We all think a lot of Fred and Mrs. Fred," she went on, bringing in two big dishes of potatoes; "and if you could see that poor, precious lamb trying to cook pork and beans with a little wisp of an apron on, all lace and ribbons, and big diamonds on her fingers, you'd be sorry for her, and you'd say, 'What kind of an old tyrant is the old man down beyant, and why don't he take her and Fred back?'

The sugar, candles, and the saddled mule, Together with your cask of malvoisie, So far exceed all my necessity That Michael and not I my debt must rule, In such a glassy calm the breezes fool My sinking sails, so that amid the sea My bark hath missed her way, and seems to be A wisp of straw whirled on a weltering pool.

I am as helpless as a ship becalmed, or a wisp of straw on a stormy sea.' X. Michael Angelo, when asked to make a portrait of his friend's mistress, declares that he is unable to do justice to her beauty.

Only today, riding through the mountains, he had come on a dried-up wisp of a man with long, iron-gray hair, a sharp, withered face, and hands like the claws of a bird.

In vindication of the wisdom and foresight of Charley and myself, I should like to mention that we had entrusted that valuable evidence of our status to the keeping of a worthy stranger dressed in an old red jacket and a pair of corduroy trousers fastened with a wisp of hay below the knees.

He made them so tame that they used to crawl over him, and, when they were too familiar, he whipped them with a wisp of straw: at his death, it is said, they left the house in a body.

The best places were quickly taken, the hollows in the trees, the holes in the walls, the forks of the apple-trees and the elms, and you could see a brown beak, like the point of a sword, sticking out of a wisp of straw between all the rafters of the roof.

Those who strive and hope and live only in the future, always looking ahead and impatiently anticipating what is coming, as something which will make them happy when they get it, are, in spite of their very clever airs, exactly like those donkeys one sees in Italy, whose pace may be hurried by fixing a stick on their heads with a wisp of hay at the end of it; this is always just in front of them, and they keep on trying to get it.

While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once more after the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his "Weber's Company of Comedians."

At the top of the bank stood the elder of the two girls; she had torn off the skirt of her riding-habit, and was about to leap down into the water where a mass of floating yellow hair and a wisp of white gown told their story of disaster.

You owes her more than one good turn now, or I'm mistaken!" "Who the devil are you?" asked Tom, startled, and with reason; yet conscious, in his dark, dreary despair, of a vague glimmer, bearing the same relation to hope that a will-o'-the-wisp does to the light on our hearth at home.

It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions.

The German kings would vanish like a wisp of smoke.

A pacific agreement with England is, after all, a will-o'-the-wisp which no serious German statesman would trouble to follow.

She is the feu follet, the will-o'-the-wisp that hovers over what is rotten, and dead.

She saw that high-sounding titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide's grand-aunt was part of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering.

Sometimes it was fixed on one, sometimes it flashed like a will o' the wisp, and appeared a little to the right or left of where she had last seen it.

Her blue eyes were as large and shining and changeable (he thought) as two oceans in midsummer; and Maudelain stood motionless and seemed to himself but to revere, as the Earl Ixion did, some bright unstable wisp of cloud, while somehow all elation departed from him as water does from a wetted sponge compressed.

you be lit," said Mr. Fotheringay, and forthwith the candle was flaring, and he saw a little black hole in the toilet-cover, with a wisp of smoke rising from it.

After he was through he cleansed his boots on a wisp of grass and set off at a good pace, for the ground past the pool began to rise, and the lane was consequently drier.

They, too, would receive a wisp of sweet hay willingly from the hand.

He searched the sky for a wisp of smoke that might tell of a human habitation, below, but saw none.

The fluid was applied by means of a wisp of straw, and the person who discharged this salutary office went round the house in the direction of the sun.

She half expected to see something hover before her, a will-o'-the-wisp, alluring her over the rocky valleys and towering mountains until death gave her weary feet rest.

All day long they tossed Sugar from one to another as though each thousand shares had been a wisp of hay instead of $200,000for soon after the opening it soared to 200.