"Tottering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Hung Wapu, whereupon the latter made a sign. The drunken man, a Japanese, whose face looked ghastly pale in the green light from the lantern, stared stupidly at the saki-bowls, which Hung Wapu was trying to shield from the tottering wretch with ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... his pale and haggard cheeks, wigged his thin locks, padded his skeleton limbs, and dressed himself in the almost juvenile costume of earlier years. Sustained by artificial stimulants, this poor old man kept his tottering seat upon his saddle for four long hours. He then, having proved that he was still young and vigorous, returned to his chamber. The wig was thrown aside, the pads removed, the paint washed off, and the infirm ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... great frame shrank in stature, and became suddenly a wreck of itself. As if age and decay had suddenly come upon him. As if the weight of his body had become too heavy for him, and set his great limbs tottering under it as ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting. Dickens, who used his eyes, remarked the contrast. The hand of a child and his face are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering and haggard. ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... child, releasing itself from its nurse's arms, ventures its little tottering steps on the soft carpet, or the smoothest grass-plot, the poor mother scarcely breathes; she imagines that these first efforts of nature are attended with every danger to the object most dear to her. Fond mother, calm ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Used to the sight of famine, he thought inanition would break the spirit without injuring the health. Many a time had he beheld those who professed to have tasted nothing for two days, trudge off tottering but cheerful, with a soup-ticket, and he had not calculated on the difference between the children of want and the delicately nurtured girl, full of overwrought feeling. Though he had been watching in loving intercession for the unhappy child, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mother came nearer tottering, and sank down before the form of the old man, while she embraced his knee in convulsive grief. "Ah! why were you not here?" she cried despairingly; "your art, your knowledge would have saved her. O Pietro! Pietro! you, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... old Benny, "he can't refuse to marry no man. Law won't let him." Such refusal, he intimates, might drive him to wild and riotous living. Remembering his last view of old Benny tottering down the village street in his white smock, his nut-cracker face like a withered rosy apple, his gnarled hand grasping the knotted staff his bent body leaned on, Mount Dunstan grinned a little. He did not smile when Penzance passed to the restoration of the ancient church at Mellowdene. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... cruelty or brutality. He was, however, essentially egotistical and insincere; he was republican, not from conviction, but from prudential motives; he adhered to the throne a while, and deserted it only when he saw that it was tottering; for a time he belonged to the moderate party in the Republic, and voted with the Girondists; he gradually joined the Jacobins, as he saw that they were triumphing over their rivals, and afterwards was one of those who handed ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... with the man himself. But in case you are not adequately intrigued by either of these romances, I can also tell you that Sir William (big and burly) and Trixie Harrison, though married, gave considerable cause for anxiety before with "outstretched hands she went tottering towards him." Even the most jaded novel-readers will suffer thrills and surprises from The Music Makers, and occasionally, perhaps, they will wonder whether coincidence's long arm has not been stretched to the point of dislocation. However that may be, the book is breezy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... latter years, while he resided in Glasgow, his health failed, and he was struck with paralysis in the legs. The massive forehead once pregnant with the fire of genius, grew dull and slow of thought, while the sturdy frame of iron hardihood became a tottering wreck. He was removed to the Home for Incurables at Broomhill, Kirkintilloch, where he died on January 2, 1877, and was interred in the Old Aisle Cemetery. He was a widower, and had two children, but they were said to be abroad at the time, the son in America and the daughter ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... holds one shoe, walking next to the boy who carries its fellow. Some are in fine cast-off clothes, with tarnished embroidery, whilst others are quite or nearly naked, without even a cap on their heads, and the procession is closed by a boy, tottering under the weight of his master's state gun, which is never allowed to be ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Pellew met the charges against the Admiralty with the plain and straightforward declarations of a seaman. Nothing could be more disinterested than his conduct upon this occasion; for there was little to hope from the gratitude of a ministry just tottering to their overthrow, and everything to fear from the resentment of their successors. But he justly considered that upon a vital question, and at such a crisis, no personal or party feeling should intrude; and he felt himself called upon to support the Admiralty with more than ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... another shock. I felt conviction tottering.... But she did look at me.... She didn't expect ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... locks, will come stealing on, And bring the tottering step, the furrow'd cheek, The eye, from whence each lustrous gleam hath gone; And the pale lip, with accents low and weak; Will ye then think upon your youth's gay prime, And, smiling, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... library apparently absorbed in a book when a tottering pale-faced woman appeared to him and, in her course toward a couch in a corner of the room, described almost a semi-circle. She flung herself face downward. A thick strand of hair swept over her shoulder. " Oh, my heart is broken! ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... shoulders to the work Bannon had put upon them, who had once spent long, sulky afternoons in the barren little room of his new boarding-house; Peterson held himself down in bed exactly three hours the morning after that famous victory. Before eleven o'clock he was sledging down a tottering timber at the summit of the marine tower, a hundred and forty feet sheer above the wharf. Just before noon he came into the office and ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... not do as he did; I had not muscle enough in my arms, but I threw my legs round the tottering ladder, and slid down, turned it back to its old place, went up ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... have always thought drunkenness a wild and almost fearful pleasure, rather demoniacal than human; but drunkenness, out here in the roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff above that hell of waters, the man's head spinning like the Roost, his foot tottering on the edge of death, his ear watching for the signs of ship-wreck, surely that, if it were credible in any one, was morally impossible in a man like my uncle, whose mind was set upon a damnatory creed and haunted by the darkest superstitions. Yet so it was; ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the electric wire that the circuit may be completed. God puts out His hand, and we lay hold of it. It is not the outstretched hand from earth, but the down-stretched hand from heaven that makes the tottering man stand. So, dear friends, let us understand that salvation does not come as the reward of faith, but that the salvation is in the faith, because faith is the channel by which all God's salvation pours into us. So there is nothing arbitrary in the way ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... board on to a low and level projection of the cliff, the only point on which a landing could be made, placed the vessel in communication with the land. Dark figures were crossing and recrossing each other on this tottering gangway, and in the shadow ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... progress towards convalescence. Already a sort of gymnasium had been arranged over his bed, so that he might, by simple muscular exercises, regain his lost strength; and more than once I have guided his tottering steps along the arched corridors, as, clad in the gray uniform of the hospital, and supported by a stick, he ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... lined on either side with wretched tenements that seemed tottering and just ready to fall, and through alley after alley, where squalid misery had hid itself from the eye of general observation, did they pass, in what seemed to Mr. Graves an interminable succession; At last the woman and her child paused at the door of an old, wretched-looking frame house, that ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... because so many people looked at Duncan's pale heavy face and tottering steps that the gentleman, after a a few minutes, took him up and carried him. They went some little distance, till they came to a small shop, the window of which was full of all kinds of papers and pictures. The ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the camp looking for death, but they came back from thence with assurance of life; they went down to the camp with heavy hearts, but came back again with pipe and tabor playing before them. So as soon as they were come to Eye-gate, the poor and tottering town of Mansoul adventured to give a shout; and they gave such a shout as made the captains in the Prince's army leap at the sound thereof. Alas! for them, poor hearts! who could blame them? since their ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... to his. "Don't look like that. I tell you I wasn't drowned. I am alive: feel me! feel me! I am Hetty;" and she knelt before him, and laid her arms across his knees. The touch, the grasp, the warmth of her strong flesh, penetrated his inmost consciousness, and brought back the tottering senses. His eyes lost their terrifying and ghastly expression, and took on one searching and half-stern. "You were not drowned!" he said. "You have not been dead all these years! You went away! You are not Hetty!" and he pushed her arms rudely from his knees. Then, in the ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... concrete cases, of Bolingbroke's vaguer generalities. "The laws of gravitation," he says, "must sometimes be suspended (if special Providence be admitted), and sometimes their effect must be precipitated. The tottering edifice must be kept miraculously from falling, whilst innocent men lived in it or passed under it, and the fall of it must be as miraculously determined to crush the guilty inhabitant or passenger." Here, again, we have the alternative of Wollaston, who uses a similar illustration, and ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... was, to her mind, a settled fact. It is a peculiar phase, this of the humble who find themselves, without effort of their own, thrust up among the great and the so-called, who forget whence they came in the fierce contest for supremacy upon that tottering ledge called society. The cad and the snob are only infrequently well-born. Mrs. Harrigan was as yet far from being a snob, but it required some tact upon Nora's part to prevent ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... little territory rebel, and he has no power to subdue the insurgents, but he can send a message to the capital, and get the army of the king, who is his sovereign and theirs, to come down and bring them back to order, and establish his tottering throne. So if you desire to own yourself or to know the sweetness that you may get out of your own nature and the exercise of your powers, if you desire to be able to govern the realm within, put yourself into God's hands and say, 'I ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... sense, Can range aright his shillings, pounds, and pence. The booby father craves a booby son; And by heaven's blessing thinks himself undone. Wants of all kinds are made to fame a plea; One learns to lisp; another not to see: Miss D——, tottering, catches at your hand: Was ever thing so pretty born to stand? Whilst these, what nature gave, disown, through pride, Others affect what nature has denied; What nature has denied, fools will pursue, As apes are ever walking upon two. Crassus, a grateful sage, our awe and sport! Supports grave forms; ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... had got a bit ahead through Oswald lending the tottering Denny a hand over the rough places. Denny's feet hurt him, because when he was a beaver his stockings had dropped out of his pocket, and boots without stockings are not a bed of luxuriousness. And he is often unlucky with ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... reasons already stated. It was published on the 14th December, 1724, at a time when the Drapier agitation had reached its last stage. The Drapier had taught his countrymen that "to be brave is to be wise," and he now struck the final blow that laid prostrate an already tottering opposition. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... Glyndon started, as he turned his gaze from the fresh, fair, rosy face of the girl, and saw the eyes dropping rheum, the yellow wrinkled skin, the tottering frame ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Hairy, and ye're welcome hame; and ye tu, bonny sir" [1] (addressing Lady Juliana, who was calling to her footman to follow her with the mackaw); then, tottering before them, he led the way, while her Ladyship followed, leaning on her husband, her squirrel on her other arm, preceded by her dogs, barking with all their might, and attended by the mackaw, screaming with all his strength; and in this state was the Lady Juliana ushered into the ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... drowsily at the unwelcome intruder, then with astonished eyes he looked round about him, until at last it dawned upon him, that he must get up and leave the church. Rousing himself he made the sign of the cross, and left the Minster with tottering steps. The night winds rustled in the old limetrees of the square and seemed to whisper strange tales into the ears of the ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... somewhat piteous. 