"Average" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no great marksman, Prince," Roger said. "I am perhaps somewhat better than an average shot, but I have seen marksmen who could do feats that I would ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... as difficult for a tourist to arrive at a just opinion on this subject as for the average Frenchman. The traveller will not find it easy to acquire the necessary first-hand data, while the other is warped ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... with by the voluntary band of observers to secure the data needed in their work are romantic in the extreme. An average winter trip requires from a day and a half to two days and a half from Reno. From the base of the mountain the ascent must be made on snow-shoes. When work first began there was no building on the summit, and no shelter station on the way. Imagine these brave ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... for ten years, but the habit seems to have grown upon him. Till five years ago two-thirds of his earnings came to me to spend for the house, but now I don't average a dollar ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... having worked up to the full extent of his powers! He kept his promise of diligence, and never again incurred reproof, but was sent up for good again in November. His career through the school was above the average, though not attaining to what was expected from his capabilities; but the development of his nature was slow, and therefore perhaps ultimately the more complete, and as yet study for its own sake did not interest him; indeed, his mind was singularly devoid of pleasure ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the other hand, was rather under than over a woman's average height. She was firm and thickset, with full limbs and broad, strong, capable hands. Her colour was in the general effect that of an autumn leaf. The yellow-brown hair was thick and long, and the golden-brown eyes sparkled from the freckled, sunburnt skin. Her rosy cheeks ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... The connection was made, though it became necessary to make what was then regarded as extraordinary speed to do it. Over one stretch of the road we ran twenty miles in eighteen minutes by the watch, and our average rate was high enough to make it a noteworthy journey. I reached Sandusky at midnight, and found reports of the militia regiments already on the way, and that the hostile expedition ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... entrance where the queens were to arrive, and the guests massed themselves in a dense lane for them to pass through. Lottie could not fail to be one of the foremost in this array, and she was able to decide, when the queens had passed, that the younger would not be considered a more than average pretty girl in America, and that she was not very well dressed. They had all stood within five feet of her, and Boyne had appropriated one of the prettiest of the pretty bends which the gracious young creature made to right and left, and had responded to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... cardinals, her brother Caesar, and her own father. All this Lucretia beheld, but they are wrong who believe that she or others like her saw and regarded it as we do now, or as a few pure-minded persons of that age did; for familiarity always dulls the average person's perception of the truth. In that age the conceptions of religion, of decency, and of morality were entirely different from those of to-day. When the rupture between the Middle Ages and its ascetic Church and the Renaissance ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... now isn't he?" Bently remarked, with his usual picturesque disregard of the conventional use of words. "The average American couldn't have ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... up from a supine to a sitting position, promptly and peevishly swore, rolled to one side (barely eluding clutches that meant to him all those frightful and humiliating consequences that arrest means to the average man) ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... at the public expense; and each, as he drew nearer to the happy day, would be treated with still increasing honour. I myself had gone most closely into the question of expense, and had found that by the use of machinery the college could almost be made self-supporting. But we should save on an average L50 for each man and woman who had departed. When our population should have become a million, presuming that one only in fifty would have reached the desired age, the sum actually saved to the colony would amount to L1,000,000 a-year. It would ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... them an attempt was made in 1733 to stop this contraband trade by the imposition of heavy duties; but the profits of the trade were so large that the revenue officers found it to their interest to be careless or actually conniving, and scarcely any duties were paid. On an average the American customs cost England from L7,000 to L8,000 a year and did not bring in quite L2,000. During the war the contraband trade afforded the French useful supplies, and in 1760 Pitt ordered the colonial governors to punish those who ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... that, knowing well that the average young Rajput of good birth would rather fight a tiger with cold steel than walk a mile or two. He ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... have been drawn largely to the growing towns and cities by the high wages offered in industrial lines; and the West, the 'Golden West' as it is sometimes called, has proved an even stronger attraction. It seems rarely to occur to the new arrival that the average farm in Ontario could produce more than a quarter section of prairie land. Signs, however, point to an increase in rural population, through ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... Some