"Express train" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moment later, for the big whale, even though grievously wounded in his fight with the killer, had risen not a hundred feet away from the ship, and was coming toward it with the speed of an express train. ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... such a noise, that one might have supposed a walrus was engaged in its ablutions. How the skin of his head, face, and neck stood the towelling it received is incomprehensible! When he walked he went like an express train; when he sauntered he relapsed into the slowest possible snail's-pace, but he did not graduate the changes from one to the other. When he sat down he did so with a crash. The number of chairs which Mr Sudberry broke in the course of his life would have filled ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... moved out from the mass. Suddenly there was a jerk to the ship which threw us both to the floor. It started upward at express train speed. Jim staggered to his feet, grasped the controls and started all four bow motors at full capacity, but even this enormous force had not the slightest effect ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... started over at once, to join you. It was getting dusk and I lost sight of the machine lowest down for a few seconds. Without my knowing it, he was approaching at exactly my altitude. You know how difficult it is to see a machine in that position. Suddenly he loomed up in front of me like an express train, as you have seen them approach from the depths of a moving-picture screen, only ten times faster; and he was firing as he came. I realized my awful mistake, of course. His tracer bullets were going by on the left side, but he corrected his aim, and my motor ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... are taught how to raise vegetables, poultry, pigs, and cows. They recite in the sitting-room or on the veranda, and their lessons all deal with matters of their own every-day life.... Instead of figuring how long it will take an express train to reach the moon if it travelled at the rate of forty miles an hour, the pupils figure out how much corn can be raised on neighbor Smith's patch of land and how much farmer Jones' pig ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... route; and never did people seem more intent upon laying in provender. The table was finely laid out, and a great variety tempted the appetite. The railroad company, when they leased this station, stipulated that every train should pass ten minutes at it. But the express train claimed exemption, and refused to afford the time. The landlord prosecuted the company, obtained satisfactory damages, and now even the express train affords its passengers time to recruit at Swindon. This place has grown up under the auspices of the railroad, and one can hardly fancy ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... driven through the window of an express train near Knebworth. We are informed however that the player who struck the ball still maintains that the engine-driver deliberately ignored his shout ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... matter of profoundest truth, this attitude is as remote from the clear realization of what is involved in the will of God as would be the conviction that the flying express train or the swift electric motor cars might be suitable enough for the aged, and the weary, and the invalid, and the people whose time was of little consequence, but that the young, the radiant, the eager, the gifted, the people ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Mrs. Gaddesden was conscious in her own mind of a strained hush of expectation. But she had never ventured to say a word to Elizabeth. In half an hour—or less—he would be here. A motor had been sent to meet the express train at the country town fifteen miles off. Mrs. Gaddesden looked round her in the warm dusk, as though trying to forecast how Martindale and its inmates would look to the new-comer. She saw a room of medium size, which ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... through Elmbridge about an hour before, but being an express train, it made no stop at such ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... utterly unable to compel the transatlantic vessels to reduce their speed in the contest for "express train" ships. He also said the board could not force ships to take the southerly passage in the spring ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... call that very quiet," exclaimed Leon as one of the German's huge shells sped over their heads with the roar and rattle of an express train. They could hear it explode several miles away with a sound as if some one had dropped a large plank upon a ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... window of an express train, Mr. Schwab saw the white front of Claremont, and beyond it the broad sweep of the Hudson. And, then, without decreasing its speed, the car like a great bird, swept down a hill, shot under a bridge, and into a partly paved street. Mr. Schwab already was ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... called North America. It would take five days and nights in a fast express train to ...
— Where We Live - A Home Geography • Emilie Van Beil Jacobs
