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nocturnal
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  • Late strollers were still out: a policeman, a night watchman, a rocket pilot, several lonely men coming home from some nocturnal rendezvous, four men and women issuing from a bar, laughing.   (source)
  • The wheat crop was full of weeds, and it was discovered that on one of his nocturnal visits Snowball had mixed weed seeds with the seed corn.   (source)
  • But I thought that, as a friend of the family, it was my duty to supply you and Tesman with a full account of his nocturnal exploits.   (source)
  • Still, the body must be hosed down, to get the smell of nocturnal darkness off the skin.†   (source)
  • Of course they would judge a spirit's nocturnal wanderings as the product of earthly memories.†   (source)
  • Richard Parker's nocturnal practice of sleeping in the lifeboat was never a law in my mind.†   (source)
  • Langdon was having trouble concentrating as a scattering of the park's nocturnal residents were already emerging from the shadows and flaunting their wares in the glare of the headlights.†   (source)
  • Every weekend that Treena came home, the Clark family began a lengthy nocturnal game of musical beds.†   (source)
  • Black skirt, black nails, black eyes—for a nocturnal rodent, yeah, I suppose she was looking good.†   (source)
  • Then I heard Toby waking up, because he is nocturnal, and I heard him rustling in his cage.†   (source)
  • I wondered what nocturnal transformation was built around this painted eye.†   (source)
  • He misses Sterling Library, where he studies every night after dinner, and the nocturnal schedule of which he is now a part.†   (source)
  • Happily, Boris never seemed annoyed or even very startled when I woke him, as if he came from a world where there was nothing so unusual in a nocturnal howl of pain.†   (source)
  • At the end of his nocturnal radio watches he'd slip quietly back to his room through the dark murmuring house.†   (source)
  • I thought briefly of the cloud cat, but surely it was not nocturnal: we'd always seen it during the day.†   (source)
  • It was upon my return from one of these nocturnal pilgrimages that I found an intruder in my study.†   (source)
  • As soon as she gets a solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom.†   (source)
  • They slipped beneath his feet as he clambered over them, and when he listened to the nocturnal sounds again, afraid the noise might have attracted someone's attention, he saw a guard appear among the ruined houses.†   (source)
  • Ousa the Bar Nowl flew past on a silent nocturnal patrol.†   (source)
  • However, our doctor friend, who was head of this partnership, had been right in saying that even during the most ferocious nocturnal raid it would never enter the heads of the Gestapo to search the surgery, so it was the only place where we could sleep safely.†   (source)
  • You do know I'm nocturnal now," he said with groan.†   (source)
  • She was on the verge of tears because of his defeat, but Florentino Ariza raised her spirits with his instincts of a nocturnal hunter.†   (source)
  • But when they kept waking each other up, doubling our nocturnal adventures, we moved Conor out to a narrow space between the kitchen and the garage.†   (source)
  • Preparations for another nocturnal visit, Martin?†   (source)
  • Insects and animals alike bustled with activity as they prepared for the fast-approaching night, whether by retreating to their various dens or, in the case of those of a nocturnal bent, by yawning, stretching, and otherwise readying themselves to hunt and forage.†   (source)
  • With a nocturnal flurry of phone calls to Pakistan, e-mails to his board, and countless pots of coffee, he began planning his spring assault on Pakistan's poverty.†   (source)
  • Back on land, the chilled, hungry, and exhausted Marines faced a different kind of nocturnal menace.†   (source)
  • After a year, my nocturnal visits to their home ceased as suddenly as they'd started.†   (source)
  • Me with my Nocturnal Seasonings, Cindy with a stiff glass of Wild Turkey, Martha comfortable at our feet.†   (source)
  • The hotel, she said, quietly afforded us complete freedom, our nocturnal habits going unnoticed in the continual press of European tourists, our rooms immaculately maintained by an anonymous staff, while the immense price we paid guaranteed our privacy and our security.†   (source)
  • That night he waited for her with impatience, and when the sounds of housework fell silent in the old adobe house and the nocturnal scampering of the rats began, he felt the girl's presence in the doorway of his room.†   (source)
  • As he says the words and sees Chi. niqua's angry brow soften with understanding, he remembers something he thought about a month ago, about his being like a nocturnal animal, blinking in the light.†   (source)
  • Things went on in this fashion for hundreds of years, the towers burning and the pigeons whispering plans for still grander and taller towers to successive generations of nocturnally inspired architects.†   (source)
  • Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks.†   (source)
  • The legend read "The wombat is a burrowing, nocturnal marsupial found only in Australia, and the only reason to mention it is the dubious distinction it has in joining man and apes in ownership of an appendix."†   (source)
  • Darkness had descended on Manassas, the countryside alive with nocturnal undercurrents, as Bourne crept through the woods bordering the "farm" of General Norman Swayne.†   (source)