day, when I have much leisure, I shall, doubtless, prepare tables specially adapted to every situation and to every temperament, which will show exactly the number of seconds, minutes, and hours which are necessary on an average to accustom one's self to anything. It is possible to do so; it will be astonishing when it is done. For the time being, I thought of this rather glumly—indeed, without a trace of enthusiasm—and I wished a little that I had not been so foolish in putting my head inside ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... these very first impressions of the workers in unskilled industries, living in a depressed quarter of the city, I realize how easy it was for us to see exceptional cases of hardship as typical of the average lot, and yet, in spite of alleviating philanthropy and labor legislation, the indictment of Tolstoy applied to Moscow thirty years ago still fits every American city: "Wherever we may live, if we draw a circle around us of a hundred thousand, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... selfishness of the average traveler, who, while unwilling to pay for more sitting, is more than willing to monopolize the whole seat, I was glad of plenty of elbow room to enable me to answer ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... necessity of making mutual concessions, as the representatives of London and Devonshire in the House of Commons are and ought to be. Now Temple's new Council was to contain fifteen members who were to hold no offices, and the average amount of whose private estates was ten thousand pounds a year, an income which, in proportion to the wants of a man of rank of that period, was at least equal to thirty thousand a year in our time. Was it to be expected that such men would gratuitously ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... establishing the European Community: ARTICLE 1 The criterion on price stability referred to in the first indent of Article 109j(1) of this Treaty shall mean that a Member State has a price performance that is sustainable and an average rate of inflation, observed over a period of one year before the examination, that does not exceed by more than 1 1/2 percentage points that of, at most, the three best performing Member States in terms of price stability. Inflation shall be measured by means of ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... the western side of Ocoa Bay is regarded as terminating also marks the beginning of another large bay, Neiba Bay, which has the form of a cul-de-sac, with a length of eighteen miles and an average breadth of seven miles. It is open to the southeast, but in all other directions is well protected by high mountains. The water is of ample depth and there are several good anchorages, the best being the port of ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... average husband only realized how he could play upon his wife's heart-strings with a few loving words I believe there would be less marital unhappiness in the world. A few minutes before I had been fiercely resentful ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... to whom these words were spoken was below the average in stature, remarkably active for her age (she was then fully sixty), and possessed of as much goodness as intelligence. My mother's judgment concerning her own mother was well founded, for soon after her death that ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... baby weighs about seven pounds at birth; the average girl, about six and a half pounds. The head is larger in proportion to the body than in after life; the nose is incomplete, the legs short and bowed, with a tendency to fall back upon the body with the knees flexed. This natural tendency should be ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... to name any one thing which more than any other typified Egypt, the average boy or girl would at once reply, "The pyramids," and rightly, for though pyramids have been built in other countries, this particular form of structure has always been regarded as peculiarly Egyptian, and was selected by the designers of ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of critics! when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on you before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine. Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spring. The public knew nothing of the internal movement which had opened this slight fountain, nor suspected the dark concamerations through which the current made its way to the surface. The smallest mountain rill often has a thunder-storm at its back; but the average reader of that day thought he had done quite enough, when he guessed that the new writer was a timid young man fabling under a feigned name, excellent in his limited way, who would be a great deal better if he could come out of seclusion and make himself ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... To the average Russian such a life was enchanting, and many were so fascinated that they became citizens of Finland. In order to do so, however, they were obliged to go through the formality of changing their nationality and becoming subjects of the Grand Duchy. