiding in the foliage of leafy trees. Glena means "the valley of good fortune," and a name more suggestive of happier thoughts than weird Glownamorra across the lake—"the glen ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... has to deplore not so much the lack of historical data as the grotesque form into which this same over-vivid imagination of the Hindu has builded his gods. As the scientific systems grow more and more fancifully, detailed, and as the liturgy flowers out into the most extraordinary bloom of weird legend, so the images of the gods, to the eye in their temples, to the mind in the descriptions of them, take to themselves the most uncouth details imagined by a curious fancy. This god is an ascetic; he must ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... with his little axe and the little tree, and the unknown peril of death that came up from the sea, made a deep impression upon my mind, though not in any sense a haunting or unpleasant one? I longed to see the chips fly and the tiny tree bow to the sturdy strokes of the weird woodman. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... to the supreme test without undue mathematics. I do not know whether it has ever happened to my critic, as it has happened to me, while watching the gambling in the casino of a Continental watering resort, to have a financial genius present weird columns of figures, which demonstrate conclusively, irrefragably, that by this system which they embody one can break the bank and win a million. I have never examined these figures, and never shall, for this reason: the genius in question is prepared to sell his wonderful secret ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... anything human. As the moth to the flame, we are led, even against our will, into all of life, even the most unpleasant. The charm possessed by the novel and unplumbed, by such stories as Jude the Obscure, or by the weird imaginings of a Baudelaire, comes from this source. It is no mere scientific curiosity, because it includes that "consciousness of kind," which makes us feel akin ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... without. Some prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the mystery of ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... do my duty, Madam," I returned, thinking it all rather morbidly interesting, these weird details about ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... phantasmagoria have furnished me with the framework, and even details, of stories which from time to time I have contributed to various magazines. A ghost story,* published some years ago in a London magazine, and much commented on because of its peculiarly weird and startling character, had this origin; so had a fairy tale,** which appeared in a Christmas Annual last year, and which has recently been re-issued in German by the editor of a foreign periodical. Many ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... gayly. "How weird! Moya, you must write an account of your experience for the Society for Psychical Research. Put ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... The whole weird and unbelievable experience was making her distrust herself, and the storm was more and more unnerving her. She feared she could ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... Sunday in the summer season. There were enthusiasts whose interest ran from March to November. There were fanatics who insisted on trips thitherward in January. And there were one or two super-fanatics—ranking ahead even of the fishermen and the sand-diggers—who clung to that weird and changing region ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... "You are nearer the mark than possibly you imagine, Miss Deane," he said. "When we took our observations yesterday there was a very weird-looking halo around the sun. This morning you may have noticed several light squalls and a smooth sea marked occasionally by strong ripples. The barometer is falling rapidly, and I expect that, as the day wears, we will encounter a heavy swell. If the sky looks wild tonight, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... look down upon a sleeping world; yet not all asleep, for far down the road skirting yonder wood, a strange procession approaches;—goblin-like figures, hideous with enormous horns, glaring eye-balls and lolling red tongues, and mounted upon weird-looking steeds, are moving ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... the loft, which was reached by a ladder, generally swung out of the way—hung a faded, woollen blanket; from the opposite corner there fell an old, patchwork, silk quilt. Dainty white curtains in all their crispness were at the windows, and upon the walls were many rare and weird trophies of the chase, not to mention the innumerable pictures that had been taken from "Godey's Lady Book" and other periodicals of that time. A little book-shelf, that had been fashioned out of a box, was filled with old and well-read books; ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... procession which wound its way along the mountain path leading to the monastery doors. On looking out, Chan saw that many of the men in this procession were dressed in sackcloth, and that in front of it was a band of musicians producing weird, shrill ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... you the story of my girl-life," said the strange, weird woman, putting a fresh supply of wood upon the fire, which had ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... thought she was deeply indebted to him; now I feel that with all his money he can't possibly repay her for what she's giving up on his account. And yet his chink has made her what she is. Money is a weird power when applied to a woman. Tiled bath-rooms, silk stockings and bonnets work wonders with the sex. She's ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... head of her lovely bay tremblingly waited Mobile, never before so empty of men, so full of women and children. Southward, from two to four leagues apart, ran the sun-beaten, breezy margins of snow-white sand-hills evergreen with weird starveling