  • Perhaps she should have lived in the night all along, with the owls and bats and other nocturnal creatures.†   (source)
  • Eugenides, when he was brought before her, blinked owlishly, like a nocturnal animal dragged out of its den into the daylight.†   (source)
  • Short and round, he had the dim pink eyes of some nocturnal creature.†   (source)
  • It was the cry of a small animal, a tiny nocturnal creature, a herbivore that depended on stealth and speed for survival.†   (source)
  • A tiny Ligurian had postulated that movement across nocturnal terrain occurred in three categories: points, scales, and plates.†   (source)
  • Underslept and with a foot still in the nocturnal world of the Danish embassy, he knew he would be brittle this day.†   (source)
  • Raphael was already sleeping through the night, but Irene was a nocturnal creature who had learned how to blackmail her way into her parents' bed.†   (source)
  • Throughout the rest of her life Granny refused to eat fish of any kind, and always carried a high-powered flashlight with her during her nocturnal peregrinations.†   (source)
  • The armadillo, they had learned, was a nocturnal beast that curled up deep underground in daylight hours.†   (source)
  • I sensed the radiance of it in the stillness, sensed the earthworms that burrowed back into the depths of the furrows, sensed the animals that wandered in the woods in search of nocturnal rut or food.†   (source)
  • The Poppet had made such nocturnal excursions common enough, but then there had been no question of his remaining asleep through the uproar.†   (source)
  • …she said that those first mornings at Yetta's rooming house, waking in a strange bed surrounded by strange pink walls as she drowsily listened to the faint far-off rumble of traffic on Church Avenue, she would for long seconds be so unable to name or recognize either herself or her surroundings that she felt herself to be in a somnolent trance, like the enchanted maiden in one of those Grimm fairy tales of her childhood, transported after a nocturnal spell to a new and unknown kingdom.†   (source)
  • He required a minimum of two church services each Sunday to keep his soul in sound repair, and after partaking of the Gospel at morning and afternoon servings he often set out across the fields for a third helping atdusk if he heard of a church with lamps lit for nocturnal psalming.†   (source)
  • But the disease was not punishment enough for her nocturnal philandering.†   (source)
  • The doctor closed his eyes a moment, thinking, then quoted carefully, shaking his finger as if at an imaginary class, " 'In the morning it arises from the sea … ' no, 'the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world … ' something, something ' … expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament.†   (source)
  • The dragons graze through these very woods in the daytime—dragons are diurnal, rats are nocturnal and go into their holes in the heat of the day.†   (source)
  • Her nocturnal madness was as unaccountable as black magic.†   (source)
  • She passed a black boarded-up store where an owl used to live and maintain its nocturnal habits.†   (source)
  • Then a strange bird called, a wild nocturnal sound, and she turned and ran back, suddenly terrified, as if a hostile breath had blown upon her, from another world, from the trees.†   (source)
  • The Daughters' Staircase was in the ground-floor bedroom of their parents, so Simon always knew the hours of his daughters' nocturnal comings and goings.   (source)
  • Silence, then the cry of a nocturnal bird.†   (source)
  • He knew nothing of the boy's fear of ghosts and other nocturnal terrors.†   (source)
  • She seemed more surprised than angry about the nocturnal call to her house.†   (source)
  • I asked, although I knew from my own nocturnal habits that it had been.†   (source)
  • But Mr. Pignati just loved the nocturnal room, and the only one who loved it more was John.†   (source)
  • Betty Bradley learned to cope with John's nocturnal weeping.†   (source)
  • A nocturnal butterfly fluttered about her head while the lights were on.†   (source)
  • The next morning the judge heard the usual chronicle of small violence and nocturnal greed.†   (source)
  • Despite the precision of his inflection, Rocher's eyes were cloudy like those of some nocturnal mammal.†   (source)
  • But wolvogs are nocturnal hunters: in the heat of the day they tend to sleep, like most things with fur.†   (source)
  • The hunched nocturnal weirdo so unsure how to conduct even the most basic relations with people that (in an interview which I was suddenly finding torturous) he had asked a recording engineer if they couldn't go to a lawyer and legally be declared brothers —sort of the tragic, late-genius version of Tom Cable and me pressing cut thumbs in the darkened back-yard of his house, or—even more strangely—Boris seizing my hand, bloody at the knuckles where I'd punched him on the playground,…†   (source)
  • It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.†   (source)
  • She watches the shadows that the passing traffic throws onto their ceiling, listens to a truck wailing in the distance like a solitary, nocturnal beast.†   (source)
  • Were they nocturnal animals?†   (source)
  • Season of woollen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now Season of chrysanthemums, the funeral flower; white ones, that is.†   (source)
  • "They're nocturnal,"†   (source)