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... woman's whole physical energy is taken up by attention to domestic matters and often also to farm-work, to the detriment of family life. The following is an account given to one witness by a farmer's wife, describing an average day's work:— ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... French had directed against them by means of the successful work of the French aviators. The French infantry also had done effective work in the short rush which they had been making, gaining on an average about twelve yards a day. Following the concentration of French troops, the German commanders brought up reenforcements to the number of 80,000. Some of these were taken from La Bassee, and others from a contingent which had been intended for a ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... made highly efficient by training. So every big, successful business conducts a course in salesmanship. Thorough tests have proved that particular principles and methods of selling are sure to produce the highest average of orders. Therefore these principles and methods are followed as standard practice ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... had this silencer for some time, you may be sure that other people know about it. These silencers must be pretty rare in England. You see, an average person like myself didn't know what it was. By the way, another point which we haven't yet cleared up is this: supposing we are right in believing Parrish to have been murdered, how do you explain ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... a perfect gentleman," he said, "which is certainly astonishing, he being a product of Cairo. I consider him in all respects—except, of course, a classical education—fully equal to the average young officer, on first joining. He is very modest and unassuming; and will, I feel sure, perform with credit any work that you may ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... general discontent disturbed her fair aspect, or impeded her glorious progress. The working classes were better off than in previous years. Pauperism declined, crime was greatly lessened. In 1852, the commitments in England and Wales were 3899 fewer than the average. In 1853, the favourable difference was seen not so much in decreased numbers as in the lesser gravamen of the offences. Much sickness was caused by the excessive severity of the weather during the spring quarter. From the 20th of-April to the 15th of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Factbook has added five new fields to the Economy category. "Central bank discount rate" provides the annualized interest rate a country's central bank charges commercial, depository banks for loans to meet temporary shortages of funds. "Commercial bank prime lending rate" provides a simple average of annualized interest rates commercial banks charge on new loans, denominated in the national currency, to their most credit-worthy customers. "Stock of money" also known as "M1," comprises the total quantity of currency in ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... easily likable. He was a man of twenty-seven, slender of build, but carrying himself well. In dress he had the quiet good taste that some men are born with, besides a willingness to take pains about shirts, boots, and cravats—in short, he looked like a well-groomed Englishman. Unlike the average Englishman, however, he spoke almost perfect French, owing to the fact that his American father had married into one of the old Creole families ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... all such property belongs to the nation,—and that it would be more wise for him, if he wishes to live the natural term of a citizen, (that is, according to Condorcet's calculation, six months on an average,) not to pass for an usurper upon the national property. This is what the serjeants-at-law of the rights of man will say to the puny apprentices of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... might make a better average and next year he might be up with me and then I should have to look out. I was not thinking of ...
— The Hilltop Boys - A Story of School Life • Cyril Burleigh
... ancient name and wide estates gave greater opportunities for taking a large share in public affairs than when the fifth Earl attained his majority. It was natural, therefore, that a young man who was recognised by his friends as above the average should be regarded as a person ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the above date, he says: "I have not heard from my father for the last fortnight. I am in very good lodgings, at a boarding-house, not working hard, and have time to cultivate some agreeable society. The landlady is all that can be desired and more than could be expected—the company far above the average. There is Mr. B., a barrister and Cambridge man, first rate; and a nice old lady, Mrs. F., very intelligent and good-natured. We three are great friends. Taking it altogether, the house is so comfortable, that I did not go to the theatre once last month." ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... about hitching folks together; He leaves that job to the fools that are roped in. Well, I'm going to stick to the helm and guide my boat the best I can. I made my bed, and I'm as good a sleeper as the average." ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... little boy there was a little girl in a red dress with blond pigtails who used to scrap with him and tattle things about him to her mother. If he were inclined to be credulous, this was second sight I had. But it is a universal. What average boy didn't, at one time or another, know a little girl with blond pigtails? What blond little girl didn't occasionally wear a red dress? What little girl didn't tattle to her mother about the naughty things the ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... is this the case that I incline to the belief that taxation so graded as to result in a maximum average of say 33-1/3 per cent. would produce at least as great a revenue as a maximum average ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... as he could measure with a two-fool rule, or tell upon ten fingers': he judged of human nature in the same way, by mood and figure: he saw only the definite, the positive, and the practical, the average forms of things, not their striking differences—their classes, not their degrees. He was a man of strong common sense and practical wisdom, rather than of genius or feeling. He retained the regular, habitual impressions of actual objects, but he could not follow the rapid ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... disguising