pines, dotted with pretty summer homes and light steamer-piers. Here on the Eastern Shore were the hotels: "Howard's," "Short's," "Montrose," "Battle's Wharf" and Point Clear, where summer society had been wont to resort all the way from beloved ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... to our ears, as we approached, a certain wailing melody, thin, quavering, distant, weird. As it rose upon the hot afternoon air it seemed absolutely strange, unimaginable, impossible. The spine of each ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... kind of activity within the shelter of this weird jungle, was evident enough, for I could catch glimpses, now and then of moving things. But what they might be, even the searching eye of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the said house was placed by the said knight a fair wench having the appearance of a woman, dressed in the strange fashion of the Saracens Mohammedans, whom he would allow by none to be seen or to be approached within a bow-shot, but whom I have seen with mine own eyes, weird feathers upon her head, and eyes so flaming that I cannot adequately describe them, and from which gleamed forth a fire of hell. The defunct knight having threatened with death whoever should appear ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... lad. At night all the sounds of a tropical forest seem mysterious and weird, but in the broad daylight the bush will be comparatively still. The nocturnal animals will slink away to their lairs, and there will seem nothing strange to you in the songs and calls of the birds. I should recommend you all to take a sound dose ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... "I am in the hands of Weird, to wend as she will have me: but I will tell thee that I have hoped and prayed that it might be in no longer space than five years; then shall I be of twenty years and three, and she but a few weeks younger, and manhood and womanhood and due service of ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... a while to the edge of a common, stretching before us, drear and brown, as far as my eye could reach. A wild, weird-looking flat, with no sign of cultivation; and the road running across it lying in deep ruts, where moss and grass were springing. As far as I could guess, it was drawing near to five o'clock; and, if ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... The trail threaded its way between great Ceiba trees, looming weird and gigantic with their buttressed trunks, all knotted and entwined with hanging lianas and curiously hung with air plants dropping from the branches. Gay-colored birds flashed in the patches of sunlight that filtered through the trees. The Cuban boa-constrictor ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... anxious watchfulness while the steamer tore along. The chute seemed to come to an end every fifty yards, but always opened out in time. Now the head of it was at hand. George tapped the big bell three times, two leadsmen sprang to their posts, and in a moment their weird cries rose on the night air and were caught up and repeated by two ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the desert stooped as with a rush of wings. The peaceful, wide spaces and the veiled hills and the brooding skies were swept clear. Crisis filled our souls: crisis laid her hand on every living moving thing in the world, stopping it in its tracks so that the very infinities for a brief, weird period seemed poised over the running horse and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... had fled from it, as from many others in the neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow. "Open the door!" he cried. "Open in the name ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... This is the weird of a world-old folk, That not till the last link breaks, Not till the night is blackest, The blood of Hengist wakes. When the sun is black in heaven, The moon as blood above, And the earth is full of hatred, This ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," North ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the entertainment by giving us extremely quaint illustrations of holy people in stained-glass attitudes: his power of twisting his limbs into weird contortions being very great. (I am told that Sir William Wilde, his father, possessed the same power.) It must not be thought, however, that there was any suggestion ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... long one, says the proverb, and night came with the craft still miles away, but the sky was brilliantly clear, and the moon shone forth, showing the white-sailed schooner in a strangely weird fashion ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... took it into his head to entertain weird beings from other houses whose brothers or cousins he had met in the holidays. On such occasions he liked to have some trusty friend by him to help the conversation along. It struck Kennedy that this might be one of those occasions. ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... and beard floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the Spaniard, hatchet ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... have nerves, then," Reggie said, getting up out of his hammock, "and get strung up like people who over-work. Just think of a strung-up slug! There is something weird in the idea. A slug that started at its own shadow. Here is tea! Oh, Mrs. Windsor, where are the tents to be ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... lass! have pity upon her, Erchie! and O, be wise for twa! Think o' the risk she rins! I have seen ye, and what's to prevent ithers! I saw ye once in the Hags, in my ain howl, and I was wae to see ye there - in pairt for the omen, for I think there's a weird on the place - and in pairt for pure nakit envy and bitterness o' hairt. It's strange ye should forgather there tae! God! but yon puir, thrawn, auld Covenanter's seen a heap o' human natur since he lookit his last on the musket barrels, if he never saw nane afore," she added, with a kind ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scene was a weird one. On one side the rocky ascent rose, black and threatening. On the other, the river rushed foaming, only broken by the rocks and little islands ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... the members of the Gee Eyes to a clearing in the woods. Here several lanterns had been hung up, casting a weird light of red, blue, and green. Those to be initiated were present, and surrounding them in a big circle, the members of ...