  • …however, when he returned to his house on the Street of Windows, he discovered a letter floating in a puddle inside the entrance, and on the wet envelope he recognized at once the imperious handwriting that so many changes in life had not changed, and he even thought he could detect the nocturnal perfume of withered gardenias, because after the initial shock, his heart told him everything: it was the letter he had been waiting for, without a moment's respite, for over half a century.†   (source)
  • For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps.†   (source)
  • The Sanctuary was nearly empty, just a few distant students carrying lanterns as they visited their charges in the Warming Lodge or cared for the clearing's nocturnal denizens.†   (source)
  • The boy became so taken with those nocturnal raids that it was a long time before he was seen at Catarino's.†   (source)
  • These pictures—the iron lung a cylinder, a gigantic sausage roll of metal, with a head sticking out one end of it, always a girl's head, the hair flowing across the pillow, the eyes large, nocturnal—fascinated me, more than stories about children who went out on thin ice and fell through and were drowned, or children who played on the railroad tracks and had their arms and legs cut off by trains.†   (source)
  • And with the never-ending, ever-strident nocturnal carnival, other games would begin, games the human race should have abandoned with the first light of creation.†   (source)
  • Though the Italians harassed the nocturnal re-supply and reinforcement with constant artillery fire, it neither stopped nor slackened.†   (source)
  • Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room.†   (source)
  • Darkness had descended on Manassas, Virginia, the countryside alive with nocturnal undercurrents, as Bourne crept through the woods bordering the estate of General Norman Swayne.†   (source)
  • The nocturnal sounds of Hong Kong's Yau Ma Ti and the nearby Mongkok would easily cover whatever cries Allcott-Price might manage — if he awoke before Jason awakened him, which was doubtful.†   (source)
  • From a host of small details imperceptible to others, Jean learned to guess when she was planning one of her nocturnal excursions to the river.†   (source)
  • Lymrills are nocturnal and—†   (source)
  • After one nocturnal session—a particularly productive visit during which the Virgin was returned to her former glory—Cohen actually checked the security footage.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Gervais lived in mortal dread that someone who mattered, someone prominent in the thinly oxygenated heights of Charleston society, would spot Annie Kate during one of her nocturnal promenades through the quiet streets or while she distractedly picked flowers and nervously paced the brick pathways of their desultory garden.†   (source)
  • The flights were necessary to conceal Eragon's absence, but the routine wore on her, for while the dark held no terrors for her, she was not nocturnal by habit, and she disliked having to do anything with such regularity.†   (source)
  • She and the frightful look of the saints in the glow of the nocturnal lamp were the two memories he retained of the house.†   (source)
  • The only activity she kept up were her nocturnal escapes out the window when she had a rendezvous with Pedro Tercero down by the river.†   (source)
  • I had never seen this nocturnal room before, and I almost went into shock when I got a look at the vampire bats.†   (source)
  • It had no lights, not even the red and green running lights, and it slipped off with a nocturnal and stealthy velocity.†   (source)
  • Fernanda then bought seventy-two chamberpots but she only managed to change the nocturnal problem into a morning one, because from dawn on there was a long line of girls, each with her pot in her hand, waiting for her turn to wash it.†   (source)
  • From it the nocturnal itinerary of the colonel from the dawn he left Macondo at the head of twenty-one men on his way to a fanciful rebellion until he returned for the last time wrapped in a blanket stiff with blood could have been reconstructed.†   (source)
  • Only in a house like that was it conceivable for her always to sleep on a mat she laid out on the pantry floor in the midst of the nocturnal noise of the rats, and without telling anyone that one night she had awakened with the frightened feeling that someone was looking at her in the darkness and that it was a poisonous snake crawling over her stomach.†   (source)
  • The passion of nocturnal secrecy was a wine in his blood.†   (source)
  • All is rapt, all is nocturnal, and the parrots go screaming through the branches.†   (source)
  • 'Look, Rhoda,' said Louis, 'they have become nocturnal, rapt.†   (source)
  • There was a smell of hot wax from where a candle drooped in the nocturnal heat; people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows.†   (source)
  • But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy.†   (source)
  • And it was against this nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being.†   (source)
  • I woke in a garden, with a blow on the nape of my neck, a hot kiss, Jinny's; remembering all this as one remembers confused cries and toppling pillars and shafts of red and black in some nocturnal conflagration.†   (source)
  • The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colours of childhood's spectrum.†   (source)
  • "Maybe even the light of day, let alone this—" he indicated the single globe stained and bug-fouled from the long summer and which even when clean gave off but little light—"which man had to invent to his need since, relieved of the onus of sweating to live, he is apparently reverting (or evolving) back into a nocturnal animal, would be too much for it, for them.†   (source)