himself and taking the other side—must have annoyed the whole Table. Yet these very things, properly managed, help to create and complicate the "novel" character. For one of the most commonly and not the least justly charged faults of the average romance is its deficiency in combined plot and character-interest—the presence in it, at most, of a not too well-jointed series of episodes, possibly leading to a death or a marriage, but of little more than chronicle type. This fault has been exaggerated, but it exists. Now it will be one main ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... a journey is always marked by ardor, both in the horses and the horsemen. This is well enough in the horsemen, but if the horses are to go far, their speed must be moderated and their strength husbanded. It was, therefore, fixed that the average journey every day should not be more than from ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... one man may be less than common honesty in another. From us, whose consciences He has reached and enlightened, God may look for a martyr's truth, a Christian's unworldly simplicity, before He will place us on a level even with the average of the exposed classes. We perhaps think our lives at least harmless. We do not consider what He may think of them, when compared with the invitations of His that we have slighted, with the aims of His Providence we are leaving without our help, with the glory for ourselves we are refusing and casting ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... him to dig out the bog until he came to a solid bottom. Metcalf, on making his calculations, found that in that case he would have to dig a trench some nine feet deep and fourteen yards broad on the average, making about two hundred and ninety-four solid yards of bog in every rood, to be excavated and carried away. This, he naturally conceived, would have proved both tedious as well as costly, and, after all, the road would in wet weather have been no better than a broad ditch, and in winter ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... treat the average Englishman either with a too effusive cordiality or with that half-contemptuous fear of being snubbed which is of all things the most disagreeable. A sort of "chip on the shoulder" spread-eagleism formerly made a class of Americans unpopular; now Americans are in favor in England, and ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... of his blue uniform when he first put it on, and felt that he had risen in the social scale. True, his earnings did not average as much, but he was content with smaller pay, since the duties ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... years hence, when the results of this study in our Normal Schools shall be realized in the preparation of the teacher, we can depend upon her adapting oral lessons from advanced works on this theme, but now, the average primary teacher brings to this study no ...
— Child's Health Primer For Primary Classes • Jane Andrews
... that, but it is not general. I deny that almost every fisherman in the islands is in debt. Then he says, 'These fishermen, for the most part, also rent small farms of from three to four acres.' That also I deny Mr. Leask has about 120 tenants, and I think the average quantity of land they hold is about twelve acres of enclosed ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... place in that region. From Parkersburgh to Charleston, Kanhaway, with but little delay. Our saline friends are great dealers in "coney." I met twenty-six in one day at the old "Col." He is doing his work clean, without any risk. There are, he tells me, upon an average, five horses sold per week from Sandy among the friends of the trade. I left Charleston; had a tedious journey to this city. Lexington is a humane place, but dangerous to move, unless you do it through some of the old wealthy friends of the trade. I must ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... complaint is a just one, or that ninety-nine out of a hundred readers of average intelligence, if asked, after reading Mr. Darwin's 'Origin of Species,' what was the most important cause of modification, would answer "natural selection." Let the same readers have read the 'Zoonomia' of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, or the 'Philosophie Zoologique' ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... to get into the street by the atrium. Medius saw them, but he made no attempt to detain them; he had sunk into lethargic indifference. It was not an hour since he had taken stock of his life and means, setting the small figure of his average income against his hospitality to Dada and her little companion; but then, again, he had calculated that, if all went well, he might make considerable profits out of the girl and the child. Now, he felt it was all the same to him whether he and his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... score of explanations. Anyhow it is better, and because it is we do not use it all by itself. Instead we use it to grade up some that is less fine in quality. After the bales have been classified we take a little of this and a little of that until we have struck a good average. It goes without saying that we never mix two extremes, or put the best and the worst together. That wouldn't do at all. We aim to produce a mean between these two qualities. All this mixing is not, however, done by hand, as you might think to hear me talk. No, indeed! We have bale-breakers ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... the number of persons in a gens, it varied with the number of the gentes, and with the prosperity or decadence of the tribe. Three thousand Senecas divided equally among eight gentes would give an average of three hundred and seventy-five persons to a gens. Fifteen thousand Ojibwas divided equally among twenty-three gentes would give six hundred and fifty persons to a gens. The Cherokees would average ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... Rowena is a cantata about the Britons and the Danes. There is a Druid priestess who sings of Cynthia and Endymion, and a chorus of jubilant Vikings. It is charmingly printed, and as a libretto for music quite above the average. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... typed and signed statement to the effect that Carl Gwinnett agreed to pay the sum of fifteen thousand dollars for the Lane Fleming pistol-collection, in its entirety, within thirty days of date. That was an average of six dollars a pistol. There had been a time, not too long ago, when a pistol-collection with an average value of six dollars, particularly one as large as the Fleming collection, had been something unusual. For one thing, arms ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... on scales of such unprecedented breadth and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in with a foil of curious homeliness and simplicity. Perhaps never before has the absolute and average commonness of humanity been so steadily and unaffectedly adhered to. I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on a Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at sundown. The car ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... which, coupled together in our modern psychological dialect under the head of "self-consciousness," are supposed to be the besetting defects of the literary character. Another result was his habitual over-estimate of the average knowledge possessed by mankind. Judging others by himself, he credited the world at large with an amount of information which certainly few have the ability to acquire, or the capacity to retain. If his parents had not been so diligent in ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... one hundred words. His labors have been lightened slightly, for the Americans have picked up a few Spanish words, such as, "Ha mucher, mucher—don't you know? Hielo, hielo!" Hielo is ice, and after the "mucher" is duly digested the average waiter comes, by and by, with a lump as big as a hen's egg and is amazed by the shouts continuing "hielo, hielo!" pronounced much ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... not altogether pleasantly. How was Polly to know that Mrs. Valentine was immersed up to her ears in a philanthropic sea with the smallest possible thought for the doctor's home? "Now that maid," said the physician, dropping his tone to a confidential one, "is as well as the average, but she's not the one who is to amuse the old lady. It's that she needs more than medicine, ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... who mean to be head-gardeners before they are thirty, and eliminate woman from their lives as a dangerous obstacle to the successful career, pay a heavy penalty when they do fall in love. The average irresponsible young man who has hung about North Street on Saturday nights, walked through the meadows and round by the mill and back home past the creek on Sunday afternoons, taken his seat in the brake for the annual outing, shuffled his way through the polka at ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... eyes were a commonplace grey, his nose a little fleshy, and his mouth completely undistinguished. He was, in short, completely unlike the Pope of fiction and imagination; there was nothing of the Pontiff about him in his manner. He might have been a clean-shaven business man of average ability, who had chosen to dress himself up in a white cassock and to sit in an enormous room furnished in crimson damask and gold, with chandeliers, at a rather inconvenient writing-desk. Even at this dramatic moment ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... train. The first school of this character was opened in 1855 at Chemnitz, Saxony. There are at present twenty-one schools of this class in the Empire. Sixteen is the regular age of admission. Candidates must have an elementary education on presenting themselves. Two years is the average length of course, including both winter and summer terms. A requisite for admission also is practical experience in the trade, hence little other than theoretical instruction ...
— The Condition and Tendencies of Technical Education in Germany • Arthur Henry Chamberlain
... a majority of the stock in a given company. You find that many of the stockholders distrust or dislike the president and are willing to sell. Some of these ask only $50 a share for their holdings; the owners of 100 shares want as much as $92; the average price asked is $76. By buying out all the president's enemies, which you can now do beyond question, you would secure a bare majority of the stock. But $92 a share seems to you excessive; that is, you think that by working quietly among the president's friends you can get ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... cause of the change in Flemish style of tapestries was in this way brought about by the Renaissance of Italy. New rules of drawing were dominating. Changes were slower when travelling was difficult, and the average of literacy was low; but gradually there came creeping up to Brussels cartoon after cartoon in the new method, for her skilled workmen to transpose into wool and silk and metal, "thread of Arras," and "gold and silver of Cyprus." Italy had the artists, Brussels ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... bottom of the sea, of which they gave us to understand they had a good store. Before evening the first party returned, bringing a larger number of pearls than we expected. Few of them, however, were particularly fine, but on an average they were of good value, which encouraged us to hope that we should be well paid for our voyage. Notwithstanding the friendly behaviour of the natives, Harry considered it prudent to keep a vigilant watch during the hours of darkness. He told the natives that he should not ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... besides, that