'Where are you, stewardess? where's the young lady? Oh! Cilly, there you are. To leave me alone all this time, and here's the stewardess saying we must go ashore at once, or lose the train. Oh! the luggage, and I've lost my plaid,' and ghastly in the lamplight, limp and tottering, Rashe Charteris clasped her arm for support, and made her feel doubly savage and bewildered. Her first movement was to enjoin silence, then to gaze about for the goods. A gentleman took pity on the two ladies, and told them not to be deluded into trying to catch the train; there would be another ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bunched together as if your eyes were ready to spring upon me miserable. I even thought of adding a white beard,—you do use long graybeard words sometimes, and naturally I had associated them with your chin. You can imagine, then, my relief as I entered your office, with the last legs of my courage tottering, and beheld you, not in the least ferocious in appearance, and not even old! The revulsion from my fears and anxieties was so swift and complete that, you will remember, I gave both hands in salutation, and had I possessed a miraculous third, you ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... with fever, the Bakers descended tottering to the water's edge. "The waves were rolling upon a white pebbly beach. I rushed into the lake and, thirsty with heat and fatigue, I drank deeply from the sources of the Nile. My wife, who had followed me so devotedly, stood by my side pale and exhausted—a ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... materials needed by industry and over 75% of energy requirements must be imported. The economic recovery that began in mid-1983 has continued through 1989, with the economy growing at an annual average rate of 3%. For the 1990s, Italy faces the problems of refurbishing a tottering communications system, curbing the increasing pollution in major industrial centers, and adjusting to the new competitive forces accompanying the ongoing economic integration of the ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... one among the spectators that had not a loved relative with the defenders. It might be a tottering grandfather, a sturdy son, who, though a boy, was inspired with the deepest fervor, and eager to risk his life for the sake of his mother or sister, whose hearts almost stopped beating in the painful suspense which must continue until the ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... glare of the yellow flash lit up a scene most awe-inspiring. The spouting fountain of fire at the base of the great powder-rock was thick with flying missiles; and on high the very cliff itself was tottering and crumbling. So much I saw; then the Catawba sprang up to haul us afoot by main strength, and to rush us, with an arm for each, headlong through the wood toward ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... is also heavier than herself, advances a few steps, halts, and drops it, without the strength to carry it. The old woman of fifty rakes away without stopping, and with her kerchief awry she drags the hay, breathing heavily and tottering. The old woman of eighty only rakes the hay, but even this is beyond her strength; she slowly drags along her feet, shod with bast shoes, and, frowning, she gazes gloomily before her, like a seriously ill or dying person. The old man has intentionally sent ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... sisters who have grown up together. Their thoughts and interests are seldom apart. All their little pleasures, their minor griefs, youthful hopes, disappointments, are shared with each other. They move together through the opening years of their life. Sometimes old age finds them still together, tottering hand in hand to the grave. Of all her sisters, Bessie could least spare Hatty, and her death left a void in the girl's life that was very difficult to fill. From the first, Bessie had accepted the responsibility of Hatty. Hatty's peculiar temperament, her bad health ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... thought of tottering out for a bite of lunch later on, and then possibly staggering round to the club, and after that, if I felt strong enough, I might trickle off to Walton Heath for ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... evening they had spent together, particularly those which he had so carefully suppressed from the narrative wrung from him, rushed upon her memory. Her folly and his generous forbearance stood facing each other. Casting her eyes on the floor, and grasping the handle of the door, to steady her tottering frame, she could only gasp ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... eye, When moonless brandlings cling! Let the froddering crooner cry, And the braddled sapster sing, For never and never again, Will the tottering beechlings play, For bratticed wrackers are singing aloud, And ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... of leaves and the weaving of branches; neck to neck, straining to distance each other, and held together by the gall of the harness. The broken boughs snapped, the earth flew up beneath their hoofs; their feet struck scarlet sparks of fire from the stones, the carriage was whirled, rocking and tottering, through the maze of tree-trunks, towering like pillars of black stone up against the steel-blue clearness of the sky. The strain was intense; the danger deadly. Suddenly, straight ahead, beyond the darkness of the foliage, gleamed a line of light; shimmering, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... private injury from the insolence of the tyrants. He withdrew from the senate and practice of the bar, quitting all public concerns; which gave an occasion of discourse, and fear, too, lest his anger should reconcile him to the king's side, and he should prove the ruin of the state, tottering as yet under the uncertainties of a change. But Brutus being doubtful of some others, and determining to give the test to the senate upon the altars, upon the day appointed Valerius came with cheerfulness into the forum, and was the first man that took the oath, in no way to submit or yield ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... man led me to a very large room, scarcely at all furnished. He pulled out of a niche a sort of ebony armchair, very tottering and worn, and said he would call madame, for whom he also placed a fauteuil, at the head of an immense and clumsy table. I was then joined by an elderly gentlewoman, who was led in ceremoniously by a gentleman still more elderly. The latter made me three profound ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... some patient who has been prostrated with bilious complaint: see his bent-up, tottering form straighten with strength again; see his long-lost appetite return: see his clammy features