  • I am beginning to feel this nocturnal existence tell on me.†   (source)
  • What was this nocturnal expedition, and why should I go armed?†   (source)
  • To our nocturnal musician's ears, this one piece's soothing effects made it worth many others.†   (source)
  • Archer had the nocturnal perspective of Fifth Avenue almost to himself.†   (source)
  • Ali was his principal attendant during this nocturnal survey.†   (source)
  • It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation.†   (source)
  • The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.†   (source)
  • This multitude undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom.†   (source)
  • The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader was going in that direction.†   (source)
  • After the departure of the ruffians, the Rue Plumet resumed its tranquil, nocturnal aspect.†   (source)
  • Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among the marshes.†   (source)
  • The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing.†   (source)
  • Every night, regularly, at nine, at twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie chant, in which it was Buck's delight to join.†   (source)
  • That night he went out as usual for his nocturnal walk, in the course of which he was in the habit of smoking a cigar.†   (source)
  • …into the room, bringing, one after another, the innumerable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases) burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this winter afternoon, the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate, more human—filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the…†   (source)
  • Winsett did not invite people to his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.†   (source)
  • In the mysterious nocturnal separation from all outward signs of life, she felt herself more strangely confronted with her fate.†   (source)
  • Then, those large eyes, with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal things—witness the owl and the cat.†   (source)
  • He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor's; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams.†   (source)
  • A nocturnal newspaper reporter, mistaking my brother for the traffic manager, to whom he bears a slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview him.†   (source)
  • But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.†   (source)
  • What becomes, then, of these nocturnal whistles, and what of the very peculiar words of the dying woman?†   (source)
  • In both cases, we are dealing with a symbolism of last and ultimate things, with elements of orgiastic primal religion, with unbridled nocturnal sacrifices in honor of dying and ripening, of death, transformation, and resurrection.†   (source)
  • And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a tempest.†   (source)
  • In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding.†   (source)
  • Certainly the slightest deviation from the Berghof's customary nocturnal peace, the tiniest muffled disturbance, even the barely perceptible sound of someone moving in the distance, was enough to bring him wide awake and make him sit up in bed.†   (source)
  • On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to Bath—which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so comic after all.†   (source)
  • As it was—and especially after the object of her nocturnal visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott had become known—her cynicism was held to exceed his; and she had not the excuse—nor her detractors the satisfaction—of pleading that she was "a foreigner."†   (source)
  • We had just celebrated a little feast, had enjoyed food and drink, and linking arms in an elevated mood, in a humanely relaxed and adventurous spirit, we sought out our nocturnal couches in the small hours of the morning.†   (source)
  • But it was what they now sang to each other, or at times with one another, concerning this situation, interrupted now and then by the muffled tones of the ceremonies several stories above—it was this exchange of song that deeply stirred the soul of the lonely, nocturnal listener, both in regard to the situation and its musical expression.†   (source)
  • —Two Gentlemen of Verona The nocturnal adventures of Gurth were not yet concluded; indeed he himself became partly of that mind, when, after passing one or two straggling houses which stood in the outskirts of the village, he found himself in a deep lane, running between two banks overgrown with hazel and holly, while here and there a dwarf oak flung its arms altogether across the path.†   (source)
  • It was during the night of December 9–10 that the Nautilus encountered this army of distinctly nocturnal mollusks.†   (source)
  • 'As by one consent, every beast of the forest seemed to arise from its den, and utter its wild nocturnal cry.†   (source)
  • …the black ground was covered with herbage, and the green banks interspersed with innumerable flowers, sweet to the scent and the eyes, stars of pale radiance among the moonlight woods; the sun became warmer, the nights clear and balmy; and my nocturnal rambles were an extreme pleasure to me, although they were considerably shortened by the late setting and early rising of the sun, for I never ventured abroad during daylight, fearful of meeting with the same treatment I had formerly…†   (source)