— Dave Porter and His Rivals - or, The Chums and Foes of Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... oft-repeated offences of his friend. And there could be few more interesting psychological studies than to trace how, from the sentiments of love and admiration he once entertained for Douglas, he was wrought to such indignation and wrath as to yield to the weird fascination of that precedent which must have been so burnt in upon his childish memory, and to repeat the tragedy which within the recollection of all men had marked the Castle of Edinburgh with so ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... broad top step Billy hurried, and peered down the street. As far as she could see not a person was in sight. Across the street in the Public Garden the wind stirred the gray tree-branches and set them to casting weird shadows on the bare, frozen ground. A warning something behind her sent Billy scurrying into the house just in time to prevent the heavy door's closing and shutting her out, keyless, ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... suggest anew what supernal splendors had once been here vouchsafed to the faltering eye of man. The illusion had come to be very dear to him; in this insistent localization of his faith it was all very near. And so he would go down to the slope below, among the weird, stunted trees, and look once more upon the broken tables, and ponder upon the strange signs written by time thereon. The insistent fall of the rain, the incisive blasts of the wind, coming again and again, though the centuries went, were registered here in mystic runes. The surface ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... however, is the general public failure to realize the gift which is within their reach. Flying was first a circus stunt and later a war wonder. The solid practical accomplishments have been lost sight of in the weird or the spectacular. People who marveled when a British plane climbed up nearly six miles into the air, or 30,000 feet, where its engine refused to run and its observer fainted, failed generally to analyze what the invasion of this new element would ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... flared up as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... from the others which seek moisture as well as darkness. By some they are called "silver witches," and as they dart off, when disturbed, like a streak of light, their bodies being coated in a suit of shining mail, which the arrangement of the scales resembles, they have really a weird ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... league with the arch-enemy of mankind—in plain English, that they were witches. The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, "and palter with him in a double sense," had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the "weird ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... more picturesque than any we had yet seen since leaving Bagamoyo. The ground rose into grander waves—hills cropped out here and there—great castles of syenite appeared, giving a strange and weird appearance to the forest. From a distance it would almost seem as if we were approaching a bit of England as it must have appeared during feudalism; the rocks assumed such strange fantastic shapes. Now they were round boulders ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... across the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... studio, Lampron was so deep in his work that he did not hear me. The large room, lighted only in one corner, looked weird enough. Around me, and among the medley of pictures and casts and the piles of canvases stacked against the wall, the eye encountered only a series of cinder-gray tints and undetermined outlines casting long amorphous shadows half-way across the ceiling. A ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... had telegraphed my great news to Haliburton on Monday night. Tuesday night he was at Skowhegan. Thursday night he was at No. 9. Friday he and Rob. stretched their cambric. Meanwhile, every day I slept. Every night I was glued to the eye-piece. Fifteen minutes before the eclipse every night this weird dance of leaps two hundred feet high, followed by hops of twenty feet high, mingled always in the steady order I have described, spelt out the ghastly message: "Show 'I ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... companions as much as circumstances would allow him. In the evening he wandered a few paces into the gloom. From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... to the kitchen, where we would be alone, with a great, cracklin' fire in the stove to sit by. I gave her food and comforted her, an' tended the baby, while she told me about hersilf, with an occasional spell o' cryin' an' a wild, weird expression on her face that gave me bad dreams fer many ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... eyes. A few were of imposing stature, wearing coarse, dusty felt hats or peaked caps, with shaggy beards or faded scarfs around their throats. Here and there, too, was a woman of comely face and figure, but for the most part it was a collection of crones, prematurely aged, with weird, wan, old-world features, slip-shod and draggle-tailed, their heads bare, or covered with dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets—red shawls, gray shawls, brick-dust shawls, mud-colored shawls. Yet there was an indefinable touch of romance and pathos about the tawdriness and witch-like ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at once to be temperamental differences which ought to have wrought against my weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a customs inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed them all with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial to a gentleman. Perhaps he was also ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... barbaric period never died. They grew up, instead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are now the high-lights of vacation time. The crude call of the weird and the inexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten psychic continents which we Western peoples have only just discovered and begun to explore. As for the buried treasure craze—why, my life-work practically amounts ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... their first appearance in September, and weird and wonderful were the descriptions given by the different men I asked whom I carried on my ambulance. They appeared to be anything in size from a hippopotamus to Buckingham Palace. It was one of the best kept secrets of the war. When anyone asked what ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... knees, almost hiding his once tan puttees. More mud streaked his jacket front and stained its sleeves to the elbows. He was bare-headed, for his cap had remained in the moat at Blentz, and his disheveled hair was tousled upon his head, while his full beard had dried into a weird and tangled fringe about his face. At his side still hung the sword that Joseph had buckled there, and it was this that caused the two men the greatest suspicion ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "jacks" sent up columns of yellow flame in front of places already filled with the riot and tumult of the night. A thousand lamps and coloured lanterns flashed like fireflies along the way, and under them the crowd had gathered, and was flowing back and forth. It was a weird and fantastic sight—this one strange and almost uncanny street that was there largely for the play and the excitement ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... still a great deal of absolute nonsense—viewed from any standpoint of common sense and logic—in most photoplay serials, and while the long-drawn-out mystery is often made possible only by the introduction of weird and unnatural happenings not even possible in real life, there is now a tendency toward serials more true to life and more dependent for their success upon plots that will stand the acid test of logical reasoning. The very fact that each separate episode, with ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... sentencing of the criminal was merely the beginning of a weird life of horror. It was customary at that period to immure prisoners in solitary confinement. There, in their small and reeking cells, filled with damps and pestilential odors, they were confined day after day, year after year, condemned ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... unbelieving brothers who sat morosely back, and took no notice, wrapped in their own sad thoughts. I wondered what they thought of it all! The others humbly knelt and prayed and cried out their sorrows before the crucifix. Their hymns were weird and plaintive, yet full of a heroic hope that ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... excessively weird and rugged. They always remind us of sterile deserts, and we cannot fail to notice the absence of grassy plains or green forests such as we are familiar with on our globe. In some respects the moon is not very differently circumstanced from the earth. Like it, the moon has the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... boys have laughed until their sides ached over the weird and wonderful adventures of Jerry Todd, Poppy Ott, Trigger Berg and their friends. Mr. Edwards' boy characters are all real. They do the things other boys like. Pirates! Mystery! Detectives! Adventure! Ghosts! Buried Treasure! Achievement! Stories of boys ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... it. The stone yielded, and he proceeded to work with the mattock. Darker and more silent than the night itself, I stood by and watched him do it, while he, bending over his dismal toil, streamed with sweat, panted, and his hard-coming breath seemed to have the harsh tone of a death rattle. It was a weird scene, and had any persons from without beheld us, they would assuredly have taken us rather for profane wretches and shroud-stealers than for priests of God. There was something grim and fierce in Serapion's zeal which ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... dark, mysterious River, speak and tell thy tales to me; Seal not up thy lips forever—veiled in mist and mystery. I will sit and lowly listen at the phantom-haunted falls, Where thy waters foam and glisten o'er the rugged, rocky walls. Till some spirit of the olden, mystic, weird, romantic days Shall emerge and pour her golden tales and legends through my lays. Then again the elk and bison on thy grassy banks shall feed, And along the low horizon shall the plumd hunter speed; ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... draws closer to her) There is one thing I should like to know—whether Sigismund has any idea that your mind is harboring such thoughts—which, after all, would appear rather weird to the ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... didst disturb my mind serene? My well-beloved circus queen, My Human Snake, my Angeline! At night I'd wake at the midnight hour, With a weird and haunted feeling, And there she'd be, in her robe de nuit, A-walking upon the ceiling. She said she was being "the human fly," And she'd lift me up from beneath By a section slight of my garb of night, Which ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... many years before I find it", she replied, calmly; and the weird, supernatural light of her eyes shone upon me for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... edifice, the City Hall, of magnificent proportions—a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight—flooded all over, facades, myriad silver-white lines and carv'd heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle—silent, weird, beautiful—well, I know that never when finish'd will that magnificent pile impress one as it impress'd me ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... given account of weird and extraordinary matters, I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire. And even should any fail to see, as now I see, the shadowed picture and conception of that to which one may well give ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... which wasn't begun then. I promised him I would write him a faithful account of our fete once we had decided our day. We took the five-o'clock train down, and a nice cold drive we had going home. The roads were rather slippery, and the forest black and weird. The trees which had been so beautiful in the morning covered with rime, seemed a massive black wall hemming us in. It is certainly a lonely bit of country, once we had left the lights of Villers-Cotterets behind us, crossed the last railway, and were fairly started in the forest. ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... when the three men found their way to the drawing-room, Mrs. Lenox had started Madeline on a career of song. She was already in the midst of a curious weird Roumanian thing, and Norris made straight for the piano. Lena, ethereal in pale blue, was sympathetically listening to perfection. She had lost her look of incongruity with her surroundings. The dreamy eyes and the transparent skin found their setting in her filmy gown and the rich soft ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... It was a weird revolution. There were few battles, little blood shed. There seemed to be no secret plots. There were no skulking leaders, no passwords, nothing that in former years ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... there in that quiet backwater of a street. Not a soul in sight! How still, for London! Only the birds. In a neighbouring studio someone was playing Chopin. Queer! He had almost forgotten there was such a thing as Chopin. A mazurka! Spinning like some top thing, round and round—weird little tune! . . . Well, and what now? Only one thing certain. Sooner give up life than give her up! Far sooner! Love her, achieve her—or give up everything, and drown to that tune going on and on, that little dancing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and strolling near the tree Saw in the pomp of moonlight that old form Still rocking, and, with deep awe at his heart, Hastened to join his comrades. Morn awoke, And the first light discovered to their eyes That weird shape rocking still. The pioneers, With kindly hands, took food and at his side Placed it, and tried to rouse him, but in vain. He fixed his eye still dully down the hill, And when they took their hands from off his frame It still renewed its ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... strange, weird dance amongst the imagery of the rings, over which my earth planet was beginning to throw a haze of light. At first it was hardly more than a walk, a slow procession round the twin circumferences of the centred tripod. But soon it increased to an extraordinary graceful ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... the window. Death to him who so passionately loved life's gayety and its music was more a thing of horror than of grief. He found no solace in the wind and rain of the autumn night. They plunged him instead into a mood of morbid imagery. The weird music of the wind became Ireland's cry of lament for her dead. The tossing boughs beyond the window, rain-spattered and somber, took on eerily the outline of dark-cloaked women keeners rocking and chanting the music of death. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... in the forest and climbed like trooping spirits up the rocky mountain side, and as she plunged deeper and deeper into the woods, the child began a wild cattle call that she was wont to use on such occasions. The echoes rang out a weird Brocken chorus, and at last, when she was growing impatient of the fruitless search, she paused to listen, and heard the welcome sound of the familiar lowing, by which the old cow recognized her summons. Following the sound, Edna soon saw the missing favorite ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Saxons, the Columna Universalis, "the terrestrial tree of offerings, an emblem of the whole world." At any rate the tree of the world, and the greatest of all trees, has long been identified in the northern mythology as the ash tree,[5] a fact which accounts for the weird character assigned to it amongst all the Teutonic and Scandinavian nations, frequent illustrations of which will occur in the present volume. Referring to the descent of man from the tree, we may quote the Edda, according to which all mankind ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... bed greatly disturbed in mind as to whether she was doing well to marry the obstreperous Westerner. "He fascinates me in a wild, weird sort of a way when I'm with him," she had said to herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... regle' and properly 'vise'; and he held his light course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... these considerations to the landlord. And as to this particular house having a bad name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... village in which she had been living to a farm among the foothills of the Alleghany Mountains. Here it was that Edwin for the first time saw an outline of the wonderful Blue Mountain of which he had at Christmas time heard many weird and frightful legends. Blue Mountain was one of the tall mountain-peaks that stood out a little apart from the main ridge and was known among the people as the home of St. Nicholas and his elves. Strange stories were connected with the place, and all ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... a few who never forgot her in their Easter offerings, for which, as for all other gifts, she was requested to "call at the back gate." This seemed, indeed, the only way of reaching the weird old creature, who had for so many years appeared daily upon the streets, nobody seemed to know from where, disappearing with the going down of the sun as mysteriously as the golden disk