he had spoken with rather more of the ex cathedra tone than was proper. A young man of opinions generally finds it so much easier to impress people with his tone than with his arguments! But he consoled himself with the reflection that the average woman—that word average was a balm for every wound—that the average woman is always tied to her religion, and intolerant of any doubts. He was pleased to think that Helen Minorkey was not intolerant. Of that he felt sure. He did not carry ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... to have revised all the figures, but of little advantage to our readers. For example, it is encouraging to the citizen to know that the average wheat yield per acre has increased more than two bushels since the first edition of this book, but it would not help the garden maker. The increase of possible products tends to counterbalance the increased cost of labor. So only the musty parts have been cut out ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... The pitches of the human voice lie, in general, between the frequencies of 87 and 768 per second. These are the extremes of pitch, and it is not to be understood that any such range of pitch is utilized in ordinary speech. An average man speaks mostly between the fundamental frequencies of 85 and 160 per second. Many female speaking voices use fundamental frequencies between 150 and 320 vibrations per second. It is obvious from what ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... people the average Northerner knew nothing. He knew the South only on its least attractive side of professional politics. For there was a group of powerful magnates, rich planters or "slave barons," who easily made their way into Congress, ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... fool's paradise. I have no less liking for purity, but I understand it in rather a different sense; certain examples of the common purity that I have met with didn't entirely recommend themselves to me. Then again, the average parent says that the daughter's lot in life is marriage, and that after marriage is time enough for her to throw away the patent rose-coloured spectacles. I, on the other hand, should be very sorry indeed to think that Cecily ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... possible for the person of average good sense to get something of a simple, broad grasp of the prophetic books. It involves reading repeatedly so as to get familiar with the contents, and rapidly so as not to get too ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... possess rather an accurate knowledge of such customers, and in consequence they lose nothing. One would as soon believe the generality of Boers, as walk into the shaft of a coal mine. He has a reputation for lying, and he never brings discredit upon that reputation. When he lies, which, on an average, is every alternate time he opens his mouth, he does so with great enthusiasm, and the while he is delivering one lie, he is carefully considering the next. When he can't think of any more lies, he starts on the truth, but in this he is ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... the impossibility of pre-adapting its mechanism to the exigences of every case, works to unforseen and undesired ends—sometimes even to absurd ones. And, with thinkers of a certain phase of modern thought, it has been a favourite taunt against the average British mind, that it rather delights in the contemplation of such abnormal workings of the great automatic law in which it has created. Some manifest mistake or error has occurred. The man supposed to be murdered walks into court; but ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... tubes, each capable of carrying the ordinary British railway, bored through a bed of cenomian chalk, two hundred feet thick on an average. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... rode away at a leisurely trot. Haste had little to do with trailing a herd, where eight miles was called a good day's journey and six an average achievement. The fallen ox was unyoked by the mellow-voiced but exasperated Ezra, and since he would not rise, the three remaining oxen, urged by the gad and Ezra's upbraiding, swung the wagon to one side and moved it a little farther after the slow-moving herd, so that the exhausted ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... and a little farther south,—in the flat-woods behind New Smyrna,—I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropical exuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himself staring. Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common Iris versicolor of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there a pool was yellow with bladderwort. I was taken also with the larger and taller (yellow) butterwort, which I used ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... "A dozen average women would need the weight and strength of more than a dozen strong heavy men even over the best pulley hung to the roof over them; and the idea of pulling them up by a rope hung anyhow round a pillar [Greek] is absurdly impossible; and how a ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... those above the average, it is possible to discourse on higher subjects; to those from the average downwards, it ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... will of Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and of what they were. The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... ideal—for most people admittedly a far away one at present. But even now, the would-be teacher should not be asked to decide earlier than this on the particular branch of the profession which she is to enter. The average pass graduate will do best to fit herself as an all-round form mistress: there should be no reason to determine in what type of school, elementary or secondary. The training required should be the same if the classes were, as