The fear of losing Joe's confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my tongue. — from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'—quartz, with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors—being skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in the rock-candy style—works of art which were achieved by the young ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment—drops its under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit—limbs and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance—that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures lavishly chained and ringed—metal indicated and secured from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped together—husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder—and both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist's brisk 'Now smile, if you please!' — from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
And it will be no great matter if it is in some other person’s hand, for as well as I recollect Dulcinea can neither read nor write, nor in the whole course of her life has she seen handwriting or letter of mine, for my love and hers have been always platonic, not going beyond a modest look, and even that so seldom that I can safely swear I have not seen her four times in all these twelve years I have been loving her more than the light of these eyes that the earth will one day devour; and perhaps even of those four times she has not once perceived that I was looking at her: such is the retirement and seclusion in which her father Lorenzo Corchuelo and her mother Aldonza Nogales have brought her up.” — from The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
found linen clothes and
The room we were shown into was very small, but clean and comfortable; a fire was lighted, and we found linen, clothes, and everything we needed. — from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
from like causes and
I shall add, for a further confirmation of the foregoing theory, that, as this operation of the mind, by which we infer like effects from like causes, and vice versa , is so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures, it is not probable, that it could be trusted to the fallacious deductions of our reason, which is slow in its operations; appears not, in any degree, during the first years of infancy; and at best is, in every age and period of human life, extremely liable to error and mistake. — from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
"Mr. Fison who has lived for a long time among uncivilized races," says Westermark, "thinks it will be found that infanticide is far less common among the lower savages than among the more advanced tribes." — from Woman and the New Race by Margaret Sanger
frequenting loose company and
No man was less fitted to be a minister of religion, and his private correspondence discloses no sign of a religious spirit, or of anything resembling a religious vocation: on the contrary, it reveals him as frequenting loose company, and cracking unseemly jokes at a most solemn moment. — from Chapters on Spanish Literature by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
for local color and
There are eight gorgeous scenes, the exact detail of which the stage manager brought from Peking and Nanking, where he specially went for local color, and where the play is laid. — from China Revolutionized by John Stuart Thomson
finally larger currents and
It is nevertheless certain that they exercise an action on the discharge of the water of rain and snow into the valleys, ravines, and other depressions of the surface, where it is gathered into brooks and finally larger currents, and consequently influence the character of floods, both in rivers and in torrents. — from The Earth as Modified by Human Action by George P. (George Perkins) Marsh
Also, there were some funny little curios and toys which had been cleverly carved out of cork, and some grotesque dolls with cork faces. — from Marjorie in Command by Carolyn Wells
felt like crying at
She felt like crying at first; then she passed through an epoch of resentment, and then through a period of compassion for him. — from A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells
This tab, called Hiding in Plain Sight,
shows you passages from notable books where your word is accidentally (or perhaps deliberately?)
spelled out by the first letters of consecutive words.
Why would you care to know such a thing? It's not entirely clear to us, either, but
it's fun to explore! What's the longest hidden word you can find? Where is your name hiding?