  • Once there (and it was always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in Mrs. Snagsby's breast, prompting her to nocturnal examinations of Mr. Snagsby's pockets; to secret perusals of Mr. Snagsby's letters; to private researches in the day book and ledger, till, cash-box, and iron safe; to watchings at windows, listenings behind doors, and a general putting of this and that together by the wrong end.†   (source)
  • Not until the light porter announced that her nocturnal sweetbread was ready, did Mrs. Sparsit arouse herself from her reverie, and convey her dense black eyebrows — by that time creased with meditation, as if they needed ironing out-up-stairs.†   (source)
  • Upon gaining this advantage d'Artagnan was near uttering a cry of surprise; it was not Aramis who was conversing with the nocturnal visitor, it was a woman!†   (source)
  • When Princess Mary returned to her room after her nocturnal talk with Pierre, Natasha met her on the threshold.†   (source)
  • After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.†   (source)
  • She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER XXXVIII CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN MR. AND MRS. BUMBLE, AND MR. MONKS, AT THEIR NOCTURNAL INTERVIEW It was a dull, close, overcast summer evening.†   (source)
  • There were then in circulation, strange stories of a surly monk, a nocturnal prowler about the streets of Paris, and they recurred confusedly to his memory.†   (source)
  • It seemed to be a sort of rite with him, to prepare himself for slumber by meditation in the presence of the grand spectacles of the nocturnal heavens.†   (source)
  • For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.†   (source)
  • Mr. Pumblechook (not improved in appearance by his late nocturnal adventure) was waiting for me, and addressed me in the following terms:— "Young man, I am sorry to see you brought low.†   (source)
  • HOSPITALITY UNDER THE ARCTIC CIRCLE It ought to have been night-time, but under the 65th parallel there was nothing surprising in the nocturnal polar light.†   (source)
  • Only a man accustomed to nocturnal rambles could at this hour have descended those shaggy slopes with Venn's velocity without falling headlong into a pit, or snapping off his leg by jamming his foot into some rabbit burrow.†   (source)
  • …in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its…†   (source)
  • Moreover, since the nocturnal adventure in the cell, he had constantly abused Quasimodo, but in vain did he ill treat, and even beat him occasionally, nothing disturbed the submission, patience, the devoted resignation of the faithful bellringer.†   (source)
  • I described our nocturnal excursion to him, and since the panels were open, he could still catch a glimpse of this submerged continent.†   (source)
  • Tell him also that I am acquainted with all the details of the adventure at Amiens; that I will have a little romance made of it, wittily turned, with a plan of the garden and portraits of the principal actors in that nocturnal romance.†   (source)
  • "Oh, yes," she exclaimed, "I recognize the flavor of my nocturnal beverage which refreshed me so much, and seemed to ease my aching brain.†   (source)
  • "Heaven forgive you, Sir Traveller!" said the hermit, whose own noise, and perhaps his nocturnal potations, prevented from recognising accents which were tolerably familiar to him—"Wend on your way, in the name of God and Saint Dunstan, and disturb not the devotions of me and my holy brother."†   (source)
  • It was the same through which, twenty-four years ago, he had been conducted by a silent and nocturnal guard; the houses, to-day so smiling and animated, were on that night dark, mute, and closed.†   (source)
  • These attempts did not prevent the cardinal, to whom his most inveterate detractors have never denied personal bravery, from making nocturnal excursions, sometimes to communicate to the Duc d'Angouleme important orders, sometimes to confer with the king, and sometimes to have an interview with a messenger whom he did not wish to see at home.†   (source)
  • You are accused before us, ~primo~, of nocturnal disturbance; ~secundo~, of a dishonorable act of violence upon the person of a foolish woman, ~in proejudicium meretricis; tertio~, of rebellion and disloyalty towards the archers of the police of our lord, the king.†   (source)
  • It was a night which led the traveller's thoughts instinctively to dwell on nocturnal scenes of disaster in the chronicles of the world, on all that is terrible and dark in history and legend—the last plague of Egypt, the destruction of Sennacherib's host, the agony in Gethsemane.†   (source)
  • Then night fell in the midst of a heavy silence occasionally broken by the calls of pelicans and nocturnal birds, by the sound of surf chafing against rocks, or by the distant moan of a steamer churning the waves of the gulf with noisy blades.†   (source)
  • The nocturnal visitor, ignorant of the fact that the count had removed the staples, might now think himself at home, and pursue his purpose with full security.†   (source)
  • All the details of her melancholy adventure, from the nocturnal scene at la Falourdel's to her condemnation to the Tournelle, recurred to her memory, no longer vague and confused as heretofore, but distinct, harsh, clear, palpitating, terrible.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, whether the cough had been answered by a similar signal which had fixed the irresolution of the nocturnal seeker, or whether without this aid she saw that she had arrived at the end of her journey, she resolutely drew near to Aramis's shutter, and tapped, at three equal intervals, with her bent finger.†   (source)