they ought to be, of manageable ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... long ago. Both of the older Kio Barra had been soft, slack men, seeking no more than average results. He, Leuwan, was different—more exacting—more demanding of ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... in different schools, and the adaptation of the course to individual instruction as well as to class work, also made a division into lessons impracticable. Each teacher will soon discover about how much matter her class, if she uses the class method, can take each day. Probably the average section will require about 2 days to cover; the longest sections, 5 days. The entire course should easily be covered in one year with recitations of about 25 minutes daily. Two 50-minute periods a week give a better division of time and also ought to finish the course ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... his college bills came to only some eight shillings a week. As this was about the average amount of an undergraduate's bill it is clear that, so far as food went, he lived, in spite of Mr. Carlyle's assertion, as ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... us any more notice, though, than as if we'd been holdin' our breath. The head pair had their eyes glued on the Captain. They were the leaders, and the rest followed like they'd been tied together with a rope. They was all girls and I guess they'd average about five years old. I thought at first they all had on aprons, but now I sees that every last one of 'em was wearin' a life-preserver. They'd tied the things on after the bump, and I suppose the nurses had been too rattled to take 'em off since. ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... Dupin is surprised at the great quantities of meat, butter, cheese and tea entered on the accounts of the poor-houses in England, and the great care taken to have these of the best quality.(100) A good symptom of such a state of things is a high average duration of human life, especially when there is a relatively large number of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... a comfortable home and a life as happy as the average. You were fairly prosperous. You seem to have had a rotten time in Paris. If you had your time over again would you do ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... practically round the question of order, the first of the great difficulties of this most difficult enterprise. How boys who could scarcely be got to behave quietly under the strictest schoolmasters could ever be brought to obey the rebuke of their equal and schoolfellow: how a heterogeneous pack of average schoolboys could organise themselves into a self-governing republic, these were problems of real and stupendous difficulty. The fines of a penny and of twopence, which were instituted at the first meeting, were found hopelessly incompetent to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... thirty-five words per minute by hand, but a hundred and twenty words or more per minute can be transmitted by an automatic sender, and the recorder has been found on land lines and short cables to write off the message at this incredible speed. When we consider that every word is, on the average, composed of fifteen separate waves, we may better appreciate the rapidity with which the siphon can move. On an ordinary cable of about a thousand miles long, the working speed is about twenty words per minute. On the French Atlantic it is usually about thirteen, although ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... him once if he had any idea how many he had talked to in the course of his career, and he tried to estimate how many thousands of times he had lectured, and the average attendance for each, but desisted when he saw that it ran into millions of hearers. What a marvel is such a fact as ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... attained through the experience of life and through thinking. Remember that the smallest pleasure, a mere momentary satisfaction, always costs us more dearly than it is really worth. The average man will not, for instance, pay a thousand rubles for a pear, for he knows that would be an insane absurdity, and moreover, he knows the relative value of a thousand rubles and of a pear. But out of the capital of his life ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... sailors of the Springbok, when they first boarded her in the Thames, looked on themselves as men bound on an empty cruise; and nothing but the pay, which was five shillings per month above the average, reconciled them to it; for a sailor does not like going to sea for nothing, any more than a true sportsman likes to ride to hounds that are hunting ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... mind hadn't worked round to looking at the thing as feasible. And yet it was; plainly it was. The law allowed for it, if one only took advantage of the law's allowances. It would be beastly, of course; and more beastly for him than the average of men; but because it was beastly it were better done at once, before the girl got ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... summer for hunting and fishing purposes. The interior is also visited by the Eskimo for the purpose of hunting reindeer and other animals, though they rarely penetrate farther than 50 miles. A narrow strip along the coast, perhaps 30 miles wide, will probably, on the average, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the time he used to ride around here on his white pony and fight all the Irish boys in Can-Town, with his long curls all handy to be pulled out. Akers says he gets a fair salary, and I should think he ought to! Seems to me I've heard the average life in that sort of work is somewhere around four years, and agents don't write any insurance at all ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... as most babies do. He trots about on all fours and carries things