blossom into health. Give them to some sufferer whose foul blood has burst out in * * till his skin is covered with sores; who stands, or sits, or lies in anguish. He has ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have come Lydia did not know for an old squaw came tottering into the fire glow. She ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... exercised nearly ten years as an independent ruler, without reference to the court of Damascus. The state of affairs in the East, indeed, left little leisure to the Umeyyan khalifs to attend to the regulation of a remote province. Their throne was already tottering before the arms and intrigues of the Abbasides, whose black banners, under the guidance of the formidable Abu-Moslem, were even now bearing down from Khorassan upon Syria. The unpopular cause of the Beni-Umeyyah, who were detested for the murder of the grandsons ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... my shoe in possession of my foot," was the keen reply. "And see—I take it off. Beauvais is tottering, I tell you; tottering. It wants but a shove, and ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... Gardens that out of the heart of a long and vague reverie there came a flash—an illumination—which wholly changed the life and future of Doris Meadows. After the thought in which it took shape had seized upon her, she sat for some time motionless; then rising to her feet, tottering a little, like one in bewilderment, she turned northwards, and made her way hurriedly towards Lancaster Gate. In a house there, lived a lady, a widowed lady, who was Doris's godmother, and to whom Doris—who had lost her own mother in her childhood—had turned for counsel before ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... bursting with information, aren't you?" It was Miss Montague, tottering upon the brink of the grave, who voiced this explosive inquiry. Her drooping shoulders straightened, she raised her head and flung the empty bottle violently from her. Her face was deathly white, to be sure, but not with darting agonies. "You know everything, don't you? You ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... all this done? Is it only intended to restore the wearying confidence of their own armies and people and the tottering faith of their allies? Is it only intended to blind the eagerly observing eye of the neutrals? No, this flood of telegrams is intended to pass through the channels which we ourselves have opened to our enemy, and to dash against the heart of the German ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... Richmond, in the late autumn of 1862: "An indefinable feeling of gloom was thrown over a most auspicious event when the bride's youngest sister glided through a side door just before the processional. Tottering to a chancel pew, she threw herself upon the cushions, her slight frame racked with sobs. Scarcely a year before, the wedding march had been played for her, and a joyous throng saw her wedded to gallant Breck Parkman. Before another twelvemonth ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... were lined with officers, looking out, with throbbing hearts, through unsteady telescopes, or with straining eyes tracing the road. Slowly and painfully, as though horse and rider both were in an extremity of mortal weakness, the solitary mounted man came reeling, tottering on. They saw that he was an Englishman. On a wretched, weary pony, clinging, as one sick or wounded, to its neck, he sat or rather leant forward; and there were those who, as they watched his progress, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... arm and led me tottering out of the room, when I went to Mammy Crissobella, and laughed till I cried; but the punishment was not over. After remaining about ten minutes looking at each other, but neither speaking nor moving, ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... reaffirmed that the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as that indestructible life-property or organizing power which characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... in the modern improvements which render Pesth so noticeable. I found no difficulty in some of the nooks and corners of this quaint town in imagining myself back in the Middle Ages. Tottering churches, immensely tall houses overhanging yawning and precipitous alleys, markets set on little shelves in the mountain, hovels protesting against sliding down into the valley, whither they seemed inevitably doomed to go, succeeded one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... mind—in the next my whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable. I let go at once my grasp upon the peg, and, turning half round from the precipice, remained tottering for an instant against its naked face. But now there came a spinning of the brain; a shrill-sounding and phantom voice screamed within my ears; a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me; and, sighing, I sunk down with a bursting heart, and plunged ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... starting Stewart upon that walk, by watching Stewart's actions in the face of seeming death, by seeing Madeline's agony of doubt, fear, pity, love. Almost Madeline felt that she could not endure the situation. She was weak and tottering. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... the hint. They parted in the shade of the avenue, as soon as they could suppose themselves unwatched from the chateau. Randolphe cut across into the wood where he had seen Charles half an hour before, while Marie went homewards with tottering steps, looking away from the ponds, from a feeling that her state of mind was too desperate for her to trust herself on the brink of ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... seen to issue, lantern in hand, from the tower door, and, where the ruins did not intervene, to pick his way over the swarded courtyard, avoiding treacherous cellars and winding among blocks of fallen masonry. The arch of the great gate was still entire, flanked by two tottering bastions, and it was here that Jonathan met them, standing at the edge of the bridge, bent somewhat forward, and blinking at them through the glow of his own lantern. Mr. Archer greeted him with civility; but the old man was in no humour of compliance. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conclude our peregrination—the glory of Hode, Rievaulx, and Byland abbeys has departed—their founders, ecclesiastics and patrons, have become dust—the crumbling arch and tottering pillar alone record "the whereabouts" of the rendezvous of heroes and kings—and rooks construct their dwellings where the silver crucifix once reared its massy form, before crowds of adoring monks—the hoarse croak of the raven is now heard through that valley where pealed the vesper ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... until an old woman, tottering out from among the crowd, put her hand to her brow, and peering under it in his face for a moment, exclaimed, "Sure enough! it is Rip Van Winkle—it is himself! Welcome home, again, old neighbor—-Why, where have you been these ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... and Juliet, by the inherent fault of stage representation, sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly! How can the profound sorrows of Hamlet be depicted by a gesticulating actor? So, to see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm in which he goes out is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the Abbey, with twin busts of William and Mary still inhabiting a niche above the classical entrance, and marking the triumph of the Protestant Succession over the crumbling buildings of the earlier faith. The windows of the church were boarded up and a few tottering tombstones surrounded it. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bewitchingly lovely this Duchess Helen was, no room was left for change." And then he began a glowing description of the charms of this wondrously beautiful woman, but likening the image to Gabrielle so closely, feature for feature, that Sintram, tottering, was forced to lean against a tree. The little Master stood opposite to him grinning, and asked, "Well now, could you have advised that poor knight Paris to ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... raving lasts but two or three days. Then nobody ventures near him; but at other times he is quite rational and harmless. He has left, however, upon me an impression more lasting perhaps than that of the old tottering staircase that threatens to close up every moment like a toy snake that ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... him, but also women of all ages back to adolescence. Hence his average or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger and younger than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth may be sufficient to tip over his tottering defences. This, I take it, is why oldish men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is not that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it is that age is no match for youth, especially ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... no longer has faith in herself. The Catholic Church, which proclaims herself the channel of life, to-day chains and stifles all that lives youthfully within her, to-day seeks to prop all that is tottering and aged within her, To us these things mean death, distant, but inevitable death. The Catholic Church, claiming to wish to renew all things through Christ, is hostile to us, who strive to wrest the direction of social progress from the enemies ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... the edge of the dark sun, and lit the world. It fell upon a great, ruined structure, some two hundred yards away. It was the house. Staring, I saw a fearsome sight—over its walls crawled a legion of unholy things, almost covering the old building, from tottering towers to base. I could see them, plainly; they ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... and thus, while the prizes could not escape, time was obtained for repairing damages. There was not a moment to be lost, for every one knew that should a breeze spring up before the rigging had been set to rights, the tottering masts would to a ...
— The Two Shipmates • William H. G. Kingston
... forth from the parents the real story: the event and the story reached my ears in the very hour in which my mind was wavering to and fro. Can you wonder that they fixed it at once, and to a dread end? What was this wretch? aged with vice—forestalling time—tottering on to a dishonoured grave—soiling all that he touched on his way—with grey hairs and filthy lewdness, the rottenness of the heart, not its passion, a nuisance and a curse to the world. What was the deed—that I should rid the earth of a thing ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... me with greatest pleasure to mention your wise and successful diplomacy in the matter of the Long House. That house you have most cleverly divided against itself; and it must fall—it is tottering now, shaken to its foundations of centuries. Also, I have the pleasure to refer to your capture of the man Beacraft and his papers, disclosing a diabolical plan of murder. The man has been condemned by a court on the evidence as it stood, and he is ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... would undertake, off-hand, without much preliminary experiment and without measuring-instruments, to divide a circle into a given quantity of sectors of equal width? The Epeirae, though weighted with a wallet and tottering on threads shaken by the wind, effect the delicate division without stopping to think. They achieve it by a method which seems mad according to our notions of geometry. Out of disorder ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... marched into the church in a body, wearing mourning badges on their arms. There were representatives of all conditions in society, and it might be said of all ages. The lisping schoolboy who was free from the restraint imposed by the presence of his master; and the aged man and woman tottering unsteadily on the verge of the grave—all were hushed in the presence of death. Everywhere within the building were the evidences of a great sorrow. Crape was seen wherever the eye turned—surrounding the galleries, fronting the platform, encircling the choir. But there was one spot thrown ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... of the guests were lying under the table; others were walking with tottering tread through the triclinium, while others were sleeping on couches at the table, snoring, or giving forth the excess of wine. Meanwhile, from the golden network, roses were dropping and dropping on those ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... longer shall she hide her burning crest— No more her children's cries In vain appeal shall rise, While ruthless War's fierce earthquake shocks With throes convulsive thy dominion's rock, And tyrants, in their proud halls, celebrate The anguish of a nation tottering to her fate. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which had once formed part of a shack, and a few strands of fence wire, trailing from tottering posts, ran into the grass. The place appeared to have been a farm, whose owner had, no doubt, abandoned it after finding the soil too light, or after losing a crop by frost; but George was more curious ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... when Miss Jane wiped her eyes and looked around, she saw the girl tottering towards the door, groping her way like ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... paralyzed; and, absorbed in this strange revelation, did not hear a tottering footstep: a woman, pale as a corpse, and with eyes glaring large, stood among them, all in a moment, as if a ghost had risen from ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... acted—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... or creeping plant, or tiny balcony, or any modest decoration whatsoever, and tore and scattered it in its scornful fury; it was the wind that left mossy secretions on the discolored surface of the plaster walls; it was the wind, in short, that shattered, and ruined, and rent, and trampled upon the tottering pile of buildings, and then flew shrieking off, to riot and glory in its destroying strength. The