  • Such was the conversation in almost all the carriages; these two sudden deaths, so quickly following each other, astonished every one, but no one suspected the terrible secret which M. d'Avrigny had communicated, in his nocturnal walk to M. de Villefort.†   (source)
  • He remembered that Dom Claude alone possessed a key to the staircase leading to the cell; he recalled his nocturnal attempts on the young girl, in the first of which he, Quasimodo, had assisted, the second of which he had prevented.†   (source)
  • I learn this desire, or rather I suspect that you feel it; and in order to spare you all the annoyances of a nocturnal arrival in a port and all the fatigues of landing, I send one of my officers to meet you, I place a carriage at his orders, and he brings you hither to this castle, of which I am governor, whither I come every day, and where, in order to satisfy our mutual desire of seeing each other, I have prepared you a chamber.†   (source)
  • "A friend!" responded Peppino; and, advancing alone towards the sentry, he said a few words to him in a low tone; and then he, like the first, saluted the nocturnal visitors, making a sign that they might proceed.†   (source)
  • The reader has not, perhaps, forgotten that one moment before catching sight of the nocturnal band of vagabonds, Quasimodo, as he inspected Paris from the heights of his bell tower, perceived only one light burning, which gleamed like a star from a window on the topmost story of a lofty edifice beside the Porte Saint-Antoine.†   (source)
  • The aspect of the Place, the vision which was moving in it, the disorder of that nocturnal assault, that hideous crowd, leaping like a cloud of frogs, half seen in the gloom, the croaking of that hoarse multitude, those few red torches running and crossing each other in the darkness like the meteors which streak the misty surfaces of marshes, this whole scene produced upon her the effect of a mysterious battle between the phantoms of the witches' sabbath and the stone monsters of the…†   (source)
  • Her reason told her that all the visions she beheld were but the children of her imagination, and the conviction was strengthened by the fact that in the morning no traces remained of the nocturnal phantoms, who disappeared with the coming of daylight.†   (source)
  • ] Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often returned quite late at night.†   (source)
  • A Nocturnal Interview.†   (source)
  • This softness was suspicious; it hinted at furtive goings and comings, silent entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolf-like tread of crime.†   (source)
  • Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of the centuries, halos of civilization.†   (source)
  • It was one of those intermissions which frequently occur in nocturnal combats, which are always followed by an increase of rage.†   (source)
  • The inventors of ideas of that nature, men with nocturnal imaginations, applied to them to have their ideas executed.†   (source)
  • Thenardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force, was kept in sight.†   (source)
  • A hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had its sewer.†   (source)
  • It did not even occur to him to tell her about the nocturnal adventure in the hovel, about Thenardier, about the burn, and about the strange attitude and singular flight of her father.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, whatever may be the contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal, from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this is it: disinterestedness.†   (source)
  • A nocturnal rain, the wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon, Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bulow's guide enlightening him,— the whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.†   (source)
  • Gavroche's adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: "The nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment.†   (source)
  • He was stiff with cold; he had eaten nothing since the night before; he vaguely recalled his other nocturnal trip in the vast plain in the neighborhood of D——, eight years previously, and it seemed but yesterday.†   (source)
  • An edifice full of nocturnal mystery, calling to souls through the darkness with the voice of angels, and when they came, offering them abruptly that terrible vision; promising to open the radiant portals of heaven, and then opening the horrible gates of the tomb!†   (source)
  • Still, in spite of his mournful preoccupation, he could not refrain from saying to himself that this prowler of the barriers with whom Jondrette was talking resembled a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once pointed out to him as a very dangerous nocturnal roamer.†   (source)
  • A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks, and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping children.†   (source)
  • The wine on Surene is a parody of the wine of Alba, the red border of Desaugiers forms a balance to the great cutting of Balatro, Pere Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains same gleams as the Esquiliae, and the grave of the poor bought for five years, is certainly the equivalent of the slave's hived coffin.†   (source)
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