in his mouth like a little dog. Nobody can say he isn't up to schedule time in the matter of creeping anyway—away ahead of it indeed, since ten months is Morgan's average for creeping. He is so cute, it will be a shame if his dad never sees him. His hair is coming on nicely too, and I am not without hope that ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is only an exaggeration of a general tropical feature; for my whole experience in the equatorial regions of the west and the east has convinced me, that in the most luxuriant parts of the tropics, flowers are less abundant, on the average less showy, and are far less effective in adding colour to the landscape than in temperate climates. I have never seen in the tropics such brilliant masses of colour as even England can show in her furze-clad commons, her heathery mountain-sides, her glades of wild hyacinths, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... his installation at Srignan, and that period of plenty was followed by a period of difficulty, almost of indigence. His class- books, which had succeeded marvellously, and from which the royalties had quickly attained to nearly 640 pounds sterling, which was the average figure for nearly ten years, were then no longer in vogue. Already the times had changed. France was in the crisis of the anti-clerical fever. Fabre made frequent allusions in his books of a spiritual nature, and many primary inspectors ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... country the troops were less fortunate. At Bronkhorst Spruit a small British force was taken by surprise and shot down without harm to their antagonists. The surgeon who treated them has left it on record that the average number of wounds was five per man. At Laing's Nek an inferior force of British endeavoured to rush a hill which was held by Boer riflemen. Half of the men were killed and wounded. Ingogo may be called a drawn battle, though ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... arranged around the scaffold and rented to spectators, like seats in a theatre. A special sewer had to be constructed to carry off the blood of the victims. In the space of a little over a month (from June 10th to July 17th) the number of persons guillotined at Paris was 1285, an average of 34 ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... wimmen. Woman is like the climate of the state of Kansas, where I was born. Thirty-four below at times and as high as one-sixteen above. Blowin' hot an' cold, rangin' from a balmy breeze through a rain shower or a thunder-storm, up to a snortin' tornado. Average number of workin' days, about one hundred an' fifty. Them's statistics. It ain't so hard to set down what a woman's done at the end of a year, if you got a good mem'ry, but tryin' to guess what she is goin' to do has got the weather man backed off inter a corner ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... sighed the old woman: "it fares no better with me. Are the beasts such sheer fools then? Only let a body have a regular, average, commonplace nose, eyes, and chin, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... his poem, and it was not much worse than the average of his verses. He had been reading his books faithfully, but he was not pleased when I told him that I preferred my Longfellow ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... natural enough to the laziness of fallen man, is that of fishing down-stream, and not up. What Mr. Stewart says on this point should be read by every tyro. By fishing up-stream, even against the wind, he will on an average kill twice as many trout as when fishing down. If trout are out and feeding on the shallows, up or down will simply make the difference of fish or no fish; and even in deeps, where the difference in the chance of not being seen is not so great, many ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... one vast metropolis. Philadelphia will also flow over in the same way into Camden and adjacent portions of New Jersey, whose farms already greatly exceed in value those of any other State. The farms of New Jersey in 1860 were of the average value of $60.38 per acre, while those of South Carolina, the great leader of the rebellion, with all her boasted cotton, rice, and tobacco, and her 402,406 slaves, were then of the average value of $8.61 per acre. (Census Table 36.) And yet there are those in New Jersey who would ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... prove more lucrative than the True? And, concerning the persons who wrote for these newspapers,—of what calling and election were they? Male and female, young and old, they were generally of a semi-educated class lacking all distinctive ability,—men and women who were, on an average, desperately poor, and desperately dissatisfied. To earn daily bread they naturally had to please the editors set in authority over them; hence their expressed views and opinions on any subject could only be counted as nil, being written, not independently, but under the absolute ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... beyond the commonest acquirements of her sex. It was not with her, as with some, that the intellect alone had proved sufficient to make out of a helpless body a noble and complete human existence; Elizabeth's mind was scarcely above the average order, or if it had been, suffering had stifled its powers. Her only possession was the ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... consumer goods, and services, but is unlikely to implement extensive changes. A major feature of the economy is the dichotomy between relatively efficient export enclaves and inefficient domestic sectors. The average Cuban's standard of living remains at a lower level than before the severe economic depression of the early 1990s, which was caused by the loss of Soviet aid and domestic inefficiencies. High oil prices, recessions in ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government |