dispirited proprietor grew tired of his long struggle with this mighty enemy; so the wind was left to work its ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... being; a disappearing by slow degrees, an obliterating of her physique from its immaterial beauty. Her form floated like the swaying of two great wings; a strong light seemed to come from her thin face, where the soul was burning. She could now come down from her chamber only in tottering steps, as she supported herself by putting her two hands against the wall of the stairway. But as soon as she realised she was being looked at, she made a great effort, and even persisted in wishing to finish the panel of heavy embroidery ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... associations of something weird and witchlike, of sorceresses and tymbesteres, of wild warnings screeched in his ear, of incantations and devilries and doom. Impatient of these musings, he sought to leap from his bed, and was amazed that the leap subsided into a tottering crawl. He found an ewer and basin, and his ablutions refreshed and invigorated him. He searched for his raiment, and discovered it all except the mantle, dagger, hat, and girdle; and while looking for these, his eye fell on an old tarnished steel mirror. He started as if he ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... arm to Deodati, and supported his tottering steps. They took leave of Mr. Van de Werve, who accompanied them to the door, and admiring Simon Turchi's kindness, he followed them with his eyes as long as ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... ominous black shape flung itself furiously, and made straight for the eagle, barking hoarsely with rage as it came. Another hollow bark followed, and a second evil ebony form hurled down from the tottering cliff-top, and flapped towards the eagle in the path of the first. Bark echoed bark above the deep mutter of the breakers, and the echoes along the cliffs answered both uncannily ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... words, she fell backwards, pale and tottering; the steward and a servant supported er in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... alone is equal to all the rest. On the other side, five thousand soldiers, a straggling and dismembered column, a wavering and languishing march, arms defective and dirty, the greatest part mute and tottering in enfeebled hands. ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... Newburgh addresses would have been fine in a high degree. In Washington they were not so extraordinary, for the situation offered him no temptation. Carlyle was led to think slightingly of Washington, one may believe, because he did not seize the tottering government with a strong hand, and bring order out of chaos on the instant. But this is a woeful misunderstanding of the man. To put aside a crown for love of country is noble, but to look down ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Despots effete upon tottering thrones Unsteadily poised upon dead men's bones, Walk up! walk up! the circus is free, And this wonderful spectacle you shall see: Millions of voters who mostly are fools— Demagogues' dupes and candidates' tools, Armies of uniformed mountebanks, And braying disciples of brainless cranks. Many ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... has enchanted many thousands before them, and for the space of two hours forgot themselves, their hopes and fears and expectations, while they followed the fortunes of the idle, lovable, unpractical Rip, up the mountain to his sleep of years, and down again, white-haired and tottering, to find himself forgotten by his kin and a stranger in his own home. People about them were weeping on relays of pocket-handkerchiefs, hanging them up one by one as they became soaked, and beginning on others. Imogen had ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... of you. In life you never denied me a request. I have one to make from my grave, knowing that you will not deny me. Love Bernard as your son; draw him to you, so that, when in your old age you go tottering to your tomb in quest of me, you may have a son to bear you up. Take my lifeless body on your knee and kiss me as you did of old. It will help me to rest sweetly in ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... sell them, and consequently save their lives for a profit. There is no cholera in our plantation, thank God! you cannot speculate on our sick. You outshine the London street Jews; they deal in old clothes, you deal in human oddities, tottering infirmity, sick negroes." Mrs. Rosebrook suggests that such a business in a great and happy country should be consigned to its grave-digger and executioner, or made to pay a ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... last-named has been referred to above under "His Masterpiece". Paradise Regained contains some noble passages, but is inferior to Paradise Lost, on which the poet's fame chiefly rests.] It was in 1658, the year of Cromwell's death, when the political power of Puritanism was tottering, that Milton in his blindness began to write Paradise Lost. After stating his theme he begins his epic, as Virgil began the Aneid, in the midst of the action; so that in reading his first book it is well to have in mind an outline of the whole ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... inheritance, had been independent in name only. The episcopal polity was also closely associated in the public mind with all the evils produced by twenty-five years of corrupt and cruel maladministration. Nevertheless this polity stood, though on a narrow basis and amidst fearful storms, tottering indeed, yet upheld by the civil magistrate, and leaning for support, whenever danger became serious, on the power of England. The records of the Scottish Parliament were thick set with laws denouncing vengeance on those who in any direction strayed from the prescribed pale. By an ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... And with slow and tottering step he moved to the door; there he halted, turned back,—and the child was pointing at him in mimicry, while Godfroi, the Norman tutor, smiled as in pleasure. The prelate shook his head, and the group ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... desolated the country. Beyond lay the burial-ground, in unspeakable dreariness. The crossed of the Catholic dead had been levelled by the fanaticism of the Huguenots, and though a great dominant stone cross raised on steps had been re-erected, it stood uneven, tottering and desolate among nettles, weeds, and briers. There seemed to have been a few deep trenches dug to receive the bodies of the many victims of the siege, and only rudely and slightly filled in with loose earth, on which Philippe treading had nearly sunk in, so much to his horror that he could hardly ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... having, all unheard and unrepresented, been ordered into arrest on the prejudiced statement of a swarm of hostile officers and sorely badgered and bullied members of his troop. Well knowing himself to be tottering on the ragged edge of final discovery, his duplicity exposed, his deceit established, he