itself. Of course, if any one had cared to insist ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... ostriches, wild white goats, and, very rarely, a waggon piled with wood, drawn along the sandy road by ten or twelve donkeys. As to vegetation, there were huge clumps of mimosa-bushes, just shedding their yellow blossoms, through which the branches showed up with their long white thorns, giving them a weird and withered appearance. It must indeed have required great courage on behalf of the old Voor-trekker Boers, when they and their families left Cape Colony, at the time of the Great Trek, in long lines of white-tented waggons, to have penetrated through that dreary-waste in search of the promised ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... or writing furiously upon a composition of his own. When he looked at the boys, he did not seem to see them, but would gaze beyond them—the pupils of his full, soft, grey eyes darkening and dilating as if they were held by some weird vision invisible to all eyes save his own; and indeed the belief was general among his friends that he was endowed with the power of seeing visions. This impression had been made even upon his old "Mammy," when he was a mite of a lad. Many a time, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... what I felt and so rouse in him the same emotion, I should be an artist. Whistler or Monet might picture for us the murk and mystery of this pregnant gloom. Wagner might sound for us the tumultuous, weird emotions of this Niebelungen workshop of the twentieth century. Dante or Milton might phrase this inferno and pandemonium of modern industry and leave us stirred by the sense of power in the play of gigantic forces. Whether the medium be the painter's color, the musician's ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... rest, during which the skipper and Smellie sought solace and refreshment in a cigar. As for me, not having at that time contracted the habit of smoking, I was contented to sit still and gaze with admiring eyes upon the weird beauty ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... Mr. Stewart that in their childhood this weird spot was held to be sacred to the Great Wolf, the totem of their tribe. Here, for more generations than any could count, their wise men had gathered about the mystic birch flame, in grave council of war. Here the tribe had assembled to seek strength of arm, hardness of ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... dance with two sparklers. He dances rather well,—not real one-steps and waltzes, but weird things he makes up himself. This one lasted as long as the sparklers burned, and it was quite gorgeous. After that we had a candle-light procession around the garden, and the grown people said that the candles looked very mysterious ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... been arranged in one great gorgeous plait, Jones suddenly breaking free from a weird sort of hypnotism that had held him since first entering the ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... show," said I. "Anyhow, I must dree my own weird—whatever that means. I don't know, and never heard of anyone who did, but it sounds appropriate. I should like to do a walking tour alone in the desert, if it were not for the annoying necessity to eat and drink. I want to get ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... flank something was hanging, and in the freshening southerly wind was flapping heavily, like a raven's wing, or as if still saturated with the last night's rain. "That's mighty queer!" said Flo, gazing intently at the unsightly and incongruous attachment to the shrub, which had a vague, weird suggestion. ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... it's great!" said Roger. "And the end is not yet! In an hour, all sorts of police and detectives and weird things like that will come up ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... Brice studied that weird tree and its position. Now, standing beneath its black shade, he drew forth a matchbox he had taken from ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... silence was weird—only the cracking of the fire was heard, and the mournful soughing of ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... the Last Men'." He nodded again to Loring, and the performance began. His voice was affecting, and his artistry unmistakable. And there were overtones in his voice that gave an added eeriness to the weird music itself. ...
— The Troubadour • Robert Augustine Ward Lowndes
... remain so. Yet, as of old, the evil personage sometimes intrudes himself into company too good for him. It was said in the witchcraft trials of 1692 that Satan baptized his converts at Newbury Falls, the scene, probably, of one of Hawthorne's weird Twice Told Tales; and there is a tradition that, in the midst of a heated controversy between one of Newbury's painful ministers and his deacon, who (anticipating Garrison by a century) ventured to doubt the propriety of clerical slaveholding, the Adversary made his appearance in the shape of a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... stopped from sheer exhaustion. He turned his eyes slowly to the wall opposite, where hung a weird array of Eastern swords and daggers, scimitars and spears, the collections of many journeys. He crossed the room and ran his finger along the edge. His mind ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... length as if she were a hummingbird lighting upon a flower, she began to circle slowly around the fire and sing. The melody was in a minor key and full of weird pathos. The words ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... should prove how intently my thoughts were fixed on you, and on the weird web which springs under your hand in meshes that bewilder the gaze and snare ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (4 syl.) or Alpleich, that weird music with which Bunting, the pied piper of Hamelin, led forth the rats into the river Weser, and the children into a cave in the mountain Koppenberg. The song of the sirens is ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. |