... the Commissioners having preceded him to that point. The train was crowded, as usual, with immigrants, tourists, globe-trotters and way-passengers. Parties for the Klondike, for California or Japan—once the far East, but now the far West to us—for anywhere and everywhere, a C.P.R. express train carrying the same variety of fortunates and unfortunates as the ocean-cleaving hull. Calgary was reached at one a.m. on the Queen's birthday, and the same morning we left for Edmonton by the C. & E. Railway. Every one ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... mean Tubblets—no, Willander Philliam Tubbs—the name is altogether too long. Why, supposin' you were standing on a railroad track looking east, and an express train was coming from the west at the rate of seventy-five miles an hour, and it got to within a hundred yards of you when I discovered your truly horrible peril, and I should start to warn you of the aforesaid truly horrible peril, take my word for it, before ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... laugh, and yet, while I pay tribute to the trait of humor, I would have the undergirding trait of all traits of character, the trait of principle. Though you may use policy now and then, never use a policy you must get off the heaven-bound express train of ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... boats sped through the darkness. The lights of the fishing fleet flashed by them like the gleam of switch-lights, seen from an express train. Mascola's anger mounted. His men were waiting for orders and he had seen nothing of the enemy's formation. A plan formed quickly in his brain. It was dangerous of course. But the liquor gave him courage. Removing ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... conservatory, the stables, the lawns, the strip of woodland through which a merry brook sang to itself continually; and, after dining with M. Martin, completed the purchase, and turned his steps towards the station, just in time to catch the express train. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... and a half hours by express train from Bandoeng to Buitenzorg, the summer capital of the Indies, and the journey is one of the pleasantest in Java, the railway being bordered for miles by marvellously constructed rice terraces which climb the slopes of the Gedei, tier on tier, transforming the mountainsides into a series ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... animal about he headed to the west. To his alarm he suddenly discovered that the prairie fire was rapidly encircling him, the flames running around the outer edge of the bottoms with express train speed, threatening to head him off and envelop him. Had it not been for the long grass, which, tangling the feet of the pony, made full speed impossible, the race with the flames would have been an easy one to win. As it was, Tad knew that the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... o'clock that Ursula Egremont's cab stopped at St. Ambrose's Road. She had missed the express train, and had to come on by a stopping one. But here at last she was, with eyes even by gaslight full of loving recognition, a hand full of her cab-fare, a heart full of throbbing hope and fear, a voice full ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ears gave the sensation of drowning, yet on and on she went. It was horrible to have no bridle, and nothing to say about where she should go, no chance to control her horse. It was like being on an express train with the engineer dead in his cab and no way to get to the brakes. They must stop some time and what then? Death seemed inevitable, and yet as the mad rush continued she almost wished it might come and end the horror of ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... house and having trouble to make both ends meet. One day there wanders in from a stalled express train an old lady who cannot remember her identity. The girls take the old lady in, and, later, are much astonished to learn who she ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... the ground before he had sprung from its deck to race after the swift thoat, whose eight long legs were sending it down the avenue at the rate of an express train; but the men of Dusar who still remained alive had no mind to permit so valuable ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Every one had expected a sensational defence, and Mr. Matthew Quiller, counsel for Skinner, fully justified all these expectations. He had no fewer than four witnesses present who swore positively that at 9.45 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, March 17th, the prisoner was in the express train ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... down the hill, and out towards The Whispering Pines. I had seen Adelaide in her window as I went flying by the house, but not a soul on the road, nor a sign of life, near or far. The whistle of a train blew as I stopped in the thicket near the club-house door. If it was the express train, you can tell—" ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... sounding in the night's silence as loud as the passage of an express train; and the echo of it, flung back from the canon side, confused it and distorted it till, to Lockwood's morbid alertness, it seemed fraught with all the madness of flight, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... to stop a freight train with his head. The train was brought to a standstill and the animal driven off the track. A short time later the bull tried the same experiment with an express train. The train did not stop, nor ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... can be more fatal than to set off this aspect of things against more attractive themes. All truth is related. Some years ago in Scotland an express train stopped abruptly on a curve in the time of a great flood. Just in front of the train was a roaring chasm from which the viaduct had been swept away. Just behind the train was the mangled frame of the girl who had warned the driver. It is impossible to understand that sacrifice lying ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... of plans for coming to Miss Lombard's aid: he was elaborating the twentieth when, on the same afternoon, he stepped into the express train for Florence. By the time the train reached Certaldo he was convinced that, in thus hastening his departure, he had followed the only reasonable course; at Empoli, he began to reflect that the priest and the Levite had probably justified themselves ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... of which would reach the luckless man first, the boat or the shark. The boat was nearer and the men were rowing like demons, but the shark was swifter, coming on like an express train. ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... along the Delaware. The lumbermen sometimes take their families or friends, and have a jollification all the way to Trenton or to Philadelphia. In some places the speed is very great, almost equaling that of an express train. The passage of such places as Cochecton Falls and "Foul Rift" is attended with no little danger. The raft is guided by two immense oars, one before and one behind. I frequently saw these huge implements in the driftwood alongshore, suggesting some colossal race of men. The raftsmen have ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the corncrake, easily distinguished from that of any other bird of our fields, may be approximately reproduced by using a blunt saw against the grain on hard wood. So loud is it at times that I have heard it from the open window of an express train, the noise of which drowned all other birdsong, and it seems remarkable that such a volume of sound should come from a throat so slender. Yet the rasping note is welcome during the early days of its arrival, since, just as the cuckoo gave earlier message of spring, so the corncrake, in sadder vein, ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... "This train's an express train," he said to himself. "Doesn't she go! I said I'd get there some day, and now I'm really going! Hurrah for New York! It's good I learned something about the streets—I'll know what to do when ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... avoid possible pitfalls. It shunned the company of the other Westhope letters, it avoided the village post-office, but after a day's delay it was launched, and lay among a hundred others in a station pillar-box. And then it hurried, hurried as fast as express train could take it, till it reached its London address, and went softly up-stairs, and laid itself, with a ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... occasion that he told me that his brother-in-law, James Wells, who resided in Brooklyn, had an acquaintance named Gilly McGloyn, and that Gilly had a brother-in-law named Grady, who was a brakeman on the express train of the New York and New Haven Railroad, which left New York at 8 o'clock in the evening. He also said that Grady wanted McGloyn to get somebody to help throw the safes out of that train. McGloyn went to Wells on purpose to inform him, ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... one more passenger, making three, in our first-class compartment in the all-day express train from Cologne to Berlin after it left Hanover. He was a naval officer of about forty-five, clean-cut, alert, clearly an intelligent man. His manner was proud, but ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... the doings of signalmen in four successive boxes, A, B, C, and D, during the passage of an express train. Signalman A calls signalman B's attention by one beat on the tapper-bell. B answers by repeating it to show that he is attending. A asks, "Is line clear for passenger express?"—four beats on the bell. B, seeing that the line ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... Mr. Finch, who insisted on attaching himself to Oscar—by the first express train, which took us straight to London. Comparison of time-tables, on reaching the terminus, showed that I had leisure to spare for a brief visit to Grosse, before we again took the railway back to Sydenham. Having decided not to mention ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... asteroids, and the great Jupiter, equal in volume to 13,000 earths. It holds Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and all their variously related satellites and rings. The two thoughts that overwhelm us are distance and power. The period of [Page 178] man's whole history is not sufficient for an express train to traverse half the distance to Neptune. Thought wearies and fails in seeking to grasp such distances; it can scarcely comprehend one million miles, and here are thousands of them. Even the wings of imagination grow weary and droop. When we stand on that outermost of ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... came out in the morning. I have often heard shells described as sounding like express trains coming through the air. They are almost as difficult to describe as the noise of the bullet. It's a far quicker noise than an express train. It sounds like a taxi going at about a hundred miles an hour and then bursting; a bullet sounds like someone cracking a very loud whip just in your ear, and a bit noisier than that when it is close to you. A machine gun—there is one going now—sounds like a very noisy motor bike, ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... a narrow plank into a ship. Their faces are red and puffy with the exertion: their hair is dripping. Ah, the summer day is hard upon these poor fellows! But it would be pleasant to-day to drive a locomotive engine through a fine agricultural country, particularly if one were driving an express train, and so were not worried by perpetual stoppages. I have often thought that I should like to be an engine-driver. Should any revolution or convulsion destroy the Church, it is to that field of industry that I should ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... instead of letting the earlier duration slip into the past. Namely, the sense of rest helps the integration of durations into a prolonged present, and the sense of motion differentiates nature into a succession of shortened durations. As we look out of a railway carriage in an express train, the present is past before reflexion can seize it. We live in snippits too quick for thought. On the other hand the immediate present is prolonged according as nature presents itself to us in an aspect of unbroken rest. Any change in nature provides ground for ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... language that some mahouts believe came from China at the birth of the world, when elephants and not men were masters. Moti Guj heard and came. Elephants do not gallop They move from places at varying rates of speed. If an elephant wished to catch an express train he could not gallop, but he could catch the train. So Moti Guj was at the planter's door almost before Chihun noticed that he had left his pickets. He fell into Deesa's arms trumpeting with joy, and the man and beast wept and slobbered over each other, and handled each other ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... I remember there was the anxious look in two beautiful hazel eyes as they gazed after the Axeine, charging his second fence with the rush of an express train. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... appalling sound. Then a great cloud of snow-dust burst in their faces, half blinding them: and, with the roar of an express train, the avalanche sped down the ravine; burying the ice-slope they had just crossed; and obliterating their footsteps as man's work is obliterated by the soundless avalanche ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... swallow the food, for she would know what she was being fed for. You are in debt here, and, of course, you will always be in debt, and you will go on in debt to the end, till the visitors here begin to scorn you. And that will soon happen, don't rely upon your youth—all that flies by express train here, you know. You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked out; long before that she'll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you, as though you had not sacrificed your health for her, had not thrown away your youth and your soul for her benefit, but as though ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... a railway journey by an express train—forty miles an hour, and from time to time ten minutes stop for the intermissions; and if the locomotive ceases ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... predicaments have been very common-place predicaments, and the ways in which I have got out of them very ordinary and obvious ways. Once, when I was a child in petticoats, I wanted to walk through a tunnel at the same time as an express train, but my nurse ran after me and pulled me back. Once, before I had learnt to swim, I was caught by the tide between Broadstairs and Ramsgate; but some sailors came and took me off in a boat. Once again, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... well-dressed man, with a high salary and well-established social position, with a luxurious home and money in the bank, goes to church and sits down in a softly cushioned pew to listen to the preaching of the Gospel, while within hearing distance of the services an express train or a freight thunders by upon the road which declares the dividends that make that man's wealth possible? On those trains are groups of coal-begrimed human beings who never go inside a church, who never speak the name of God or Christ except in an oath, who lead ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... the ground. The plan of mounting a road vehicle upon a truck suited to receive it has already been adopted for some purposes, notably for the removal of furniture and similar goods; and it is capable of immense extension. An express train will run through on the leading routes from which roads branch out in all directions, and as it approaches each station it will uncouple the truck and "motor-omnibus" intended for that destination. The latter will be shunted ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... and talk over those good old times when they were together at Eton. But George told his friend that before he went anywhere, before he shaved or broke his fast, or in any way refreshed himself after a night journey from Liverpool by express train, he must call at a certain coffee-house in Bridge street, Westminster, where he expected to find a ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... romance in the eager young soul of Prince Robin. He revelled in the love story of his parents. The beautiful Princess Yetive first saw Grenfell Lorry in an express train going eastward from Denver. Their wonderful romance was born, so to speak, in a Pullman compartment car, and it thrived so splendidly that it almost upset a dynasty, for never—in all of nine centuries—had a ruler of Graustark stooped to marriage ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... to slow down a little more rapidly than was comfortable. It was jerk after jerk, as he dropped off the power, and put on the brakes, but at last we got down to the speed of a fast express train. Soon we were so close that the surface of the planet became dimly visible, simply from the starlight. We were now settling down very cautiously, and presently we began to notice curious shafts of light which appeared to issue ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... beyond our grasp. Let us try to comprehend it. If there were air to convey a sound from the sun to the earth, and a noise could be made loud enough to pass that distance it would require over fourteen years for it to come to us. Suppose a railroad could be built to the sun. An express train traveling day and night at the rate of thirty miles an hour, would require 341 years to reach its destination. Ten generations would be born and would die; the young men would become gray haired, and their great-grandchildren would forget the story of the ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Beacon, en route for Washington. He left there this morning, to embark on the 'Errand Boy,' which expects to reach the city to-morrow, in time for the express train North." ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the Naugatuck Railroad!" shouted the conductor of the New York and Boston Express Train, on the evening of May 27, 1858.... Mr. Johnson, carpet-bag in hand, jumped upon the platform, entered the office, purchased a ticket for Waterbury, and was soon whirling in the Naugatuck ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... aght—aw gate seventeen pence this mornin' at Ringby, an ther's eighteen pence here, that's three bob nobbut a penny. Last Sundy aw addled three an' ninepence, at Siddal an' Whitegate. Ther soa flayed if onnybody starts o' writin', 'at they hook it like a express train, for they think ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... Englishmen, who always dreamed of it. By doing this they would have further and completely wrought up the Mohammedans by making more difficult the journey to Mecca. Best of all, we thought, we'll simply step into the express train and whizz nicely away to the North Sea. Certainly there would be safe journeying homeward through Arabia. To be sure, we hadn't maps of the Red Sea; but it was the shortest way to the foe, whether ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... 21, 1913, this glorious time had an end. He started by express train for Paris from Victoria Station. He stayed at the French capital till the middle of June, addressing (by the help of His interpreter) 'all sorts and conditions of men.' Once more Paris proved how thoroughly it deserved the title of ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... caused, nor of the accusation that Mr. Arthur Morton had been concerned in it. It was in a late evening paper that I read an account of the proceedings of yesterday, and I have come this morning as fast as an express train could bring me to testify ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the route (they looked just like overgrown black-walnut clocks), though at every one of them a man popped out as if he were worked by machinery, and waved a red flag, and appeared as though he would like to have us stop. But we were an express train, and made no stoppages, excepting once or twice to give the engine a drink. It is strange how the memory clings to some things. It is over twenty years since I took that first ride to Rivermouth, and ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... turned with a rapidity that belied her huge bulk and apparent unhandiness. A double track of ever-diverging foam marked the progress of the deadly missile. Another followed almost in its wake, both torpedoes travelling at the speed of an express train. ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... course of the second round Willie achieved a smart clip on his opponent's ear, but next moment he received, as it seemed, an express train on the point of his nose, and ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... for trial, but he wished to pay one last visit to his home and family. That gratification however was denied him, he was recognised by an Englishman named Hulme, a railway guard; in an instant he was surrounded by police and detectives, and torn of with brutal violence to gaol. That same night an express train flashed northwards through the fog and mist bearing O'Brien a prisoner to Dublin. In the carriage in which he was placed sat General M'Donald, a Sub-Inspector of Constabulary and four policemen. On entering the train a pistol was placed at O'Brien's head, and he was commanded not to speak on ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... horizon, which was now being rent in every direction by continuous lightning flashes, could be seen a long line of whitish colour, which, there could be no doubt, was approaching the ship with more than the speed of an express train. ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... strike before midnight, but Benson brought word that they were liable to lynch you, and so we lost no time in getting here. We rode twenty miles like we were racing with an express train. You must allow we did a good job this ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... absorption, he discovered himself picking little threads from his clothes, like a spider's cobweb, and he observed how with each minute he drew his breath more freely. Sometimes it seemed to him that the wheels of the tremendous express train were not turning swiftly enough on their axles, and that he himself ought to put his hands to the wheels to hasten on the new health-giving impressions and place them behind him like thin curtains, so that the partitions dividing him from ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... strength of all reformers lies in their blind conviction that whatever strikes them as right must be done immediately, with a haste that strongly resembles hurry, and with no regard for consequences. You might as well try, when an express train is running at full speed on the wrong track, to heave it over to the right one without stopping it and without killing the passengers. Yet most reformers of themselves and others, from the smallest to the greatest, seem to believe that this ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... immensely interesting way in which, like a loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held them easily together was something well worth noting. Now, however, for compensation, the express train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in consequence... In consequence what? What is the result of the stop of an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I suddenly paused, aware of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an express ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... visiting-cards, and therein discovered that of a deaf ironmaster at St. Etienne whose life he had once saved at a railway station by dragging him, as he was crossing the line, out of the way of an express train that came thundering through. Aristide, man of impulse, went straight to St. Etienne, to work upon the ironmaster's sense of gratitude. Meanwhile, M. Say, man of more sober outlook, bethought him of ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... hoped that she was effectually hidden; she hoped that he had gone away to some far-off country where he would never more return. Alas! This world of ours has no far-off country left, and, even if the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness so far as to go to the Rocky Mountains, an express train and a swift boat will bring him back to his wickedness whenever he desires a little more enjoyment and the society of ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... of the motor became a sort of whine, and the electric rapidly acquired speed. It crept up on the gasolene car, as an express train overtakes a freight, and the man, looking back, and expecting to see his rival far behind was surprised to note the queer looking vehicle lapping his ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... itself. The very last person in the world whom I should have suspected of being connected with the strange affair at Stretton Street was my affable friend the French banker. I now began to wonder if my first meeting with him in the express train between York and King's Cross just before my amazing adventure had been simply by chance, or had it any connection between that meeting and the trap which had, without a doubt, been so cunningly prepared for me as I passed through Stretton Street to my uncle's ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... as if the ship and all its contents were blown up, there being none of the reverberating sound, like that usually heard when heavy guns are fired, as of an express train rushing at speed through the air; but a dull, hollow, sullen, sharp roar, succeeded by the heavy swish of some body, or something, falling into the water alongside, while a thick smoke hung over the deck like ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... I dreamed that I saw a young man stepping carelessly on and off a railway track, near a curve around which the express train might come thundering and screaming at any moment. Whether on the track or off it, the young man was indifferent to danger and wanton in his movements. But as I looked I saw in my dream, that there was nothing whatever above his coat collar—he had no head. This explained ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... was an express train, and for a little while we didn't speak. Peterkin was still looking rather upset about his money. He told me afterwards that he had been keeping it for his Christmas presents, especially one for Margaret, as we had never had a chance of getting her any flowers. ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... was recently greatly amused by a local misprint. The president of the university is required by its ancient charter to be an "antipaedobaptist"; the types reproduced the word as "antipseudobaptist," a word which would be a very good Greek rendering of "hardshell." An express train at full speed having struck a cow, the report was made to say that it "cut her into calves." Sixty years ago the "London Globe" made the Registrar General say that the city was suffering from a high rate of morality. The ingenuity ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... quoted in the news-market of the world. Each night, from thousands of spots all over the surface of the globe, it received thousands of facts, of cold, accomplished facts. It knew that a tidal wave had swept through China, a cabinet had changed in Chili, in Texas an express train had been held up and robbed, "Spike" Kennedy had defeated the "Dutchman" in New Orleans, the Oregon had coaled outside of Rio Janeiro Harbor, the Cape Verde fleet had been seen at anchor off Cadiz; it had been located in the harbor of San Juan, Porto Rico; it had been sighted steaming ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... considered more of a swim than anything else, and the hunters always crossed it by the bridge, towards the left. Travers saw the bridge and tried to jerk Satan's head in that direction; but Satan kept right on as straight as an express train over the prairie. Fences and trees and furrows passed by and under Travers like a panorama run by electricity, and he only breathed by accident. They went on at the stream and the hill beyond as though they were riding at a stretch of turf, and, though the whole field set up a shout of warning ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... been less sulky! But with him there could be no pleasant chat, no cosy evening hour over a cup of tea and a pipe; and I would almost have preferred being alone to this solitude a deux. I sat on deck and listened to the breakers. Often they sounded like a rushing express train and awakened reminiscences of travel and movement. The cool wind blew softly from afar, and I could understand for the first time that longing that asks the winds for news of home and friends. I gave myself up wholly to this vague dreaming, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... Sancho Panza's, 'Fine words butter no parsnips;' and I can tell you that, all over England just now, you workmen are buying a great deal too much butter at that dairy. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding a collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white hot iron at a furnace mouth, that man is not the same at the end of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... bridesmaids. Before the breakfast was ended the bride and bridegroom had escaped, but soon returned, the bride in a traveling gown of blue cloth. Volleys of rice followed the bridal pair, and more rice pelted the windows of the coach as it drove to the express train which was to convey the happy pair to Fontainebleau for a day, and thence into Switzerland. In the evening Colonel Harris entertained a large party of friends at the new opera house. The Harrises next morning ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... An express train soon whirled them down to Taddington, in Barfordshire. There was Harris, with three servants, waiting for them, one with a light cart for their luggage, and two with an open carriage and two spanking bays, whose ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... reimbursed. Clive went off with a pocketful of money to the dear old Poor Brother of Grey Friars; and he promised to return with his father, and dine with my wife in Queen Square. I had received a letter from Laura by the morning's post, announcing her return by the express train from Newcome, and desiring that a spare bedroom should be got ready for ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he wanted them. Lucy wondered how he or they knew the way, it all seemed such a waste of snow; and after feeling at first as if the rapidity of their course made her unable to speak, she ventured on gasping out, "Well, I've been in an express train, but this beats it! ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... instances enough to make us feel that there lie in us dormant, mysterious powers by which the rapidity of all our operations of thought and feeling will be enhanced marvellously, like the difference between a broad-wheeled waggon and an express train! At some turning point of your life, when some great joy flashed, or some great shadow darkened upon you all at once; when some crisis that wanted an instantaneous decision appeared—why, what regions ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... statement that a mountain is so many feet in vertical height above the sea, and contains so many tons of granite, is nothing. Mont Blanc, is about three miles high. What of that? Three miles is an hour's walk for a lady—an eighteen-penny cab-fare—the distance from Hyde Park Corner to the Bank—an express train could do it in three minutes, or a racehorse in five. It is a measure which we have learnt to despise, looking at it from a horizontal point of view; and accordingly most persons, on seeing the Alps for the first time, guess them to ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Effie could see the country below, hedges and rivers and churches and farmhouses flowing away from under them, much faster than you see them running away from the sides of the fastest express train. ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... attach the crescograph to this fern; the magnification is tremendous. If a snail's crawl were enlarged in the same proportion, the creature would appear to be traveling like an express train!" ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... life. Out of the varying chances of its warfare is born that incessant ebb and flow of chemical change, that inability to reach an equilibrium, which we term "vitality." The course of life, like that of a flying express train, is not a perfectly straight line, but an oscillating series of concentric curves. Without these oscillations movement could not be. Exaggerate one of them unduly, or fail to rectify it by a rebound ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... a mighty roar—a thundering sound, as of an express train—a blinding light, and a scorching heat. Jack felt himself lifted from the ground by the force of the blast, and ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... aboard a lightning express train, which look them to within a short distance of the old ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... the deliberate German express train through the Black Forest, Colonel Kenton said he had only two things against the region: it was not black, and it was not a forest. He had all his life heard of the Black Forest, and he hoped he knew what it was. The inhabitants burned charcoal, high up the mountains, ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... they greatly fear the small-sized, quiet, unobtrusive, and meek-looking cat. Sparrows and starlings that fly wildly at the shout of a small boy or the bark of a fox-terrier, build their nests under every railway arch; and the incubating bird sits unalarmed amid the iron plates and girders when the express train rushes overhead, so close to her that one would imagine that the thunderous jarring noise would cause the poor thing to drop down dead with terror. To this indifference to the mere harmless racket ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... trained camera. The tripod must be nursed like a contrary child. It must be firmly set." Mr. Fildew speaks of the difficulty he had, on one occasion, when he was obliged to follow the progress of an express train while operating his camera from an aeroplane, they being constantly buffeted by pockets of wind, while flying for many miles at a low altitude in order to keep within the desired focus. He cites another case, when ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... different subject. It describes a journey from Chawton to London, in her brother's curricle, and shows how much could be seen and enjoyed in course of a long summer's day by leisurely travelling amongst scenery which the traveller in an express train now rushes through in little more than an hour, but scarcely sees ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... however, not being aware of Ned's incarceration, and believing, no doubt, that there was honour among thieves, was true to his day and hour. He had been engaged down somewhere in the country on business, and came up by express train for this particular job; hence his ignorance as to his ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... tossed the ball so exactly; otherwise he would have had to slow down. As it was he was going like an express train by the time he swept around the Princeton line outside of end. Pemberton could not only run like the wind, but could start like a shot from a rifle. That he got clean away before the opponents had found the location of the ball was partly ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... them. If by twenty-five years of age a man has been grappled by intoxicants, he is under such headway that your attempt to stop him would be very much like running up the track with a wheelbarrow to stop a Hudson River express train. What you call an inebriate nowadays is not a victim to wine or whiskey, but to logwood and strychnine and nux vomica. All these poisons have kindled their fires in his tongue and brain, and all the tears of a wife weeping ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... much use talking in this wise to a scoffer. He that maun to Cupar maun to Cupar. We're all in the same express train, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... instantly larger, like an express train approaching a station at full speed; her flags flew out as flat as pieces of painted tin; her bits of brass-work flashed like fire. Already the ends of the wharves were white ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... without sparks, without a trail, though its lower part was brighter than ever. Its path lying little above them, the nearer it came the more the collision seemed inevitable. Imagine yourself caught on a narrow railroad bridge at midnight with an express train approaching at full speed, its reflector already dazzling you with its light, the roar of the cars rattling in your ears, and you may conceive the feelings of the travellers. At last it was so near that the travellers started back in affright, with eyes shut, hair on end, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... so enormous that you cannot really grasp them. But imagine yourself in an express train, travelling at the tremendous rate of sixty miles an hour and never stopping. At that rate, if you wished to arrive at the sun today you would have been obliged to start 171 years ago. That is, you must have set off in ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... wear themselves out with unnecessary rush and hurry, as we do in the States. The train advertised to start for Halifax at 2 P.M. more frequently leaves at 3, or 3.30; but then it has to wait the arrival of the steamboat which, four times per week, comes across from St. John. The express train requires six hours to traverse the miles intervening between this quiet village and that not much livelier town, while for the accommodation train they allow ten hours; but when one comes to see beautiful country one does not wish to have the breath taken away ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... Temple, barristers and solicitors, judges and juries and detectives; appointments in queer places to meet queer people—all this had passed before me with the rapidity of a landscape viewed from the window of an express train; and now that the chapter had closed, I found that it was but the preface to the real business I had set my ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... going about their everyday employments, with every movement exact to life. We can cross the Ocean against the wind and waves by means of harnessed sunbeams, without any exertion of our own, at the rate of an express train, which train, by the by, is also moved by the same means; we can dive to the bottom of the sea and journey there for hours, in perfect safety, without coming to the surface, and we are even developing wings, or their equivalent, which from immemorial tradition we were not to possess before we had ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... Hicks, sometime a mercer in Cheapside and ultimately Viscount Campden. But another scene which has more particularly haunted me all through my life was that of my mother's sudden death in a saloon carriage of an express train on the London and Brighton line. Though she was in failing health, nobody thought her end so near; but in the very midst of a journey to London, whilst the train was rushing on at full speed, and no help could be procured, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... though two thirds of the school, including most of the girls, had come down to the railway station to see the High School eleven off on its way to Tottenville. That city was some thirty miles away from Gridley, but there was a noon express train that went ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... Grant, a tall, fair-haired fellow, and our best bat—he could swipe away at leg balls; and as for straight drives, well, he'd send 'em over a bowler's head, just out of his reach, and right to the boundary wall, at such a rate, like an express train going through the air, that they defied stopping. "But, Charley," he suggested, "we've got some good ones left of our team, and I daresay we can pick up some fresh hands from amongst the visitors to make up a fair ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... Paris was in many respects different from the first—which I have just described. The route was a new one, and pleasanter than that via Boulogne. Our party took an express train from the London bridge terminus for Newhaven, a small sea-port. The cars were fitted up with every comfort, and we made the passage in quick time. At three P.M. we went on board a little steamer for Dieppe, where we arrived at nine o'clock. After ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... humors of the box and the vicissitudes of the road, have long moldered into dust so far as they were matter, and are preserved in the printed pages of our novelists so far as they partook of the spirit, a journey to London by express train can still be a very pleasant and romantic adventure. Cassandra Otway, at the age of twenty-two, could imagine few things more pleasant. Satiated with months of green fields as she was, the first row of artisans' villas on the outskirts of ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Lytton sped on toward the city. He traveled by the express train, which stopped at ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... a short time afterwards, returning home from market slightly hazy in his ideas, was run over by an express train as he endeavoured to ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell) |