nevertheless braced himself for the supreme effort to bluff to the very last. Thanks to the storm-shed without, the hall was dark, and for a moment he could only vaguely see the huge bulk of the infantryman ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareff approaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and the younger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born on Poictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he came from, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble on Hathor twenty years ago; the losers had had ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... was of no avail, the terrible brute dashed in head foremost, and tumbled in the room with Boone and the fragments of the door. The two foes rose and stared at each other; Boone had nothing left but his knife, but Bruin was tottering and unsteady, and Boone felt that the match was more equal: ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... the interiors exposed to view, like a doll's house. Here is a street full of shops. That heap of splintered wardrobes and legless tables was once a furniture warehouse. That snug little corner house, with the tottering zinc counter and the twisted beer engine, is an obvious estaminet. You may observe the sign, "Aux Deux Amis," in dingy lettering over the doorway. Here is an oil-and-colour shop: you can still see the red ochre and white lead splashed ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... this contemptible, superstitious, tottering object, that the bold sons of France allow themselves to be enslaved? He is a mere skeleton in purple, who can scarcely cough out of his asthmatic throat the desire to live; yet they tremble before ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... strength of the kingdom. Of course, a Catholic queen resolved to suppress his doctrines; but nearly the whole Scottish nobility rallied around his standard, marching with the Bible in one hand, and the sword in the other. The queen brought in troops from France to support her insulted and tottering government, which only increased the zeal of the Protestant party, headed by the Earls of Argyle, Arran, Morton, and Glencairn, and James Stuart, Prior of St. Andrews, who styled themselves "Lords of the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Mrs. Lenox. "The proper study of womanhood is baby." Lena went out to find a very small person in a very tottering condition, steered up and down the hall by another be-capped maid who was holding tight to his rear petticoats, while Mrs. Lenox trotted by his side, pulling a woolly lamb that baa'd with enchanting precision, and allowing her skirts to be worried ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... this was not obvious at the time, was the appointment of Alexander D. Protopopoff as Minister of the Interior. This was the man who was finally to kick aside the last wedge shoring up the tottering walls of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... old? I'm a fool, I admit, or I wouldn't have lugged your loads and done your work the way I have. But, you see, I'm strong and vigorous and I felt sorry for a tottering ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... escaped, and the woods resounded with gay cries, "Have a care, Omi to fo! Hold on tight, Omi to fo! Now, go ahead, Omi to fo!" There was no going slowly, you stood still or went with a rush. Women tottering along on crippled feet pointed cheerily at my big shoes. I dare say the difference in size consoled them for all their aches ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... such opportunity of buying the finest books at the lowest prices is likely ever to occur again, as the fortuitous concourse of events brought to Dr. Cogswell. It was the year of revolutions—the year when the thrones were tottering or falling all over Europe, when the wealthy and privileged classes were trembling for their possessions, and anxious to turn them into ready money. In every time of panic, political or financial, the prices of books, as well as of all articles of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... acquaintances,' he wrote of a heretical assailant, 'he would see that among the people with convictions it would be hard to find one so free from prejudice as I am. I have many friends among the Protestants, and now that their system is tottering, they are all the dearer to me.' In spite of his scanty means, his shabby valet, his threadbare cloak, and the humbleness of his diplomatic position, the fire and honesty of his character combined with his known ability to place him high in the esteem of the society of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... Aurora for the starry sphere Where all is love, and even life forgiven. Bride of immortal beauty—ever dear! Dost thou await me in thy blest abode? While I, Tithonus-like, must linger here, And count each step along the rugged road; A phantom, tottering to a long-made grave, And eager to lay down ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... but in this close and deadly contest the Phoenix had the advantage. Her guns were lighter, her men better drilled, and their fierce energy overbore the Frenchmen. Presently the Didon, with her foremast tottering, her maintopmast gone, her decks a blood-stained wreck, passed out ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs. Pava, uneasy, began lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed, and, sighing heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue. The calf, fumbling, poked her nose under her mother's udder, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... short. The cash-room door suddenly opened, and the cashier appeared before them with tottering step, and a wild, haggard look on his ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... Hun. I must approach him cautiously; if near, 90 A sudden step will startle him, and he Seems tottering already. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Mediterranean shores of Africa. Not a building attracts the eye of the stranger amidst a confusion of greyish-yellow mud houses with flat roofs and without windows, and neglect and decay stare out from heaps of ruins. There is hardly a tottering caravanserai to invite the desert wanderer to rest. Some streets are abandoned, while in others the foot sinks over the ankle in blown sand from ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... joy when, tottering down the beach this morning, supporting my frame upon two sticks, I beheld your bottle cast up on the sands? Now, thought I, I can unburden myself to these three unfortunate men, obviously in even greater distress than my own, and we ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... of the old man's tottering figure and vague hands, every uncertain gesture and panic-stricken pause, seemed to put it beyond question that he was helpless, that he was in the last imbecility of the body. He moved by inches, he let himself down with little gasps of caution. And yet, unless the philosophical entities ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... goods are of less value, and he takes nothing off the price on that account—danger, if this defect either hinder the use of the goods or render it hurtful, for instance, if a man sells a lame for a fleet horse, a tottering house for a safe one, rotten or poisonous food for wholesome. Wherefore if such like defects be hidden, and the seller does not make them known, the sale will be illicit and fraudulent, and the seller will be bound to compensation for ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... cut like saber thrusts. But when a man finds the walls of his house about to fall on him he is apt to clutch blindly at anything which promises to prop the tottering structure. ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... Paul gave notice of the disaster; and then Virginia would suppress her complaints when she found that Paul was unhappy. When I came hither, I usually found them quite naked, which is the custom of this country, tottering in their walk, and holding each other by the hands and under the arms, as we represent the constellation of the Twins. At night these infants often refused to be separated, and were found lying in the same cradle, their cheeks, their bosoms pressed close together, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... long control, 155 Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul; While low delights, succeeding fast behind, In happier meanness occupy the mind: As in those domes, where Caesars once bore sway, Defac'd by time and tottering in decay, 160 There in the ruin, heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed, And, wond'ring man could want the larger pile, Exults, and owns his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... fine old festal vestments reserved for such occasions and with mitres on their heads, for Amalfi clings to the ancient ecclesiastical privileges that were granted in distant days when Florence and Venice were little more than villages. Last of all walked the Archbishop, an aged tottering figure, weighed down by his cope of cloth of gold and seemingly crushed beneath his immense jewelled mitre. Two lackeys, almost as infirm as their venerable master, and clad in threadbare liveries edged with armorial braid, were in close attendance, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Last of all he himself was massacred, after a reign of twenty years. His empress, Constantina, was confined with her three daughters, and murdered with them a few months after. The tyrant was slain by Heraclius, governor of Africa, after a tottering reign of eight years. When Phocas mounted the throne, his images were received and set up at Rome: nor could St. Gregory, for the sake of the public good, omit writing to him letters of congratulation.[50] In them he makes some compliments to Phocas, which are not so much praises as respectful exhortations ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... will not allow themselves to be led away by the false issues which are [290] dangled before them. A man really may love his fellow-men; cherish any form of Christianity he pleases; and hold not only that Darwinism is "tottering to its fall," but, if he pleases, the equally sane belief that it never existed; and yet may feel it his duty to oppose, to the best of his capacity, despotic Socialism in all its forms, and, more particularly, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... park,—Clothes-line Park, Amarilly had dubbed it—one Monday afternoon, singing a song of gladness. The park was confined by a clothes-line stretched between three tottering poles and the one solitary poplar tree of the Jenkins estate. The line was hung with white linen garments, and smaller articles adorned the grass ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... whom his eyes lighted was the King, who had laid aside his hat and cloak, and taken the terrified and weeping child on his lap. M. Fauchet stared at him awhile before he recognised him; but at last the trembling man knew him, and tottering to his feet, threw himself on his knees, looking years older than when I had last ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... might be again sent down, but the viewer forbade any to descend, as it must prove their destruction. At length some men came to carry young Gilbart's corpse to his mother's cottage. She and Mark followed with tottering steps. The sad truth had forced itself on her that she was a widow—the two bread-winners of her household gone. Still it was some poor consolation to have recovered the body of her son. Many had ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... forward of the sail, which was hoisted amidships. The sled was surrounded by the savage beasts, and when it struck the tottering brute that alone stood in its direct path, there seemed to be at least half a dozen of the bears on either side, rising on their ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... he was tottering and groggy. He staggered away and started to whirl the swing. I saw it coming. I made believe I didn't and started after him in a rush. Biff! It caught me on the jaw, and I went down. I was young and strong. ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... could adequately serve its purpose. The sea, with fury spent, had sullenly retired. The strongest buildings, half standing, roofless and tottering, told what once had been the make-up of a thriving city. But that cordon of wreckage skirting the shore for miles it seemed, often twenty feet in height, and against which the high tide still lapped ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... the times in Europe, where the attempt to secure opportunities of expansion as well as larger liberty for the individual took quite different form. The old absolutist system of government was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were tottering. The red lava of deep revolutionary fires oozed up through many glowing cracks in the political crust, and all the social strata were shaken. That the wild outbursts of insurrection midway in the fifth decade failed and died away was not surprising, for the superincumbent ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... across the fields. The stranger was greatly amused here with Ellen's awkwardness in climbing fences. Where it was a possible thing, she was fain to crawl under; but one or twice that could not be done, and having, with infinite difficulty, mounted to the top rail, poor Ellen sat there in a most tottering condition, uncertain on which side of the fence she should tumble over, but seeing no other possible way of getting down. The more she trembled the more her companion laughed, standing aloof meanwhile, and insisting she should ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... sure. He must be quite old by now." (Her tone suggested that he was tottering on the brink of the grave.) "It has been seven years since I've seen him, and he was ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... we journeyed over the foot-hills and mountains, fording icy torrents, winding around the crumbling brows of ragged peaks, creeping along the rocky flanges that overlooked awful precipices, crawling breathlessly over tottering bridges ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry |
